The Dirt (29 page)

Before we boarded the plane home from France, I phoned my dealer in L.A. and told him to meet me at the airport. Then I called a limo to pick him up to make sure he’d be on time. I fidgeted in my seat the whole ride, thinking about getting that first sweet hit of heroin in my veins after so long. I didn’t even care about getting laid anymore. Vince could keep all the girls—just leave me the drugs.

I was the first one off the plane. “Bye, guys, see you later,” was all I had to say to the band I had spent the last eight months with. Then I walked off with my dealer, hopped into the limo, and had a needle in my arm before the door even closed. We met Nicole on Valley Vista Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, where she showed me around my first real house, which she had picked out for me while I was on tour.

I had always thought that age and success had enabled me to overcome the shyness and low self-esteem I had developed from constantly switching homes and schools as a kid, but in reality I hadn’t changed at all. I had just drowned those feelings in heroin and alcohol. As a human being, I had never really learned how to act or behave. I was still the kid who didn’t know how to play normal games with his cousins. As I grew older, I only put myself in situations where I was the one running the show. I wasn’t interested in hanging out with other people in their environments, where I had no control. So once I set foot inside my house, I hardly ever left. Nicole and I shot up between five hundred and one thousand dollars’ worth of drugs a day. We went through bags of heroin, rocks of cocaine, cases of Cristal, and whatever pills we could get our hands on.

At first, it was a big party. Izzy Stradlin would be rolled up in a ball in front of the fireplace, porn stars would be passed out in the living room, and Britt Ekland would come stumbling out of the bathroom. One night, two girls came by and said that they were with a guy named Axl who was in a band called Guns N’ Roses, and he wanted to come in but was too shy to knock and ask.

“I think I’ve heard of him,” I told them. “I know his guitar player or something.”

“Then can he come in?” they asked.

“No, but you can,” I told them. And they did.

As I shot more and more cocaine, paranoia set in and soon I hardly let anyone in the house. Nicole and I would sit around naked day and night. My veins were collapsing and I would scour my body to find fresh ones: on my legs, my feet, my hands, my neck, and, when the veins everywhere else had dried out, my dick. When I wasn’t shooting up, I’d patrol my house for intruders. I started seeing people in trees, hearing cops on the roof, imagining helicopters outside with S.W.A.T. teams coming to get me. I had a .357 Magnum, and I’d constantly hunt for people in the closets, under the bed, and inside the washing machine, because I was sure someone was hiding in my house. I called my home security company, West-Tech, so often that they had a note in the office that warned patrol men to answer my alarms with caution because I had pulled a loaded gun on so many of their employees.

I had been onstage performing for tens of thousands of people; now I was alone. I had sunk into a subhuman condition, spending weeks at a time in my closet with a needle, a guitar, and a loaded gun. And no one in the band visited, no one called, no one came to my rescue. I can’t really blame them. After all, Vince had been in jail for three weeks and not once did the thought of calling or visiting him even cross my mind.

T
wo weeks after the
Theatre of Pain
tour, I put my brand-new twelve-thousand-dollar diamond-bezeled gold Rolex safely in my drawer, took a cab to the nearest precinct stationhouse, and turned myself in. I wanted to get it over with. They brought me to a quiet jail in Torrance to serve my thirty days.

My cellmate was in jail for stealing sports cars, and we were both trusties, which meant we had to bring food to the other prisoners, clean cells, and wash cop cars. In return, we got privileges: not just television and visitors, but on weekends the guards would bring us burgers and a six-pack. I had just spent almost a year on the road trying to stay sober to please the court, and now that I was in jail the guards were encouraging me to drink. Though the sergeant on the night shift hated my guts, everyone else wanted autographs and photos. In many ways, the rehab, guilt, newspaper headlines, and sober touring had been a much worse sentence than prison.

One afternoon, a blond fan who had figured out what jail I was in stopped by to visit. She was wearing Daisy Dukes and a Lycra tie-front halter top, and the sergeant on duty said I could bring her back to my cell for an hour. I walked her through the corridor, watching all the other prisoners salivate as we paraded by. I took her into my cell, shut the door, and fucked her on my cot. I could do no wrong in the eyes of my prisonmates after that.

