Authors: Tommy Lee
“No, Nikki-san, this is serious. You have to go to jail.”
Doc McGhee tried to intercede. “I’m his manager,” he told the cops, and they threw him to the ground and handcuffed him.
Then they marched toward me and, in front of all the fans, knocked me off my feet, handcuffed me, and led me into a squad car. Tommy chased after, harassing the cops and yelling. “Take me, too! If he’s going to jail, I’m fucking going, too!”
“No, no, no,” Doc barked, trying to sound like he was in control as he sat handcuffed in the backseat of the squad car. “Take it easy. We’ll have him out in an hour.”
After a few hours, they brought Doc and me to the sergeant’s desk at the station. I was wearing leather pants, high heels, a torn T-shirt, and makeup. I was sweaty and still completely high. It was after midnight and dark in the station house, so I took off my sunglasses.
“I’d leave those glasses on,” Doc said. “Your eyes are bloodred, and there’s makeup running all over your face.”
I put my sunglasses back on and kicked my feet up on the sergeant’s desk. I didn’t give a fuck what happened to me. The sergeant walked in and said something in Japanese. An interpreter who Mr. Udo had sent over translated: “He said to please remove your feet from the desk.”
“Hey, can I ask you a question?” I snapped at the sergeant.
The translator spoke to the sergeant and then told me I could ask whatever I wanted.
“Okay,” I said. “If my balls were on your chin, where do you think my dick would be?”
The sergeant looked at the translator expectantly. The translator sighed, and began speaking in Japanese.
“Arigato gozaimasu,”
the sergeant said. “Thank you very much.”
“Sure.” I nodded. The two spoke some more, then the translator grabbed my arm and escorted me out of the station.
“What the fuck just happened?” I asked him on the way back to the hotel.
“I told him that you said the bottle accidentally slipped out of your hand and broke. And that you feel really bad about the misunderstanding because you love Japan and the Japanese people, and are looking forward to going home and telling the American press how hospitable the Japanese are.”
“So you didn’t say anything about my balls?”
“No.”
“Then you’re not a very good translator, are you?”
The next night, it was Vince’s turn to disgrace us. He had polished off a pitcher of kamikazes at a Roppongi restaurant, and was so wasted that he wouldn’t stop talking. The only problem was that nobody understood a word he was saying. At the table next to us, there were four Yakuza gangsters in suits. Vince suddenly jumped up and slurred, “Thasss itttt!” He walked over to the Yakuza table, grabbed the underside with his hands, and flipped it over on them. The Yakuza guys dropped to the floor, pulled guns out of their waistbands, and raised the barrels over the edge of the table so that they were pointing directly at Vince. Fred Saunders, our bodyguard and wet nurse, jumped on Vince like he was a grenade about to explode and escorted him out of the restaurant.
“What the fuck did you do that for?” Fred asked Vince.
“Thosssh guysssh wasssh taalkingth ssshhhith bout m-m-me,” Vince slurred.
“What do you mean they were talking shit about you? They were speaking Japanese.”
“Japaneeesshhh?” Vince looked at Fred, uncomprehending.
“Yeah, we’re in Japan.”
“Oh.” Vince knitted his brow and suddenly grew quiet. I don’t think he even knew where he was—and he was still supposed to be on probation.
Later that night we went to the Lexington Queen, where even quiet Mick was out of control, running around with his pants around his knees and a Godzilla mask on his face, stomping on glasses and trying to breathe fire out of his ass. Vince went back to the hotel with some Yakuza guy’s girlfriend and I stuck around starting fistfights: the first one with Tommy (to this day he insists I hit him in the mouth, though he was so drunk he fell over before I had the chance to connect) and the last one with an American tourist whose head ended up cracked against a steel pole. The next morning, I woke up and suddenly realized I had been so busy fighting and getting out of jail the previous day that I had completely forgotten to celebrate my birthday. Vince woke up the next morning naked on the floor of his hotel room, with his prized Rolex watch gone. Yakuza’s revenge.
After three shows at Budokan, we were all supposed to go home for Christmas before our European tour. Tommy couldn’t wait for his first Christmas in his multimillion-dollar mansion with Heather. Mick and Emi were psyched to finally begin a normal relationship back home. Vince kept talking about banging Sharise, a mud wrestler from the Tropicana he had started dating. And, me, I had no one. No chick, no family, and no friends besides drug dealers. So what was the point in going home and spending Christmas day doing drugs by myself?
