CHAPTER 14

THE ASYLUM

No one seems to hear me now, As though my words were all blacked out. And written on the walls of the Asylum. —“THE ASYLUM” (WRITTEN BY LITA FORD AND MICHAEL DAN EHMIG)

WE MOVED TO THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE—LITERALLY AND METAPHORICALLY. More precisely: Turks and Caicos, a chain of islands that’s approximately seven hundred miles off the coast of Miami. For the first year and a half, we lived on the main island, Providenciales, called “Provo” by the locals, where the population is about ten thousand people. In that time, we moved our household six times. Provo at least had a few resorts, a school, a grocery store, a doctor—that is, some signs of life.

My first order of business was to get James into a school. He knew his basic school skills, and I had already taught him to write. But I wanted to get him into a school so he could make friends. James went to the Ashcroft School for first grade and the first half of second grade; it was filthy. When James would come home from school, we had this huge container where we would dump the dirt from his shoes, just to see how much we could collect. His fingernails would be dirty, and his face would be beet red from the heat. How does a child focus on doing schoolwork in that kind of heat? I went to the school one day to see how James was doing and I didn’t recognize him because of how red his face was. I asked if the school had fans and they said no. They would do physical education at one o’clock in the afternoon, the hottest time of the day. I tried to get them to change the time of the class, but they wouldn’t do that, either. I started pulling him out of school for the afternoons, since all he would be missing is running laps around the school for an hour in the hottest sun of the day.

My husband became interested in purchasing a deserted stretch of oceanfront property on North Caicos, an undeveloped island twelve miles from Provo. Was it beautiful? Sure. But there was almost nothing there but mosquitoes, flamingos, crabs, cockroaches, island rats, and bushes. The mosquitoes were turbocharged, like jumbo jets. There was no water, electricity, roads, medical facilities, mailboxes, FedEx, restaurants, grocery stores. Forget Walmart or Starbucks. It was all sugar-white sandy beaches and mangroves where the hammerhead sharks gave birth to their young. They were indeed healthy ocean waters. But the beach was as desolate a place as you could imagine—if you need help, think of Robinson Crusoe or Cast Away. It would have been wonderful for two weeks out of every summer, but it was not where I wanted to raise the boys. On that stretch of coastline there was nothing. No children to play with, no normal human society or culture.

The only hint of civilization nearby was a small community of shacks in the middle of the island and one shitty, broken-down school that was a thirty-minute drive on a poorly maintained road. There were no computers or air conditioning; on a Caribbean island it is too unbearably hot for there not to be air conditioning or even ceiling fans! Our house was bigger than the school was. What kind of credentials did the teachers have? I would have died before I let James, and eventually Rocco, rely on that place for their education.

Meanwhile construction began on our new home—actually two mansions right next to each other. My husband and the Piergiovanni family, his Jehovah’s Witness business partners who would become our next-door neighbors in North Caicos, employed more than one hundred Haitians and “belongers,” as the locals were called. One house would be ours, and the other was the Piergiovannis’. The Piergiovannis did most of the manual labor. They were big lumberjack-style people who lived their lives studying the Bible and building. Not my type of hang!

I didn’t go to see what they were doing until the foundations had already been poured for these two massive, three-level mansions. When the boat pulled up to the property, I almost passed out. I was under the impression we would at least have some privacy in this godforsaken place. Nope. The two foundations were poured not more than forty feet away from each other.

“Oh great,” I said to my neighbor, “we’ll be able to pass each other the oregano.”

I was not happy. I think the feeling was mutual; the devout Piergiovannis probably thought I was the Antichrist because I was a rocker chick. Well, that doesn’t make me bad, ladies and gentlemen. I’m not antisocial, either: I just didn’t understand the logic of living forty feet away from anyone when there was an entire fucking island at our disposal. It defeated the whole purpose of moving to such an out-of-the-way place.

Needless to say, I dreaded the day when I would have to move into that house, but the foundation was already poured.

