by Tommy Lee
“Good luck in your poverty,” I told her cockily, though inside I was as confused as a whore in church. I went home, paid the last month of rent, and told the management that I was moving out and that The Thing was responsible for the house now.
I felt ancient, exhausted, and useless: too old ever to get another young, good-looking girlfriend and too old ever to find another band on its way up like Mötley Crüe had been. So much for young women, multimillions, and arena rock. I could travel the country, playing in the streets for money like Robert Johnson—I just had to change my way of thinking. So I moved into an apartment in Marina del Rey and began brainwashing myself with alcohol. Each night before I went to bed, I could feel myself growing more bloated, like a sweaty, disgusting pig. And not once did I think about visiting Vince in rehab. I wasn’t angry with him, but I was upset. Even though I knew it wasn’t his fault, I couldn’t bring myself to forgive him either.
fig. 3
When Vince arrived at the studio, there was no tearful reunion. A vague sense of sadness enveloped the room, as if an ex-wife had suddenly burst through the doors. I’d been strutting around L.A. with Robbin Crosby and the guys from Hanoi Rocks like I was king of the world for the past few months, without a thought for the band. I had written songs for the album that was to become Theatre of Pain, but I had no idea what I was doing or saying or playing; I was so fucked up I could hardly even dress myself anymore.
When Vince meekly said hello, even though he had just been through rehab, I offered him a bump. Maybe just to fit in again, he said yes, rolled up a dollar bill, and snorted it. Then he covered up his mouth and ran to the bathroom, where he vomited everything in his stomach for the next five minutes.
“What the fuck was that?” Vince asked.
“Smack, man,” I told him.
“Smack? What the fuck are you doing that for?”
“Because it’s cool.”
“Jesus, you are fucked up!”
But we were all fucked up. What Vince didn’t understand was that as he was getting sober, we were all hitting a new peak of addiction. We were stuck home and didn’t know what to do with ourselves after such an intense tour. Our girlfriends and wives—Lita for me, The Thing for Mick, and Honey for Tommy—were leaving us, and we were alone. So Mick lost himself in high-proof homemade cocktails, Tommy in gallon jugs of vodka and eightballs of cocaine, and, for me, it was anything I could inject into my system.
Every time I came home from the studio, I’d open the door and there would be people everywhere in the front room, listening to music, shooting up, fucking. I’d walk past them, because I didn’t know who any of them even were, and collapse into bed. My room was littered with needles and books. I was reading about the relationship between theater, politics, and culture, from the olden days when entertainers who failed to make a king laugh would be put to death to newer ideas like Antonin Artaud’s essay on “The Theater of Cruelty.” We were originally going to call the album Entertainment or Death, but a week after Doug Thaler tattooed it on his arm, we changed it to Theatre of Pain. I stole the title either from that Artaud essay, from a girl I had dated a couple times named Dinah Cancer (who was in the band 45 Grave), or from both.
In the studio, nobody liked the sounds they were getting out of their microphones, bass, or guitars. But we were too loaded to do anything about it. Mick was pissed off about having to use a Gallien-Krueger amp instead of his Marshall, though he practically wet his pants when Jeff Beck came in to borrow one of his guitar picks.
I had only written five songs, and we recorded every one. Then we had to plunder past demos just to scrape together a full album. “Home Sweet Home” was one of the first songs we put on tape, and it captured our feeling at the time of being stranded and alone and desperate and confused vagabonds yearning for some sense of security, whether it be family, intimacy, or death. But we recorded it so poorly: We’d come into the studio and go through two takes, hate them both, and then get bored and fed up and go home. And we’d do that every day for a week, just on “Home Sweet Home,” getting nowhere very slowly.
While we were working on the song, our accountant came by the studio with an aspiring actress named Nicole. She was very pretty, but she had her hair feathered back and sprayed to lie thick and flat on top. My first impression was that she was an annoying uptight lawyer type. I was always so uninterested in girls. I liked getting laid, but as soon as I got off, I would leave the room if we were on tour and knock on one of my bandmates’ doors to see what they were doing. I don’t know why anyone liked me: I was not good boyfriend material. I was boring, I cheated, and I wasn’t interested in anything that anybody had to say if it didn’t pertain directly to myself.
After seeing Nicole around rehearsals for a couple days, I asked her, “Do you want to grab some Thai food?” I took her to a restaurant called Toi around the corner from the house Robbin and I shared.
A couple bottles of wine later, I asked her, “Uh, have you ever done smack?”
“No,” she told me.
“How about blow?”
“Yeah, a couple of times.”
“Ever done ’ludes?”
“Um, I think I did. Maybe once.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ve got some smack, some blow, and some ’ludes if you want to come over to my place. I’ve also got a couple bottles of whiskey, and we could have some fun.”
“Okay,” she said. I could tell that she was dying to break out of her yuppie facade, to experience a night with a bad boy and then go back to the straight world and maybe gossip about it with the other prissy bitches around the watercooler because it was so out of character.
