by Tommy Lee
In my mind, though, I just couldn’t make sense of anything: Why was Razzle’s high-top in the middle of the street? Where was Vince? What was going on? What should I be doing, saying, thinking, screaming?
Then I saw him. Vince. He was sitting on the curb, his arms wrapped around his ankles, rocking back and forth. I ran toward him, and as I did, I saw Razzle out of the corner of my eye. He was being carried on a stretcher toward the open back doors of an ambulance. I figured that he was all right, though obviously in need of some serious attention, considering the state of his side of the Pantera.
Vince was covered with blood, and just rocking and making this strange sound that seemed to come from such a painful place that I don’t think I can even call it crying. I didn’t know if he was in pain, shock, or just freaking out. I tried to talk to him but a cop knocked me out of the way. He handcuffed Vince and shoved him into a police car. I drove with Beth and the Hanoi guys to the hospital.
After two and a half hours of waiting in complete silence, a doctor finally came into the waiting room. His gloves were bloody and his mask was pulled down around his neck. My eyes filled with water before he even spoke. The tears just hung there suspended, covering my eyes like contact lenses, until the dreaded doctor spoke those dreaded words: “Your buddy Razzle didn’t make it.” And then the dam burst, and tears drenched my face.
It had started out as a barbecue to celebrate the kickoff of our third album, but nobody wanted to go home. Beth was tearing out her hair because she was a neat freak and hated it when my friends came over to the house and got their germs everywhere. Our marriage was based not on love, but on drugs, alcohol, and her 240Z—and I was miserable. I’d stay out as late as I could, and drink from the moment I woke up until I went to sleep so that I didn’t have to deal with her nagging.
The party was a revolving door of people, but a few never left, like a couple of girls with apartments in the complex, an NBC anchorman who lived next door, and Tommy. Fortunately, he had split up with Honey; I hated being in the same room as them—not because they constantly fought but because I’d fucked her at least half a dozen times behind his back. Mick arrived on the third day, and I was surprised to see him there, since he rarely drank with us. He preferred to lock himself alone in his room, where he probably partied more than we ever did, judging by the way his body was beginning to bloat from constant alcohol consumption.
I finally got some sleep on the third night of the party. I woke up the next afternoon and looked out the window. Washed up on the beach was what looked like a small black whale. I slipped on jeans and a Hawaiian shirt and ran downstairs to take a closer look. And there was Mick, passed out in the sand in black leather pants, leather boots, and a leather jacket with the noonday sun blazing down on him. The clothes had clearly once been wet, because now they were dried out and clung to him like old, wrinkly skin. It looked like he was decomposing into the sand.
I wanted to bring him inside, but he mumbled something about just wanting to be left lying there. So I left him there, looking like E.T. when he was sick, and headed back into the party.
That night, the booze ran out. I had just bought a ’72 Ford Pantera, which is a fast, beautiful car, and Razzle wanted to see what it was like to ride in. It was bright red on the outside, with a sleek black leather interior. We were both fucked up and shouldn’t have driven, especially since the store was only a couple blocks away and we could have easily walked. But we just didn’t give it a second thought. Razzle wore high-tops, leather pants, and a frilly shirt—a twenty-four–seven rock-and-roll god, he wouldn’t ever be caught in the jeans and Hawaiian shirt that I was wearing.
We screeched into the parking lot and picked up a couple hundred dollars in beer and liquor to keep the party going. The car had no backseats, so Razzle held the bags of booze in his lap in the passenger seat. On the way home, we were driving along a hilly road that wound up the coast. It was full of little dips and hills, and as I was heading up a slight incline, there was a small bend ahead, just before the top of the hill. It was dark, and for some reason the streets were wet. Since I hadn’t been outside that night, I wasn’t sure if it had been raining lightly or if the streets had just been washed. As I approached the bend, I noticed that the gutter on one side of the road was full and was draining water and sewage into the gutter on the other side.
