by Tommy Lee
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” she replied.
“Nice to meet you.”
“Well, bye.”
“Bye.”
That was it, dude. That’s all we fucking said. It was brief, it was awkward, and it fucking changed my life. The place was the Forum Club, the event was an REO Speedwagon concert, the chick was Heather Locklear, and the guy who introduced us was my accountant, Chuck Shapiro. Chuck, who had taken me to the show because he was also REO Speedwagon’s accountant, knew Heather because his brother was her dentist. That’s how these things work, by alignments of a million chance events. Some call that luck, but I believe in fate. I have to. I made a million mistakes with that chick, and she still fucking went out with me.
I thought about her again a week later when I was flipping through the TV and saw an episode of Dynasty with Heather in it. I instantly called Chuck and begged him for her digits. He called his dentist brother and hooked me up like a true friend
The next afternoon, I took a deep breath, kicked my feet up on the couch, and called her. The conversation was just as awkward as our first one. My TV was on mute in the background, but as we made uncomfortable small talk, I saw her face appear on the screen in The Fall Guy. I took it as a sign that we were meant to be.
“Hey, turn on your TV,” I told her. “You’re on channel four.”
She flipped on her set. “Um,” she informed me, “that’s actually Heather Thomas.”
I wanted to hang up right then, grab a gun, and shoot myself in the fucking head. God aligns everything perfectly for me, and I always manage to fuck it up.
She took pity on me and suggested we meet anyway that Friday night. I’d never dated anyone like Heather before. She wasn’t the kind of chick I could take back to my van like Bullwinkle, or have group sex with in a Jacuzzi like Honey. She was a real woman, a good girl, and more famous than me—three things I’d never experienced on a date before.
I was nervous as shit beforehand. I primped myself in the mirror for hours, popping zits, combing my hair, fussing with my shirt collar, dabbing cologne strategically around my body, and making sure all my tattoos were covered. I arrived early at the house where she lived with her sister and dawdled outside until it was exactly seven o’clock. I felt like a fucking trained monkey in my stiff white button-down shirt and black pants. I buzzed the doorbell, fidgeting nervously, and a girl who looked just like Heather opened the door. I didn’t know what to say because I wasn’t sure if it was Heather or her sister. I waved sheepishly, walked inside, and waited for her to give some sort of sign betraying her identity. Then, at the top of the staircase, I saw a white dress. Now, that was Heather. She descended slowly, without a word, like in Gone With the Wind.
She looked so fucking hot that I wanted to run up to her, tackle her, and tear her clothes off. “You look beautiful,” I told her as I gently took her arm. Her sister watched me carefully, and I could feel her sizing me up, determining whether I was right for Heather or just a clown.
We went out for Italian food, then watched some lame stand-up comedy because I thought it was something that normal people did on dates. That night, we talked about everything. She had gone out with a lot of uptight rich guys and cheesy actors like Scott Baio. But she’d never been with a rocker. I could tell this was a point in my favor after she asked to see my tattoos. She was a good girl who fantasized about a bad boy, and I knew that even my starched collar and Drakkar Noir cologne couldn’t cover up the fact that I was that bad boy.
We went back to her house and drank champagne, but I was too scared to make a move. I didn’t want her to think I was just after a one-night stand or trying to mack on a famous actress. By the time I left that night, we had made a million plans together.
We slowly started hanging out more—going to dinner, movies, parties. Eventually, I started spending the night at her house. But she would not put out, dude. I’d get her drunk and try to mack on her every way I could for weeks, but she wouldn’t go all the way. That was another thing I had never experienced before, and because of it, we actually grew intimate and became friends. She had a bubbly personality, a great sense of humor, and loved playing pranks as much as I did. She showered me with flowers and I learned to love it. Any guy, I decided, who says he doesn’t like flowers is insecure about his masculinity.
After a month and a half, I was so worked up I couldn’t take it anymore. We finally fucked, and she had made me wait so long that I savored every second, because believe me, it only lasted for seconds. But we did it again and again that night until we were sure we were in love, because when you are with someone you don’t love, once is usually enough.
