Sean and I were invited, along with Tim Leary, to a party at Johnny Depp’s house. It was late at night, and as I was pulling in, because the car was kind of crooked, I backed it up. Sean told me not to go too fast, but of course I didn’t listen. I gunned it, and we almost drove off a cliff and right onto Marlon Brando’s kid’s house, which had a huge glass roof. We were in a Supra, and the car was literally hanging off the cliff, rocking back and forth. She said, “Let’s get out of here!” and I was like, “No, don’t move, or we’re gonna fall.” Finally she said, “Fuck you” and got out, which made it creak. She was really pissed. I’d never seen her so mad. So I was stuck in the fucking thing, freaking out. I had to crawl out of the car, and fortunately it didn’t go into Christian Brando’s living room, which is where it would have wound up. After we escaped I called a tow service, and they pulled the car away from the cliff.
Having self-destructive DNA, there was no way that a happy relationship with Sean was going to last. Sure enough, I fucked it up. One night I went out drinking with Tom Rainone, who was in LA working with Wes Craven. I got all fucked up, and then we got into a high-speed chase with the cops in LA. Fortunately, this time I wasn’t driving. Tom was in a ’57 Thunderbird, and we were going through alleys, trying to lose the cops. I was yelling, “What are you doing? Pull over!” And he said, “Fuck that!” Somehow he got away from the police. He was laughing about it, but I was pretty freaked out and extremely drunk. He drove me back to the place off Melrose where Sean and I were living in this little courtyard of apartments that all looked the same. I tried to open the door, but my key wouldn’t work in this fucking lock. There were windows by the door, so I punched in the window, reached around, and opened up the door. I walked in, and there was this dog there. I thought, “Huh? Sean and I don’t have a dog.” Then this little fucking cockapoodle starts barking and yapping. I kicked it and tried to stop it from biting my ankle. And then this guy came out with a shotgun. I was in the wrong apartment, just like when I was a teenager and was tripping on acid. Our place was next door. I apologized and somehow avoided getting shot. Then I went into our apartment. By this time I had to piss really bad. I was so fucking wasted that I thought I was in the bathroom when I got up the stairs. Sean had just washed and folded all our laundry, and it was lined up against the wall, freshly clean and pressed. She had done all that work. I was so drunk that I didn’t notice it, so I unzipped my pants and peed all over the laundry because I thought that’s where the toilet was. The next morning Sean was gone. All I saw was a letter that read, “You have to get out!” She was throwing me out for peeing in the newly washed and folded laundry—and for being a fuck-up. So I called up Tim Leary and explained the situation, and he invited me to move in with him.
chapter 12
The Psychedelic
Evolution of Leary
Turn On, Tune In, Pass Out
I lived with Tim for two years, during which time I traveled back and forth on tour and to the studio. Back at Chicago Trax! we were putting the final touches on Filth Pig. Scratch Acid’s Rey Washam’s plundering drums matched the sluggish tone of the music, which gave the whole thing a depraved, depressing vibe. Former M.O.D. guitarist Louis Svitek came on to finish the guitars with Mikey. Filth Pig finally came out on January 30, 1996, and everyone hated it. They all wanted Psalm 70, and I gave them an electronic-free record full of gun-in-mouth dirges of nothing but pain. Aside from the cover art, the humor was gone. All that was left was misery. And I still had to tour the fucking thing—which went down in history as the interminable, intolerable, absolutely depraved “Sphinctour.”
The bus had so many needles that it looked like a blood bank. Rey and I were shooting up all day, every day. By that point all the hot groupies had learned to steer clear of us, so we’d get all these mentally deranged or deformed girls hanging out on the bus. One night I fucked a paraplegic chick in a wheelchair. I think she had Parkinson’s. So she’s blowing a guy in our crew and I’m fucking her. She’s wearing a colostomy bag, and I was naturally curious. I stopped fucking her for a second and I started squeezing the bag back into her.” I asked, “Does this hurt? Do you feel that?” She moans, “Noooooo.” I’m squeezing her shit bag back up into her while I’m fucking her. Afterward I helped her back into her wheelchair and felt really kind of bad because that was the sickest thing I’d ever done. I’ve never been into degrading or humiliating women. If they want to get into some kinky shit, fine, but to do something to make them feel ashamed is just cruel. I may be an asshole, but I wasn’t a cruel asshole.
We toured that album forever, and by that time I was just going through the motions. We did a few new songs, but mostly it was a greatest-hits cavalcade. We’d do “N.W.O.,” “Thieves,” “So What,” “The Missing,” “Deity,” “So What,” and then close with “Stigmata.” Alternative music was on the decline, so we were drawing more of a metal crowd and playing smaller places, like the Electric Factory in Philadelphia and Roseland Ballroom in New York. That’s why we stayed on the road for four months straight—I was too depressed and strung out to cause much trouble, except for the time I was caught on camera fucking a rotisserie chicken in our dressing room as a joke.
