by Tommy Lee
So I went to visit a friend named Sedge who was a full-on fucking Nikki Sixx junkie. When I walked in, he was sitting on the sofa juicing up. “Hey, bro, hook me up,” I begged. “I don’t want to feel a fucking thing right now.”
“No problem,” he said, rubbing his fingers together in what would have been a snap if he wasn’t too junked-out to generate enough friction.
I rolled up my sleeve, tied myself off with a piece of medical rubber tubing on the table, and waited for him to prepare the syringe. I saw him lower it into a spoon and draw two cc’s.
“Bro, I’m not like you,” I told him. “I don’t do this all the time. That might be too much for me.”
“Naw, don’t worry about it,” he half snapped. “It’s fine. Trust me, dude. I’m a junkie. I know what I’m doing.”
“Fuck it. Whatever.” Those words—“Trust me, I’m a junkie”—should have been a clue right there. I mean, he was a fucking addict, dude, so of course his tolerance was going to be more than mine.
He stabbed my arm, released the two cc’s into my system, pulled the needle out, and untied me. I entered fucking paradise. I was so fucking happy. I didn’t feel a thing. My body relaxed, the words Bobbie and Brown disappeared from my consciousness, and a stream of pleasure shot out from my heart and flooded my body. I dropped back into the couch and closed my eyes.
When we were touring with Corabi in Europe, there was a press conference in Italy. And this phenomenally beautiful Italian journalist stood up and said, “Nikki, I want to ask you a question.” She had blow-job lips, flowing auburn hair, and looked just like Raquel Welch playing the role of Lust in the movie Bedazzled. “Do you ever thank God for making you so beautiful?”
“No,” I answered her. “I curse him for making my dick so small.”
After the press conference, she invited me to join her for coffee so that we could talk more. “Well, you know I’m married,” I told her.
“No, no. Just talking,” she said, still looking like Lust. “Maybe we will go together tomorrow.”
“Call me.”
The next morning, instead of calling my room, she knocked on the door. I dragged myself out of bed, opened the door, and she barged in and slipped out of her boots, skirt, and tight sweater. Her body was unbelievable: perfect, golden brown skin with shampoo-commercial hair cascading over full breasts mounted in a red push-up bra. My morning wood pushed against my underpants. She pushed me down on the bed, said, “Let’s see if God really cursed you,” and we started rolling around. But just as I was about to fuck her, she said, “You have a rubber, right?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Then I’ll be right back,” she said, and slipped into her clothes.
When she left, I took a moment to think: What was I doing? I almost fucked this chick. I’m married; I have children. Screwing this very beautiful Italian woman who’s driving me crazy with lust is a waste of time. I slipped into my clothes, went across the hall to Mick’s room, and watched her return with the rubbers, only to find nobody home.
A few weeks later, I was in London with my wife, Brandi. Our record label threw us a party full of freaks like midgets, stilt-walkers, and English rock stars. Suddenly, there was a commotion at the door and a woman was yelling, “I will not be treated this way. I am the press.” It was the ravishing Italian journalist. She pushed past security and marched right toward me. “Where the fuck did you go?” she demanded. Brandi turned to me, and I went red in the face. I escaped out the back door with Brandi in pursuit, cursing at me the whole way. I learned an important lesson that night: If I had just fucked that Italian instead of staying faithful, none of this ever would have happened.
By that point, my marriage was in the gutter anyway. The love that had blossomed out of my sobriety during the making of Dr. Feelgood was just a momentary obsession egged on by the fact that I hardly ever saw her, so I didn’t know what she was really like. By the time we discovered we weren’t right for each other, she was already pregnant with our first child, Gunner. I consoled myself by spending as much time with our children as I could; she consoled herself by spending as much of my money as she could. And that’s how I ended up in a fifteen-thousand-square-foot mansion full of white marble and tiled pools and sixty-foot ceilings. It was a nightmare.
