The Dirt (36 page)

O
ne of my favorite movies is
Crossroads
, about the legend that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads one night so that he could play guitar like no man has since. At the end, the devil comes to Robert Johnson in the depths of his unhappiness and gloats, “You got what you wanted. You wanted to be a bluesman.”

I used to tell myself the same thing: “You got what you wanted. You wanted to be a rock-and-roll star. Deal with it.” My dreams had come true, but they weren’t what I had thought they would be.

When we were recording
Girls
, Tom Zutaut would stop by the studio and see me drunk, slouched over, and knocked out on painkillers. When he first signed us, he used to call me the purple people eater because he said I had a purple aura. But now he looked at me distraught: “Your purple people eater is fading,” he said sadly. “It’s fading into this weird alcoholic thing.”

“No, it’s not,” I would mumble back. But it was. When I was recording the staccato guitar line at the end of the song “Girls, Girls, Girls,” I fell out of the chair because I was so drunk (though we used the take anyway because we liked how it sounded and I was in too much pain to play anymore).

We had sold millions of records and I was still broke. The rest of the guys were partying and spending all this money on drugs, but I was stuck with lawyers, accountants, and greedy exes coming down on me for child support. When I left for the tour, I kept my car at a friend’s house and not only did he total the right side but he had the nerve to ask for five hundred dollars for car-sitting. When you start to get successful, everybody thinks you’re rich. Me, I didn’t even have enough money to buy another car. And, on top of that, I lost the last guy who I had considered to be a real friend. I haven’t had one since.

Before I went onstage, I’d line up six shots of vodka next to an open can of Coke, and then down them all. During the show, I’d have a glass of pure vodka on the side, which the other guys thought was water. Afterward, I’d bring out a jar of Mars-ade—a mix of tequila, orange juice, and grenadine—and suck that down.

Alcohol would bring out sides of my personality that I never even knew existed. I was moldy one night at the Lexington Queen in Japan, and the owner happened to have a Godzilla mask. I put it on, hopped on the dance floor, and started doing what we call crack dancing—shaking my ass with my butt crack hanging out of my pants (we used to do a lot of crack bowling, too). I suddenly got inspired to leave the bar with the Godzilla mask on and terrorize unsuspecting Japanese civilians, maybe crush some office buildings, too. I pulled my pants down to my ankles, and walked up and down the street barking and snapping at people with my Godzilla mask on. The rest of the guys were chasing after me laughing, because they’d never seen me behave like that before. Someone had told me that it’s legal in Japan for a man to stop anywhere and pee on the side of the road. So I decided to see if that was true.

I thought I was so funny. But when I returned to my hotel room, I looked at myself in the mirror and just saw an ugly, dirty guy with a big giant belly. Since I had started drinking heavily after Vince’s accident, I had slowly been blowing up like a balloon. I was surprised no one pitch-forked me and stuck an apple in my mouth. I was such a pig.

That’s why I should have been suspicious when Emi Canyn, one of the two backup singers we had hired (in emulation of the Rolling Stones with Merry Clayton or Humble Pie with Madeline Bell and Doris Troy) started getting really friendly with me. She was thin, athletic, and beautiful and I was old, ugly, and sickly. No woman in her right mind would have been attracted to me.

The guys had made a rule: “You don’t shit in your backyard,” as Nikki explained it, “and you don’t sleep with anybody who works with you.”

So when they started hearing Emi’s voice coming from my room at all hours, they flipped out. The Jack Daniel’s and Halcion made them blind with rage, and they punished us much more than we deserved. They stopped talking to us, gave us dirty looks, poured drinks on us, and smeared food all over our luggage. Emi was very religious, and they showed her no mercy. Whenever the plane hit turbulence during the tour, they’d stand up, drop their pants to their ankles, and start chanting “Fuck God! Let’s crash!” just to make her freak out, grab her crucifix necklace, and start crossing herself and praying. If I tried to stop them, they’d heave a bottle of Jack at me.

It was so hypocritical because before we had hired Emi (and Donna McDaniel, the other backup singer in the Nasty Habits), we were working with a vocalist named Brie Howard. She had a dirty, bluesy voice, like Tina Turner, and had sung with Robbie Nevil and toured with Jimmy Buffett. But just as she was about to join the band, Nikki started dating her.

I was disillusioned and disgusted that Nikki and the guys came down so hard on me after that. I guess they lost all the faith and trust they had in me, and I definitely lost any faith and trust I had in them as friends and bandmates. If I didn’t love playing guitar so much, I would have walked out on them.

I’ve always been ready to crawl back to where I came from. Most people aren’t: They think bad things only happen to other people. That’s why I try to rely only on myself. Anything could happen to our society and probably will, from a massive earthquake to a nuclear attack to a stock market crash. Most people say, “Oh I have a great job, plenty of money, good benefits, and medical coverage. I feel great and safe.” But what if a depression or a food shortage raised the price of bread to fifty dollars. How would you feed your family? Could you survive as your ancestors did? Unlikely!

When you’re running around begging for scraps of food, drugs and girls suddenly don’t seem so important. I never really got into the decadence or the pampering or the hard drugs like the rest of the band did. They used to call me Eightball Mars, because I’d say, “Give me an eightball and don’t ask me why.” I was new to cocaine, and when it became a problem, I stopped. Not like Nikki.

