Authors: Tommy Lee
W
hile I was on my own, I tried to avoid two things: One was listening to any John Corabi songs, which wasn’t difficult since they were never on the radio anyway. The other was my own press clippings. I was so tired of the band saying that I was selfish, that I walked around with the attitude that the world owed me something, that I was a pampered pretty boy who had inflicted suffering on everyone and never had to suffer a day in his life. Nikki was cool because he was a street kid, Mick was cool because he had spent so long in so many bands. But nobody knew a thing about me. Nobody cared where I came from. And I came from the worst place you could imagine: Compton.
My father, Odie, was a half-Indian auto mechanic and full-time ladies’ man from Paris, Texas, who worked for the L.A. County Mechanical Division repairing sheriffs’ cars. My mother, Shirley, was a half-Mexican lady from New Mexico who worked for Max Factor at a factory. Between them they had so little money that every year they moved me to a worse neighborhood: from Inglewood to Watts to Compton, where they put my younger sister, Valerie, and me into kindergarten. In elementary school, Valerie and I first realized we were different from everybody else: We were the only white kids in our whole school and neighborhood.
Several dozen Crips used an apartment across the street from us as a clubhouse, and at the end of the block there was a house where another gang, the AC Deuceys, hung out. The Crips and the AC Deuceys were always warring and shooting at each other, and whenever we left the house, my mother would cross herself and pray that none of us met with a stray bullet.
Every day, the neighborhood seemed to deteriorate more. But my parents refused to move, even when a bullet came hurtling through my sister’s window in the middle of the night. One day, I was walking home from school and four kids ran up to a well-dressed teenager, shot him, took his sneakers, and left him lying in the street. He couldn’t even speak, there was so much blood gurgling out of his mouth.
A few days later, I was waiting for the ice cream man in front of my house when I saw the same four kids across the street, hanging out near the Crips house. I looked down at my sneakers and figured that they wouldn’t fit those guys, so I was safe. They looked at me and began to cross the street, exactly to where I was standing. I prayed that they wanted ice cream too. A tall guy walking on the left side of the group, with a black T-shirt and raised red scars running up his arms, kept staring at me the whole time. My throat went dry and sweat prickled down the sides of my body, rooting me to the ground.
He separated from his friends, walked up to me, and smiled. Then he grabbed me, wheeled me around so that he was standing behind me, stuck his hands in my pockets, and grabbed my ice cream money. It happened so quickly that I couldn’t feel a thing when a blade sliced across my skin, from ear to ear. I thought that he had slit my throat, and when he released me and ran away, I collapsed to the ground. I was sure I was dead.
No one in the neighborhood even lifted a finger to help me. They just stared at me like I was a trash bag left out for the garbage truck to collect. I stood up and put my hand to my neck. I was covered in blood. But the guy had missed my jugular and only cut the side of my face and chin. All that for fifteen cents. And at the hospital, I got free ice cream anyway.
When I returned to class the next day, my teacher, Mrs. Anderson, lavished so much attention on me that it was almost worth it. Even before puberty, I had a nose for Playmates, and not only did Mrs. Anderson used to be one but she still looked like one. She had long, ironed-straight brown hair and a figure that made me feel like I was in the Warner Bros. cartoon with the big-city showgirl and the country bumpkin wolf whose tongue rolls down his mouth and across the floor when he sees her. Thanks to Mrs. Anderson, I had a revelation that was to be the guiding principle of my life: Chicks are hot. I didn’t know what tits were or what sexy was, but, somewhere deep inside, I knew that whatever those words meant, their definition was Mrs. Anderson. I took advantage of every opportunity I could to get close to her. (I still own a Playmate book with her photo in it.)
In her class, if you behaved well and folded your hands properly on your desk and read aloud with proper diction, Mrs. Anderson gave you the honor of walking in the front of the line to lunch and recess. And, as she led the line, Mrs. Anderson would hold your hand. That day in school, I got to hold Mrs. Anderson’s hand again: Little did she suspect what I was thinking. On parents’ night, I was so confused I introduced her to everyone as my mother. I wanted to be her lover or her son. I didn’t care which.
