The Dirt (28 page)

On the plane, the guys would turn to me and ask, as they chugged Jack and Coke, “Vince, could you pass that plate of coke over there?” They’d smoke pot and blow it in my face. They acted like that the whole tour, and then if I ever broke down and took a drink, they’d chew me out and tell me I was hurting the band. While I was in rehab, Tommy had been driving his motorcycle fucked up with Joey Vera of Armored Saint on the back. He wiped out on the freeway and flipped the thing half a dozen times, crushing Joey’s hand so he couldn’t play bass. And no one said a word to Tommy. He kept drinking like it was nobody’s business, getting so fucked up that our tour manager, Rich Fisher, would drag him out of bed when it was time to leave each hotel, throw him in the luggage rack, roll him downstairs to the bus, and then find a wheelchair in the airport to cart him onto the plane. One night, Rich handcuffed Tommy to the bed to keep him from drinking, but within an hour, Tommy had escaped and was downstairs, lying unconscious in a pile of broken glass from a restaurant booth divider he had just shattered.

That was funny to the guys, but everything I did was wrong. One rule on the plane was: Hands off the stewardesses. But I was so bored staying sober that I’d always end up with a stewardess in the bathroom or the back closet or the hotel room after we landed. Then the band would find out and she’d get fired. To put me in my place, they hired the pilot’s wife as a stewardess. Eventually, they even put a second security guard named Ira on the payroll and his only job was to knock me out and take me up to my room if I drank or caused any trouble in public.

In the meantime, everybody was having the time of their lives. While we were rehearsing for a new leg of the tour, Tommy showed up with some Polaroids he had taken while he fucked Heather Locklear. The two of them had suddenly started dating, and now we had the privilege of seeing Heather Locklear’s ass up close.

Women had become my new vice, too. But not women like Heather Locklear. Instead of drinking and drugs, I’d fuck a lot of groupies. And there were tons of them. I’d go through four or five girls a night. I’d have sex before a show, after a show, and sometimes during a show. It never stopped, because I never passed up an opportunity and the opportunities were always there. A few times, when I really needed a distraction, I’d line up half a dozen naked girls on my hotel room floor or facing the wall, then run a sexual obstacle course. But the novelty wore off quickly. Even though I was married to Beth and we had a daughter, our relationship had hardly improved. Besides, her orange 240Z, which I loved so much, had blown up. So it was only a matter of time before our relationship did, too.

It seemed like all my relationships were exploding in my face. I could understand why the band was so upset, but what I did was over and done. As my bandmates, they should have been supporting me. After all, we had just recorded a weak album and the first hit from it, a cover of Brownsville Station’s “Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room,” which I used to play with my old band, Rock Candy, was my idea. But every night, though I loved singing it live, Nikki would complain that the song was stupid and he didn’t want to play it. Outside of “Home Sweet Home,” which MTV aired so much they had to establish an expiration date for new videos in order to stop the flood of requests, the rest of the album was pure shit. Every night, when I ran around onstage in my pink leather pants that laced up the sides, I felt like the only one sober enough to realize how bad some of those songs were. I was shocked the record went double platinum, and maybe it just reinforced the idea that we were so great we could even get away with putting out a terrible album.

When we flew back to L.A. between legs of the tour, my lawyer arranged for a meeting in court with the district attorney and the families of the others involved in the accident. In order to avoid a trial, he advised me to plead guilty to vehicular manslaughter and strike a compromise. He figured that since the people drinking at my house were mostly in Mötley Crüe and Hanoi Rocks, the party could be explained as a business meeting and we would be able to pay damages to the families through the band’s liability insurance, because there was no way I could afford them on my own. This was why the families of the victims agreed to what everyone saw as such a light sentence: thirty days in jail, $2.6 million in restitution to them, and two hundred hours of community service, which I’d already been chipping away at by lecturing in schools and on the radio. In addition, my lawyer told the DA that I could do more good lecturing on the road than I could sitting on my ass in prison, where I wouldn’t be a benefit to anybody. The DA agreed and deferred my sentence until after the tour.

The sentence was a huge relief, lifting a dark cloud that had been hanging over my head. But it was a mixed blessing, because now people hated me even more than they did before. The headlines in the papers calling me a murderer resurfaced, but now they were even meaner: “Drunk Killer Vince Neil Sentenced to Touring World with Rock Band.”

T
he day Vince’s sentence was handed down, I was home with Nicole. When I answered the phone, there was a needle in my arm. We were scheduled to tour Europe with Cheap Trick in a couple months, and I had become so shut off to Vince that I didn’t care how many years he was about to be sentenced, so long as it didn’t fuck up the tour, because Cheap Trick had always been such a big influence and now they were going to be our opening act. When I heard it was only thirty days, though, my heart thawed and my eyes watered despite myself. He was going to be okay, and the band was going to continue unscathed, even if we didn’t really deserve to. Then I shot up and nodded out.

Because heroin was Nicole’s and my little secret, no one in the band realized how bad we were getting. I never even told our road manager or security guards I was shooting up: I would always score the heroin myself. And though I wasn’t pathetic yet, I was slowly getting there. The irony of it all was that I later found out our accountant had originally set me up with Nicole because he thought the influence of this clean, delightful-looking lady would keep me on the straight and narrow. He greatly underestimated my powers, or lack thereof. And so did I. I learned that when we went to Japan.

