by Tommy Lee
The day Vince’s sentence was handed down, I was home with Nicole. When I answered the phone, there was a needle in my arm. We were scheduled to tour Europe with Cheap Trick in a couple months, and I had become so shut off to Vince that I didn’t care how many years he was about to be sentenced, so long as it didn’t fuck up the tour, because Cheap Trick had always been such a big influence and now they were going to be our opening act. When I heard it was only thirty days, though, my heart thawed and my eyes watered despite myself. He was going to be okay, and the band was going to continue unscathed, even if we didn’t really deserve to. Then I shot up and nodded out.
Because heroin was Nicole’s and my little secret, no one in the band realized how bad we were getting. I never even told our road manager or security guards I was shooting up: I would always score the heroin myself. And though I wasn’t pathetic yet, I was slowly getting there. The irony of it all was that I later found out our accountant had originally set me up with Nicole because he thought the influence of this clean, delightful-looking lady would keep me on the straight and narrow. He greatly underestimated my powers, or lack thereof. And so did I. I learned that when we went to Japan.
I didn’t bring any junk with me, figuring that would be a good way to stop, but by the end of the plane ride, I began to get sick. At the hotel, I was sweating, my nose was running, my temperature was rising, and my body began shaking. I’d never felt anything like this before from not taking a drug. I always thought that I was stronger than any drug, that I was too smart to actually be dependent on anything, that only idiots with no willpower became addicts. But in my hotel room, I came to the conclusion that either I had been wrong or I was an idiot. I took my little cassette player out of my bag and put on the first Lone Justice album, which had just come out. I played it over and over for almost twenty-four hours while I lay awake, too sick to sleep.
After two days of light junk sickness, I realized that I was indeed an addict. The band had changed from a lighthearted, fun-loving imp to some sort of bitter, callus-skinned nomadic creature. We were tired, we hadn’t stopped in years, and I’d become crass and mean.
But here I was in a country where fans gave me little dolls, drew cartoons for me, said they loved my hair, and came up to me crying. Through my sickness, I could sense that for the first time, I was getting some of the love that I had been searching for all along through music. And in return I terrorized the country, destroyed whatever got in my way, and drank everything I could to try to blot it all out. I was weak, from love, from addiction, and from self-disgust.
By the time the tour ended in Europe, I was a vengeful, self-hating junkie. On Valentine’s Day, we played with Cheap Trick in London and the guys from Hanoi Rocks came to see the show. Brian Connolly from the Sweet was backstage, and I knew he didn’t remember telling me I’d never make it when I sent him my London demos four years earlier. When I saw him, I felt the rage and hurt of that phone call return. I glared at him, hoping he’d somehow remember and apologize, but he never spoke a word to me. And I couldn’t bring myself to walk up to him and gloat because I looked like shit from not having shot up since the morning. I was content with everyone else in the band telling me what an asshole he was that night. That was my valentine.
I grabbed Andy from Hanoi Rocks after the show and we hopped into a black English taxi in search of heroin. With the Clash song “White Man in Hammersmith Palais” ringing in my head, we finally found a dealer in a crumbling row of tenement houses nearby.
“This stuff is pretty strong.” The dealer smiled at me through large, rotting teeth.
“I’m cool,” I told him. “I’m an old pro.”
“You look pretty fucked up, brother,” he told me. “Do you want me to do this for you?”
“Yeah, that would be great.”
He rolled up my sleeve and looped a rubber medical tie around my upper arm. I held it taut while he filled the plunger and sunk the needle into my arm. The heroin raced through my veins and, as soon as it exploded in my heart, I realized that I’d fucked up. I never should have let someone else shoot me up. This was it: I was checking out. And I wasn’t ready. I still had things to do, though I couldn’t remember what exactly. Oh well. Fuck.
