The Dirt

by Tommy Lee

  “You ain’t a fucking punk, you motherfucker!” I leapt off the sofa, slammed his head against the table, yanked his ear, and pressed the lobe flat against the wood with my fingers. Then, with the whole room watching, I hammered a nail straight through his earlobe and into the table.

  “Aaaaaaauuuuuggggghhh!” he yelled, and writhed in pain, stuck to the table like a dog on a tight chain.

  “Now you’re punk rock!” I told him. We turned up the stereo and kept partying like he wasn’t there. When I woke up the next afternoon, he was gone, but the nail was still mysteriously in the table. I tried to avoid imagining what he must have done to escape.

  I had reached a new place in life. No longer was I the downtrodden, victimized, sniveling, untalented wanna-be begging the cool guys to let me join their band. I was in the cool band. I was recording my very own album with my very own songs. We had our own apartment in the middle of the scene that was the only place to be after hours. And we traveled around in Cadillacs that Coffman rented for us. Ungrateful, we’d kick the doors in and destroy them without a thought for the cost.

  When we went out together, four male degenerates dressed like female sluts, people were drawn to our energy. If we walked into the Troubadour, everybody came with us. If we split, the club emptied. It felt like we were becoming the kings of L.A. It seemed like every guy wanted to be us and every chick wanted to fuck us, and all we had to do was simply be a band.

  It was the best time of my life, but it was also the darkest. I was a walking terror. The chip on my shoulder had grown to the size of a large boulder, and if anyone even tried to touch it, I’d smash it in their face. Man is like a rottweiler or a tiger; he’s a very beautiful animal, but if he gets pissed off and you’re standing in range, you’re going to go down, no matter who you are.

  At least, that’s the kind of man I was. One night, after waking up and drinking all day, Vince and I arrived early for a show at the Whisky A Go-Go. When I walked in, a jock with feathered hair sneered, “Who do you think you are? Keith Richards or Johnny Thunders?”

  I didn’t say a word. I grabbed his face and started smashing it into the side of the bar, shattering glasses and covering the counter with blood. The bouncer walked up to me and, instead of kicking me out, smiled. “Cool, dude,” he said. “We’ll get you some free drinks for that. Do you mind if I call you Muhammad Ali, Sixx?”

  He walked Vince and me upstairs, and we continued swigging Jack Daniel’s. But while I was getting a hand job from a girl at the bar, Vince slipped away. I combed the entire club, and asked everyone if they had seen him. It wasn’t until later that night, when I was leaving the club, that I found him passed out underneath a blue Ford Malibu, with his feet sticking out the side like a car mechanic. I dragged Vince home, where we found a girl handcuffed to his bed. Though Tommy was nowhere to be seen, she was one of his victims, the daughter of a famous athlete. I saw her recently, working on the pirate ship at Disneyland. It was good to see that she was still around handcuffs.

  Vince passed out with the girl still handcuffed to his bed. When he awoke at midnight, the girl was gone, Tommy was back, and we all went out again.

  There was a party at the Hyatt House that night, with about sixty people jammed into a room. A thin, tan, huge-breasted girl I knew in a form-fitting stretch dress grabbed my hand and, slurring and stumbling, pulled me into a small, closet-size room. She drunkenly tore open my leather pants, grabbed my dick, pushed me against the wall, hiked up her dress, and maneuvered me inside her. We fucked for a while, then I told her I had to go to the bathroom. I went into the party and found Tommy. “Dude, come here.” I grabbed him. “I got this chick in the closet. Follow me, and don’t say a word. When I tell you, start fucking her.”

  In the closet, I stood directly behind Tommy. He fucked her while she grabbed my hair and yelled, “Oh, Nikki! Nikki!” After Tommy and I went a few rounds with her, I slipped back into the party and grabbed a scrawny kid in a Rolling Stones concert jersey, probably someone’s kid brother.

  “Congratulations,” I told him. “You are about to lose your virginity.”

  “No, man.” He looked up at me, eyes wide and fearful. “I don’t want to!”