I didn’t bring any junk with me, figuring that would be a good way to stop, but by the end of the plane ride, I began to get sick. At the hotel, I was sweating, my nose was running, my temperature was rising, and my body began shaking. I’d never felt anything like this before from not taking a drug. I always thought that I was stronger than any drug, that I was too smart to actually be dependent on anything, that only idiots with no willpower became addicts. But in my hotel room, I came to the conclusion that either I had been wrong or I was an idiot. I took my little cassette player out of my bag and put on the first Lone Justice album, which had just come out. I played it over and over for almost twenty-four hours while I lay awake, too sick to sleep.

After two days of light junk sickness, I realized that I was indeed an addict. The band had changed from a lighthearted, fun-loving imp to some sort of bitter, callus-skinned nomadic creature. We were tired, we hadn’t stopped in years, and I’d become crass and mean.

But here I was in a country where fans gave me little dolls, drew cartoons for me, said they loved my hair, and came up to me crying. Through my sickness, I could sense that for the first time, I was getting some of the love that I had been searching for all along through music. And in return I terrorized the country, destroyed whatever got in my way, and drank everything I could to try to blot it all out. I was weak, from love, from addiction, and from self-disgust.

By the time the tour ended in Europe, I was a vengeful, self-hating junkie. On Valentine’s Day, we played with Cheap Trick in London and the guys from Hanoi Rocks came to see the show. Brian Connolly from the Sweet was backstage, and I knew he didn’t remember telling me I’d never make it when I sent him my London demos four years earlier. When I saw him, I felt the rage and hurt of that phone call return. I glared at him, hoping he’d somehow remember and apologize, but he never spoke a word to me. And I couldn’t bring myself to walk up to him and gloat because I looked like shit from not having shot up since the morning. I was content with everyone else in the band telling me what an asshole he was that night. That was my valentine.

I grabbed Andy from Hanoi Rocks after the show and we hopped into a black English taxi in search of heroin. With the Clash song “White Man in Hammersmith Palais” ringing in my head, we finally found a dealer in a crumbling row of tenement houses nearby.

“This stuff is pretty strong.” The dealer smiled at me through large, rotting teeth.

“I’m cool,” I told him. “I’m an old pro.”

“You look pretty fucked up, brother,” he told me. “Do you want me to do this for you?”

“Yeah, that would be great.”

He rolled up my sleeve and looped a rubber medical tie around my upper arm. I held it taut while he filled the plunger and sunk the needle into my arm. The heroin raced through my veins and, as soon as it exploded in my heart, I realized that I’d fucked up. I never should have let someone else shoot me up. This was it: I was checking out. And I wasn’t ready. I still had things to do, though I couldn’t remember what exactly. Oh well. Fuck.

I coughed, I gagged, I coughed again. I awoke, and the room looked upside down. I was on the shoulder of the dealer, who was carrying me out the door like an old trash bag. I gagged again, and vomit came pouring out of my mouth. He dropped me to the floor. My body had turned blue, there was ice down my pants from Andy trying to wake me up, and I had large welts all over my arms and chest from being struck with a baseball bat. That was the dealer’s idea: He thought he could put me in so much pain that my system would shock itself back into action. When that tactic failed, he had evidently decided to throw me in the Dumpster behind his tenement and leave me for dead. But then I vomited on his shoes. I was alive. I considered that my second valentine of the night.

Of course, I didn’t learn my lesson. No one in the band ever seemed to learn his lesson, no matter how many warnings God gave. Two nights later, I was at it again.

Rick Nielsen, Cheap Trick’s guitarist, wanted to introduce us to Roger Taylor of Queen, who was one of Tommy’s favorite drummers. Roger took us to a Russian restaurant that he said Queen and the Rolling Stones always went to. He led Tommy, Rick, Cheap Trick singer Robin Zander, and me to a private back room with hand-carved oak trim along the ceiling. We sat around a huge antique wooden table and drank every kind of vodka shot known to man—sweet, spicy, raspberry, garlic—before feasting on a Russian dinner. Rick was wearing a black rubber jacket, and for some reason I kept telling him that I wanted to piss on it.

We were getting hammered and stuffed, laughing about what a great night this was, when a maitre d’ walked in and announced, “Dessert is served.” Then a whole team of waiters came in the room. There was one waiter for each of us, and each was carefully carrying a covered silver platter. They placed the dishes in front of us and one by one lifted the lids. Lying on each were seven rock-star-sized lines of coke. Though I was still weak from the night before, I snorted them all and kept drinking. The next thing I knew, we were back at our hotel bar and Roger Taylor was talking to Rick Nielsen while I sat on a stool behind them. I kneeled on the stool, pulled down my leather pants, and did what I’d been promising to all night: peed on Rick’s jacket. He didn’t even realize anything was happening until it started dribbling down his pants and onto the floor. I thought it was pretty funny at the time, but when I went up to my room afterwards, I felt terrible: I had just pissed on my hero.

I wanted to run out and look for heroin that night, but I forced myself to lie in bed and wait for sleep to come. I wasn’t going to kick heroin, but maybe it was time to slow down. I started trying to control my intake: I’d shoot up one day, then stay clean the next. Sometimes I’d go as many as three days without shooting up. But I was just fooling myself. I discovered that when I ran out of heroin just before the tour ended.