WHILE THE HOMES were being built, I heard that Dee Snider from Twisted Sister was on the main island at one of the resorts with his family. We had a rental there we were living in, while we waited to relocate to North Caicos. I’d known Dee since 1984, when Twisted Sister played with the Lita Ford band. They were so supportive of a chick on guitar, and they’d always be cheering me on. Dee as a front man was just incredible, packed full of energy with a terrific voice and equally great attitude. He was also a very loyal husband and father, and I loved that about him. I felt like he was a big brother to me, looking out for me and offering words of advice and encouragement. I thought Dee and his wife, Suzette, might like to meet my boys, who were growing up so beautifully. I also couldn’t wait to see a familiar face.

It was a thrill. The Sniders and my family became friends immediately. Dee has a daughter who is the same age as James, and they got along well. They were both little rocker kids. Dee’s daughter wanted to be a lead singer like her father and James wanted to play guitar like me. To anyone who saw me or talked to me, it looked like I had one big happy family. I firmly hid the fact that I was miserable, living in such an isolated, dirty, and lonely place, away from everyone and everything I had once known.

We took Dee and Suzette over to show them our future outpost on North Caicos, which by this time had all three levels in place. We went up to the top floor of the house, where you had a view of nothing but ocean as far as the eye could see. Not even a single boat cruising by. It was breathtaking, but also you could sense the isolation. I looked at Dee’s face and could tell what he was thinking. How is Lita going to last here with the boys? No school. No doctors. No friends. No music. Dee seemed to be a little in shock. “Okay,” he kept saying in between deep breaths. “Okay.”

I felt sad. But, hey, it sure was a pretty view.

The next morning, we said our good-byes to Dee and his family. He returned to the world I had left behind, while I awaited sentencing on Alcatraz, a.k.a. North Caicos.

IT TOOK TWO years to finish both houses. They were built like a bank vault—or a prison cell, depending on your perspective. According to the contractors, our mansion could withstand “450-mile-per-hour winds.” It was cold inside, with granite floors and countertops. To me it looked like an asylum with balconies.

I was scared to death to move to North Caicos for many reasons. It was even more remote than Provo. My children’s well-being concerned me the most. There was only one doctor on the main island in Provo. He was the guy you went to if you had the flu or a bad cut, but if you needed emergency attention, you had to be airlifted into Miami. Moving to North Caicos would make urgent medical treatment even more of an issue. Risking my personal well-being was one thing, but when you’ve got two young kids, that’s not a chance any mother wants to take. I went so far as to stock up on EpiPens, antibiotics, and other first aid items. Because we would be living in such a remote place, I needed some kind of reassurance, no matter how small, that I could buy twenty to thirty minutes of time in case something happened to us, like a shark bite or a boating accident.

I also had a tutor set up for the kids on North Caicos. When the day rolled around for her to come over for her first visit, though, she never showed. Later that afternoon she called and apologized, explaining that her car had broken down. This was not unusual since the roads there were so bad. She said she would be there at the same time the following day, but again, she didn’t show up. She was my only chance at finding a tutor on North Caicos who could teach second grade, and she proved to be unreliable. Finally that good old saying came to mind again: “If you want something done right, do it yourself.” So I decided to homeschool the boys myself. I had no choice but to put them through the Lita Ford School. Still, I was livid, as this was not my idea of life, and I had no clue where to start. I had been in a rock band since I was sixteen years old—I wasn’t a teacher. No one had hated school more than me. There were no school supplies on the island or books of any kind, and more important, I wanted the kids to have friends their own age and be in a school for that reason.

I started doing my research, trying to figure out how the hell I was going to make this work. I finally found a respected curriculum on the mainland, the Calvert School, from Canada, that I really liked. It made learning fun and was the easiest to understand. If this was going to be our reality, I wanted it to be as fun and educational for the boys as possible.