But I couldn’t bring myself to leave her because I remembered all too well what my life had been like without a father. So much of my anger and violence, and probably the reason I always pushed myself to the point of self-destruction with drugs, was because I was still pissed at my father for abandoning me to a rootless, nomadic existence with my mother and her various husbands. I had been through so much with Mötley Crüe, but none of it could heal or fade those scars. I didn’t want my three children to grow up with those same scars.
While we were recording a bonus EP called Quaternary (which means “the power of four”) with Corabi, I wrote a song called “Father” and just lost my mind in the music, asking, “Father, where are you?” in the chorus. I began to think that the hole in my life was probably mirrored in his life, that it must be hard for him to know he has a son he can’t communicate with.
The last time I had spoken with my father was in 1981, when he basically disowned me and I changed my name. Over a decade had passed since then. I was a father now, and I thought that he’d want to know he was a grandfather. Perhaps we could even begin to repair the damage between us. Now that I was thirty-seven, maybe it was time to finally bury the adolescent angst which had fueled my whole life.
The last place I knew he had worked at was a pool-construction company in San Jose, so I called information for the number, dialed it, and asked if Frank Feranna was still working there.
“Who wants to know?” a voice asked.
“I’m his son. I’m trying to find him.”
“Randy?”
“Who’s Randy?”
“Well, whoever you are, Frank Feranna’s dead. Been dead a long time.”
“Wait.”
“Don’t call here again.”
They hung up. I called my mother in Seattle to see if she knew what had happened to my father. She insisted that he was alive. I tried to pull more details out of her and asked if the name Randy meant anything to her, but it was no use. The lyrics I had written for “Primal Scream” on Decade of Decadence kept spinning through my head—“When daddy was a young man/His home was living hell/Mama tried to be so perfect/Now her mind’s a padded cell”—and I had to hang up before I started screaming at her again. I was too old to let my mother keep pushing all the buttons that set me off, even if she was the one who had originally put them there. My whole life has always been a big mystery, and it didn’t seem like she was going to help clear it up anytime soon.
The next day, Brandi told me that she wanted to take a vacation. “Where should we go?” I asked her. But I had misheard her: she wanted to go alone. Some girlfriends of hers were going to Hawaii, she explained, and she wanted to join them and clear her head.
“Things have been hard lately,” she said. “And I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I need to find it.”
“If that’s the problem, maybe we should spend some time together. We can find a baby-sitter for the kids, go away together, and try to figure things out.”
But she insisted on flying to Hawaii without me, and that’s when I first smelled a rat. I hired a private detective to follow her, and it seems that what she was looking for was not herself but a man named Adonis. Why is it that the other guy is always an Adonis or a Thor or a Jean-Claude? To make matters worse, Adonis was the brother of an executive who I hung out with. In other words, Adonis had been in my house with his sister and brother dozens of times, and I had innocently welcomed him in and treated him like a friend. I felt like a fool, a cuckold. Here I was trying to make this marriage work, and she was running off and leaving me with the kids so she could bask in the sun with some Greek playboy in Honolulu—on my dime. Everyone at Elektra probably knew what was going on b
ehind my back. I knew I should have fucked that Italian journalist.
The private investigator said he had photographs, but I didn’t want to see them. It all made perfect sense: Adonis, I remembered, had a house in Hawaii. He also had a house in Santa Monica. The private investigator called a few days later to tell me that they had returned to Los Angeles. Brandi still hadn’t called me, and I was so pissed off about being betrayed, misled, and humiliated that I decided to kill the Adonis bastard she was sneaking around with. I grabbed a double-barreled shotgun, hopped in my Porsche, and peeled out toward the Pacific Coast Highway. As I sped downhill, I planned out exactly what I was going to do when I arrived: I was going to knock on his door and say, “Hi, you may remember me. My name is Nikki, and you’ve been fucking my wife.” Then I was going to unload both barrels in his nuts.