Oh, and in Norway we got fucked by the Cure and fucked with Slayer at a festival. It was a weird bill that featured a bunch of really big, totally diverse bands. At the Scandinavian festivals it’s light until 3 a.m. so they have what amounts to a headliner after the headliner. Ministry was opening for the Cure at that show, but the Cure went on first. We showed up before the show and the Cure’s vocalist, Robert Smith, heard that I was a maniac and told security he didn’t want me back there. They had a fjord that went around the stage; you could only get to it by boat. Since we were weren’t allowed backstage before the Cure played, I had to go out into the audience and wound up surrounded by all these skinheads. Maybe they were there for Slayer; I don’t think they were Cure fans. These guys had purple moonshine that they had made in their bathtub. I’m sitting there with my luggage, waiting to go backstage, hanging with these degenerates. They gave me this shot of moonshine, and it instantly made me blind—not drunk blind, but literally blind, like I can’t see my dick hanging out of my pants. I don’t know what was in that stuff, but it fucked me up. When my sight came back twenty minutes later they got me to sing Swedish national songs with them. They didn’t know who I was or if I was in a band; they just thought I was some weird freak carrying around my luggage. I did a second shot . . . and went blind again! I have no idea what substance on earth makes you go blind for twenty minutes, but forty minutes of sporadic blindness was enough for me. I stumbled around and met this boat captain who ferried me to the backstage area. I had to climb down this mountain to get to the stage. By this point the Cure were on, so I was able to get back there and drop off my stuff. That’s where I met Fear Factory vocalist Burton Bell and guitarist Dino Cazares, who were also on the bill. The festival was at an open-air venue like Red Rocks in Morrison, Colorado. There’s no dressing rooms; they just have these trailers. When we got there Slayer were in the trailer. We wanted in, and they had been offstage for a while. We said, “C’mon, man. Get out of the trailer!” They told us, “Fuck you!” So my crew and I tipped the trailer with Slayer in it over into the fjord. They scrambled out of the lake like spiders, cursing at us, but they should have known better than to start a fight with us. We didn’t talk for years. Then I became friends with all those guys except Kerry King—he’s not a nice person. He’s got a chip on his shoulder, and he hated Mikey, which means I hate him. If you hate my little brother, I’ll stick up for him.
In addition, Patty, now my ex-wife, caused a real commotion on that tour because she went to Florida to visit her mom and, while she was there, met some kid from a band in Atlanta who sold her a pound of coke for $20,000, which is really cheap. But there was a caveat. The kid figured she would get his band to open for Ministry in exchange for the cheap coke. I didn’t know about any of this
. Patty was banging him and getting coke from him, and then she comes back to visit me and says, “Hey, give this CD a listen, will you?” I put it on and it was horrible. She said, “Well, you’ve got to let them open for you because I promised this guy.” I said, “No fucking way. These people are not going to tour with us. They suck and they look weird.”
When she told them they couldn’t open for us after all, the guy went crazy. He figured this was his big chance. He had already given her a bunch of coke and she had promised, so he thought it was a done deal. I was in no mood to help her out because I was still pissed at her. The guy lost it. I found out later he was a rich kid dying of cancer. This was going to be his last hurrah; he was supposed to be dead within a year. And I dashed his dream, so he vowed to get back at me. He followed our bus in his Jaguar and threatened me at all the shows. He called me every night and said, “I’m going to kill you tonight.”
It was creepy shit, and Barker and some of the other members thought I was delusional and making this shit up because I was on drugs, but it was the real deal. It got to the point where I started having to stay at different hotels than the band did and I used fake names so this guy couldn’t track me down—yet somehow he still did. One night he called my hotel and said again, “Tonight is the night you’re going to die.”
I informed the FBI and told my management. I alerted local police officers all to no avail. This fucker followed us through twelve states, and kept making death threats. He was using a cell and hanging up right away, so the police couldn’t trace his calls. I started wearing a bullet-proof vest, which was uncomfortable and made me feel like a pussy. But I decided I’d rather be a live pussy than a dead hero. After I wore the vest for a few shows, though, I started getting mad. I was like, “Fuck you for making me protect myself! I already hate myself and have a death wish.” So I started to dare him. In Dallas he found me at my hotel and said again, “Definitely tonight. You’re going down.” At the show I wore a shirt that had a gun target on it and I took off the bullet-proof vest. I thought, “Fuck it. If I’m going down, I’m going down hard.” I kept pointing to my chest like, “Fuck you! Do it!” Nothing happened. So I stopped wearing the vest altogether.