The next morning, I was hanging out by her pool in my boxers when her father stopped by the house. Heather flipped out: She may have been famous for playing the sexually aggressive, domineering bitch on television, but in real life she was as prude as they came. She was so worried her dad, who was the dean of the UCLA School of Engineering, would disapprove if he saw all my tattoos. I covered myself with towels. But even though there was ink peeking through, her dad didn’t seem to mind.
After we fucked, the relationship flew to a whole new level. One day, we were watching dirt-bike racing on TV and I told her I’d love to try that. The next day, there was a dirt bike outside my house. No one—male or female—had ever done anything that generous for me before. We were slowly realizing that we wanted to be together for a long, long time, maybe even forever.
When I left her to tour Theatre of Pain, playing “Home Sweet Home” every night, I felt alarm bells going off in my head. That was what I wanted my whole life. I wanted to make a home, like my parents. I was always the gangly tagalong, running around L.A. looking for a father or mother figure. Maybe it came from the fear that my dream analyst said I picked up from my mother: I was scared of being alone, of being out of communication. The longer the Theatre tour dragged on, the more I knew what I wanted to do.
When I was home on break during Christmas, Heather and I were driving on the Ventura freeway in a limousine. I stood up and stuck my head through the moon roof.
“Hey,” I yelled to Heather. “Get up here and check this out.”
“What?”
“Come up here!”
“Do I have to?”
Slowly, reluctantly, she stood up. As soon as her head popped through the opening, and her body pressed against mine, I asked her: “Will you marry me?”
“What?” she said. “It’s too loud up here. I can’t hear you.”
“WILL YOU MARRY ME?”
“Really?” She looked at me skeptically.
I reached in my pocket and pulled out a diamond ring. “Really.”
“What?”
“REALLY!”
When the tour ended, we married in a courtyard in Santa Barbara. I wore a white leather tuxedo and she wore a white strapless dress with white sleeves that started midway down her arm, leaving her tan shoulders and thin, delicate neckbone uncovered. It was the biggest wedding I had ever seen: five hundred guests, skydivers dropping in carrying big magnums of champagne, and white doves that flew through the air after we said our vows. Rudy, one of our techs, gave us the best toast ever: “To Tommy and Heather,” he said, raising a champagne glass. “May all your ups and downs be in bed.” Then he took the champagne glass and smashed it over his head. I glanced at the tables where Heather’s family was sitting, and they all looked like they were having second thoughts about the marriage.
It was one of the happiest days of my life. All my friends were there, including half the Sunset Strip scene. It seemed like everybody was in big bands now: Ratt, Quiet Riot, Autograph, Night Ranger. The only problem that afternoon was Nikki. I asked him to be my best man, and he showed up a mess. He was emaciated; he sweated constantly; and his skin was pure yellow, dude. He kept excusing himself to go to the bathroom, and then he’d return and start nodding off in the middle of the ceremony. As a best man, he was so fucked up on heroin he was usel
ess. I couldn’t believe he was shooting up at my fucking wedding.
The day after I returned home from Tommy’s wedding, there was a hand-delivered letter from our accountant, Chuck Shapiro, waiting for me in the mailbox. “You have been spending five thousand dollars a day,” he wrote. “Five thousand dollars times seven is thirty-five thousand dollars a week. Per month, that’s one-hundred forty thousand dollars. In exactly eleven months, you will be completely broke, if not dead.”
Before Tommy’s wedding, I had managed to keep my habit a secret because I hardly saw anyone in the band. The gang was now split into different houses in different parts of the city. We were still doing pretty much the same thing we did when we all lived in an apartment together: waking up, getting fucked up, then going to sleep and starting all over again. But the difference was that we weren’t doing it with each other. Tommy was in Heatherland, living in a multimillion-dollar home in a private neighborhood with security gates. He was so excited that one of his neighbors was an investment banker making forty-five million dollars a year and another was a lawyer handling major murder cases. But all I could think was, “These people used to be our enemies.” Vince was either in jail or hanging out at his house with strip-club owners and sports dudes and sleazy businessmen. And as for Mick, he’s so secretive, he could have been dealing arms to Iran or runway modeling for all I knew.
