Authors: Tommy Lee
It was Jerome that started me down the alley that would lead to Alcoholics Anonymous years later, where, coincidentally, I met and became friends with Harry Nilsson. (In fact, in a delusional state of sobriety, we actually talked about collaborating on an album.) Jerome had the highest substance abuse rate per capita of any city in the United States, which was impressive for a town of three thousand.
I also made friends with a fellow dork named Allan Weeks, and we spent most of our time in his house, listening to Black Sabbath and Bread and staring at our school yearbook, talking about which girls we wanted to go out with. Of course, when it came down to it, we were pathetic. At high school dances we just stood outside, listening to music leak out the door and feeling uncomfortable when girls walked past because we were too scared to dance with them.
That spring, we heard that a local band was coming to play at our high school and bought tickets. The bass player had a huge afro and a headband, like Jimi Hendrix, and the guitar player had long hair and a biker mustache, like a Hell’s Angel. They seemed so cool: They used real instruments, they had big amplifiers, and they held three hundred kids spellbound in a gymnasium in Jerome. It was the first time I had seen a live rock band, and I was awestruck (though they were probably hating whoever booked them in a shitty small-town high school). I don’t remember what they were called, what they sounded like, or whether they played cover songs or originals. All I knew was that they looked like gods.
I was too goofy to ever have a chance with Pete’s sister, so I settled for Sarah Hopper: a fat, freckled girl with glasses, no cutoff shorts, and legs that looked more like pasty semicircles than golden arches. Sarah and I would hold hands and walk around downtown Jerome, which was about one city block. Then we’d go to the pharmacy and look at the same records over and over. Sometimes, to impress her, I’d walk out with a Beatles album hidden under my shirt and we’d listen to it at the immaculate house where her Quaker parents lived.
One night, I was lying on my grandparents’ avocado-green carpet when their black Bakelite phone, which was used so rarely that it just hung on the wall with no chair or table around it, rang. “I want to give you a present,” the voice on the other end—Sarah’s—said.
“Well, what is it?” I asked.
“I’ll give you the initials,” she cooed into the receiver. “B.J.”
And I replied, “What’s that?”
“I’m baby-sitting. Just come over.”
As I walked to meet her, I mulled over the possibilities—a Billy Joel record, a Baby Jesus figurine, a Big Joint? When I got there, she was wearing ill-fitting red lingerie that belonged to the woman who owned the house.
“Do you want to go into the bedroom?” she asked, leaning with her elbow against the wall and her hand on her head.
“Why?” I asked like an idiot.
So while the kids played in the room next door, I had sex for the first time and discovered that it was like masturbation, but a lot more work.
Sarah, however, wasn’t letting me off easy. She wanted it all the time: As her parents made cookies for us at her house, I’d bonk their daughter in the other room. While her parents were in church, Sarah and I would slip out to the car. That was the routine until I came to a sudden realization that all men must face at least once during the course of their lives: I was bonking the ugliest girl in town. Why not step it up a notch?
So I shed Sarah Hopper and, while I was at it, dumped Allan Weeks, too. And I didn’t give a shit about how they felt because it was the first time I ever had the courage to believe I could rise above the bottom of the barrel. Instead, I started hanging out with the classy kids, like a three-hundred-pound Mexican named Bubba Smith. I had gotten laid and started doing alcohol and drugs, which I thought made me look pretty hip—especially under the black lights I soon bought for my bedroom. And, as anyone with a teenager in the house knows, once there are black lights in the bedroom, that kid is no longer yours. He belongs to his friends. Goodbye chocolate chip cookies and Beatles, hello weed and Iron Maiden.
I was still far from the coolest kids in Jerome. They had cars; we had bicycles, which we’d use to ride around the park and terrorize couples making out. I’d come home late, amped up on pot, and watch
Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert
. And if my grandparents tried in any way to constrain or criticize me, I’d flip out. It was too much for them to handle night after night. So they sent me away to live with my mother, who had migrated with my half sister, Ceci, to the Queen Ann Hill area of Seattle, where they lived with her new husband, Ramone, a big, tenderhearted Mexican with a low-rider and slicked-back black hair.