  I pushed him toward the tiny room and locked him in there with the girl. I heard him crying and yelling, “Let me out of here, you bastard!”

  I was so drunk that when I woke up the next day, I didn’t remember a thing—until the phone rang. It was the girl from the night before.

  “Nikki,” she said, her voice trembling. “I got raped last night.”

  My heart dropped into my stomach, and my body went cold. The memories of the night before came flooding back, and I realized that I had probably gone too far.

  And then she continued: “I was hitchhiking home from the Hyatt House, and this guy picked me up and raped me in his car.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

  At first, I was relieved, because it meant I hadn’t raped her. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I pretty much had. I was in a zone, though, and in that zone, consequences did not exist. Besides, I was capable of sinking even lower than that.

  There was a homeless girl who was a fixture on the Strip: She was young, crazy, and always wore a Cinderella costume. One night, we picked her up and brought her home so that Tommy could try to sleep with her. And while he was in bed with her, we stole her costume. After she left the house in tears with Tommy’s clothes hanging off her, no one ever saw her in the streets again.

  Once we had taken clothes from a homeless girl, there were no taboos. I even tried to fuck Tommy’s mother, but failed miserably; when his dad found out, he told me, “If you can get in there, you can have it.” After that, I started dating a German model or at least a skinny German who told me she was a model. She had photos of herself hanging around the guys in Queen, so I was impressed. Her upstairs neighbor, Fred, wanted to teach me how to freebase, and that annoyed the German girl, who we nicknamed Himmler. Every week, Himmler came by the house and we celebrated with Nazi Wednesdays. We walked around in armbands, goose-stepping and sieg-heiling. Instead of torching the cockroaches on the wall with flaming jets of hair spray, we scooped them up and burned them with their compatriots in the oven. When they died, they’d stand up on their back legs and then keel over while we barked at them in fake German.

  “Hey,” she scolded, in her deep, guttural accent, “zat eez not vunny. Many millionz of people haft died in zee ovens.”

  After we broke up, I dated a groupie with a narrow waist, a Sheena Easton haircut, and fuck-me eyes. Her name was Stephanie, her parents owned a luxury hotel chain, and she was smart enough to know that the quickest way to our hearts was to bring us drugs and groceries. I met her at the Starwood when she was hanging around the guys from Ratt. I loved dating her: We’d go to her apartment and do blow and quaaludes, and then I’d get to fuck her, which was great because I didn’t have any money to buy blow and quaaludes and I couldn’t fuck myself. (Though I’m about to fuck myself over with this story.) She would let me do anything: On one of our first dates, she took me out to dinner and I used a bottle of wine on her underneath the table.

  One night, Vince, Stephanie, and I were hanging out at the Rainbow, eating quaaludes and escargots, and throwing up under the table every fifteen minutes. We got plastered, took her back to the house, and all ended up in Vince’s bed. That was never my scene: Tommy and Vince were always piling chicks together. But having a guy there wrecked the moment for me. I couldn’t get it up and eventually went back to my room, leaving the two of them alone. That was the last time I saw Stephanie naked, because once you put Vince in the same room as a girl with money and a nice car, it’s all over. They dated for months after that and were about to get married when Vince found a richer girl, Beth, with blond hair and a better car, a 240Z.

  I don’t know how we ever dragged our incestuous, partied-out little selves to the next level as a band, because we didn’t even believe
that a next level existed. It was just about packing people into our shows and making sure they left talking about us. We even called Elvira one night, who agreed to introduce us if Coffman paid her five hundred dollars and picked her up in a black towncar. The longer we lived together, the better our concerts became because we had more time to dream up stupid antics. Vince started chain-sawing the heads off mannequins. Blackie Lawless had stopped lighting himself on fire because he was tired of burning his skin, so I took over because I didn’t give a shit about the pain. I would have swallowed tacks or fucked a broken bottle if it would have brought more people to our shows.