Homeschooling was life-changing for me, as it turned out, and brought me even closer to my kids. Every morning my sons and I and the dogs would get up and walk the beach. The boys would run, swim, exercise, and hunt for shells. I remember looking at their little footprints in the sand. My kids’ footprints and mine were the only ones on the beach—that’s how deserted it was. They’d find some conch shells that were as big as basketballs. We’d head back to the house and the boys would jump into the pool to rinse off the sand and salt from the beach, and then we’d have breakfast. I’d make a fresh homemade breakfast of eggs, waffles from fresh ground wheat, or French toast, a breakfast fit for a king, and then we would get to work on school. James, Rocco, and I would all sit at a huge antique round table and do schoolwork every morning. I taught James his times tables, how to read, and how to write cursive and printed words. I would put on an educational CD for Rocco to keep him occupied while I taught James, and then we would switch. I was teaching two different grades at the same time and it was hard work. After lunch, we went back to work again till about three or four in the afternoon before heading out to go fishing—I had taught the boys to fish, the same way my father had taught me.

At night before bed we would read dictionaries and encyclopedias. James would also read storybooks to Rocco and me. We had all the Dr. Seuss titles and heaps of other books. My favorite book was Are You My Mother? I taught the boys a lot. We would have music lessons too. James recorded his first song at age seven. It was called “Destruction” and was inspired by a particularly messy day in our house after three meals and a full day of activities.

Between homeschooling the boys, cooking, making bread, picking vegetables from the garden, and cleaning a five-bedroom, six-bathroom, ten-thousand-square-foot house filled with sand, I was fucking exhausted. I felt like Cinderella, stuck in her wicked stepmother’s house. We were living like the fucking Amish. I loved being with my boys, but I felt trapped living in that house and being on that island. I barely watched TV because half the time the satellite was blocked by a massive cloud in the sky and wouldn’t work. I didn’t keep up with music. At night, I would often fall asleep in the top bunk of James’s bed while we were watching a movie. Before dozing off I’d look out the porthole-shaped window in his room. I’d fix my gaze on the brightest star, just like I had as a teenager in the back of that station wagon when the Runaways were on tour. There it was. That same star still followed me wherever I went. But I could never really relax. The only joy or pleasure I had during those years on the island was being with my kids. They were my world. I’d lie in bed praying my kids would grow up and live a happy and healthy life, and that they’d always be my best friends. Given the isolated life we were living, who else were we supposed to be friends with?

I MISSED THE music industry so much, and it made me sad my kids had no connection to the world I loved. For the first time since I had moved to Florida, I started listening to music again. For fun, I decided to teach James and Rocco about the “School of Rock.” I started with the first letter of the alphabet: A is for AC/DC or Alice Cooper, B is for Black Sabbath, and so on. We did that for every letter of the alphabet and the boys would ask me to tell them stories about the bands, since I had met them all at some point in my career. I’d always have something to tell them about the bands we were learning about. I told them about MTV, and how I’d wait all week to watch Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, wondering, Who will the guest of the week be? I’d go online and we would look up the songs for whatever group or artist we were studying, and go over the guitar solos. We had a hell of a lot of fun doing it. I would talk to James about touring, explaining how to warm up for a show, and then how to cool down. I’d tell Rocco about charisma and stage presence.

One day my son James said to me, “Mom, for everything that happens, you have a song.”

He was right: whenever anything happened around the house, I’d sing an appropriate verse or part of whichever song came to mind. “Yes, James,” I replied, “life is a song. Music makes the world go round.” Doing the School of Rock was therapeutic for me, and it was special to share with the boys. But it was a Band-Aid over a hole in my heart. If music made the world go round, I ached to contribute my note.

JAMES AND ROCCO were introduced to UFC/MMA fighting at the most competitive level possible as they grew older. Seriously. They began practicing the Gracie form of Brazilian jujitsu, which is regarded by many to be the fiercest school of the martial art—and the most lethal, if used the wrong way. The school’s founder, Hélio Gracie, “insisted that fights should only be decided by submission or loss of consciousness.” Does this sound kid-friendly? Well, my family became acquainted with the Gracie family (their ranks include Rorion Gracie, a cofounder of Ultimate Fighting Championship) and their Miami-based protégés, the Valente brothers. According to their own website (graciemiami.com), the “Valente Brothers is [sic] the official representation of Grandmaster Hélio Gracie in Florida. Professors Pedro, Gui and Joaquim Valente started training directly under the Grandmaster at the age of 2 years old and were his loyal disciples.” If language like “loyal disciples” sounds fanatical to you, I’d say you’re probably on the right track.