HERE, FINALLY, WAS A CITY CRAWLING with creeps and degenerates, a city big enough to cater to my drug-taking, alcohol-drinking, music-obsessed state. Ramone listened to El Chicano, Chuck Mangione, Sly and the Family Stone, and all kinds of Hispanic jazz and funk, which, between tokes on a joint, he’d try to teach me to play on a beat-up, out-of-tune acoustic guitar with a missing A string.
We soon moved, of course, to an area nearby called Fort Bliss, a massive cluster of small four-apartment pod buildings for people on welfare. On my first day of school, instead of beating me up, my classmates asked if I was in a band. So I told them I was.
I had to take two buses to school and, to kill time during the half-hour wait for the second bus, I’d stop by an instrument store called West Music. There was a beautiful Les Paul gold-top guitar hanging on the wall that had a clear, rich tone. When I played it, I tried to imagine that I was shredding up the stage with the Stooges, sending squealing guitar solos spiraling to the rafters as Iggy Pop convulsed at the microphone stand and the audience erupted like they did in that high school gym in Jerome. At school, I befriended a rocker named Rick Van Zant, a longhaired stoner who played in a band and had a Stratocaster guitar and a Marshall amp stack in his basement. He said he needed a bassist, but I had no instrument.
So I walked into West Music one afternoon with an empty guitar case one of Rick’s friends had loaned me. I asked for a work application and, when the guy turned around to find one, I stuck a guitar into the case. My heart was hammering through my shirt and I could hardly speak when he handed me the form. As I examined it, I noticed that the price tag for the guitar was hanging out of the case. I told him I’d come back and drop off the application, and walked out as casually as I could, accidentally banging the conspicuous guitar case into walls, doors, and drum sets as I left.
I had my first guitar. I was ready to rock, so I headed straight for Rick’s basement.
“You need a bassist,” I told him. “I’m your man.”
“You need a bass guitar,” he sneered.
“Beautiful,” I replied as I threw the case on a table, opened it up, and pulled out my newest possession.
“That’s a guitar, you fucking idiot.”
“I know,” I lied. “I’ll play bass on the guitar.”
“You can’t do that!”
So I bid farewell to my first guitar and sold it, using the money to buy a shiny black Rickenbacker bass with a white pick guard. Every day I’d try to learn the Stooges, Sparks (especially “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us”), and Aerosmith. I wanted so badly to join Rick’s band, but they knew as well as I did that I couldn’t play for shit. Besides, they were more into traditional big-riff rockers, like Ritchie Blackmore, Cream, and Alice Cooper (especially
Muscle of Love
). A guy across the street from him was starting a band called Mary Jane’s, so I tried to jam with him, but I was hopeless. All I could do was pick a note every thirty seconds or so and hope it was the right one.
Finally, outside an eighteen-and-over show I was trying to get into, I met a guy named Gaylord, a punk rocker who had his own apartment and band, the Vidiots. Every day after school, I’d go to his house and drink until I passed out, listening to the New York Dolls, the MC5, and Blue Cheer. There’d always be a dozen glammed-out New York Dolls–looking chicks and dudes there, wearing fingernail polish and eye makeup. They called us the Whiz Kids, not because we took a lot of speed—which we did—but because we were flashy dressers, like David Bowie, whose
Young Americans
album had just come out. Like the mods in England, we’d sell drugs to buy clothes. I practically moved into Gaylord’s and stopped going home. I did drugs all the time—pot, mescaline, acid, crank—and was soon a bona fide punk-rock Whiz Kid selling drugs for them.
I began dating a girl named Mary. Everybody used to call her Horsehead, but I liked her for one simple reason: She liked me. I was so happy that a girl actually talked to me. After weeks of drugs and rock and roll, I was cool but still pathetic. I had painted toe- and fingernails, torn punk clothes, eye makeup, and a bass guitar I carried everywhere, even though I still couldn’t play and wasn’t in a band.
We stood out and were ridiculed everywhere we went. At school, I’d get into fights because a group of black kids would call me Alice Bowie and block the hallway to keep me from passing. On the way home from school, I started casing houses. I’d knock on the door as I passed by and, if nobody answered two days in a row, the next afternoon I’d smash the back door in and grab whatever I could hide under my jacket. I’d come home from school with stereos, TVs, Lava lamps, photo albums, vibrators, whatever I could find. In our complex I’d ransack the basements in each apartment pod and break into the washing machines with a crowbar in search of quarters. I was angry all the time—partly because the drugs were fucking with my moods, partly because I resented my mother, and partly because it was the punk-rock thing to do.