When I woke up, everything had totally changed. The face of a man in white with glasses was hovering inches away from mine, and the first words out of his mouth were, “You’re lucky to be alive, sonny. Real, real lucky.”
I figured I was in some kind of junked-out dream, and I blinked my eyes and tried to figure out what was going on. “Where am I?”
No one answered me. The dude was gone. I wasn’t sure if he was a dream, a madman, or guardian spirit trying to give me a message. I was in a white room, kind of like heaven but also institutional-looking. It was … a hospital. And not only was I in complete pain, but my skin had turned a shade of blue. The events of hours before came flooding back to me: That motherfucker Sedge had almost killed me.
Later that night, Sedge and a friend of mine named Doug came to visit. Sedge threw a bagful of clothes on the bed and said, “T, we’re getting you the fuck out of here.”
“Why, dude?”
“Because if you stay here any longer, the fucking media are going to find out and have a fucking field day. So shut up and follow me. Trust me.”
In my half-conscious state, I knew I’d heard those words before, but I couldn’t remember where. Sedge and Doug tore the tubes out of my arms and pulled off the wires attaching me to various machines whose function I was completely oblivious to. I was worried that one of those tubes or wires was keeping me alive, and if they pulled one out, dude, I’d die. But then I realized if I was lucid enough to worry about it, I was probably okay. They helped me put on my pants, boots, and T-shirt, then we ran down the corridor and out of the hospital as fast as we could. No one stopped us, no one said a word, and no one ever found out about it, including Bobbie.
The next time Bobbie and I saw each other was on New Year’s Eve, two days later. I went out with some of my best bros to a club called Sanctuary, and Bobbie met us there. We all sat in a booth popping E, drinking champagne, and being fucking maniacs. In an hour it would be 1995, and we’d probably be too fucked up to even know what day it was. Suddenly, a waitress came over and said, “Tommy, here’s a shot of Goldschläger. It’s for you, from Pamela Anderson.”
“Pamela Anderson?”
“Yes, she’s one of the owners of the club.”
“Is she here!?”
“She’s right there.” The waitress pointed to a table in the corner, where Pamela was sitting surrounded by friends. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed her before. She was wearing all white, her hair was the most perfect shade of blond I had ever seen, her teeth practically glowed through her lips when she laughed, and she stood out so radiantly from everyone around her that it seemed like a beam of black light was shining on her from above. I lifted the shot, did something corny like winked or smiled, and slammed it. Then I grabbed the whole bottle of Cristal and guzzled it like a happy pig. I put it down, walked over to her table, and blew up the area.
“Hey, Pamela, I’m Tommy,” I said suavely. “But I guess you know that since you sent me a shot,” I continued not so suavely. “Thanks.”
I needed to recover from such a stupid line. So I pushed my way into the booth, slid over her girlfriends’ laps, and forced myself a space right next to her. Then I grabbed her face and just licked the side of it, from chin to temple. Maybe if I had done that when I was sober, I would have seemed like some kind of invasive asshole. But I was on Ecstasy, so it was all good and anything I did was not rude, it was innocent and full of love and a yearning to bond with all of humanity. She fucking laughed and, without missing a beat, turned away and licked the face of the girl next to her. Then fucking everyone started passing licks around the table.
On Ecstasy, Joan Rivers looks like Pamela Anderson, so imagine what Pamela Anderson looked like. She was so beautiful I couldn’t even bring myself to think of defiling her with thoughts of lust. I just stared at her all night, and she just stared back. We probably talked about something for those hours, but I can’t remember what. I didn’t even realize midnight had passed until ten minutes later, when Bobbie walked by the table and said, with all the bitchy attitude she could muster, “Happy New Year.”
She tried to shoot all the fucking negative vibes she could from her eyes, but my Ecstasy defense system was too strong. I wished Bobbie a happy new year too, then turned back to Pamela. I didn’t want to give Pamela the impression that Bobbie and I were dating, especially since our relationship had degenerated to nothing but overdoses and late-night phone calls to the police (little did I know what was in store for me). I was ready for a change and, God, how I hoped Pamela would be that change.