She opened up something inside of me that never closed. Thanks to her, I found myself the following year, at age ten, under the doghouse with a girl named Tina, sticking my hands up her skirt and just feeling what was there. I didn’t know what sex was, so I thought that was what I was supposed to do with girls. As young as we were, however, we were far from innocent. The kids in my class were joining gangs. Some of them even carried knives in their lunch boxes, and several kids in sixth grade already had guns. I quickly learned a cardinal rule of survival: make friends with people bigger than yourself. One such giant was Andrew Jones, a classmate whose brother was a Crip leader, thus protecting me from any more harassment from the Crips across the street.
Once I was accepted by the cool kids, I pretty much became a delinquent like them. I’d throw rocks at cars and set fires to garbage cans in school. Some of the kids had BB guns, and we’d meet in a deserted lot and play army. I would return home almost every day bleeding from my head, chest, or arms because of BB gun wounds. Eventually, as the neighborhood continued to decline, the empty lots turned into cheap warehouses. One day after school, three black kids, one Samoan, and I snuck over a barbed-wire fence and past two security guards to break into a warehouse that was full of seaside souvenirs—giant conch shells, sponges, and coral necklaces. We took whatever fit in our backpacks and sold it on a street corner. If I had grown up in a normal neighborhood, maybe I would have had a lemonade stand instead of one selling hot merchandise.
At the Compton swap meet, I used the money I made to buy my first cassette,
Cloud Nine
by the Temptations. Soon, I was obsessed with soul: Al Green, the Spinners, the Temptations, the Four Tops. That was ghetto music back then. With my extra money (and with five bucks of allowance earned cleaning the Ford and washing windows for my dad each week), I began buying Matchbox cars and singles, like “Smoke on the Water,” “Dream On,” “Hooked on a Feeling,” “The Night Chicago Died,” and, a personal favorite, “Clap for the Wolfman.”
But my riches came to an end when the police caught me running out of a warehouse with a box of stolen gardening supplies, handcuffed me, and brought me back to my parents. When I came home from school the following day with a story about how some kids had thrown a teacher out of a window, my parents had finally heard and seen enough. With both of them working, they couldn’t have two unsupervised kids running around Compton stealing flower bulbs and watching their teachers fly out of windows. They moved my sister and me to my aunt’s house in Glendora until they could sell the house in Compton.
Eventually, my mom landed a better paying job at a dental brace factory and found a place in Glendora, where I transferred into Sunflower Junior High. Except for Mrs. Anderson’s class, I had always been a terrible student, and classes at Sunflower were a struggle compared to Compton. I found it nearly impossible to write even a simple sentence—until I learned that I had a form of dyslexia. Rather than working on my problem, I chose to skip school, learn how to surf, and make money the way I had in Compton. Walking to school one day, I found a paperback full of hardcore sex photos. When I told the other kids about it, they all wanted to see it. But the book wasn’t theirs: it was mine. And if they wanted to see it so badly, they’d have to pay for it. I hid the book in a pile of junk in my next-door neighbor’s garden shed, and every day I’d rip out ten pages, bring them to school, and sell them for a quarter each. After about seventy pages, our gym coach busted me when some kids taping photos on the walls of the boys’ locker room told him where they had gotten the porn.
When I was suspended, I decided I’d just get rid of the whole book for five dollars. So I went to my neighbor’s shed, opened the door, and it was gone. I still don’t know who took it. It was probably Tommy Lee.
When I was fifteen, though I didn’t even have a driver’s license, my father gave me his ’54 Chevy pickup truck so that I could take myself to junior high. With motion came freedom, and I discovered drugs, alcohol, and fucking. I’d go to the beach, surf all morning, drink screwdrivers, and then pass out on the beach. I always fell asleep with my hand over my stomach, so that I spent most of my teenage years sunburned head to toe except for a white hand-shaped tattoo on my belly.
My surfing buddy John turned me on to my first drug, angel dust. When I tried it, I was crammed with four friends in a ’65 Nova at a drive-in theater screening
Silver Streak
. John laced some pot with angel dust and handed the pipe to me. I didn’t know how much I was supposed to smoke, and I wanted to keep up with John, so I ended up getting so stoned that I could hardly even move or speak. I couldn’t wait to come down. A security guard came knocking on the window and I was sure he was going to take us to jail, especially when John rolled down the glass and smoke came billowing out.
“Sir,” the guard said. “Please remove your foot from the brake. Your tail-lights are bothering the people in the cars behind you.”