I coughed, I gagged, I coughed again. I awoke, and the room looked upside down. I was on the shoulder of the dealer, who was carrying me out the door like an old trash bag. I gagged again, and vomit came pouring out of my mouth. He dropped me to the floor. My body had turned blue, there was ice down my pants from Andy trying to wake me up, and I had large welts all over my arms and chest from being struck with a baseball bat. That was the dealer’s idea: He thought he could put me in so much pain that my system would shock itself back into action. When that tactic failed, he had evidently decided to throw me in the Dumpster behind his tenement and leave me for dead. But then I vomited on his shoes. I was alive. I considered that my second valentine of the night.
Of course, I didn’t learn my lesson. No one in the band ever seemed to learn his lesson, no matter how many warnings God gave. Two nights later, I was at it again.
Rick Nielsen, Cheap Trick’s guitarist, wanted to introduce us to Roger Taylor of Queen, who was one of Tommy’s favorite drummers. Roger took us to a Russian restaurant that he said Queen and the Rolling Stones always went to. He led Tommy, Rick, Cheap Trick singer Robin Zander, and me to a private back room with hand-carved oak trim along the ceiling. We sat around a huge antique wooden table and drank every kind of vodka shot known to man—sweet, spicy, raspberry, garlic—before feasting on a Russian dinner. Rick was wearing a black rubber jacket, and for some reason I kept telling him that I wanted to piss on it.
We were getting hammered and stuffed, laughing about what a great night this was, when a maitre d’ walked in and announced, “Dessert is served.” Then a whole team of waiters came in the room. There was one waiter for each of us, and each was carefully carrying a covered silver platter. They placed the dishes in front of us and one by one lifted the lids. Lying on each were seven rock-star-sized lines of coke. Though I was still weak from the night before, I snorted them all and kept drinking. The next thing I knew, we were back at our hotel bar and Roger Taylor was talking to Rick Nielsen while I sat on a stool behind them. I kneeled on the stool, pulled down my leather pants, and did what I’d been promising to all night: peed on Rick’s jacket. He didn’t even realize anything was happening until it started dribbling down his pants and onto the floor. I thought it was pretty funny at the time, but when I went up to my room afterwards, I felt terrible: I had just pissed on my hero.
I wanted to run out and look for heroin that night, but I forced myself to lie in bed and wait for sleep to come. I wasn’t going to kick heroin, but maybe it was time to slow down. I started trying to control my intake: I’d shoot up one day, then stay clean the next. Sometimes I’d go as many as three days without shooting up. But I was just fooling myself. I discovered that when I ran out of heroin just before the tour ended.
Before we boarded the plane home from France, I phoned my dealer in L.A. and told him to meet me at the airport. Then I called a limo to pick him up to make sure he’d be on time. I fidgeted in my seat the whole ride, thinking about getting that first sweet hit of heroin in my veins after so long. I didn’t even care about getting laid anymore. Vince could keep all the girls—just leave me the drugs.
I was the first one off the plane. “Bye, guys, see you later,” was all I had to say to the band I had spent the last eight months with. Then I walked off with my dealer, hopped into the limo, and had a needle in my arm before the door even closed. We met Nicole on Valley Vista Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, where she showed me around my first real house, which she had picked out for me while I was on tour.
I had always thought that age and success had enabled me to overcome the shyness and low self-esteem I had developed from constantly switching homes and schools as a kid, but in reality I hadn’t changed at all. I had just drowned those feelings in heroin and alc
ohol. As a human being, I had never really learned how to act or behave. I was still the kid who didn’t know how to play normal games with his cousins. As I grew older, I only put myself in situations where I was the one running the show. I wasn’t interested in hanging out with other people in their environments, where I had no control. So once I set foot inside my house, I hardly ever left. Nicole and I shot up between five hundred and one thousand dollars’ worth of drugs a day. We went through bags of heroin, rocks of cocaine, cases of Cristal, and whatever pills we could get our hands on.
At first, it was a big party. Izzy Stradlin would be rolled up in a ball in front of the fireplace, porn stars would be passed out in the living room, and Britt Ekland would come stumbling out of the bathroom. One night, two girls came by and said that they were with a guy named Axl who was in a band called Guns N’ Roses, and he wanted to come in but was too shy to knock and ask.