A band’s strength is in the solidarity of its members. When they split off into different worlds, that’s usually when the problems and rifts begin that lead to a breakup. What was cool about us initially was that Vince and Tommy were kids from Covina, I was from Idaho, and Mick was from Indiana; we were all small-town dysfunctional losers who somehow became rock stars. We made our dreams into our reality. But we got so caught up in success that we forgot who we were. Vince was trying to be Hugh Hefner, Tommy thought he was Princess Diana with his high-class marriage and new friends, and I thought I was some kind of glamorous bohemian junkie like William Burroughs or Jim Carroll. I guess Mick always wanted to be Robert Johnson or Jimi Hendrix, though he was drinking so much he was beginning to look more like Meat Loaf.
Reality came crashing down on me at Tommy’s wedding. I was trying to kick, unsuccessfully, and was making an ass of myself because I had no social skills and didn’t enjoy dancing with millionaires. During the reception, I told our tour manager, Rich Fisher, that I’d been doing a little bit of heroin, as if it wasn’t obvious. And he told everyone in the management office. When I didn’t respond to Chuck’s warning letter, my management company and a counselor named Bob Timmons (who had helped Vince try to get sober) burst into my house and pulled an intervention. At first, I was pissed. But after talking for hours, they wore me down. Nicole and I agreed to check into rehab. The place was actually the same clinic on Van Nuys Boulevard where Vince had been.
Like Vince, I wasn’t ready for rehab. But unlike Vince, I didn’t have the threat of prison to keep me there. During my third day, a fat, wart-faced woman kept trying to convince me that to clean up I had to believe in a higher power. “Fuck you and fuck God!” I finally yelled at her. I stormed out of the room, and she chased after me. I wheeled around, spit in her face, and told her to fuck off again. This time she did. I went to my room, grabbed my guitar, jumped out of the second-story window, and started walking down Van Nuys Boulevard in my hospital gown. I lived five miles away: I figured I could make it.
The hospital called Bob Timmons and told him I had escaped. He hopped into his car and caught up with me on Van Nuys Boulevard.
“Nikki, get in the car,” he said as he pulled up alongside me.
“Fuck you!”
“Nikki, it’s okay. Just get in the car. We’re not mad at you.”
“Fuck you! I’m not going back to that place!”
“I won’t take you back there. I promise.”
“You know what? Fuck you! I’m never going back there. Those people are insane! They’re trying to brainwash me with God and all this shit!”
“Nikki, I’m on your side. I’ll give you a ride home, and we can find a better way for you to get clean.”
I relented and accepted the ride. We drove back to my house and threw away all the needles, spoons, and drug residue. I begged him to help me get clean on my own, without God. Then I called my grandparents for support, because whatever little sanity I possessed as an adult was due to them. But my grandmother was too ill to take the call. That night, I wrote “Dancing on Glass,” flashing back to my overdose with the line “Valentine’s in London/Found me in the trash.”
Nicole stayed in rehab for two more weeks. When she returned to the house as an outpatient afterward, something was different. We were sober. And being sober, we discovered that we didn’t really like each other that much. With the heroin gone, we had nothing in common. We broke up immediately.
To stay clean, I hired a live-in personal assistant named Jesse James, who was a six-foot-five-inch version of Keith Richards and who always wore an SS hat covering up what I believe was a hairpiece. But over time, his job metamorphosed from baby-sitter to partner in crime. He went out and fetched me drugs, and as a reward, he got to do them with me. We drank and shot up coke mostly. But every now and then I’d inject a little heroin, for old times’ sake.