Soon we were in too deep. In fact, the Valente brothers were asked to be our boys’ godfathers. My husband got their logo—of a triangle chokehold—tattooed on his stomach. Yes, I thought it was freaky. I began to fear I was losing my boys to this madness.

Grandmaster Hélio Gracie, the founder of Gracie Brazilian jujitsu, is worshipped among Brazilian jujitsu enthusiasts. It was a total way of life that extended far beyond the fighting mat, from how you thought to what you ate. Hélio Gracie had stomach issues, so he created a restrictive diet to heal himself, which later became well known and used by Gracie trainers like the Valentes. He called it “the Gracie diet.” Chocolate or candy was out of the question. Cake—only vanilla—was allowed once a year. If the boys ate chocolate, they got a mark against them in jujitsu, which meant they wouldn’t get their belts at the next ceremony. I was thinking, This is crazy. The boys need to be able to have a childhood. Let them eat a fucking M&M. They didn’t have any stomach issues, so why would they need to follow the Gracie diet? We bought them a fighting cage and put in a home gym that was full of exercise equipment: rowing machine, VersaClimber, weights, and an inclined rock wall. A child with an eight-pound vest on doing this kind of climbing wasn’t my idea of healthy exercise. Olympic champion Howard Davis Jr. was hired to teach James and Rocco to box.

This is beginning to sound nuts, right? If you have any doubts, type “Rocco Gillette” into YouTube and see for yourself: there’s a video of my precious seven-year-old son sparring with a gold-medal-winning boxer; it has more than fifteen thousand views. The boys also were put into Russian judo classes to teach them to kick and learn throws.

Believe me, I just wanted them to be children, free to do and act as kids would: eat chocolate, be carefree, have friends, and be happy and healthy. James and Rocco would end up in tears after each intense workout. They were only little boys; this was something they should not have had to stress about night and day. They weren’t the only ones who stressed. I did too.

I OFTEN GET asked about the tattoos on my arms, and I’ve never really had the opportunity to explain why I got them in the first place. I’m sure a lot of people believe they were something I chose to do on my own, without anyone else’s input, but that’s certainly not the case.

The first tattoo I got done was the skull with “Gillette” across it, on my left arm. It was a four-hour job. The tattoo artist, Christian, asked me discreetly, “You don’t really want this tattoo, do you?”

He could see I was sick to my stomach over it.

“No, I don’t.”

“Do you want me to do it anyway?”

“Yeah.”

Grin and bear it, Lita, I thought to myself.

In my eyes, “Gillette” represented my boys. I was okay with that.

That wasn’t enough. I ended up with a second tattoo, with the cross and Roman numerals that spell out May 13, 1994—our wedding anniversary—on my right arm. My son James was born on May 13, 1997, so in my eyes I looked at it as his birthday instead of as our anniversary.

Over the tailbone of my lower back, I have a tattoo that reads MY HUSBAND. Finally, I broke down and got my husband’s first name tattooed down my forearm. I felt like I had been branded.

I WAS BECOMING a shadow of who I once was.

I fell asleep on the couch one night and woke up gasping for air, almost as if I was underwater. It was hard to breathe, and my heart was racing in my chest, like I had just missed a flight. What I really wanted to do was run to the door so I could get outside into the open air, but I would have set off the alarm system. The keypad was in the master bedroom in the closet. I’m trapped, I realized. I never kept alcohol in the house, but we had had some company over that night—a rare occurrence—and they had brought over some red wine, so I poured half a glass, thinking it would ease the anxiety. It didn’t. It made my heart pound even faster. Now I was really panicking.

