While promoting his album, Battle Studies, John gave two interviews, one with Rolling Stone that was released in January, then one a month later in Playboy. He talked like he’d tied a cinderblock to the gas pedal, a man intent on destroying his image as a thoughtful singer-songwriter. The first one was just gross, with him talking about the women in Hollywood he’s slept with and essentializing women down to their private parts. “You need to have them be able to go toe-to-toe with you intellectually,” he said. “But don’t they also have to have a vagina you could pitch a tent on and just camp out on for, like, a weekend? Doesn’t that have to be there, too? The Joshua Tree of vaginas?”
I’ve only skipped through the Rolling Stone interview, but a girlfriend who cared about me wanted to make sure I knew about one sentence that actually mattered. He said lately he could only sleep with “girls” he’d already slept with, because he couldn’t fathom having to explain to a new woman that, yes, the famous John Mayer was interested in her.
Did you catch it, too? Girls. Plural.
I confronted him about it, naming another person he’d been with. “Are you sleeping with both of us?”
“I’m not ‘back with you.’ ”
“Yeah, but you got my ex to break up with me!” I yelled. “I was living in Dallas! You took me away from something. What is wrong with me that I let you get me back into this situation again with you?”
The February interview in Playboy sealed it. He talked about me by name in the most degrading terms. You can look it up, because I had to be asked about those quotes in every interview I did for about two or three years. I scanned it more than read it, horrified at whatever paragraph my eyes landed on. He called me “sexual napalm” and said he wanted to snort me like a drug. If I had charged him $10,000 to sleep with me, he’d sell everything he had to keep doing it. He also used the n-word and said he wasn’t attracted to black women. He wasn’t even interviewing. He was “Johnning.” He opened the spigot of his mouth, and that’s what poured out.
This time John emailed me a letter apologizing. It was the kind of letter that might have worked on me before I’d met women around the world who were facing their own reckonings on what they were willing to do or become just to be loved.
Well, I sat myself down and wrote him a letter back. This one I didn’t have anyone proofread to impress him, because I had no interest in impressing him. Or ever even seeing him again. It was a goodbye letter. He did this to me just as I was about to do a press tour to promote The Price of Beauty, a passion project about female empowerment. And almost every interview began with a reference to me being sexual napalm. I found if I made a joke about it—saying he “gave away my game, because everybody thinks I’m the nice girl”—the interviewer at least moved on quickly. But the quotes followed me everywhere. Never had I felt men undress me with their eyes like then, and I was a freaking pop star. I was used to that, but this was something on another level. The guy got on the school intercom and said I was crazy in bed.
I didn’t accept his apology. I deleted all his contact information from my phone. I was done with this man in a way I never thought was possible. When he reached out to me, I changed my number and changed my email.
Delete.
Look, I hold on to everybody. If I think about it, I can really start to hurt about past relationships. I can go there so easily, because I gave so much of my time and my self to these guys. You feel like you need some return on that investment, but sometimes it’s just personal growth.
You probably have that someone, too. I think it’s okay every now and again to reflect on that time. Get down the box from the top shelf of the emotional closet and marvel at the things that used to mean so much. The keepsakes of our mistakes, the souvenirs of lost years. But know when to start making new memories with people who deserve the you that you are now.
I can’t tell you how many of my girlfriends have warned me not to write about John. “He’ll come for you,” one told me, genuinely concerned. But I am grateful he removed himself from my life so spectacularly. It cleared the way for destiny to knock on my door.
Part Four
22
Love Comes to My Door
May 2010
As I’ve started writing this section, we’ve had two earthquakes here in California. I am the first to admit that I am not good at earthquakes. I always tell my husband, Eric, that I’m a tornado girl, because I did so many classroom drills growing up in Texas. I know to shelter in place, find my foundation, and wait things out. Earthquakes throw me, because I am someone who relies on the ground beneath my feet. When I write or pray, I like to be close to the ground, and I draw strength from its sureness. When it shakes, something so permanent also seems fragile.
I have that same need to hold on to something when I think about all the chance moments that brought Eric and me together. My hands move to touch him or one of my kids, just to feel that sureness that we five souls all really found one another. They are the foundation I have built my life on. I know God put us together, but it still seems incredible that love literally came to my doorstep on a beautiful May evening.
So many things had to happen for our paths to cross—not just that first night—but in the thirty years we spent preparing ourselves for each other. I see us in a split-screen montage of scenes, crafted from the memories he’s shared with me, and I know his heart so well it’s like the faithful, musical girl in Texas is somehow there with Eric Maxwell Johnson, a smart and thoughtful boy growing up in Needham, Massachusetts. While I went to record companies in New York to pursue my dreams, he went to Yale, an Academic All-American wide receiver who graduated with nearly every receiving record in the book. If people talked about my voice, they talked about Eric’s hands. He remains legendary at Yale for being able to catch anything. While I was three days away from releasing my first album, he was at the Yale Bowl, diving to make the impossible game-winning touchdown against Harvard with twenty-nine seconds left in the game. It was a moment so famous in Ivy League football history, it’s still just known as The Catch, and by the time he graduated, the Massachusetts guy who’d broken Harvard’s heart also broke every receiving record in the Yale book.
Our separate lives began to accelerate. While I was landing in the papers for my first USO tour, the New York Times was profiling him for transforming his body to play tight end for the NFL. Hall of Fame coach Bill Walsh, then San Francisco 49ers’ general manager, watched a videotape of Eric’s workout that his agent had sent around to get interest going for the 2001 NFL draft. Bill believed in his potential, just like people believed in mine. Eric played first for the San Francisco 49ers for six years, then spent one year with the New Orleans Saints. We both married people for love, and we sat with our spouses watching each other on TV, catching glimpses of each other as channels flipped by. Me on Newlyweds, him on ESPN. How many times we must have seen each other and yet not known, “Oh, there you are.” Then each of our marriages had ended, his just as injuries forced him into early retirement, mine as I was forced to reevaluate who I really was.
The first part of 2010 was a time of renewal for each of us. He was finalizing his divorce and studying ways to heal his body from the trauma of football. He studied meditation and researched nontraditional medicine with Master Ming Yi Wang, a teacher/healer based in California. Eric lived like a monk, first sleeping in a tent on a roof in San Francisco, and after a long trip to China with Master Wang, he moved to Venice, a beachy neighborhood in L.A. While he went for long walks with his dog, I had stepped back from the spotlight and was happy to be single and alone. I needed to clear my head and heart because everybody who I allowed in I gave everything to. For once, I gave all that to me.