The Dirt (55 page)

I left the hospital, drove straight to Moonshadows, borrowed a couple painkillers from the Joe Isuzu actor, David Leisure, and drank. Without the hospital, the bar became the entire focus of my existence. I put myself in a fog the night Skylar died and, with booze and pills, kept myself there so that I wouldn’t have to think about it. I was her father, and I was supposed to protect her. I had done everything in my power for Skylar—everything—and the truth was that I was powerless. She was gone, I was here, and there was no changing that. The only thing that could be changed was for me not to be here, but I didn’t have the balls to kill myself; I hoped that the booze and the pills would do the trick. I would take twenty ten-milligram doses of Valium a day and drink hundreds of dollars in beer and whiskey. I didn’t fucking care what happened to me. Sometimes I would imagine getting run down by a car or decapitated by a madman or just throwing myself through a window. I wanted to be with her so badly.

Heidi and a diamond merchant I had met through Tommy and Heather, Bob Procop, who was staying at my house after his was destroyed in an earthquake, arranged the funeral and took care of me like an invalid. I was incapable of showering, changing clothes, or doing anything for myself. I’d never had a relative that was close to me die before. I’d never even been to a funeral before, and now here I was, burying my own daughter. This wasn’t how things were supposed to work.

Skylar’s grandparents had arranged a closed-casket service for her, but someone screwed up and the casket was open. Inside was someone who didn’t even look like my daughter: her eyes were so swollen that I could see the root of her eyelash. I didn’t want that to be my last image of her so, throughout the service, I stared at my feet. I couldn’t bring myself to look at her pink casket. It was so little. She was so little.

After the service, I was basically kidnapped, put in a limousine, and the next thing I knew I was in a rehab clinic called Anacapa in Oxnard. Heidi had called in our one-man personal crisis hot line, Bob Timmons. I escaped that day, returned home to Malibu, swallowed a cocktail of pills from the medicine cabinet, and passed out. When I awoke, I was in another bed. I had somehow left home and checked into the Universal City Sheraton Hotel, where I continued to anesthetize myself.

But whatever I did was never enough. Every night I woke up screaming from terrible nightmares. I’d imagine demons and devils dancing on Skylar’s grave. Skylar’s headstone had been ordered but it hadn’t been made yet, so I kept having the worst visions about it not being there and there being nothing to mark her grave. In other nightmares, I’d see her tumor growing to the size of a human being and attacking me, enveloping me in its cancer. And as the tumor smothered me, it would give off a strong odor: not the smell of putrefaction or death, but the sweet, warm smell of Skylar. I had taken the blanket she died in from the hospital and every night I slept under it, because the smell made me think of her as still living in this world.

I spent at least a week in that nightmare state, unsure when I was conscious and when I wasn’t, until Heidi and Bob Timmons finally talked me into checking into the Betty Ford Center. But before I went, I told them, I was playing golf first. I somehow thought that would rehabilitate me. I flew to Palm Desert, a couple hundred miles away, and booked a room at the Marriott. For a week, I drank alone, played golf alone, passed out alone. Then, I locked my clubs and my clothes in my room and took a taxi to the Betty Ford Center.

After three days of rehab, I was ready to really lose my mind. I couldn’t deal with the therapists, the discipline, the guilt they kept heaping on me. I walked into the front office and said, “I’m out of here.” They wanted their full fifteen-thousand-dollar fee. I wrote a check and called a cab to the Marriott. Fuck them.

I drank, golfed, and passed out for what was probably another month. I was lost to the world. I put myself in limbo: it looked like heaven and I felt like hell. One day I shot a seventy-six and became so excited that I scared myself. I wasn’t supposed to be this happy. Skylar was gone. What was I doing? I was running, I was hiding, I was playing golf at a resort.

I called Heidi and Bob Timmons again and this time they flew me to L.A. to check back into Anacapa in Oxnard. The treatment, they said, wasn’t so much for alcohol or pills or golf as it was for grief. I needed to find a way to work through my emotions, to treat them with something besides a bottle and a five-iron. I wrote Skylar a note, and then I set it on fire and burned it, watching the smoke ascend into the sky. That, for me, was the beginning of accepting a past I could not change. I began to think about Skylar’s life in a different light and to thank God for the four years that he gave her and allowed me to spend with her. I pledged to commit a greater percentage of my remaining life to charity work, to help other children and parents who were suffering, and to make sure that Skylar’s death had not been in vain. When I called my parents and Heidi, they could tell simply by hearing my voice, which shook and sobbed less, that I had come out the other end, that I could visit her grave now and decorate it with confetti and flowers on her birthday, and that I could finally smile when I remembered the funny things she used to do.