Almost every day I’d sell drugs, steal shit, get in fights, and fry on acid. I’d come home and lie on the couch tripping on
Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert
until I passed out. My mother didn’t know what was going on: Was I gay? Straight? A serial killer? An artist? A boy? A man? An alien? What? To tell the truth, I didn’t know either.
Every time I set foot in the house, we’d get in arguments. She didn’t like what I was turning into, and I didn’t like what she had always been. Then, one day, it happened: I couldn’t take it anymore. On the streets I was free and independent, but at home I was supposed to be a kid. I didn’t want to be a kid anymore. I wanted to be left alone. So I tore the place apart, stabbed myself, and called the police. It basically worked, because I was free of her afterward.
I spent that night with my friend Rob Hemphill, an Aerosmith freak who thought he was Steven Tyler. To him, Tyler was the punk that Mick Jagger could never be. After his parents kicked me out, I slept in Rick Van Zant’s car. I’d try to wake up before his parents, but usually they’d leave the house to go to work and find me sleeping in the backseat. The third time they caught me, they called my mother.
“What’s going on with your son?” Mr. Van Zant asked. “He’s sleeping in my car.”
“He’s on his own,” my mother said, and hung up.
When I could, I went to school. It was a good way to make money. Between classes I’d roll joints for kids, charging fifty cents for two. After two months of good business, the headmaster walked around the corner and caught me with a bag of weed in my lap. That was my last day of school. I’d been to seven schools in eleven years and was fed up anyway. After being expelled, I spent my days under the 22nd Street bridge, where all the other burnouts and dropouts killed time. I was going nowhere.
I found a job at Victoria Station washing dishes and rented a one-bedroom apartment with seven friends who had also dropped out of school. I stole another bass and, for food, I’d wait by the garbage can outside Victoria Station until the busboys threw out meat scraps. I was quickly growing depressed: Just a year ago I’d been ready to take over the world, and now my life was going nowhere. When I ran into my old friends, like Rick Van Zant or Rob Hemphill or Horsehead, I felt alienated, like I had emerged from a gutter and was getting them filthy.
I didn’t feel like going to work, so I quit. When I couldn’t afford rent anymore, I moved in with two prostitutes who felt sorry for me. I lived in their closet, hanging posters of Aerosmith’s
Get Your Wings
and Deep Purple’s
Come Taste the Band
on the walls to make it feel like home. I had nothing going for me. One day, I came home to my closet and my mother-whores were gone. The landlord had kicked them out, so it was back to the Van Zants’ car. Winter was fast approaching, and it was freezing cold at night.
For money, I started selling chocolate-covered mescaline outside concerts. At a Rolling Stones show at the Seattle Coliseum, a freckle-covered kid came up to me and said, “I’ll trade you a joint for some mescaline.” I agreed because the mescaline was cheap, but as soon as I did, two cops burst out of a nearby car and handcuffed me. The kid was a narc. He and the cops dragged me, kicking and calling them names, underneath the Seattle Coliseum.
For some reason, however, they didn’t book me. They took my information, threatened me with a ten-year mandatory minimum in jail, and then let me go. They said if they ever saw me again, even if I wasn’t doing anything wrong, they’d put me behind bars. I felt like my life was blowing up: I had nowhere to live, no one to trust, and after all this, I had never even played in a single band. In fact, as a musician, I sucked. Just weeks before, I had sold my only bass guitar for money to buy drugs to peddle.
So I did the only thing a punk rocker who’s hit rock bottom can do: I called home.
“I have to leave Seattle,” I pleaded with my mother. “And I need your help.”
“Why should I help you?” she asked coldly.
“I just want to go see Grandma and Grandpa,” I begged.
The next day, my mother came to put me on a Greyhound bus. She didn’t really want to see me again, but she didn’t trust me with the money. She also wanted to remind me that she was a long-suffering saint for helping me and I was a selfish jerk. But the only thing that I could think was “Boom! I’m out of here and never coming back.”