I managed to make it to Rocco’s room, which was empty, because there had been a leak onto the bamboo flooring. It had become moldy and made me worry, so I made him sleep in James’s top bunk some nights. This was one of those nights. I sat there from ten P.M. till about four A.M., paralyzed. I wanted to get to a paper and a pen to write my children a note. I felt as though I was having a heart attack and was seized with a powerful desire to compose a final message to my children. But I couldn’t raise my arms; I thought that if I moved, I would die. All I could think about was my boys.

Who is going to take care of them once I’m gone? What’s going to happen to them?

It wasn’t until ten A.M. that morning that I was able to settle down enough to emerge from the room. I grabbed the Mayo Clinic’s Family Health Encyclopedia that I kept around for emergencies and starting reading. I wanted to know what had happened to me. I realized I had experienced a panic attack. Living on this island was really starting to destroy me, and the feelings of loneliness, being trapped, and being isolated had taken their toll physically, not just psychologically.

What’s going to happen to me?

It became clear to me, finally: I needed to get away from my marriage and off that damn island. I needed to do something that made me feel like Lita again. I didn’t have the answers yet, but I had a mission. I had to save myself and my boys.

THE FIRST STEP was to get a toehold back in the United States. I started pushing the idea of buying a house in Miami. The boys frequently were traveling there anyway for jujitsu training. It took me three years, but we finally bought a place in Miami. I thought I was one step closer to freedom, but I was wrong.

We would go back and forth between the islands and Miami, but I wanted to figure out a way to keep us in Florida more. James was eleven now, and Rocco was seven. I got involved in a school talent show for some friends of ours. I put together the kids to sing “We Will Rock You.” I hung out in the background and borrowed a gold-top Les Paul to play during the show. We named the band “Kids Row.’’ I made them costumes and we had a lot of fun. A couple of the boys who James and Rocco did jujitsu with were a part of the group. Each kid had a verse to sing. James had so much fun with the Kids Row project that I decided to buy him the gold-top Les Paul I had used for the talent show for his eleventh birthday. He showed a natural inclination for playing guitar, and I figured that even if it sat in his room for a while, if he wanted to play it, he could, instead of playing one of “Mommy’s guitars.” Most of my guitars were in storage.

Working with the boys on Kids Row spurred my hunger to make music. In 2009, I released a record called Wicked Wonderland. Or at least it was packaged as a “Lita Ford album.” Here’s what All Music Guide had to say about it:

It’s an album with explicit sexual content, examining S&M, bondage, power exchanges, and all manner of kink and crave in lyrics, words, and sleeve images. Ford wrote all of these songs with her co-producers Greg Hampton and Gillette. Gillette is also either a duet partner or backing vocalist on every track here.

Take a look at the credits list if you want to figure out who had artistic control. As for the “S&M, bondage, power exchanges, and all manner of kink,” when I look back at photos or video footage of the tour on the Internet, it makes me sick to my stomach.

All I will say is, this wasn’t a Lita Ford album.

Let me state for the record: I disown Wicked Wonderland.

IN THE MONTHS that followed the release of Wicked Wonderland, my husband declared, “There’s no money in the music industry.” He said, “If we want to make some money, why don’t we do a reality show.”

I thought it had the potential to be cool, but we had to be realistic. We needed professional management, unlike the Wicked Wonderland experience.

We called Morey Management, who had represented Miley Cyrus, and much to our surprise, they got on a plane and flew to Florida to meet us. I made them pasta and served red wine. We showed them the house and they got to meet our boys. They flew back to Los Angeles and thought that they could work with us. We had a manager. Awesome! They helped us find an agent, and we started shopping for a reality show. It took months, but the Gersh Agency finally landed us a contract with TLC.

