The Dirt

by Tommy Lee

  I placed an ad in that classified paper, The Recycler, that read: “Extraterrestrial guitarist available for any other aliens that want to conquer the Earth.” I was calling myself Zorky Charlemagne at the time, so I used that name in the paper and received some real bizarre phone calls, but not from anybody who seemed sane. I ended up in a Top 40 band called Vendetta, which made me enough money to buy a Marshall stack and a Les Paul. I bought another Marshall stack and Les Paul when I returned from a tour of Alaska, and placed another ad in The Recycler. Usually people will write an ad that begins with the letter A, like “A righteous guitar player seeks band,” just so they can be at the top of the listing. I didn’t care, because I knew my ad would jump no matter where it was. It read: “Loud, rude, and aggressive guitarist available.”

  The guy with the Hitler mustache from Sparks responded. But I told him that I didn’t like his music and I’d be wasting his time and mine if I tried out for him. I think he respected me for that. Some cheesy band in Redondo Beach that went on to become Poison or Warrant or some other name that wrecked the eighties called because they’d seen me play at Pier 52. I didn’t call them back. To quote Andy Warhol, “Everybody has fifteen minutes of fame.” To quote myself, “I wish they didn’t.”

  I think Nikki finally found the ad and phoned. We talked for a little while and arranged a day to meet. I crammed my guitar and Marshall stacks into a tiny Mazda that belonged to my friend Stick and drove to North Hollywood. Nikki and I said hello like two complete strangers: neither of us remembered having met the other before. He had changed his name and his hair was all blown out, jet-black, and hanging over his face; I wouldn’t have been able to recognize him if he was my own father. It took another week or two before he asked, “Hey, aren’t you that weird guy who came in the liquor store one day and…” I couldn’t believe it: He had really grown into himself.

  Nikki said he’d left his old band, London, because there were too many people trying to tug the group in too many different directions. Now he was trying to put together his own project and realize his own vision. I pretended like I agreed, but I knew that he was still young and musically naive, and I could influence him to evolve my way. At that rehearsal, we played a few of the songs Nikki had written—“Stick to Your Guns,” “Toast of the Town,” “Public Enemy #1.” They had this sissy guy, whose name I won’t mention, playing guitar. The first thing I did when I walked in was say, “He ain’t gonna make it.” So they told me that if I wanted him out, I had to tell him. It was day one and they already had me doing their dirty work.

  There was also a real bony little kid there, with a giant growth on his chin that looked like a Chicken McNugget. He said he’d been pushed or fallen down the steps at Gazzari’s the night before and busted his lip. I don’t know if that was what was on his face, but it seemed like a permanent second chin. The kid claimed that he could play the drums, though he seemed too young and scrawny to be any good. But when he started playing, he wasn’t a sissy. He hit hard. His name was Tommy.

  And, come to think of it, it wasn’t Nikki who found the ad in The Recycler at all. It was Tommy. He called. He left the message. He made it happen. And, man, could he play.

  Duuuuuude. Fuck yeah. Finally. How much room is Nikki going to get, bro? Fuck. The dude tried to put his own mother in jail. I love him; we’ve practically been married for twenty years. But sometimes it’s dysfunction junction over there. I’m not like that. I’m a hopeless fucking romantic. That’s a part of me that a lot of people don’t know about. They know everything there is to know about another part of me, but not a thing about my heart. Dude, it’s bad, but it’s all good. All fucking good.

  My fate was sealed with my first crush on this rad little girl who lived down the street from me in Covina. I used to chase her all over the place. I’d follow her around on my bicycle and spy in her window at night like a pint-sized stalker. All I wanted to do was kiss her. I had seen my mom and dad kiss, and it looked pretty cool. I figured I was ready to try it for myself.