I announced to everyone that I was embarking on a solo tour. Not a music tour, but a tour of drugs and prostitutes. I was going to go to Hong Kong, Malaysia, Beijing, and then end with a fucking bang in Bangkok. I told Doc to send my suitcase back to Los Angeles. All I needed was a pair of black leather pants, a T-shirt, and my wallet. If I felt like changing clothes, I could just buy them, wear them, and then throw them in the garbage and be done with them. Fuck it. I didn’t need anything.
“There’s no way you’re going to do that,” said Doc.
“Fucking watch me,” I spit at him. “And if you stand in my way, you’re fucking fired.”
We argued back and forth for half an hour until we were at each other’s throats. Finally, Mr. Udo stepped in. “I will go with you,” he said.
“What?!” Doc and I both looked at him incredulous.
“We go together on your tour.”
“Okay,” Doc threw up his pudgy little hands. “I’ll go, too.” Then he stormed out of the room, mumbling something about not even getting Christmas off.
The next day, the three of us boarded a plane to Hong Kong. I was so dirty that no one would sit in my row. Finally, Mr. Udo, wearing a business suit, took the seat next to me.
“Nikki-san, I must talk to you,” he said gently in my ear. “Last time my friend was like this, he died.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I told him, not really caring.
“My friend was Tommy Bolin.”
“Really?” I suddenly grew interested.
“You are a lot like Tommy-san,” he continued. “You hold a lot of pain from your past. And when you hold your pain inside like that, sometimes it hurts you. And it makes you hurt yourself. I can see that you are very creative, like Tommy-san. But you are killing your creativity. I spent a lot of time with Tommy-san, and I told him that I was his friend and that he needed to quit. He told me he could not quit. He died before the year was over. So I am telling you now that you need to quit. You are going to die. I am your friend. You are like Tommy, and I don’t want to lose you, too.”
“Aw, Mr. Udo,” I said. “I’m just having fun.”
He frowned. I could tell that, although I had caused him nothing but grief, this very professional Japanese businessman had somehow taken a liking to me and was determined to save me from the grave I was hell-bent on running into. He saw that grave lying open somewhere in the earth directly ahead of me, and he knew I was heading straight for it. Only the road was dark, and nobody but my maker knew when the earth would suddenly disappear beneath my feet and I’d drop into it so fast that I wouldn’t even have time to regret choosing such a dangerous path without a single light to guide me.
THAT NIGHT IN HONG KONG, I left the hotel by myself and went to a strip club that the desk clerk at the hotel told me was really a whorehouse. Inside, there were four different rooms: One had a Chinese band playing Top 40 American songs, another had booths full of Chinese Triad gangsters, and another had dancers onstage. I took a seat in the fourth room, where women were parading across the floor, numbered one to eight hundred. There was every kind of Asian chick for every kind of fetish you could imagine, from petite nymphets in baby bonnets sucking lollipops to strapping women in leather S&M outfits. I motioned for the hostess and ordered them like food dishes. “I’ll take number fourteen, number seven, and number eight. Send those to my room.” Then I ordered ten for Doc and a dozen for Mr. Udo. I really thought that I was doing them a favor, and repaying their kindness for chaperoning me on my solo tour.
I paid for the girls, went back to my room, and passed out. If anyone knocked on my door that night, I didn’t hear it. Or maybe I did hear it, let them in, and got spanked by a fat Korean. I can’t really remember, but sex was the last thing on my mind. When I woke up the next afternoon, I threw up, shot up the last of my cocaine stash, put on my leather pants, and met Doc and Mr. Udo in the lobby.
“Did you guys get your presents from me?” I asked.
“Nikki.” Doc grimaced. “You’re sick. I answered the door, and there were two girls in Nazi outfits and a nun. What’s wrong with you?”
“Fuck, Doc. I was just having fun. How about you, Mr. Udo? Did you enjoy your gifts?”
“My wife is like my air,” he said.
“Huh?”
“Without her, I cannot live. She is my air.”
I stood there feeling like a giant prick. I had tried to contaminate his air.
“You go home now,” Mr. Udo said. “You don’t go to Bangkok. You are done. Okay?”