“I think I’ve heard of him,” I told them. “I know his guitar player or something.”
“Then can he come in?” they asked.
“No, but you can,” I told them. And they did.
As I shot more and more cocaine, paranoia set in and soon I hardly let anyone in the house. Nicole and I would sit around naked day and night. My veins were collapsing and I would scour my body to find fresh ones: on my legs, my feet, my hands, my neck, and, when the veins everywhere else had dried out, my dick. When I wasn’t shooting up, I’d patrol my house for intruders. I started seeing people in trees, hearing cops on the roof, imagining helicopters outside with S.W.A.T. teams coming to get me. I had a .357 Magnum, and I’d constantly hunt for people in the closets, under the bed, and inside the washing machine, because I was sure someone was hiding in my house. I called my home security company, West-Tech, so often that they had a note in the office that warned patrol men to answer my alarms with caution because I had pulled a loaded gun on so many of their employees.
I had been onstage performing for tens of thousands of people; now I was alone. I had sunk into a subhuman condition, spending weeks at a time in my closet with a needle, a guitar, and a loaded gun. And no one in the band visited, no one called, no one came to my rescue. I can’t really blame them. After all, Vince had been in jail for three weeks and not once did the thought of calling or visiting him even cross my mind.
Two weeks after the Theatre of Pain tour, I put my brand-new twelve-thousand-dollar diamond-bezeled gold Rolex safely in my drawer, took a cab to the nearest precinct stationhouse, and turned myself in. I wanted to get it over with. They brought me to a quiet jail in Torrance to serve my thirty days.
My cellmate was in jail for stealing sports cars, and we were both trusties, which meant we had to bring food to the other prisoners, clean cells, and wash cop cars. In return, we got privileges: not just television and visitors, but on weekends the guards would bring us burgers and a six-pack. I had just spent almost a year on the road trying to stay sober to please the court, and now that I was in jail the guards were encouraging me to drink. Though the sergeant on the night shift hated my guts, everyone else wanted autographs and photos. In many ways, the rehab, guilt, newspaper headlines, and sober touring had been a much worse sentence than prison.
One afternoon, a blond fan who had figured out what jail I was in stopped by to visit. She was wearing Daisy Dukes and a Lycra tie-front halter top, and the sergeant on duty said I could bring her back to my cell for an hour. I walked her through the corridor, watching all the other prisoners salivate as we paraded by. I took her into my cell, shut the door, and fucked her on my cot. I could do no wrong in the eyes of my prisonmates after that.
The day before I started my sentence, Beth and I had moved into a $1.5 million house in Northridge with our two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. Beth visited me in prison every day for the first week. Then she suddenly stopped coming. I didn’t really think much about it: I wasn’t in love with her when we married, and it had only gone downhill from there.
After nineteen days, the warden released me for good behavior. Since I hadn’t heard from Beth, I had a buddy pick me up outside. We drove to Northridge, but I couldn’t remember where our house was. After an hour of searching, we finally stumbled across it. I walked to the door and rang the bell. Nobody was home. I walked around and checked the windows, but all the curtains were drawn. Maybe we were at the wrong house.
I walked around the back, and was pretty sure I recognized the pool and the yard. So I decided to break in. There was a glass door, and I shattered one of the panes near the handle, reached around and opened it, praying that I wouldn’t get sent right back to jail for breaking and entering. I walked inside and looked around. It was my house, but something was different: All the furniture was gone. Beth had taken everything—even the ice trays in the freezer. All she left behind was my Rolex and my Camaro Z28. The only problem was that she had taken the keys.
I called Beth’s parents, her grandparents, and her friends, and they all claimed they hadn’t heard from her. I wasn’t that interested in talking to her: I just wanted a divorce, my car keys, and some way to stay in touch with my daughter. I didn’t see Beth again for almost ten years, when she appeared at a concert in Florida with her husband and new children in tow. Our daughter, Elizabeth, eventually moved to Nashville to try and make it as a country singer.