As the car rounded the curve, I shifted into second gear for the final stretch home. But as I did so, the wheels chirped and the car suddenly slid sideways in the water, to the left—into the lane for oncoming traffic. I tried to maneuver out of the skid, but as I struggled with the steering wheel, a pair of lights bore down on me. Something was coming over the top of the hill and heading straight for us. That was the last thing I saw before I was knocked unconscious.
When my head cleared, Razzle was lying in my lap. I forced my mouth into a smile for him, as if to say, “Thank God, we’re all right,” but he didn’t respond. I lifted his head and shook it, but he didn’t budge. I kept yelling “Razzle, wake up!” because I assumed that he had been knocked out, too. It was like we were in our own little world. I didn’t even realize that this was taking place in the Pantera until people began looking and reaching into the car, pulling Razzle out to the street.
I started to climb out of the car, but the paramedics rushed over and laid me on the pavement. “They reek of alcohol!” a medic yelled at the officers as he bandaged my ribs and the cuts on my face. I thought they were going to take me to the hospital, but instead they left me sitting on the pavement.
It seemed like a bad dream, and at first all I could think about was my car and how badly it was totaled. But then Beth and some people from the party arrived and started freaking out, and it slowly began to dawn on me that something bad had happened. I saw a decimated Volkswagen and paramedics loading a man and a woman I didn’t know into an ambulance. But I was in such a state of shock that I didn’t realize this had anything to do with me or real life.
Then a police officer walked up to me. “How fast were you going? The speed limit’s twenty-five.”
I told him that I didn’t remember, which was true. Only later did I recall the speedometer needle pushing sixty-five.
He gave me a Breathalyzer test, which I would have refused if I was in my right mind, and I measured .17. Then he read me my rights and, without handcuffing me, led me into the back of his squad car. At the police station, the officers glared at me. They kept asking me to tell them what happened, but all I could say was, “Where’s Razzle?” I figured that they had put him in another room to give a separate statement.
The phone rang, and the commanding officer left the room. He came back and said, coldly, “Your friend is dead.” When he spoke those words, the impact of the accident finally caught up with me. I felt it not just emotionally, but physically, as if I had been smashed with a hundred whiskey bottles. My ribs tore at my torso so bad I could hardly move, and pain shot through my face every time I spoke or winked. I thought about Razzle: I would never see him again. If only I had gone alone, or walked, or sent someone else for booze, or left the liquor store thirty seconds later, or skidded at a different angle so that I was dead instead. Fuck. I didn’t know how I could face anyone—his band, my band, my wife. I didn’t know what to do with myself.
The police sent me home as the sun was coming up, and Beth and Tommy were waiting for me. They tried to comfort me, but I didn’t respond. I was confused. I didn’t know how to make this new reality fit into the way my life seemed just twelve hours before. I was still the same person, but somehow everything had changed.
The next day, the phone didn’t stop ringing: friends, relatives, reporters, enemies were all calling and asking what happened. Then, as quickly as it had begun, the phone stopped ringing. After an eerie morning of silence, my managers called: The police had decided to arrest me for vehicular manslaughter. I went to the precinct and turned myself in.
The parents of the couple who were in the Volkswagen were
at my preliminary hearing. They looked at me like I was Satan. Lisa Hogan, the girl driving the car, was in a coma with brain damage, and her passenger, Daniel Smithers, was in the hospital in traction. He also had brain damage. As I stood there, I knew I should be in jail for what happened, even if it was technically an accident. If I had been just an ordinary guy, without fame or money, I probably would have been locked up on the spot. But instead I was released on a twenty-five-hundred-dollar bail until the trial, though I was told that if the trial didn’t go well, I was looking at seven years in prison and the end of my career.
When I came home after the hearing, our manager, Doc McGhee, told me that I had to check into rehab. I told him that I wasn’t an alcoholic and there was no way I was going to be treated like I had a problem. I wasn’t a wino lying in a gutter. But the court had required me to get treatment, and he had found a place that was more like a country club. He said that it had tennis courts, a golf course, and a small lake with boats. He drove me there the next day and I went along peacefully, figuring that it would be nice to get a vacation from all the newspaper headlines calling me a murderer. It was on Van Nuys Boulevard, and I walked into a very cold-looking hospital with barred windows.