  I’ve learned in life that if you chase something for long enough, pretty soon it will start chasing you. After a while, my neighbor started following me around everywhere, and we became crazy about each other. One time, we somehow ended up behind a bunch of bushes in this cool grassy shaded area that nobody could see. The little bushes had small bright red berries growing from them. They were the color of her lips. Without even thinking, I picked a berry off one of the bushes and held it between our mouths. Then we wrapped our lips around the berry and kissed for the first time. It felt so romantic and magical: I thought that if we kissed with this little red berry between us, we’d somehow become something else. Maybe she’d turn into a princess and I’d become a knight and take her out of Covina on my white horse. We’d gallop to my castle as the neighbors looked on, wondering who this beautiful prince and princess were. And we’d live happily ever after. Unless somebody ate or destroyed the magic berry. If that happened, we’d return to Covina and be just two dumb little kids again. That’s how it’s always been in my life: There’s always a storm cloud lurking in the distance, waiting to fuck up everything good and perfect.

  I went to a dream analyst recently and he told me I inherited that storm cloud from my mother. Her life was like that: Everything good was surrounded by tragedy. Her name was Vassilikki Papadimitriou, and she was Miss Greece in the fifties. My dad, David Lee Thomas, was an army sergeant, and he proposed to my mom the first time he ever fucking saw her. They were married within five days of meeting, just like Pamela and I would be almost forty years later. He didn’t speak a word of Greek; she didn’t speak a word of English. They drew pictures for each other when they wanted to communicate, or she’d write something in Greek and my dad would struggle to make sense of the odd characters using a Greek–English dictionary.

  She tried six times before me to have a child: five times she miscarried and, when she succeeded the sixth time, my brother died within days of his birth. For some reason, they weren’t supposed to be here. I don’t know how she had the courage to try again. But when she became pregnant for the seventh time, she refused to even get out of bed for nine months in case something went wrong.

  Just after I was born, my parents left Athens and moved to a Los Angeles suburb called Covina. It was hard for my mother. She used to be a totally rad model, and now here she was in America making a living cleaning other people’s houses like a fucking servant. She was always embarrassed by her job. She was living in a new country with a stranger who had suddenly become her husband. And she had no family, no friends, no money, and hardly spoke a word of English. She missed home so much she named my younger sister Athena.

  My dad worked for the L.A. County Road Department, fixing the highway-repair trucks and tractors. My mom always hoped he’d make enough money so she could quit her job and hire a housekeeper, but he never did.

  The dream-analyst guy said that my mom passed a lot of the day-to-day fear she lived with in America on to me, especially when I was a young child. She would talk to me in Greek, and I wouldn’t be able to comprehend a word she was saying. I had no idea why I could understand everybody else around me, but I couldn’t make out a word my mother was saying. Experiences like that, the analyst said, led to the constant fear and insecurity I feel as an adult.

  I walked into a session with the analyst once in a short-sleeved shirt, and he looked at my tattoos and fucking flipped out. I told him about my parents and how they used to communicate when I was a child. At my next session, he said he’d been thinking about my family all week and come to a conclusion: “At a very young age, you watched people draw pictures and communicate with them. Now, you use those tattoos as a form of communication.” He pointed out that a lot of the tattoos were symbols of things that I wanted in my life, like koi fish, which I got inked long before I ever had a koi pond in my house. I also have a leopard tattoo, and one of these days I’m going to have a fucking leopard. I want one on my couch just chilling when I get
home from a tour.

  PEOPLE SAY THAT YOU CAN’T PREDICT your future, that nobody knows what life has planned for them. But I know that’s bullshit. It’s not just the tattoo images that later became reality for me. It goes much further back. I predicted my future when I was three and, in a childish effort to make louder and better noises, arranged pots and pans on the kitchen floor and whaled on them with spoons and knives. My friend Gerald tells me now that I knew in my soul what I wanted to do back then. And the day I started making that racket on my mom’s cooking shit was the day I manifested it. But I didn’t know it at the time. I was stupid.

  When the milkman came by playing an accordion, I decided that I wanted to learn squeezebox instead. So I abandoned the kiddie drum set that my parents had bought me in order to keep their clean dishes off the floor, and started taking accordion lessons with my sister. When a dance teacher stopped by pimping lessons, my sister and I got so excited we joined a tap and ballet company, which was great because then I could dance with girls. I didn’t give a shit about playing baseball in the park with the other guys: I just wanted to hold girls.