“Okay,” I squeaked. I had finally found someone willing to be a father figure, and in the space of twenty-four hours I had already let him down and disgusted him. I deserved to be abandoned again.
Mr. Udo went back to Tokyo that day, and Doc booked a flight for himself to New York and one for me to L.A. for the next morning. That night, I wandered the busy, compact streets of Hong Kong with my translator, looking for drugs. We turned into a long alleyway off Wanchai Road, and at the end there was a solitary lantern swaying in the wind. In front of it was a manhole cover sending steam rising into the air. It looked like something out of a horror movie, so of course I told the translator I wanted to walk down the alley.
At the end, under the lantern, there was nothing except a little old Chinese man in a brown robe. “Who is he?” I asked the translator.
“He is the soothsayer.”
“Oh, cool,” I said. “Can he tell my fortune?”
She talked to him, and then asked me to give him four Hong Kong dollars and show him my hand. I thrust my hand under his nose. He ran his hand across mine, then suddenly curled my hand up and pushed it away. His face was twisted as if he’d just drunk sour milk. He said something to her, then waved her away.
“What did he say?” I asked the translator.
“You don’t want to know,” she said, turning away and walking ahead.
“No.” I chased after her. “What did he say!”
“He said that you are going to die before the end of the year if you don’t change your ways.” The date was December 21. “He also said that you are unable to change your ways.”
I don’t think God could have given me any more warnings than he had in the past few weeks. My life had wound down to a sad, lonely addiction and everyone, from square businessmen like Mr. Udo to crazy old fortune-tellers, could see it coming. Everyone but me. “For God’s sake,” I yelled at the translator. “I just wasted ten dollars on that!”
When we returned to the hotel, I called my dealer in L.A. to make the usual arrangement. “I’m coming in tomorrow,” I told him. “Meet me with a thousand dollars’ worth of smack and some coke, syringes, and a case of Cristal. I’ve got some time off before I have to go to Europe, and I want to make the most of it.”
I flew in to Los Angeles International, got high in the silver limo that picked me up, and went back to the house. Sometimes you can’t tell how much you’ve changed when you’ve been away until you see yourself in your own mirror. That way, you can compare yourself with how you looked when you last saw yourself in the exact same mirror. I wanted to cry. I was getting a puffy alcoholic face, like Jimmy Page or Mick Mars. My arms were rail thin and covered with long, discolored track marks, and the rest of my body was soft and gushy. My face looked like one of those slippery kids’ toys that has a layer of fluid underneath the skin, though the toy I resembled had clearly been owned by some brat who abused the shit out of it. Even my hair was falling out in clumps, and the ends looked split and fried. I was disintegrating.
I needed to go out on the scene to escape from my own decay and loneliness. I flipped through my phone book in search of old friends. I called Robbin Crosby, then Slash, because Guns N’ Roses were going to open for us in America after the European tour. I picked up Robbin at his house in a silver limo I liked to rent and gave him some blow. On the way to the Franklin Plaza Hotel, where Guns N’ Roses were staying because they were all homeless, I threw up all over the limo. I wiped the chunks off on an antique beaver-hair-covered top hat I had bought for Slash and gave it to him at his door along with a bottle of whiskey. Some of the guys in Megadeth were also staying at the hotel, so we all piled into the limo. Robbin scored some junk from his dealer, who wasn’t too happy about the conspicuous limo outside his house, and we did drugs until our minds went blank.
We drove to the Cathouse, raised hell, and staggered back to the limo, with hordes of fans tailing us. Back at the Franklin, Robbin’s dealer was waiting. He said he had gotten some sweet Persian heroin while we were gone, and asked if I wanted some. “Yeah,” I told him. “But you do it.” By that point in the evening, I was too sloppy fucked up to get myself off. The only time I had let someone else shoot me up before was in the tenement in Hammersmith, where I was almost thrown out with the trash.
He rolled up my sleeve, tied off my arm with a rubber tube, and plunged the Persian into my veins. The heroin raced to my heart, exploded all over my body, and in an instant I was blue.
I lost consciousness. When I opened my eyes, everything was a blur of light, color, and motion. I was on my back, moving through some kind of corridor. Sounds whooshed in and out of my ears, unrecognizable at first, until a voice slowly emerged out of the white noise.
“We’re losing him, we’re losing him,” it said.