The Dirt (61 page)

“Don’t go in there!”

I lost it. “What do you mean don’t go in there? That’s my fucking bedroom. And that’s my personal stuff in there.”

“I want you to wait outside and keep quiet.”

“This is bullshit! I’m not going to do shit to her.”

“Did you hear what I said, Mister Lee?”

“I fucking heard you! I just want to make sure she doesn’t take any of my stuff! I have that right, don’t I?”

I guess I didn’t have that right. Because before I knew it, I was thrown to the ground, handcuffed, and pushed into the back of their cop car.

“What are you taking me to jail for?” I yelled as they drove away.

“Assault.”

“What?”

“The lady says you tried to strangle her.”

Since it was a Friday night, they kept me there for the rest of the weekend, which gave Bobbie just enough time to clean my entire fucking place out. When I came home Monday morning to find all the rooms empty—chairs, tables, bed, everything—I wasn’t even surprised. I was just curious as to where she’d found a moving company willing to work on weekends. I hope she had to pay them some serious overtime, because I know they worked hard. All they left me was one fork in the dishwasher.

BUT HERE’S THE SICK THING about love. I fucking missed her. And she was totally missing me too. So just days after I was released from jail, I found myself in the apartment she had rented after leaving my house—fucking her on my old bed, dude. We weren’t really going out again, but we weren’t quite broken up either. It turned into one of those relationships that just needs to be shot and put out of its fucking misery. We were holding each other back from life, from meeting other people, but at the same time we couldn’t get enough of each other.

The second or third time we hooked up after jail, she started bitching me out because she thought I was interested in one of her hot friends. She stomped and screamed around the house for fucking hours without a break. I tried to laugh it off, and it only made her madder. I tried to ignore her, and it only incensed her more. I tried to reason with her, and she just grew angrier. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t know how to stop the noise. I grabbed a fucking vase off the table, smashed it on the ground, said, “You’re a fucking asshole,” and split. I was so upset. I couldn’t get rid of this crazy fucking woman or my crazy fucking feelings for her, and nothing was working. I needed to escape from this shit, get my mind off it, stop the noise. Why was I still even wasting my time on this bitch who had set me up?

So I went to visit a friend named Sedge who was a full-on fucking Nikki Sixx junkie. When I walked in, he was sitting on the sofa juicing up. “Hey, bro, hook me up,” I begged. “I don’t want to feel a fucking thing right now.”

“No problem,” he said, rubbing his fingers together in what would have been a snap if he wasn’t too junked-out to generate enough friction.

I rolled up my sleeve, tied myself off with a piece of medical rubber tubing on the table, and waited for him to prepare the syringe. I saw him lower it into a spoon and draw two cc’s.

“Bro, I’m not like you,” I told him. “I don’t do this all the time. That might be too much for me.”

“Naw, don’t worry about it,” he half snapped. “It’s fine. Trust me, dude. I’m a junkie. I know what I’m doing.”

“Fuck it. Whatever.” Those words—“Trust me, I’m a junkie”—should have been a clue right there. I mean, he was a fucking addict, dude, so of course his tolerance was going to be more than mine.

He stabbed my arm, released the two cc’s into my system, pulled the needle out, and untied me. I entered fucking paradise. I was so fucking happy. I didn’t feel a thing. My body relaxed, the words
Bobbie
and
Brown
disappeared from my consciousness, and a stream of pleasure shot out from my heart and flooded my body. I dropped back into the couch and closed my eyes.

W
hen we were touring with Corabi in Europe, there was a press conference in Italy. And this phenomenally beautiful Italian journalist stood up and said, “Nikki, I want to ask you a question.” She had blow-job lips, flowing auburn hair, and looked just like Raquel Welch playing the role of Lust in the movie
Bedazzled
. “Do you ever thank God for making you so beautiful?”

“No,” I answered her. “I curse him for making my dick so small.”

After the press conference, she invited me to join her for coffee so that we could talk more. “Well, you know I’m married,” I told her.

“No, no. Just talking,” she said, still looking like Lust. “Maybe we will go together tomorrow.”

“Call me.”

The next morning, instead of calling my room, she knocked on the door. I dragged myself out of bed, opened the door, and she barged in and slipped out of her boots, skirt, and tight sweater. Her body was unbelievable: perfect, golden brown skin with shampoo-commercial hair cascading over full breasts mounted in a red push-up bra. My morning wood pushed against my underpants. She pushed me down on the bed, said, “Let’s see if God really cursed you,” and we started rolling around. But just as I was about to fuck her, she said, “You have a rubber, right?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Then I’ll be right back,” she said, and slipped into her clothes.

When she left, I took a moment to think: What was I doing? I almost fucked this chick. I’m married; I have children. Screwing this very beautiful Italian woman who’s driving me crazy with lust is a waste of time. I slipped into my clothes, went across the hall to Mick’s room, and watched her return with the rubbers, only to find nobody home.