  After dancing, I got excited about piano, but it turned out to be just mundane fucking repetition, playing scales over and over until I wanted to kill people, starting with my piano teacher. Then I saw a guitar at a pawn shop and developed an obsession with guitar. My accordion was an electric DaVinci, and I’d turn it up until the distortion was nasty and play “Smoke on the Water” until my mother cracked and bought that pawnshop guitar. I played it through my accordion amplifier as loud as I could, with the windows open so that everyone in the neighborhood knew that I had a fucking guitar. I’d even take it out in the yard and rock out so that everybody could see me. I don’t know why I wanted people to notice. I’m still that way: I do things because I love them, but I also want the recognition. It’s brought me a lot of happiness and gotten me into a lot of trouble.

  Fortunately, no Jehovah’s Witnesses stopped by the house when I was a kid, because I probably would be selling Bibles today. Instead, after watching dudes in a high school marching band beat on the snares at a football game, I turned back to the drums that I never should have abandoned in the first place. My father bought me my first professional snare for Christmas. This was no cardboard box, dude, no fucking paint can or upside-down pot. And if my dad hadn’t made me sit there and do my scales on the piano and learn about bars and beats and measures, I would never have picked up drumming as fast as I did.

  As I write this, with my father lying on his deathbed, I don’t know how I can ever repay him. I’m watching him slowly die—he’s probably got a year left—and when he looks at me, tears bubble out of his eyes. And when I look at him—this man who did nothing but support me—I can’t help but cry. After buying me that snare, he cosigned for me so that I could buy the rest of the drum kit myself. He told me, “I won’t buy it for you because then you won’t respect it. But I’ll help you and cosign for it so that if you mess up and miss your payments, I’ll have your back.” Then he helped me build a fucking room inside the garage with insulation, carpeting, a door, doubled plywood walls, and soundproofing made from egg cartons. My parents would park their cars in the driveway just so that I could have a soundproofed practice room. And, then, when I was ready for my first car, my father came through again and cosigned on the loan. He’d never walk a mile for me, but if I fell down while walking for myself he’d pick me up.

  Now that I had my own practice room, every kid at school who had ever played or seen a guitar wanted to come over and rock the fuck out, which usually meant playing Led Zeppelin songs over and over. Not a lot of parents would let their kids do that in their house. My folks’ only rule was no music after 10 P.M., and I respected that. For a while, at least.

  Music was all I thought about in school: My favorite classes were music and graphic design, where I’d make rock-and-roll T-shirts with my friends. I also dug coed volleyball. And that had nothing to do with music, but everything to do with rock and roll, if you know what I mean.

  Every day I’d go to my three favorite classes, then skip the rest of school and pound on my drums all afternoon while my parents were at work. Just before my mother came home, I’d take a walk, kill some time, and then come back as if I’d just returned from school. It was a good plan until I started failing eighth grade.

  My teacher, Mr. Walker, would write down our grades in a little book, close it, and put it in his drawer every day. So, along with a couple other kids who were failing, I hatched a plan to steal his grade book when he left the classroom to smoke his pipe. My assigned seat was in the front of the room, so when he took a smoke break one morning, I ran to his desk, bent over the top, reached around, and pulled the black grade book out of the drawer.

  I made it back to my seat just as he returned. As he discussed To Kill a Mockingbird, I passed the book behind me to Reggie, who raised his hand and asked to go to the bathroom. I followed him, as did another friend. We met in one of the stalls and placed the grade book on top of a closed toilet lid. Reggie took out his lighter and set the thing ablaze. We were idiots, bro: We thought that if we destroyed the book, then all our F’s would disappear and Mr. Walker would have to pass us. We were also stupid because we thought that three kids in the bathroom for ten minutes wouldn’t arouse any suspicions.