The day before I started my sentence, Beth and I had moved into a $1.5 million house in Northridge with our two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. Beth visited me in prison every day for the first week. Then she suddenly stopped coming. I didn’t really think much about it: I wasn’t in love with her when we married, and it had only gone downhill from there.

After nineteen days, the warden released me for good behavior. Since I hadn’t heard from Beth, I had a buddy pick me up outside. We drove to Northridge, but I couldn’t remember where our house was. After an hour of searching, we finally stumbled across it. I walked to the door and rang the bell. Nobody was home. I walked around and checked the windows, but all the curtains were drawn. Maybe we were at the wrong house.

I walked around the back, and was pretty sure I recognized the pool and the yard. So I decided to break in. There was a glass door, and I shattered one of the panes near the handle, reached around and opened it, praying that I wouldn’t get sent right back to jail for breaking and entering. I walked inside and looked around. It was my house, but something was different: All the furniture was gone. Beth had taken everything—even the ice trays in the freezer. All she left behind was my Rolex and my Camaro Z28. The only problem was that she had taken the keys.

I called Beth’s parents, her grandparents, and her friends, and they all claimed they hadn’t heard from her. I wasn’t that interested in talking to her: I just wanted a divorce, my car keys, and some way to stay in touch with my daughter. I didn’t see Beth again for almost ten years, when she appeared at a concert in Florida with her husband and new children in tow. Our daughter, Elizabeth, eventually moved to Nashville to try and make it as a country singer.

As for me, after a year of policed sobriety, prison, therapy, and repentance, it was time to have a little responsible fun. I moved a couple of buddies in and, instead of buying furniture, installed a mud pit next to the pool for female wrestling. I invited all the drug dealers I knew to hang out at my place, because wherever there were drugs, there were girls. At one of my parties, a bunch of guys in suits who I didn’t know walked in. On the way out, one of them handed me a rock of cocaine as big as a golf ball, tipped his hat, and said, as if he was the Godfather or something, “Thanks for your hospitality.” After that, he was at my house every night. His name was Whitey, a drug dealer who probably did more coke than he sold, the house guest who never went away. He had spent some time in New Mexico, and pretty soon started bringing his New Mexico buddies over, particularly a tough-looking, tenderhearted, bath-deprived man named Randy Castillo. Some nights ended up with a lot of girls in lingerie and Whitey, Randy, and a select few other friends in bathrobes; other nights I’d bring a dozen girls back from the Tropicana to wrestle nude for me and my buddies. I wanted so badly to forget about the past year, to stop being Vince Neil and start being someone else, like Hugh Hefner.

fig. 5

N
ikki, our security guy Fred Saunders, and I had been up for two days straight drinking, doing blow, and taking mushrooms. We were somewhere in Texas. The window was open and the wind was making the shade flap around inside the room. Then, all of a sudden, there came a sound.
Chugachugchugchug chugachugchugchug
. A train was passing by, dude. And Nikki looked at me. I looked at Nikki. And we didn’t even have to speak: We were in this weird drugged-out state and our minds were in total synchronicity.

“Let’s go,” we both said to each other—not out loud, but telepathically.

Fred read our minds, and yelled, “No, no, no!” But we left him in the fucking dust. We ran down the hallway and into the elevator, trying our best to shake Fred because he would never let it happen. We sprinted through the lobby and across the long, manicured lawn in front of the hotel. We kept running, as fast as we could, until our lungs felt like they would collapse. Fred was a couple hundred yards behind us, yelling, “No, you motherfuckers! No!”

But we kept running until we saw the train, chugging along the tracks in front of us, fast as a bitch. I caught up to it until I was sprinting alongside it.

“Come on, Nikki! Come on!” I yelled. He was still panting behind me.

I grabbed a small metal handhold near the back of one of the cars and the train yanked me off my feet. I swung my boots into a step at the bottom of the car, and I was off.