This Is Gonna Hurt: Music, Photography, and Life Through the Distorted Lens of Nikki Sixx

by Nikki Sixx

  I do not and will not claim to always love these little outbursts of mine, but goddamn it, I try and so should we all. It’s only through change that things change (duh) but, if this is so, then why does so much stay the same (or stay the strange?). I know life is a process of growing. I know death is when the growing stops. I know they say energy is wasted on the youth and this I say is true. I need more energy now to get through my day than I did ten, twenty, thirty, or forty years ago.

  So we fight the clock, wake up, sharpen the blade, and see if anybody is out there on the battlefield ready to die. I kill for a living, but I do it with a heart. I will take your head for a trophy but only to show other warriors that success can be theirs.

  Lawyers, record company executives, accountants, and all their puppets come to mind. Some come to be mounted, some just thrown in the alley and forgotten.

  Today is one of those murderous days. As I type, my hope is to not get too much blood on my computer. I guess one could say I’ve softened over the years. Now I think before I swipe, thrust, or cut. Sometimes I’m aware that I am calmer and at peace.

  May God be with you and not with me. He will only slow me down. Now get off your ass and change what you don’t like about your life. You get what you focus on. Trust me on this if nothing else. I am living (and dying) proof.

  CEMETERY, MILAN, ITALY fig.mi47

  IV

  HELP IS ON THE WAY

  My first taste of therapy came when I was sent to the principal for knocking out a kid with my lunch box. I went to the office, and the kid went to the nurse. I felt justified due to the months of torture I endured on the bus rides to school every day. I would climb aboard the bus and two older boys would tell me I couldn’t sit down unless I gave them my lunch money. Even when I did, they would abuse me, pushing me under the seats and sitting on me for the twenty-mile trip to school.

  Having no luck asking the driver for help, I decided one day to fill my metal lunch box with rocks. When the usual happened, I handed over my lunch money. As we pulled up to school and exited the bus, I called out the kid’s name (I can’t remember it for the life of me), and when he and his friend turned around I swung my lunch box and hit that motherfucker in the face with everything I had. Blood splattered everywhere, and he hit the dirt with a thud. As I wound up for another swing, to level the second bully, he took off in a dead sprint for the nearest teacher. They told me I broke the first bully’s nose, and now all the other kids were scared of me.

  The principal asked me how I could do such a violent thing for no reason, but what really stung was when he said, “What’s wrong with you?” It’s a question that has come up more than once since then. At the moment there was no leather couch for me to lie down on as I told of my wretched life, or a $350 bill owed at the end of the session. There would be plenty of time later for that.

  CAMBODIA fig.cb251

  Somewhere inside, I have a fantasy that I can create something to help people change their lives. But maybe like a self-help book as written by William S. Burroughs. The sneer and snot of rock n roll is as much a part of me as the tattoos on my arms. Still, showing how I got here alive might make a positive difference in somebody else’s struggle, just like certain books helped me through mine. That hope is a big part of what this book is about. It’s what makes me passionate about getting it right.

  Writing for me is therapy, like self-help with a pencil and the nearest tablet or notebook to write it all down. My life is on the pages of a million journals, scraps of paper, computer files. I’ve even been known to write on myself. It’s like WWF wrestling with a schizophrenic. After the second or third round you go back to your corner, rethink what you wrote, then rewrite it again and again, all whilst taking uppercuts and flying arm bars from yourself.

  Since Heroin Diaries came out I have heard from thousands of teenagers and others who say or write things like, “Nikki, your book inspired me to do better things with my life than waste it on drugs and alcohol, thank you…” I am so glad something I wrote could help them.

  Many of those kids are probably like me as a teenager. Back then I was an eyesore with a dream. It took a lot of crazy, angry, self-destructive behavior over a lot of years to get me from there to here. I had every right to be pissed off—at my family, at my tormentors, at the world. It was the kind of rage that can kill you.