They drew up an agreement and sent it to us. The way it was worded bothered me. It didn’t say “Lita Ford” anywhere on the contract. “They’re signing us because this is Lita Ford’s family. Not for any other reason.” I was confused. A couple of months passed, and the contract issue still bothered me. I hadn’t spoken to our managers since they had been at our house. It pissed me off that I was in the dark about how I was going to be portrayed. I would be damned if I was going to be presented as a broken-down Cinderella on national television. I wouldn’t let it happen. I needed the truth, and I knew the only way to get it was to find it myself.

I told my husband, “I’m going to get on a plane to meet the TLC gang. I also want to talk to Jim Morey and Bobby Collin,” the company’s top executives.

When I walked in to meet with the TLC people, they were thrilled to see me. I was shocked because of what I had been told about them before I left for LA. I sat down with the director from TLC, a couple of the main writers, and the vice president of TLC and had a great conversation. They had some exciting ideas. Morey Management sent me over to a songwriter so that we could write some songs for the show. We wrote two really great songs. One was going to be the title track for our reality TV show. The kids were also going to make an album as a Jonas Brothers–type group. We would have had a reality TV show, and the kids would have had their own album. I think it would have been successful.

After that I made more trips to Los Angeles. I was getting more confident and asserting my independence; it was as if being back in LA had awoken me from a nightmare.

The spell was broken. But life’s never simple. The path ahead of me would be as dark and challenging as anything that had come before.

I made the two last flights to LA by myself. For only the third time in seventeen years of marriage, I was alone—without the boys or my husband.

When I was in Los Angeles, my cell phone broke, and so I walked into a Sprint store to buy a new phone. The salesman said, “Lita Ford?”

I said, “Yes, that’s me.” It felt good to hear someone say my real name after so many years of not hearing it. They hooked me up with a brand-new phone, listed under my own name. It might sound like a small thing to most people, but it felt like an important step in reclaiming my identity and freedom.

For more than a decade I had done the best I could to endure the way I was living, but I knew staying in my marriage would have been the death of me, emotionally and spiritually. It was time for Lita Ford to return.

I flew home to Florida eleven hours earlier than originally scheduled. I landed in Fort Lauderdale, rented a car, drove to my attorneys’ office, and filed divorce papers. I had bravely crossed the point of no return—but I didn’t understand how devastating the fallout would be. What happened next was pure heartbreak. I succeeded in gaining my independence, yet I would lose the most precious part of my life.

I PAID THE ultimate price for my freedom.

When I filed for divorce in 2010, I lost my boys. Suddenly they would not speak to me or visit me. It was a complete transformation from my social, lively, and colorful boys. Their neighbor, who is a respected attorney, witnessed the change in them too. She came out of her house one day, said hello, and the boys ran back inside the house. This wasn’t some stranger; we used to go to her house often to ride horses and play with her animals. Now the boys wouldn’t speak to her, either. It seemed unreal that the sons I had poured all my love and life into could turn against me.

In retrospect, I have deep sympathy for them. Breaking away from my marriage was the hardest thing I’d ever done—but I was able to draw on enough life experience to finally understand the situation I was in wasn’t right. My kids were not so lucky. They knew nothing else. In fact, their primary contact with the outside world—extreme martial arts—seemingly reinforced their home environment, proudly promoting the virtue of being “loyal disciples.” (Readers may be interested to learn that “Control” is the third tenet of the “Gracie Triangle.”) By leaving the family, I was now a disloyal outsider. It seemed as if I was being shunned.

I have chosen not to detail the divorce proceedings here. Ultimately, the only fact that matters is that I became disconnected from my darlings. It’s hurt me beyond measure. And unfortunately it seems that if you pay the right attorneys the right amount of money, the courts turn a blind eye and allow parents to be cut out of their children’s lives. It’s called parental alienation.

For a time I moved into an apartment nearby my boys, hoping to reconnect with them. I had a sleeping bag, a pillow, my suitcase, and my two dogs who slept at my feet. The apartment complex I was staying in was full of kids. Every time one of them would be close by, the dogs would get all excited, thinking it was James and Rocco.

No one will ever know the emotional pain I experienced. I want James and Rocco—and the rest of the world—to know it is not their fault. They are children—my children.