“Where’s the golf course?” I asked Doc.
“Well,” he said. “I’ve got good news and bad news.”
There was no good news: It was just a little hospital, where I had to detox and go through intense therapy for thirty days. As I sat in that hospital—reliving the accident again and again with therapists, reading editorials in the paper saying that I should get life in prison to discourage drunk driving, and crying my eyes out every time I remembered Razzle and his high-tops and his happy-go-lucky British accent—I thought that this was it for me.
I had gotten maybe one phone call from Tommy or Nikki when I first checked in, but that was it. No one in the band called or visited after that. They either weren’t being supportive or were being told to keep their distance. I was alone, and they were probably moving on without me. I imagined Nikki auditioning new singers and leaving me to seven years in prison and a life of scorn as a walking murderer, the butt of jokes on talk shows to be rerun until the day I sink to hell.
When I came home after the Shout tour, I didn’t know what to do with myself. We had been on the road for thirteen months, and in that time I had lost my girlfriend, our home, and most of my friends. I was sleeping on a shitty mattress and eating out of a Styrofoam ice chest. I felt lonely, depressed, and crazy. This wasn’t how rock stars were supposed to live.
So Robbin Crosby, a photographer named Neil Zlozower, and I decided to go to Martinique. It was a surreal trip because I had been on another drug binge and was too incapacitated to do anything for myself. Someone took me to the airport and put me on a plane to Miami, then someone put me on another plane, then someone moved me through customs, and the next thing I knew I was in a pool bar on a beautiful island with topless women everywhere. It was the closest thing I’d seen to paradise in my lifetime.
After a week of partying in Martinique, we flew into Miami. As I walked off the plane, a tall man in a blue blazer came running up to me. “Nikki, Nikki,” he yelled. “Your singer is dead.”
“What?!” I asked.
“Vince died in a car crash.”
My knees went weak, I grew dizzy, and I collapsed into a chair. This wasn’t part of the plan, this wasn’t supposed to happen. What was going on? I hadn’t read any papers, watched TV, or talked to anyone while I was away. I walked to a pay phone and called management.
“There’s been an accident,” Doc said.
“Oh my God, so it’s true!”
“Yeah,” he said. “Vince is pretty fucked.”
“I’ll say he is. He’s dead, dude.”
“What are you talking about?” Doc asked. Then he told me the story: Razzle was dead, Vince was in rehab, and everyone was depressed, confused, and upset.
I took the next plane to Los Angeles and went to the shitshack I shared with Robbin. I called Michael Monroe and Andy McCoy from Hanoi Rocks, and we all disappeared into a strange, intense friendship bonded in death, drugs, and self-destruction. Michael would sit around all day, combing his hair, putting his makeup on, taking his makeup off, and then putting it on again.
“You may really be a transvestite,” I told him one day after I went to look for him in the bathroom at the Rainbow, only to discover that he was using the ladies’ room.
“No, man,” he answered as he smeared foundation on his face. “I just like the way I look.”
“But that doesn’t mean you have to use the ladies’ room.”
“I always use the girls’ bathroom,” he told me, “because whenever I use the guys’ room, I get into a fight because someone calls me a fag for putting makeup on in the mirror.”
I had disapproved of shooting cocaine since the days when Vince was hanging with Lovey and showing up at concerts in a bathrobe. But with the guys from Hanoi Rocks, I started combining it with my heroin all the time. I didn’t even call Mick or Vince. I didn’t know what to do with myself: I had fulfilled a lot of my dreams with Shout at the Devil. It was the orgy of success, girls, and drugs I had always wanted. But, now, I was confronted with a new problem: What do you do after the orgy?