I was mad as hell when I first saw him doing heroin. We were playing at the Long Beach Arena on the
Shout at the Devil
tour, and he was sniffing a little bindle. I asked, “What the fuck was that?” He said it was smack, and I asked, “Have you started shooting that shit?” He said that he would never do that, but I was fucking livid. I knew exactly what was going to happen to him, and during the
Girls
tour it did.

But how can you save someone like that from himself? No one could stop me from drinking and swelling up; no one could stop Elvis from the pills that killed him.

That’s what I thought when I got the call between legs of the tour telling me what I already feared. Our tour manager was shit-faced high and crying when he broke the news to me. He asked me to call England and cancel the European leg of the tour for him. Why me?

I was hungover, confused, upset, and mad—at Nikki and at myself for not doing more to stop him. I called
Kerrang
magazine and said the first thing that came to my head: “We can’t come over because we heard you have severe storms over there and, um, we have so much equipment that we are afraid that it could cause a cave-in. Because, uh, there is snow on the roof or something.”

I didn’t know what I was talking about. All I knew was that I couldn’t tell them what Rich had really told me: Nikki was dead.

E
arly in the
Girls
tour, I stopped dating Vanity. Whenever she came out to meet us, she’d annoy me, the rest of the band, and the road crew by riding a bicycle around the stage in the middle of rehearsal or doing something else obnoxious. It wasn’t much of a relationship anyway, and the drugs had caused her to lose a kidney. She was even starting to lose her sight and hearing. I found out years later, though, that she turned herself around. She cleaned up, found God, became a reverend, and changed her name back to the one her mother gave her, Denise Williams.

Now I was truly alone. I had no girlfriend, my grandmother was dead, my dad was probably dead, and I didn’t talk to my mom. So I was the only one in the band without a family, a girlfriend, a wife, or any prospects, and I was too smacked out to care. As for the music, I could hardly even stand the last two albums I had written. And the acclaim? There was none. Critics despised us. I felt like the McDonald’s of rock and roll: My life was disposable. Consume me and throw me out.

After six months of touring
Girls
, my existence had disintegrated to the point where every waking moment was about drugs: I went onstage to get drugs, I came offstage to find more drugs, I used my per diem to buy drugs, and I traveled to each city only to see if anyone had new drugs. Heroin, coke, freebase, Jack, zombie dust: They all had been controlling my life for a year straight. And, like a bad relationship, the longer they stayed in my life, the more miserable and out-of-control my life became.

Soon, everyone knew what was going on: One night after a show, we returned to our jet to find a note from Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith on the windshield, telling us we were crashing and burning, and that they had been there and could help us. Though once we had idolized them, now we just laughed at them, ignored their warning, and kept crashing and burning.

Just before we left for Japan, an earthquake hit Los Angeles. I had been up for three days straight, and when I ran out of the house, the only thing I grabbed was my freebase pipe. That’s how important it was to me. I didn’t even take my house keys, and had to break open my side door to get back inside. I knew I was in a downward spiral. But I didn’t realize how low I had actually spun until we started our second tour of polite, civilized Japan, where our antics made us stick out like clowns at a funeral.

Coming into Tokyo on a high-speed bullet train from Osaka, Tommy and I turned into our superpowered alter egos, the Terror Twins. Powered by magical zombie dust, we were more powerful than a speeding bullet train, able to inhale large lines in a single snort, and blessed with X-ray powers that enabled us to find and consume every bottle of sake on the train. We ran up and down the aisles saving the world by spilling rice and powdered donuts on our arch-rivals, that copulating pair of supervillains, Emi and Mick (or, as we preferred to call them, Jonah and the Whale).

“We should have killed you all in the war,” Tommy suddenly bellowed. And we both started grabbing sake bottles and giving select passengers a purifying bath. Tommy was in his Indiana-Jones-hugging-a-dominatrix phase of dressing and, as he ran down the aisle, no one could see his flesh, just a low-slung hat, skintight gloves, and a coat trailing behind him like the cape of some avenging angel cut out of denim, leather, and cocaine.

Our Japanese promoter, Mr. Udo, was terrified. “You must settle down,” he told us sternly. “Fuck you,” I yelled. And I grabbed a Jack bottle and threw it at him. The missile didn’t even come close to its intended target. Instead, it hit a terrified commuter, who collapsed to the ground with blood pouring out of his head.

Mr. Udo didn’t bat an eyelash. “I want to do something for you,” he said calmly. “But you have to sit down first.”

I returned to my seat and he pushed his thumb into the back of my neck. A rush of some kind of fluid or blood ran through my body, and I slumped in my seat, completely mellow. My superpowers were gone. Mr. Udo then walked over to Tommy and did the same thing. Sitting there, we realized that we hadn’t been funny at all. We had really upset everyone, especially Mick, who looked like he was ready to walk out on us any minute. It was nearly the end of the tour and everybody was sick of the show. Not the concert, but the show—which was me and Tommy, the Terror Twins, a pair so stupid we never managed to amuse anybody but ourselves.

When we got off the train in Tokyo, there were thousands of fans waiting for us. I walked out to greet them, but a squad of cops materialized and walked toward me. “Nikki-san,” Mr. Udo said. “You are going to have to go to jail. You understand, don’t you?”

“Fuck you!”