  Today I always say you’re allowed to reevaluate your thoughts, opinions, or stance on anything, and I know I do it. (It’s a man’s prerogative to change his mind.) I used to say it’s easier to apologize than ask for permission. I now think I wasted too much time with drama when I did that.

  So this process continues, over and over, until the paper, the pencil, and I are all lying in a crumpled mess in the corner, worn out yet content with the answers to the questions that were clawing at my head. It’s like seeing a guy on the floor, sweat pouring off his face like Niagara Falls, gasping for breath, and you ask, “Are you OK?” and he says, “Yeah, I just had the best workout of my life.”

  I have been through two divorces and have done my best to keep the drama quiet. It hasn’t always been easy, or even possible. Divorce devastated me on many levels, but how I handled it set the bar for how I believe things should be handled. I am a smart-ass, big time. Love sarcasm, and when I say I have a sharp tongue, we’re talking straight razor. To hold my tongue is sometimes like holding a hand grenade. It ain’t always easy to muster up the maturity to not lob that fucker back. The old saying “restraint of pen and paper” should say “restraint of pen, paper, and send key.”

  I’m getting better at it. When we got off our second Crüe Fest tour, the singer of a particular band complained, moaned, and bitched about everything. And, of course, he loved to tell anybody who would listen about how his band was blowing our old tired asses off the stage every single night, and naturally he shot off his mouth online, too. Those who know me expected me to crush him as I have others in the past.

  But I thought about it first. By then we had had around twenty bands on that tour, hundreds of road crew members, hundreds of thousands of fans at the shows, and millions of radio listeners, and the only person to complain was this one singer in one band. That thought made me laugh so hard I could barely contain my giddiness. Before the tour the same guy was on the phone begging to be included. Now this. Sometimes the guy holding the grenade pulls the pin without knowing what to do next. That’s the guy who blows himself up.

  I’ve been a lot of people in my short life—the dumb guy, the angry guy, the guy with a mission, the smart guy, and the guy with the hand grenade who is too stupid to throw it. Now I am the who I am today guy. (Please don’t count my multiple personalities in there.) And that guy is one happy, creative motherfucker. By the way, thank you for putting up with me while I exorcised my demon right before your eyes. I think I am all better now.

  A Brief Interruption: Nikki Being Normal

  Not that I have completely conquered my inner asshole…

  Today I woke up excited. My little community is having a neighborhood parade and, believe it or not, I’m tickled pink to take my family to watch.

  Of course, we came unprepared. The neighbors had lawn chairs, coffee, donuts, juice, and bagels. Some were playing music and huddled under trees in their pajamas, laughing and socializing.

  Life is good. Life is funny, and as one of my favorite Spanish poems says, “I am exactly where I am supposed to be in the universe.”

  My days of raucous anarchy are long behind me; I am mature in my life and so secure that I don’t fly off the handle and/or sever the nearest throat when agitated.

  I’m just a dad taking his kids to see a parade.

  Pulling up and parking curbside, front and center, greeting my neighbors with glee.

  In the distance, bicycle horns and children laughing. In the air, excitement.

  Coming up the two-lane blacktop road, kids, dogs, and a unicyclist. Antique cars and the local marching band. Banners for the neighborhood vet and
housewives running for office. Candy being thrown from every vehicle as kids scamper to get that all-important Tootsie Roll.

  “Maybe there is a God,” I say with a sigh.

  A guy walks up to me and says, “Whose car is this?”

  “It’s mine,” I say. “Is there a problem?”

  “Yeah,” he snaps, “people like to stand here and watch the parade.”

  Feeling somewhat foolish and ignorant in the ways of parade parking, I say, “I’m sorry, would you like me to move?”

  HELP IS ON THE WAY? fig.rb19

  He rolls his eyes and says, “Well, you better. You never should have parked here anyway.”