We went home and got fucked up, and fucked. But for some reason she didn’t leave. She liked the drugs. They were fun, they bonded us in guilt: I knew her secret and she knew mine. Every night after rehearsals, we’d go back to my place and shoot up. Then we started waking up in the morning and shooting up. Then she’d come by rehearsals and, no matter what we were recording, I’d take a break and shoot up in the bathroom or in her car and somehow never make it back to the studio. On the surface, we were boyfriend and girlfriend, but technically we were just drug buddies. Using the pretext of dating as an excuse to spend all our time together doing heroin, we dragged each other down until we were raging addicts. We hardly even had sex: we just shot up and nodded out on my filthy mattress.
SINCE VINCE’S ACCIDENT, THE FOUR of us had detached and started leading separate lives. Especially Vince. When we went out on the Theatre of Pain tour, he was left on the outside. For some reason, we continued to see him as the bad guy and ostracize him. He was in trouble, but we weren’t. So if I caught him with a beer after a show, I’d chew him out. On one hand, he deserved it, because if he was caught, the judge would crucify him at his trial. But on the other hand, there I was lecturing him about drinking a beer when I had a bottle of Jack in my hands and a syringe in my right boot.
So while everyone was busy keeping Vince from drinking beer, no one realized that I was progressively growing worse. The night before we were supposed to shoot the “Home Sweet Home” video on a tour stop in Texas, I caught Vince at the hotel bar and told Fred Saunders, our security guard, to send him up to his room with a girl. Meanwhile, I had an eightball of coke that I wanted to mix with something. So I told Fred I needed some pills. He came back with four large blue pellets in his hand, and warned, “Don’t take more than one of these. They will wipe you out.”
I thanked him and picked up a blond stripper in thigh-high cowboy boots, tight Jordache jeans, and huge fake tits bursting out of a red halter top. We went up to my room, and I guzzled a fifth of whiskey, snorted and injected as much blow as I could, and swallowed all four pills in one gulp. I only offered her a few crumbs of leftover coke, because I didn’t care. I was used to stuffing everything in sight into my system, because I had come to discover that my favorite form of entertainment was just mixing everything and then seeing what happened to my body.
The blond may have come to my room thinking she was going to get laid by Nikki Sixx, but now she had a freaked-out Frank Feranna to deal with, a high school nerd who had burst panicked out of a rock star’s skin. The blond grabbed the hotel room list and called Fred. He ran into the room and pulled me off the furniture. I hit the ground and started convulsing as a white lather began to leak from between my lips. Fred tried to make me bite down on a toilet-paper roll but I started to scream. Mid-yell, I suddenly passed out.
When I woke up in the morning, I was calmer, but I was really no better. A limousine drove me to the video shoot and someone put me into my fully glammed-out Theatre of Pain costume. The shoot was supposed to take place at noon on the concert stage, and while I waited, I wandered underneath the stage. I met a man under there, and we had a long talk about family and music and death. When it came time for the shoot, I was upset about being interrupted from my conversation.
“Nikki,” said Loser, my bass tech. “Who are you talking to?”
“I’m talking. Leave me alone.”
“Nikki, there’s no one there.”
“Leave me alone!”
“Easy, there. You’re freaking out.”
We shot some scenes backstage, kissing posters of chicks like Heather Thomas that we put on the wall in each city, then went onstage. I felt like I was on acid and speed at the same time, and kept guzzling whiskey to try to bring myself down. My eyes were rolled so far back into my head that I couldn’t see a thing and had to wear sunglasses for the video. I could hardly walk, so they lined up two dozen people at the front of the stage to make sure I didn’t fall off.
I have to admire Vince because he never said one snide word to me about how fucked up I was. But that was probably because he had discovered the joys of pills himself. He could just take one quietly, zone out, and escape the pressures of being on tour with us, of lecturing at high schools in every city, of talking to therapists about the accident all the time, of not being able to drink, and of not knowing from week to week whether he’d be on the road or in jail.
We used to think of ourselves as an army or a gang. That’s why, for the tour, we bought a private plane and painted it all black with a giant dick and balls on the tail, so that every time we landed it looked like we were coming to fuck the city. But instead of acting like an invading force, we started turning into rival commanders. Each of us attracted different soldiers after each show. The burnouts and stoners and guys who liked to say “dude” hung out with Tommy, who was entering his Sisters-of-Mercy-hugging-Boy-George phase of dressing; the guitar nerds would flock to Mick; the freaks would trap me into some long conversation about books or records; and Vince would retreat into his shell. He’d pick up a chick, then go back to the bus or his hotel room and do his thing.
Perhaps that is what made him feel safe. He couldn’t trust us anymore because we’d deserted him, but he’d find a girl, and she would love him with her entire body and heart that night, and he was in a situation that was familiar, that he could control, and that would keep him distracted. Without realizing it, Tommy, Mick, and I drew a line and pushed Vince to the other side. And the longer we kept partying while enforcing sobriety on him, the thicker that line became, until the earth beneath it cracked and Vince was left alone on a small sliver of rock, separated from the rest of us by a chasm that all the pills, girls, and therapists in the world couldn’t cross.