SHORTLY AFTER I escaped from my horrible situation, I went in to get my soon-to-be-ex-husband’s name removed from my forearm. I had them black it out because it would have taken two and a half years for them to burn off that name, and I wasn’t going to wait. I had waited long enough to escape from my life with him. I let it heal for about three months and then went to get it blacked out again, and this time I had them add the red lining to the black widow symbol as well as the script BLACK WIDOW right below it. I had survived a miserable hell, and now I had the battle scars to prove it.

LOST AND ALONE, I turned to the only thing that could give me solace: music. During the divorce proceedings I started playing guitar again and writing songs. Working again and doing shows kept me busy and my mind off the horrible things that were going on. I got involved with David Fishof’s Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp. It’s such a rewarding feeling to get a group of five strangers who have never played together into a room and watch them grow into a band in just four days. Sometimes they come in nervous or scared, but I always remember what Mike Chapman told me in a preproduction meeting decades ago when he saw my hands shaking. “Lita, if you weren’t scared, I’d be nervous, because being scared means you care.”

To see fans care that much about playing their instruments with me is a humbling experience. Sometimes you get a camper who isn’t as cooperative. At one particular camp, I had one girl in my group who came in, sat down, and crossed her arms. She looked miserable. I said to her, “Stand up.”

“I don’t want to stand up.”

“Okay. Well, we have to write a song, so let’s all write a song.”

She said, “I don’t want to write a song about sex, drugs, or rock and roll.”

“Well, why are you here?” I asked her.

I suggested writing a song called “Agony,” because she looked like she was in agony being there. We got started and all of a sudden, she started singing and totally sang the shit out of it. The issues she was having in her life at the time had made her angry, but I saw her channel all of that into our group’s song. It was so rewarding to see her get off that chair!

At one of the Rock and Roll Fantasy Camps, I reconnected with guitarist Gary Hoey. We had met years before, but had never really had the opportunity to know each other well. We exchanged information, and sometime after that, Gary called me and said, “Lita, I have a studio in my house, and if you ever want to record here, you’re more than welcome to.” It would be about a year into the divorce ordeal before I took Gary up on his offer and headed to New Hampshire. I thought that getting out of the scene and studios in LA and into a very peaceful place in the woods—which had a soothing, calming vibe—would do me some good. Gary’s studio had a very homey feel to it. We allowed ourselves to feel that the music was right, because when you’re alone like that, I think you really come to more of the truth in your work.

When Gary and I started working together musically, we were finishing each other’s sentences. We had many of the same influences, so when we connected, it was effortless. The first song we wrote and recorded was “Branded,” which was about the tattoos I had gotten while I was married. There were times when I would play a solo and Gary would say, “Wow, that’s awesome”; then he’d add something, and I’d say, “Woah!” Gary’s guitar parts complemented mine. The next song we wrote was “Love to Hate You,” which would turn out to be the happiest song on what would become the Living Like a Runaway album. We traded off licks and guitar parts in that song because as a duet, it felt right doing it that way. In “A Song to Slit Your Wrists By,” I played the first part of the guitar solo and then handed the guitar to Gary, and he played the second half. It got to the point that when we’d play back the songs, I couldn’t tell whether some parts were mine or Gary’s! That’s how connected we were musically.

When I went back to Gary Hoey’s house for the second time, we wrote “The Mask” and “The Asylum.” After working with Gary, I felt like I had just had the best sex of my life, through music: it was a creative thrill I hadn’t felt in sixteen years. I loved it.

Some nights, I’d say, “I’m not going to play guitar on this,” and he’d say, “Lita, you have to play guitar on this.” He knew as well as I did that I had to make this the best thing I had ever done. “My” previous album, Wicked Wonderland, had damaged my credibility in the industry to such an extent that I needed to reset everyone’s expectations.

Sometimes we’d get started recording, and I’d ask to begin from the top.

“Sorry, can I do that again?”

Gary responded, “Lita, you can do a hundred takes if you want. You’re the artist.”