  As we were trying to hurry along the fire by lighting the book from different edges, the door to the stall flew open. Standing in the entrance was Mr. Walker, and his face was as red as a fire engine. It was all bad, dude. As we were all blowing on the book trying to put out the fire, he grabbed us by the fucking ears. I swear to God, my feet didn’t touch the floor all the way to the principal’s office. The principal had a chair by the wall, and when it was my turn to see him he made me face it and grab the handles.

  “Stare at that dot on the wall!” he barked.

  “What dot?” I asked. Then, all of a sudden, the blows came, one after another, right on my fucking ass. He beat the shit out of me, then suspended me. My parents grounded me so hard.

  I somehow graduated to South Hills High School, where I joined the drum corps of the marching band I had admired so much when I was a kid. Because we competed against other schools, I had to learn all kinds of tricks: twirling sticks, banging on the side of the drum, and other shit that went beyond drumming and into actual theater. The bass drum guys would swing the mallets from their wrist straps while all the snare drummers would flip and click their sticks in unison as they marched in time. Everything I learned in the drum corps I used in my playing with Mötley later on.

  But for all everyone else in the school cared, I might as well have still been taking ballet. Everywhere I went, people called me “band fag.” It wasn’t like I played the flute: I was a fucking drummer. It pissed me off that I was the only one who thought I was cool.

  The senior drum captain was a tall, dark-haired guy named Troy who had gone through puberty too early in life: his bones seemed like they were trying to burst out of his body, and his face was still flecked with acne scars. I was only a freshman, but I was excelling quickly in the band and pretty soon he felt that I was threatening his authority as drum captain. One day before practice, I was bending over to pick up my drum when he tapped me on the back. As I turned around, he knocked my nose to the other side of my face. I went to the hospital, where they anesthetized the area, stuck a pair of pliers up my nose, and—crack—twisted it back into place. But it never looked the same after that: It’s still crooked.

  I never saw him again because afterward, my parents sold their home and moved fifteen minutes away. I started sophomore year at a school called Royal Oak High in the Covina/San Dimas area.

  It was there that I formed my first band, U.S. 101. I asked my parents if we could rehearse in the garage, and they fucking let me. The band’s guitar player, Tom, was a major surfer dude and loved the Beach Boys. Even though I thought the Beach Boys were stupid sissy shit, I played along because I was so stoked just to
be jamming with an actual band. (Two members even went on to form Autograph.)

  From ballet to drum corps, I had always been an outsider. Being in a real rock band, though, suddenly made it cool to be a outsider. And there’s a big difference between being a lame outsider and a rad one. It didn’t matter that my band sucked. We started playing school dances and backyard parties: everywhere they needed a band, or didn’t. It was on that circuit that I first saw the coolest fucking kid in the world. He was a surfer dude with long blond hair fluffed up high on his head, just like David Lee Roth. He dressed in sharp, all-white clothes, and he was in a band. A much better band than mine. He went to Charter Oak High, about a mile away from my school. But he was kicked out during sophomore year and started coming to Royal Oak. As soon as he walked through the double doors—wearing badass, low hip-hugging bell-bottoms and a white muscle T-shirt—you would have thought the Rapture had occurred. All the girls were speechless, in puppy love with this long-haired surfing rocker. His name was Vince Wharton.

  fig. 2

  Tommy with father, David Lee Thomas, and mother, Vassilikki

  I went up to him one day after school and said, “Hey man, what’s up? My name’s Tommy and I play drums. I hear you’re in a band.”

  His band was called Rock Candy, and I started going to backyard parties so I could drink and watch them play. Vince had an amazing voice: He’d do Cheap Trick covers and sound exactly like Robin Zander. And he sang some sweet Sweet and Aerosmith.

  To me, Vince was God. He was in a rad band, he was a kick-ass surfer, the girls fucking fainted with lust whenever he walked by, and there was a rumor going around that he had fathered a boy before he was even in high school. I thought I was lucky that he even talked to a skinny misfit like me. I never even imagined I’d be cool enough to actually play in a band with him.