A few weeks later, I was in London with my wife, Brandi. Our record label threw us a party full of freaks like midgets, stilt-walkers, and English rock stars. Suddenly, there was a commotion at the door and a woman was yelling, “I will not be treated this way. I am the press.” It was the ravishing Italian journalist. She pushed past security and marched right toward me. “Where the fuck did you go?” she demanded. Brandi turned to me, and I went red in the face. I escaped out the back door with Brandi in pursuit, cursing at me the whole way. I learned an important lesson that night: If I had just fucked that Italian instead of staying faithful, none of this ever would have happened.

By that point, my marriage was in the gutter anyway. The love that had blossomed out of my sobriety during the making of
Dr. Feelgood
was just a momentary obsession egged on by the fact that I hardly ever saw her, so I didn’t know what she was really like. By the time we discovered we weren’t right for each other, she was already pregnant with our first child, Gunner. I consoled myself by spending as much time with our children as I could; she consoled herself by spending as much of my money as she could. And that’s how I ended up in a fifteen-thousand-square-foot mansion full of white marble and tiled pools and sixty-foot ceilings. It was a nightmare.

But I couldn’t bring myself to leave her because I remembered all too well what my life had been like without a father. So much of my anger and violence, and probably the reason I always pushed myself to the point of self-destruction with drugs, was because I was still pissed at my father for abandoning me to a rootless, nomadic existence with my mother and her various husbands. I had been through so much with Mötley Crüe, but none of it could heal or fade those scars. I didn’t want my three children to grow up with those same scars.

While we were recording a bonus EP called
Quaternary
(which means “the power of four”) with Corabi, I wrote a song called “Father” and just lost my mind in the music, asking, “Father, where are you?” in the chorus. I began to think that the hole in my life was probably mirrored in his life, that it must be hard for him to know he has a son he can’t communicate with.

The last time I had spoken with my father was in 1981, when he basically disowned me and I changed my name. Over a decade had passed since then. I was a father now, and I thought that he’d want to know he was a grandfather. Perhaps we could even begin to repair the damage between us. Now that I was thirty-seven, maybe it was time to finally bury the adolescent angst which had fueled my whole life.

The last place I knew he had worked at was a pool-construction company in San Jose, so I called information for the number, dialed it, and asked if Frank Feranna was still working there.

“Who wants to know?” a voice asked.

“I’m his son. I’m trying to find him.”

“Randy?”

“Who’s Randy?”

“Well, whoever you are, Frank Feranna’s dead. Been dead a long time.”

“Wait.”

“Don’t call here again.”

They hung up. I called my mother in Seattle to see if she knew what had happened to my father. She insisted that he was alive. I tried to pull more details out of her and asked if the name Randy meant anything to her, but it was no use. The lyrics I had written for “Primal Scream” on
Decade of Decadence
kept spinning through my head—“When daddy was a young man/His home was living hell/Mama tried to be so perfect/Now her mind’s a padded cell”—and I had to hang up before I started screaming at her again. I was too old to let my mother keep pushing all the buttons that set me off, even if she was the one who had originally put them there. My whole life has always been a big mystery, and it didn’t seem like she was going to help clear it up anytime soon.

The next day, Brandi told me that she wanted to take a vacation. “Where should we go?” I asked her. But I had misheard her: she wanted to go alone. Some girlfriends of hers were going to Hawaii, she explained, and she wanted to join them and clear her head.

“Things have been hard lately,” she said. “And I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I need to find it.”

“If that’s the problem, maybe we should spend some time together. We can find a baby-sitter for the kids, go away together, and try to figure things out.”

But she insisted on flying to Hawaii without me, and that’s when I first smelled a rat. I hired a private detective to follow her, and it seems that what she was looking for was not herself but a man named Adonis. Why is it that the other guy is always an Adonis or a Thor or a Jean-Claude? To make matters worse, Adonis was the brother of an executive who I hung out with. In other words, Adonis had been in my house with his sister and brother dozens of times, and I had innocently welcomed him in and treated him like a friend. I felt like a fool, a cuckold. Here I was trying to make this marriage work, and she was running off and leaving me with the kids so she could bask in the sun with some Greek playboy in Honolulu—on my dime. Everyone at Elektra probably knew what was going on behind my back. I knew I should have fucked that Italian journalist.

The private investigator said he had photographs, but I didn’t want to see them. It all made perfect sense: Adonis, I remembered, had a house in Hawaii. He also had a house in Santa Monica. The private investigator called a few days later to tell me that they had returned to Los Angeles. Brandi still hadn’t called me, and I was so pissed off about being betrayed, misled, and humiliated that I decided to kill the Adonis bastard she was sneaking around with. I grabbed a double-barreled shotgun, hopped in my Porsche, and peeled out toward the Pacific Coast Highway. As I sped downhill, I planned out exactly what I was going to do when I arrived: I was going to knock on his door and say, “Hi, you may remember me. My name is Nikki, and you’ve been fucking my wife.” Then I was going to unload both barrels in his nuts.