I hadn’t thought about Mötley Crüe in so long, and clearly they hadn’t thought about me. Sure, we were at war, but, as far as I was concerned, all our little hissy fits seemed so stupid and petty after what I’d been through. Not once, however, did those guys, who had been closer to me than my own sister, ever call. Maybe they just didn’t know how to call or what to say. But they would have to say something soon, because the week I was being released from rehab also happened to be the week we were supposed to meet for the first time in four and a half years—in court. In all the drama of the past half year, I had forgotten that I had sued them.

While I was in rehab, Sharise and I finalized our divorce and Heidi, who was closer to me than we ever expected to get after all this, moved into my place in Malibu. It was hard for Sharise and me to talk afterward. Skylar’s illness had created a strong bond between us but once she passed away, that bond snapped completely.

Recently, however, the bond renewed itself. I kept asking the doctors how Skylar had gotten cancer. And they’d tell me that certain foods and chemicals and exposure to the sun and this and that all can cause cancer. “But she’s four,” I’d tell them. “She’s four. What the fuck does a four-year-old do to get cancer like that? She doesn’t eat a lot of sugar. She uses sun-screen. She’s a normal, average kid.”

I never found an answer. I just accepted the situation. But one day, I was watching a news program about government rocket testing and chemical dumping in an area just north of Malibu called Simi Valley. That was where Sharise and I had lived. One of the reasons we had bought a house there was because it was on top of a hill and the area surrounding it, the real estate agent told me, was government-owned, so it would never be developed, which was great because I didn’t want to look down on some ugly construction zone or plot of prefab houses. We liked seeing a beautiful field and valley and wide open space outside every morning. We had no idea that a company called Rocketdyne Propulsion and Power was dismantling old nuclear reactors and dumping the waste there, and that a disproportionate number of residents of the area were dying from a variety of different types of cancer, including our Skylar. It was in the air, it was in the water, it was in our homes. More than two hundred thousand people filed a class-action suit against Rocketdyne, and Sharise and I hired an attorney to prepare a lawsuit of our own.

Of course, that won’t bring Skylar back. It won’t even make us feel any better. But maybe it will influence corporations to act more responsibly and prevent someone else from going through what we did. I often imagine that Skylar is still with me—sitting next to me in the car or lying in a warm lump next to me on the bed. I guess that makes me crazy, but it also keeps me sane.

u
m, Nikki and I were sitting on the floor of an elevator in London. It kept going up and down, up and down, up and… You get the picture. Nikki was saying, “What am I going to do about John? What do I do with this kid? Do we bring Vince back? Do we fire John?”

I was sort of half joking, but we both hit on the same idea at the same time: Why don’t we have two singers?

Um, we never spoke about it again.

w
e fired everybody. Chuck Shapiro, the accountant who had stood by us for nearly fifteen years—good-bye. Bob Rock, the producer responsible for our biggest hit and our biggest flop—so long. Doug Thaler, the manager who had been with us ever since we were L.A. fuck-ups pissing in cop cars—see ya. We blamed and fired everybody around us for our failure on the Corabi tour. It was the first time we failed so, hey, it couldn’t have been our fault. They were probably glad to get away from us by that point anyway, because we were the worst kind of band in the world: one that is on its way down and refuses to see it or stop it.

As we were deciding which of a hundred different directions to take our next album in, we hired a new manager named Allen Kovac because, frankly, we were impressed by his ruthlessness. He had brought Duran Duran back from the new-wave grave and had not only gotten Meat Loaf his royalties back from Epic Records but had also given him another hit. We told him that Mötley Crüe was a band with John Corabi as its singer and that we hoped he wasn’t working with us under any other assumption. “Of course,” he promised. But in my heart I knew that the only reason he had agreed to manage us was so that he could get Corabi out of the band and bring Vince back.

A few weeks later, Doug Morris, the CEO of Warner Music (which owned Elektra), called us to New York for a meeting. After all the millions of dollars we had generated for his company, this was the first time they had ever treated us with respect: on the day of the meeting, limos arrived at each of our houses and took us to a private airport, where the Warners corporate G4 jet (which we’d never even been on before) was waiting for us on the runway.

They hadn’t invited Corabi to the meeting, but we figured it was just an oversight and brought him along instead of Mick, who wanted to stay home and watch
Three Stooges
reruns. Corabi and I boarded the plane and found Allen Kovac, his secretary, Tommy, and Pamela Anderson, who Tommy had just married in a whirlwind romance that had caught us all off guard. She was behaving strangely and refused to sit down. Instead, she lay on her back the whole time, mumbling incoherently and rolling around as if she were ill. While she did that, Tommy and I looked at downloads of bestiality pictures on our computers and tried to gross out Kovac’s secretary. To us, everything seemed just great. Here we were with a new manager being fed shrimp cocktails and champagne on a corporate jet that was bringing us to a label that gave us $4.5 million dollars every time we nodded our heads to do another record. We figured that Doug Morris wanted to give us some encouragement and say how proud he was of us for sticking to our guns despite a bungled tour and shake-ups at the label. It seemed like, finally, our career was moving up again. We couldn’t have been any stupider.