  fig. 12

  With Elvira backstage at Santa Monica Civic Center, New Year’s Evil Show, 1982

  fig. 13

  Nikki with Lita Ford

  With each new gig, our stage setup looked better and better: Mick had a dozen lights he had bought from Don Dokken and a PA he had stolen from his old Top 40 band, White Horse. We had a dirty white bloodstained bedsheet that we stripped from Tommy’s bed and painted our name on in big black letters. Inspired by Queen, Tommy and Vince built a three-tiered drum riser: a frame of two-by-fours painted white with stretched black cloth over the top, and mounted with fifteen flashing lights and skulls and drumsticks. It weighed a ton and was a pain in the ass to assemble each show. We also made small Plexiglas boxes filled with lights that we would climb on, pose from, and leap off. The whole show was a hodgepodge of whatever looked cool and cheap to us. We painted the drumheads, stuck candelabras all over the stage, mounted voodoo heads on the ends of drumsticks, tied handkerchiefs on whatever we could, decorated our guitars with colored tape, wrapped telephone cords around ourselves, and used the most evil recordings we could find to pump up the crowd before our concerts.

  When we sold out a series of shows at the Whisky, I was so ecstatic I called my grandparents and said, “You’re not going to believe it! We sold out three nights at the Whisky. We fucking made it.”

  “Made what?” he asked. “Nobody even knows who you are.”

  And he was right: We were selling out show after show, but no label would sign us. They told us our live show was too erratic and there was no way our music would ever get on the radio or make the pop charts. Heavy metal was dead, they kept telling us; new wave was all that mattered. Unless we sounded like the Go-Go’s or the Knack, they weren’t interested. We didn’t know about charts or radio program directors or new wave. All we knew about was raw fucking Marshall stacks of rock and roll blasting in our crotches and how much fucking blow, Percodan, quaaludes, and alcohol we could get for free.

  The only reason I wanted a record deal was so that I could impress girls by telling them I had one. So we solved that problem by creating our own label, Leathür Records. We booked time in the cheapest studio we could find: a sixty-dollar-an-hour outhouse on a bad stretch of Olympic Avenue. Mick liked the place because it had a Trident board and really small rooms that he said were great for natural reverb. Mick fired the house engineer and brought in Michael Wagner, a jovial, cherubic German who used to be in the metal band Accept. Together, we spit out Too Fast for Love in three drunken days. When we couldn’t get anyone to even agree to distribute the album, Coffman did it himself, driving around in his rented Lincoln, trying to talk record stores into carrying a couple copies. Within four months, however, we had a distributor (Greenworld) and had sold twenty thousand albums, which wasn’t bad for a record that cost six thousand dollars to make.

  We celebrated the album’s release with a party at the Troubadour, which was one of my favorite clubs because there was a guy there I really enjoyed beating up. He had long hair and idolized us, but he was a pest and suffered deservedly for it. I had just finished pushing him backward over Tommy, who was positioned behind him on all fours, when I saw a girl with thick platinum blond hair, apple red cheeks, heavy blue eye shadow, tight black leather pants, a punk-rock belt, and thigh-high black boots.

  She walked up and said, “Hi, I’m Lita. Lita Ford, with the Runaways. What’s your name?”

  “Rick,” I said.

  “Really?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I’m Rick.” I was pretty full of myself, and assumed that everyone knew my name.

  “Sorry,” she said, “I thought you were someone else.”

  “Well, you thought wrong,” I sneered, with my nose stuck in its usual place up in the air.

  “That’s too bad, Rick,” she said, “because I wanted to split a quaalude with you.”

  “You did?” I began to pay attention.

  “I thought you were Nikki.”

  “I am Nikki! I am Nikki!” I practically wet myself like a dog in pursuit of a treat.

  She bit the quaalude in half and stuck it in my mouth, and that was it.

  We began talking and hanging out. Prior to meeting her, I had thought of most women the way I thought of my first girlfriend, Sarah Hopper, as pests who were sometimes useful as alternatives to masturbation. But Lita was a musician, and I could relate to her. She was nice, normal, and smart. In the furious tempest that my life had become, here was someone I could cling to, someone to help keep my feet on the ground.