At one-thirty, with Bobbie firing dirty looks from the bar all night, Pamela said she had to leave. Her friends were tired and wanted to go home. In all my years of experience, I have yet to devise a way of separating a woman I want from her fucking friends who are bored because they aren’t getting any attention. I walked Pamela to her girlfriend Melanie’s car, asked for her digits for the tenth time that night (and finally got them), and laid a huge fucking sloppy kiss on her. I was cocky on Ecstasy and Cristal. I later found out that when Pamela closed the car door, the first thing Melanie did was look at her and say, “Don’t even think about it.”
“What do you mean?” Pamela tried to ask innocently.
“Listen to me: That guy is a fucking maniac.”
Pamela smiled guiltily. Melanie looked over at her and said, one more time to make sure it sank in, “No!”
The problem with meeting someone you like in Los Angeles is that everybody is always too busy to get together. Their first priority is their career: Making a friend or going on a fucking date is like sixth on the list. So when I called Pamela and she couldn’t seem to settle on a day to hang out, I figured this would be another one of those fucking L.A. hookups that start out with so much promise but never get off the ground. Instead, they just sort of dwindle away as, with each phone call and promise to try to get together next week, each person grows more distant and the spark that ignited at their meeting fizzles out.
After six weeks of this telephonic fucking cock-teasing, I finally got the message I’d been waiting for. “Tommy. Damn, you’re not there. It’s Pamela. I’ve got twenty-four hours to play, and I want to play with you. Call me at the Hotel Nikko at six P.M. and we’ll rendezvous.”
I was so fucking psyched, dude. My experiences with Heather had taught me that clean-cut actress chicks want a bad boy, so instead of buying new clothes and shaving and trying to look all fresh like Pamela, I put on my dirtiest fucking leather pants, slipped into an old T-shirt that stank of b.o., and didn’t bother to shave or shower. I did, however, brush my teeth.
I drove to the Pleasure Chest and picked up four hundred dollars’ worth of sex toys and outfits. I had my overnight duffel in one hand and a shopping bag full of lubricants and vibrating clitoral stimulators and ben-wa balls in the other. I was ready to rock her fucking world. I called her hotel at 4:59 P.M. I couldn’t wait. The receptionist said she hadn’t arrived yet.
I drove around, killed some time, and called back five minutes later. She still wasn’t there. I grabbed some food and called back. No answer. I finished my meal, called again, and she still hadn’t shown up. Now it
was 6 P.M. I drove to the hotel and I waited in the lobby for another hour; then I headed back to my house, calling the hotel every five minutes until they began to pity me. “Sorry, she’s still not here,” the receptionist said. “You’ll be okay. I’m sure she’ll be here any minute. If you want to give me your number, maybe I could call you when she shows up.”
“Aaaaarrrgggghhh!!!”
“Excuse me?”
I left messages at her pad, at her friends’ houses, everywhere. I was just hunting her down like a little fucking stalker, the exact same way I had chased after the first girl I ever kissed with the red berry. Finally, just before 10 P.M., Pamela picked up the phone. She wasn’t even at the fucking hotel; she was at home.
“Hey, what’s up?” she asked, as if she were surprised I was calling.
“Dude, what are you doing right now?” I was exploding. I needed to see her.
“I’m walking out the door.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m taking a plane to Cancún tonight. I have to be there for a photo shoot tomorrow morning.”
“Oh, really. What about me?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “We were supposed to get together tonight, right?”
“I think so.”
“I’m so sorry. Listen. When I get back. I promise.”
“We could get together before then,” I hinted.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Don’t even think about it.”
“What do you mean?” I protested innocently.
“Don’t even think about coming. I have a lot of work to do. They’ve got me booked for eighteen-hour days, and there’s no time to play.”