The only thing I could think to do after the orgy was to have another one, a bigger one, so that I didn’t have to deal with the consequences of the last one. Vince was on the news every day, and I was so junked out I’d ask, “Why is Vince on the news?” And someone would say, “That’s for the manslaughter charge.” And I’d just say, “Oh yeah,” and shoot up again.
Vince was my bandmate, my best friend, my brother. We had just finished the most successful tour that a young band could possibly have had that early in its career; we had experienced some of the best times together; we had shared everything, from my girlfriend to Tommy’s wife to the room-service groupies. And I didn’t call him, I didn’t visit him, I didn’t support him in any way whatsoever. I was, as usual, only interested in indulging myself. Why wasn’t I there for him? What was the reason? Were the drugs that powerful? When I thought about Vince, it wasn’t with pity; it was with anger, as if he was the bad guy and the rest of the band members were innocent victims of his wrongdoing. But we all did drugs and drove drunk. It could have happened to any of us.
But it didn’t. It happened to Vince. And he was sitting in rehab contemplating his life and his future while all I could do was sit at home and contemplate the next hit of cocaine to send up my veins. Tommy was out partying at the Rainbow with Bobby Blotzer of Ratt, Mick was probably sitting on his front steps nursing a black eye, and Mötley Crüe was dead at the starting gate.
I was sure I was dead. I woke up on the beach, and the sky and sea were pitch-black. There was a glow of light coming from the distance, and I walked toward it. It was the glass windows of Vince’s house. I looked inside to see Beth, Tommy, Andy, and some of the other guys in the living room. But they weren’t partying. They were sitting in silence, looking sad, like something terrible had happened. When they spoke, they seemed to be whispering. There were tears in Beth and Tommy’s eyes. I figured that they were crying for me: that I had drowned in the water and they had discovered my body. Now I was just a soul or a ghost or some sort of spirit, stuck on earth in limbo to do penance for my life or for my suicide. But where was The Thing? Why wasn’t she there crying with them? After all, it had been to get her attention that I waded into the water in the first place. Maybe she was with my body at the morgue.
Since I was a ghost, material objects could no longer stand in my way. So I tried to walk through the glass window into the room in order to hear what Tommy and Beth were saying about me. That was when I really hurt myself. The noise of my body colliding into the window shocked the group in the house to life. They ran to the window and looked out in panic, only to find me lying on my back in the sand.
“Where have you been, dude?” Tommy exclaimed when he saw me.
/> I guess I was alive after all.
When they told me about the accident, Beth said that a lot of people thought that I was in the car: Razzle had been disfigured so badly that he looked like me. It wouldn’t have made a difference, because it was over for Mötley Crüe, as far as I was concerned. I was pretty used to being a hobo, and I could always go back to bumming and crashing on couches.
When I came home, I was shaken. I just thought, “Alcohol sucks,” and then I started drinking more heavily than I ever had. The Thing soon left the house. I bought a BMW 320i; and one night I was home talking with the drummer from White Horse about how fucked up my relationship was. He wanted to see the BMW, so I opened the curtains to show him, and the car was gone. I called the cops and told them that my girlfriend had stolen my car. They could tell I was drunk, and didn’t seem to really care. “Okay,” they told me. “We’ll go out and look for her. And if we see her with the car, we’ll shoot her, okay?”
“Never mind,” I said.
“She’ll be back, don’t worry about it,” the cop said as he hung up.
But she never did come back. I’ve always been faithful to whoever I’m dating, because if you cheat on your wife or girlfriend, you start to believe that she is doing the same thing to you and it breeds fear and distrust and eventually destroys your relationship. But the women I’ve dated and married haven’t always felt the same way: they can go fuck whoever they want and then come home and say, “Hey, baby, what’s going on?” I don’t understand how someone can do that to a person they’re supposedly in love with, so if they do that to me, I have to assume they’re not in love with me. And that’s what happened with The Thing. I found my car outside the house of a professional boxer. When I confronted her, she said, “Fuck you. I’m with him. He’s much younger.” Though she never said it, I felt that she thought he was a better bet than me, that he would make more money. I always told her that in a few years I would have multimillions.