With Nicole gone, I started going through girls like socks. Jesse and I would sit around and watch TV all day, I’d try to write some songs for the next album, and when that failed we’d call whatever Hollywood girl we wanted to fuck that night. But once we did all the strippers and porn stars we were interested in, we quickly became bored. We’d ride around the neighborhood and throw bricks through windows, but the fun wore off pretty quickly. I decided I needed a girlfriend. So we started picking out girls on television we wanted to go out with, imagining all kinds of funny dating scenarios. There was a cute blond local newscaster we’d watch, and I’d call her at the station during a commercial break and talk dirty to her. Then I’d watch her when she went back on the air to see if she looked aroused or flustered or upset. Though she never came over, for some reason she always took our calls.
One day, the video for Vanity 6’s “Nasty Girl” came on the air, in which the three girls in the band rubbed themselves suggestively as they sang. As a protégée of Prince’s, the band’s leader, Vanity, seemed to come from such a different world than mine. “It would kind of be cool to fuck her,” I told Jesse.
“Go for it, cowboy,” he told me.
I called our management office and told them I wanted to meet Vanity. They called her managers, and within a week I was on my way to her apartment in Beverly Hills for our first date. The second she opened the door, she fixed me with a crazy stare. Her eyes seemed like they were about to whirl out of her skull, and I knew before she even spoke a word that she was completely psychotic. But then again, so was I. She invited me into her apartment, which was only a few rooms cluttered with trash and clothes and artwork. Her house was full of weird posterboards with magazine clippings, egg cartons, and dead leaves glued to them. She called these things her artwork, and each one had a story.
“This one I call The Reedemer,” she said, pointing out one messy collage. “It depicts the prophecy of the angel descending on the city, for he will come to redeem the souls trapped in the bulbs of streetlamps and the little piggies will walk down the street and the children will laugh.”
That night, we never left the apartment. After all the girls I had corrupted, it was time for one to corrupt me. The artwork, she eventually admitted, was something she did after staying up for days freebasing cocaine.
“Freebasing?” I asked. “I’ve never really done that the right way before.”
And so I fell right into the spider’s web. Stuck on freebase, I lost what little remained of the self-control I had been practicing since rehab and became a completely dysfunctional paranoid. One afternoon, there were some people hanging out in my living room, and Vanity and I were holed up in the bedroom. We turned on the radio, which was attached to spe
akers throughout the house, and listened to music while we lit up some freebase. As we were smoking, the music stopped and a talk radio program began. I pulled out my .357 Magnum and took another hit. As I was holding the freebase in my lungs, I yelled at the radio, “You motherfuckers, I’ll fucking shoot you. Get the fuck out of here.” I think I somehow thought that the voices coming from the radio were actually the people in my living room, which was on the other side of the door. The voices didn’t stop when I yelled at them, of course, so as I exhaled a sweet puff of white smoke into the air, I unloaded my .357 through the door.
But the voices continued. “I’ll fucking kill you, I’ll fucking kill you!” I yelled at them. I kicked open the door, and saw that they were coming from a four-foot-tall speaker in the corner. I loaded another clip into the gun and littered the speaker with .357 hollow-point Magnum shells. It fell on its side. But the voices continued: “Hi, this is KLOS, and you’re talking to Doug…”
I fucking flipped out, and everybody cleared out of my living room while I tore the poor speaker apart until, eventually, the voices stopped. I think Vanity must have, in a moment of lucidity, figured out how to turn off the radio.
Our relationship was one of the strangest, most self-destructive ones I’ve ever had. We would binge together for a week, and then not see each other for three weeks. Or, while smoking crack, she would lecture me about how drinking Coca-Cola was bad for my stomach lining. One afternoon when I was at her house, a dozen roses from Prince arrived with a note saying: “Drop him. Take me back.” At the time, I fell for it, but now I think she was just manipulating me. Prince probably never sent her any flowers.
Other times, I’d be at her apartment, and she’d send me out for orange juice. When I returned, the security guard wouldn’t let me back in.
“But I was just here,” I’d say, completely confused.
“Sorry, sir, direct orders. You can’t come in.”