  Now I’m walking around to the driver side. My ass has started to burn, but I just suck it up. Then his wife says, “Anyway, you’re a rude and inconsiderate person.”

  I stop in my tracks, knowing it’s too late to stop what’s about to rocket outta my mouth.

  Razor blades and fireballs…boom, direct hit.

  “Well,” I say to her, “good fucking morning to you, too.” To which I add, loudly, “You know what? I am gonna park here every year, right here, on this corner, every year…until you DIE.”

  Then there is that uncomfortable silence I have grown to enjoy, even as I thought I had maybe outgrown outbursts like this one.

  We watch the rest of the parade and I go home content.

  I can’t wait until next year. I’ll have to leave home extra early to make sure I get that parking spot.

  …Anyway Where Was I?

  Twenty or so years after my first therapy session with the school principal, I stepped up to the real thing. This time it was an actual professional. After all, by then I was a professional drug addict; it would only make sense to level the playing field.

  Mötley Crüe had found a band counselor. His name was Bob Timmons, and he had been brought in after helping Vince get into rehab in 1985. Vince had been charged with drunk driving and vehicular manslaughter. He was but the first band member to go down in flames—first rehab, then jail, and Bob had a lot to do with saving Vince. Bob then had the pleasure of dealing with the mass dysfunction known as the Crüe. We were hitting the skids on drugs, crashing and burning, only to come back phoenixlike time after time, but even the most glamorous rock n roll debauchery doesn’t sit pretty when people die. The band was right behind Vince in needing to be saved from the flames.

  After “Girls Girls Girls,” it would be my turn in the same Van Nuys facility that helped Vince. To be honest, part of me liked it and part of me (the scared part of me) hated it. I ran out of rehab, literally. But Bob was there for me, taking me to AA, CA, and NA meetings. I found a sponsor and started working through the twelve-step program. Amazing what a little light at the end of the tunnel can do for you.

  I think for the first time since I was a kid I was thinking maybe I wasn’t quite as fucked up as I’d been told. I had wounds, but wounds heal and turn to scars. That saying “You know a man by the scars he has” is true for me. I have a saying too: “I never trust a person without some kind of baggage.” Because those of us who have been through the war of life and survived usually have more heart. If you have heart and are honest, you have probably worked on yourself and therefore are trustworthy. I want someone like that in my foxhole. That is the man I was turning into, but I wasn’t there yet.

  Bob arranged band meetings with a therapist who would take us through the AA steps. We would go around the room and share our feelings. To be honest, I would have called it bullshit except I had been working on myself away from the band, so it wasn’t completely foreign to me. Mick wasn’t gonna have any of it, but Mars always will take a bullet for the team and so he sat there and steamed, but he sat there. Vince had seen and heard all this before, so he was acclimated. Tommy was open to these meetings because he believed it would help the band.

  After a time I saw a change in the band and myself. It was actually working. It was like couples’ counseling, talking it out with one another and clearing away a lot of the old hurts in our marriage. Mötley Crüe wasn’t about to get a divorce. We had way too much fighting left to do, with one another and the world.

  Around this time Tommy went to rehab, and so we all went and did group therapy sessions with him. Vince has been back a few more times, and to be honest I can’t really even remember half the stuff that was said in those rooms over the years, but I know it changed us individually for the better, and I know it changed the band, too. After that, the question was whether the world was ready for a sober Mötley Crüe, and whether I was ready for a sober Nikki Sixx, and the answer in both cases was yes. And so began another chapter.

  I feel as though my addiction and the band’s craziness have been covered a million times, and I won’t do it again now. But I do find it interesting to see how my personal struggles connect with my creativity. My younger days formed the adult me and also fueled all my creative endeavors, even today.

  The misery that drove me insane as a teenager inspired the monstrous imagery of the photography in this book, as well as a song like “Shout at the Devil.”

  ###

  KOREA TOWN fig.kt61

  Shout at the Devil was a film that came out in 1976. It was also a Mötley Crüe album and a song that came out in 1983.