Slowly I gained confidence in myself after not playing or being in the studio for so long. After a decade and a half away, I had to rediscover who Lita was, and Gary brought that out of me.

It was such a different, positive feeling compared to the awful emotions I was dealing with during the divorce. It may have saved my life.

I WAS EXPERIENCING extreme highs writing with Michael Dan Ehmig and Gary Hoey, and profound lows because I’d had to deal with the horrible feelings about my relationship with James and Rocco. Gary and his beautiful wife, Nicole, and their kids were a godsend in my life. He took me into his studio and his family welcomed me into their home, and I was able to dump all the pain I was going through into my music. They were so wonderful to me. Nicole would make me blueberries, yogurt, and granola for breakfast, whatever she could get me to eat. My mind was always on my kids so I didn’t feel like eating much. It was usually coffee and that was it. She kept trying to be my home cook and take good care of me. One night, I helped Nicole make dinner. I showed her how to make the pasta sauce my mom had taught me to make all those years ago. It was so much fun. While we were working, Gary would call into the house—which was steps away from the studio—and Nicole would copy down notes and put them in a neat order so that I could use them for my lead vocals. I never wanted to leave. It felt like I was home. I fell in love with their children, who were the same ages as my boys, and they adored my dogs.

I went back to Gary’s many times, and each visit, we’d get into the groove of writing songs. I would lay down a vocal, then Gary and I would put in the rest. Then we’d play the song back to Nicole and the kids. If Nicole wasn’t in tears, or someone in the room wasn’t in tears, or the teenage friends that Alison had over didn’t like it, then we’d record it again. It always helped us out to hear the ideas that Nicole had. She was honest and would give input as to whether something was too slow, too much, not enough. She was as much a part of the record as Gary and I were.

When we would get stuck on ideas, I’d call Michael Dan and say something like “I have a song idea about an angel but it’s become about the devil.” A few seconds later he’d sing a line like “Love don’t come easy for a lonely soul like me. . . . I find myself in trouble on a road to misery. . . . I try to do the right thing but I’m easily misled. . . . I’m drawn to the dark side . . . and the devil in my head,” and I would be like, “What the hell?! Yes! That’s brilliant!” If I didn’t know him as well as I do, I don’t think that I would have been able to write the album the way we did.

Michael Dan and Gary Hoey and his family saw me through the entire record when a lot of people would have turned their backs on me and said, “No, I don’t want to work with Lita. She’s too eighties.” At this point I had been out of the music scene for twenty years. When I returned, I had no idea where the music culture was, since we never listened to the latest music on the island. I played what I wanted and not whatever was the flavor of the month. Just to make life easier, I didn’t start listening to music (other than my own) when I lived in LA. As far as I was concerned, I’d earned my right to play whatever the fuck I wanted to play. Which was exactly what I did.

IN BETWEEN WRITING sessions, I would go back to Florida to meet with attorneys, go to court, and, most of all, to see my boys. I did that for almost a year as I wrote what would become my next album. I wished James and Rocco could have come up to New Hampshire to play in the snow with Gary’s kids. My children had never experienced winter. I wanted to take them so badly, but the alienation continued: I was unable to speak to the boys on the phone or even e-mail or text. I was blocked on Facebook. All communication was denied. This was not court ordered.

From my perspective, the legal system didn’t care about my kids. My ex was allowed to take the children “fishing” to a country where US laws do not apply. A place I knew they’d never come back from. If they do, I sure won’t be told about it. The record was handed in to the label the same day my divorce was made final in February 2012. I came out of it with a good amount of money, but it should have been a lot more considering the millions of dollars’ worth of land we owned. But I just wanted to be free of my ex-husband, and I wanted the whole process to stop torturing the kids, so I accepted the shitty deal. The only thing I truly wanted was my children, and with the boys acting the way they were, it had become painfully clear I was going to lose my sweet baby James and Rocco. I took the reduced sum of money, signed the settlement, and got on with my life.

To be clear: I would give up all the money in the world to be able to hold my boys in my arms.