  One night, Lita, Vince, Beth, and I were leaving the Rainbow when a biker started pushing the girls around and asking if they wanted to fuck him. The bikers had declared war on the rockers back then. We watched for a minute, and then walked up to him. We were in a good mood, so we didn’t hit him. We asked him to stop. He glared at us and told us to fuck off.

  I was wearing a chain around my waist, attached to a piece of leather and a buckle. I whipped the chain off my waist and started swinging it in the air, trying to crack heads. Suddenly, a couple more people joined the fight. One of them, a hairy six-foot-four beast, charged at me like a bull, knocking the wind out of me and pushing me back into the bushes. I reached for the chain on the ground, and he grabbed my hand with his leather glove, stuck it in his mouth, and bit it through to the bone. I screamed and, in a rush of adrenaline, grabbed the chain and started whipping him across the face with it.

  All of a sudden, he pushed me back, pulled out a gun, and said, “You’re under arrest, motherfucker.” In the commotion, I didn’t even realize that the two people who had joined the fight weren’t the biker’s friends, but undercover cops. They cracked me seven times across the face with their billy clubs, breaking one of my cheekbones and blackening an eye. Then they handcuffed me and tossed me into their squad car. From the backseat, I saw Vince running away like a glam chicken, probably because he’d just been arrested at the Troubadour a few weeks before for hitting a girl who didn’t like the U.S. Marines outfit he was wearing.

  “Fucking punk,” the big cop yelled at me. “Hitting a cop. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  The car screeched to a halt at the head of an alley. He grabbed both my elbows with one hand, dragged me out of the car, and threw me on the ground. Then he and his partner started kicking me in the stomach and face. Whenever I turned onto my stomach to try to shield myself from the blows, they’d roll me onto my side so that they could kick me where it hurt more.

  I went to jail that night covered in smeared makeup, fingernail polish, and blood. They charged me with assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer. I spent two nights there with the cops threatening to put me away for five years without parole. (The police, however, didn’t end up pressing charges because a scandal soon developed when dozens of people accused the cops of harassing them and beating them up on the Sunset Strip.)

  Lita hocked her prized Firebird Trans Am for a thousand bucks to make my bail. We walked three miles from jail back to the Mötley House to meet the band in time for a show at the Whisky that night. Afterward, accompanied by the sounds of Tommy’s girlfriend Bullwinkle smashing everything of value we had in the house, I pulled out a lined yellow notepad and vented my anger:

  A starspangled fight

  Heard a steel-belted scream

  Sinners in delight

  Another sidew
alk’s bloody dream

  I heard the sirens whine

  My blood turned to freeze

  See the red in my eyes

  Finished with you, you’ll make my disease.

  No, that last line wasn’t right. As I crossed it out, the door flew off its hinges, and Tommy crashed to the ground, his head cut open and Bullwinkle towering over him like an angry moose.

  “Your blood’s coming my way,” I scribbled beneath the crossed-out line.

  Better, but not perfect.

  The next morning, a lawyer came by with an eviction notice. We had been in the house for nine months, constantly drinking, fighting, fucking, practicing, and partying, and we were all sick and haggard. We needed a little mothering. So I moved in with Lita on Coldwater Canyon in North Hollywood. Vince moved into Beth’s apartment. And Tommy moved in with Bullwinkle. I don’t know where Mick was: maybe we left him hanging upside down in one of our closets. We never bothered to check.

  I think that the only reason I ever succeeded was because of my passion. I always went beyond what anyone else was doing to get something I wanted. Like when I was a DJ at my high school station in Park Forest, Illinois, I heard about a radio conference at Loyola University and signed myself up. It was there that I discovered I could get free records. Our high school radio station had been operating for years, and not once had it occurred to them that they didn’t have to buy their own albums.

  My first job out of school was in the mailroom of the Chicago WEA distribution branch, a position I only got because I impressed someone at the label while I was on the phone begging for free Cars records. Eventually that same passion earned me a promotion to Los Angeles, where I worked as an assistant in the sales department at Elektra Records, which at that time had acts like Jackson Browne, Queen, the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, and Twennynine with Lenny White.