  Originally it was called “Shout with the Devil.”

  After the song had become a mainstay on the lips of millions of teenagers, I researched the movie of the same name. This is what I remember finding.

  Lee Marvin and Roger Moore both starred in this war film loosely based around “a girl.” The weakness for alcohol only equaled the obsession with greed and violence. All this was a nice side dish to the plot, but in the end it still seems to really be only about “a girl.”

  If I had seen this movie (and I probably didn’t), it could have been the blueprint for my love life. All the toxic elements are there.

  Like I said, it was 1982, maybe 1983, and I had a fervor for sticking my opinion in your face like a threat to cut your jugular, but with a pen instead of a straight razor.

  I was dating Lita Ford at the time.

  I remember sitting in Lita’s mom’s kitchen (Lisa Ford, R.I.P.) in Long Beach, California, acoustic guitar in hand. Lisa was cooking up some Italian masterpiece as I wrote my own. “Shout, shout, shout with the devil,” I sang (for my supper), dripping with hate for politicians (or any authority figure), even though I didn’t know any. I figured they were all corrupt and didn’t have America’s best interests at heart. (Like I was any different.) To be honest, I didn’t know what I was talking about. I was young. I was dumb. I was pissed.

  In retrospect, I didn’t write that song, it wrote itself. I was just the messenger. I knew what I wanted the Crüe to look like. I knew what it needed to sound like. But I didn’t know where all that information was coming from. Some would say from hell; others just said that we were going there. Nonetheless, like a huge bolt of lightning, creativity comes down from the act of imagining, every time, for me.

  Messages are like this. Signed, sealed, and delivered to us from some far-off, distant dreamland, these little “awareness pills.” No prescription needed. These are well-earned life lessons. Gobble them up, I say. After all, you paid for them.

  Now, if you’re smart enough to have listened to the elders, you can take the shortcut and save yourself a lot of time and pain. Most of us aren’t so wise when we’re young, so we trudge through the darkness until we smash face-first into a cement wall. Only then do we ask, “Anybody got a light?” If you can imagine that lightbulb turning on, that’s how ideas pop into your head. It’s that simple.

  That day you learned another simple little lesson, you grew another inch, and you couldn’t imagine why you had done what you did. Ideas come out of adversity plus dreaming. Key word is ideas come to you. Now, to put them into action, that’s the part that distinguishes the men from the boys, the girls from the women, and the idiots from the geniuses.

  When you imagine something, you
see it, you taste it, and you feel it. If you’re that clear, it becomes real. It doesn’t matter if you know why. Like magic it will appear right out of your imagination.

  Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” I believe this works with both good and evil. If I can imagine the demise of a villainous enemy hard enough, I guarantee something will happen to him. (Some call this voodoo.) Negative energy is equal in power to positive energy. It just takes twice as much time to dredge up the darkness as it does the light.

  I have received in my life everything I have ever imagined, positive and negative. Can you imagine how crazy my brain is at times? It’s a full-blown nuclear power plant brewing up enough sewage to destroy the world (or at least a few innocent bystanders).

  In my twenties, I pumped out so much sewage from my brain that I think I alone am responsible for 90 percent of all the smog in Los Angeles. (To the clown in the back of the room who called me a narcissist, that was a joke.)

  Now that I am able to redirect the energy into massive amounts of positive energy, I feel like I could light a city with just my heart. Seven words I believe to be true: “We who are awake need less sleep.”

  Shout at the Devil was a film that came out in 1976.

  It was also an album and a song that came out in 1983.

  Originally the song was “Shout with the Devil.” I changed it, but that didn’t stop the press back then from saying that we were on the devil’s side, shouting alongside him. But we weren’t.

  Imagine that.

  Shout at the Devil

  by Mötley Crüe

  He’s the wolf screaming lonely in the night

  He’s the blood stain on the stage