“Oh, I didn’t realize,” John said, and took his foot off the pedal.
I walked out of the car to go to the snack bar, which was in the back of the parking lot. Though the pavement only sloped slightly upward, it felt like I was climbing a mountain. I began to sweat and run out of breath as I struggled to put one foot in front of the other. It took forever, because I kept stopping to lean against cars and rest. Going downhill on the way back, the ground seemed so steep I could hardly walk. I fell about eight times and skinned my knees and arms trying to navigate my way down this Mount Everest which, if I wasn’t high, would have seemed almost completely level. Before I was even halfway to the car, I had spilled all the popcorn and soda I was carrying. Of course, I was so stoned that I kept clutching the empty cups and cartons as if they were still full while I tripped and stumbled toward the car.
Soon, John had me getting baked in school. In English class, I sat there so lost in space that whenever the teacher talked to me, I sat at my desk motionless, showing no sign of having heard her. When she sent me to the principal’s office, I never made it there. Two hours later, the principal found me wandering around the football field. I had no idea where I was.
Next, John turned me on to white cross or cross tops (a little white upper with an X mark on the top), which, when combined with angel dust, turned me into a frothing madman. Amped up on speed and dust in the parking lot before shop class one afternoon, I noticed that my surfboard racks were missing from the top of my truck. I obsessively searched everywhere until I found them in the car of a football player named Horace. I ran into the school, found him at his locker, and confronted him. He was a steel-chested, bowl-cutted jock who constantly filed his nails and teeth into claws and fangs to terrorize underclassmen. After denying he had seen my racks for five minutes, he walked up to me, thrust his chest in my face, and looked down. “Well, what are you going to do about it,” he barked, puffing his animal breath on the top of my head.
Without even hesitating or stopping to think, I clenched my fist and hit him in the face. It connected so hard that I heard a cracking sound. He hit the ground like an ape shot out of a tree, cracking his head on the floor. His eyes rolled back in their sockets, and he was gone. It shocked the fuck out of me that I had laid him out like that—with a broken nose and cheekbone, it turned out.
I walked into shop class, buzzing and nursing my bleeding knuckles, but otherwise acting as if nothing had happened. Ten minutes later, the principal walked in, looked at my knuckles, brought me into his office, and had me arrested for assault. My mom picked me up at the police department and, though no charges were pressed, I was suspended for four days. When I returned to school, nobody fucked with me again and all the other football players, who hated Horace anyway, treated me like a hero.
Near school in the San Gabriel Valley there was a roller-skating rink called Roller City, where John and I would try to pick up girls. That was where I realized that I liked being onstage. Every day, they had a lip-synching contest. So me, John, and another surfing buddy signed up. We dressed in flared pants, loud open-buttoned polyester shirts, wigs, and other accessories we thought rock stars were supposed to wear. The song of the day was Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “Let It Ride,” so I jumped around onstage, goofed off, played air guitar, and threw the microphone around. The crowd ate it up, and not only did we win, but I got laid that night. Soon, me and my friends were on a lip-synching circuit, driving to roller rinks in Cucamonga and malls in Diamond Bar to compete. The next time I won was two weeks later, when I dressed like some combination of Ray and Dave Davies of the Kinks for “You Really Got Me.” But the difference between this contest and the other ones was that I was really singing. And I sounded good. I never knew I had it in me.
Now that I had a car, long hair, and was sort of a singer, girls were everywhere. Since my trusting parents were at work all day, I’d take girls home and fuck them during lunch. I dated a stoner named Jodie for a while and a girl whose real name was actually Candy Hooker. (Her father had invented Hooker Headers for racing cars.) For high school I thought I was doing pretty well for myself, maybe too well.
During one lunch break, I went to the parking lot with a girl named Tami, who had started lavishing attention on me after I broke my leg at a skate park in Glendora. I banged her in front of my truck with the noon-day sun shining on my ass. That was all. I didn’t think about her again until two months later. She pulled me aside after school, and I naturally assumed she wanted some more. But, instead, she told me that she was pregnant and that she really wanted to keep the baby. I didn’t really love her or want a girlfriend, but when I realized that she was going through with it, I tried to make it work. I spent a lot of time with her and supported her when she was kicked out of school because they didn’t allow pregnant girls in class. (We eventually ended up at the same continuation school.)