I never really thought that I was an alcoholic until I completed rehab successfully. Then I became an alcoholic. Before, I just drank to have a good time. But after the accident, I kept trying to forget about what had happened. If I was to function in the world as a normal human being, I just couldn’t keep putting myself through the guilt of Razzle and Lisa Hogan and Daniel Smithers.
In therapy, however, they wouldn’t let me forget anything: They forced me to work through my feelings about the accident every day until I wanted to start drinking so that I could forget about them all over again. It was a vicious circle. Even though I stayed sober, I knew that it was only a matter of one beer, one glass of wine, one bottle of Jack until I was a full-on alcoholic, worse than I’d ever been.
While I waited for the trial, I flew around the country and warned kids against drinking and driving, and that helped ward off the demons of alcoholism that were fluttering in my brain. But to be sober, you also need to have people around you who support you. And except for our managers, who offered me a diamond-bezeled gold Rolex if I could last three months without taking a drink, nobody was.
On the plane, the guys would turn to me and ask, as they chugged Jack and Coke, “Vince, could you pass that plate of coke over there?” They’d smoke pot and blow it in my face. They acted like that the whole tour, and then if I ever broke down and took a drink, they’d chew me out and tell me I was hurting the band. While I was in rehab, Tommy had been driving his motorcycle fucked up with Joey Vera of Armored Saint on the back. He wiped out on the freeway and flipped the thing half a dozen times, crushing Joey’s hand so he couldn’t play bass. And no one said a word to Tommy. He kept drinking like it was nobody’s business, getting so fucked up that our tour manager, Rich Fisher, would drag him out of bed when it was time to leave each hotel, throw him in the luggage rack, roll him downstairs to the bus, and then find a wheelchair in the airport to cart him onto the plane. One night, Rich handcuffed Tommy to the bed to keep him from drinking, but within an hour, Tommy had escaped and was downstairs, lying unconscious in a pile of broken glass from a restaurant booth divider he had just shattered.
That was funny to the guys, but everything I did was wrong. One rule on the plane was: Hands off the stewardesses. But I was so bored staying sober that I’d always end up with a stewardess in the bathroom or the back closet or the hotel room after we landed. Then the band would find out and she’d get fired. To put me in my place, they hired the pilot’s wife as a stewardess. Eventually, they even put a second security guard named Ira on the payroll and his only job was to knock me out and take me up to my room if I drank or caused any trouble in public.
In the meantime, everybody was having the time of their lives. While we were rehearsing for a new leg of the tour, Tommy showed up with some Polaroids he had taken while he fucked Heather Locklear. The two of them had suddenly started dating, and now we had the privilege of seeing Heather Locklear’s ass up close.
Women had become my new vice, too. But not women like Heather Locklear. Instead of drinking and drugs, I’d fuck a lot of groupies. And there were tons of them. I’d go through four or five girls a night. I’d have sex before a show, after a show, and sometimes during a show. It never stopped, because I never passed up an opportunity and the opportunities were always there. A few times, when I really needed a distraction, I’d line up half a dozen naked girls on my hotel room floor or facing the wall, then run a sexual obstacle course. But the novelty wore off quickly. Even though I was married to Beth and we had a daughter, our relationship had hardly improved. Besides, her orange 240Z, which I loved so much, had blown up. So it was only a matter of time before our relationship did, too.
It seemed like all my relationships were exploding in my face. I could understand why the band was so upset, but what I did was over and done. As my bandmates, they should have been supporting me. After all, we had just recorded a weak album and the first hit from it, a cover of Brownsville Station’s “Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room,” which I used to play with
my old band, Rock Candy, was my idea. But every night, though I loved singing it live, Nikki would complain that the song was stupid and he didn’t want to play it. Outside of “Home Sweet Home,” which MTV aired so much they had to establish an expiration date for new videos in order to stop the flood of requests, the rest of the album was pure shit. Every night, when I ran around onstage in my pink leather pants that laced up the sides, I felt like the only one sober enough to realize how bad some of those songs were. I was shocked the record went double platinum, and maybe it just reinforced the idea that we were so great we could even get away with putting out a terrible album.
When we flew back to L.A. between legs of the tour, my lawyer arranged for a meeting in court with the district attorney and the families of the others involved in the accident. In order to avoid a trial, he advised me to plead guilty to vehicular manslaughter and strike a compromise. He figured that since the people drinking at my house were mostly in Mötley Crüe and Hanoi Rocks, the party could be explained as a business meeting and we would be able to pay damages to the families through the band’s liability insurance, because there was no way I could afford them on my own. This was why the families of the victims agreed to what everyone saw as such a light sentence: thirty days in jail, $2.6 million in restitution to them, and two hundred hours of community service, which I’d already been chipping away at by lecturing in schools and on the radio. In addition, my lawyer told the DA that I could do more good lecturing on the road than I could sitting on my ass in prison, where I wouldn’t be a benefit to anybody. The DA agreed and deferred my sentence until after the tour.
The sentence was a huge relief, lifting a dark cloud that had been hanging over my head. But it was a mixed blessing, because now people hated me even more than they did before. The headlines in the papers calling me a murderer resurfaced, but now they were even meaner: “Drunk Killer Vince Neil Sentenced to Touring World with Rock Band.”