As for me, after a year of policed sobriety, prison, therapy, and repentance, it was time to have a little responsible fun. I moved a couple of buddies in and, instead of buying furniture, installed a mud pit next to the pool for female wrestling. I invited all the drug dealers I knew to hang out at my place, because wherever there were drugs, there were girls. At one of my parties, a bunch of guys in suits who I didn’t know walked in. On the way out, one of them handed me a rock of cocaine as big as a golf ball, tipped his hat, and said, as if he was the Godfather or something, “Thanks for your hospitality.” After that, he was at my house every night. His name was Whitey, a drug dealer who probably did more coke than he sold, the house guest who never went away. He had spent some time in New Mexico, and pretty soon started bringing his New Mexico buddies over, particularly a tough-looking, tenderhearted, bath-deprived man named Randy Castillo. Some nights ended up with a lot of girls in lingerie and Whitey, Randy, and a select few other friends in bathrobes; other nights I’d bring a dozen girls back from the Tropicana to wrestle nude for me and my buddies. I wanted so badly to forget about the past year, to stop being Vince Neil and start being someone else, like Hugh Hefner.
fig. 5
Nikki, our security guy Fred Saunders, and I had been up for two days straight drinking, doing blow, and taking mushrooms. We were somewhere in Texas. The window was open and the wind was making the shade flap around inside the room. Then, all of a sudden, there came a sound. Chugachugchugchug chugachugchugchug. A train was passing by, dude. And Nikki looked at me. I looked at Nikki. And we didn’t even have to speak: We were in this weird drugged-out state and our minds were in total synchronicity.
“Let’s go,” we both said to each other—not out loud, but telepathically.
Fred read our minds, and yelled, “No, no, no!” But we left him in the fucking dust. We ran down the hallway and into the elevator, trying our best to shake Fred because he would never let it happen. We sprinted through the lobby and across the long, manicured lawn in front of the hotel. We kept running, as fast as we could, until our lungs felt like they would collapse. Fred was a couple hundred yards behind us, yelling, “No, you motherfuckers! No!”
But we kept running until we saw the train, chugging along the tracks in front of us, fast as a bitch. I caught up to it until I was sprinting alongside it.
“Come on, Nikki! Come on!” I yelled. He was still panting behind me.
I grabbed a small metal handhold near the back of one of the cars and the train yanked me off my feet. I swung my boots into a step at the bottom of the car, and I was off.
Nikki had almost caught up. “Come on, dude. Come on!” I yelled. He dove and
caught the bottom of the step I was standing on. The train was dragging him now, with his body squirming and his feet kicking in the dirt. I grabbed his arms and pulled him up to where I was.
“Oh my God, dude! This is the best!” we yelled telepathically at each other. “We just hopped our first fucking train!”
And, then, as we saw Fred and the hotel fade into the distance, the excitement wore off. We had no fucking idea where we were, where we were going, and we had absolutely no money. The train was picking up speed, chugging faster and faster. We looked at each other, terrified. We had to get off this thing. It didn’t seem to have the slightest intention of stopping anytime soon. We couldn’t do this: We had a show the next day.
“Okay. One, two, three,” we thought at each other. And at three, we both dove off, tumbling against the rocks on the ground, which left bruises, scrapes, and welts all over our bodies. We followed the train tracks home, finally reaching the hotel as the sun rose.
Before the Theatre of Pain tour, we never would have let go. We would have let that train take us to the end of the earth if it could. We never used to think about anything before we did it. We’d only think about it when: (A) it was too late, or (B) someone got hurt.
But it wasn’t like that anymore after Vince’s accident. Something had changed. Sure, we still partied, went crazy, got fucked up, and stuck our dicks in anything. But it wasn’t the same: Partying led to addiction, addiction led to paranoia, and paranoia led to all kinds of stupid mistakes with huge repercussions. Even fucking wasn’t the same: Fucking led to marriage, marriage led to divorce, divorce led to alimony, alimony led to poverty. Everything was different after the accident: We became conscious of our own mortality—as human beings and as a band.