That didn’t stop the craziness. This guy was so delusional that he became convinced I’d broken into his house and stolen some heroin or coke from him. I’m like, “I don’t break into people’s houses” (well, that is, at least not intentionally). But he was sure it was me. He threatened to kill me, my daughter, and Patty. He even took a shot through our front window in Chicago when I was visiting them. That’s when I said, “Okay, this thing has gone far enough.” Because I’ve never had much luck with the police, I called my good friend Danny Wirtz. I said, “Dude, I have this problem. I don’t know what this guy’s talking about. I didn’t do anything. He’s convinced and fixated that I stole his heroin. He threatened me and my family and shot my window.”
It was embarrassing to admit all this to him, but I didn’t have anywhere else to turn. The day after that one phone call, the cops showed up, formed a perimeter around my house, did a sweep, and arrested the guy. This all happened within twelve hours of Danny getting on the phone. I’d never seen that kind of power before. It was like, “Hey, I have a problem.” “Don’t worry about it. It’s not a problem.” The cops were like his security guards. And that psycho who threatened my family will never be back. I heard he passed away a few years ago from cancer.
Back at Tim’s, life was both chaotic and fascinating. In addition to taking me in, Tim let Gibby Haynes stay at his house for a while. Tim encouraged us to take whatever drugs we wanted—he was the guru of LSD, after all. But as an academic and a researcher, he wanted to see what effects different hallucinogens had when they were coupled with different substances—coke, heroin, Nyquil, Hungry Man dinners. He would get all this hallucinogenic shit mailed to him from all these companies and universities and then test it on us every couple weeks. Actually, it was mostly on me. He kicked Gibby out of the house after he peed in the drawer of an antique desk in Tim’s office when he was off his head. So Gibby went and I stayed. Tim would get me to shoot up all these laboratory drugs that were based out of MDA—ecstasy and Ayahuasca, an Amazonian concoction made from shrubs, leaves and Virola, a South American drug that you grind into a powder and cook down. Tim had me shooting up all this shit. He would be all excited and say, “Hey, I got a new package.” And I would groan, “Okay, fuck. Let’s do it.” I would shoot it up, and he would scribble down notes on how the drugs affected me. I don’t know what he was writing because to me the hallucinations were always the same.
I’d have these horrific visions of hell and the apocalypse: naked people with blood spouting from every orifice; skies that turned black, then silver, then white again; winged beasts with razor-sharp talons; and, most of all, spiders of all shapes and sizes. They’d fall from the sky. They’d come up from the ground. They’d creep around corners and crawl all over me. I’d be screaming and trying to brush off the bugs. And I’d always end up staggering over to Tim’s blind dog, a sweet golden retriever, Mr. Bodles, that Lemmy, my dog, is probably related to. I’d grab his collar, and he would take me outside so I could breathe without spiders scurrying in my mouth and down my throat. Talk about the blind leading the blind. After an hour or so Tim would come out and stare at me. Then he’d take more notes and ask me some questions about how I was feeling and what I was seeing. He’d measure the diameter of my pupils and see if I could track his fingers with my eyes. I don’t know if I passed or failed; I just know I saw spiders. The stuff he gave me was so strong that it took effect in less than twenty minutes. The visions were instantaneous, and they were never enjoyable. But I’d subject myself to it because it helped him out somehow, and I knew if I did my job, my rent was paid and I had a place
to stay.
Some people have asked me why I’m not angry at Tim for using me as a human guinea pig. Man, I could never be mad at Tim. I was a willing subject, and he was a good friend—a father figure, actually. I was this rock junkie, but he didn’t treat me like a degenerate. He was patient and understanding. We had long talks about everything: quantum mechanics, esoterics, philosophy, psychology, the occult, psychedelic science and the opening of the third eye, even pop culture. He was a knowledgeable figure who had credentials, and we had a strong bond with one another. Tim would recite baseball statistics to me of every batting champion since 1967. He was encyclopedic.
Hall of Fame left fielder and first basement Carl Yastrzemski was his favorite. He knew everything that guy was involved with. And his passion didn’t stop with sports. He was involved on a day-to-day basis with the growth of society and culture, whether it was through entertainment, acting, or music. He taught me how to be a Renaissance man—Tim was a Renaissance man, but he wasn’t an elitist. He got his world views by dealing with students who taught him there’s more to the world than your little brain. Tim was gregarious and wanted to know everything about every aspect of life. Nothing bored him, and no one was too stupid to talk to. In the mid-90s he watched Entertainment Tonight and the E! Channel and was very serious about following what they covered. At the same time he was extremely well read and could recite Shakespeare, the Bible, and Burroughs, to name a few.
I was a part of pop culture and wanted nothing to do with it, but Tim taught me to pay attention to what the masses were consuming. That was really important to him. He used to throw dinner parties once a week and invite billionaire businessmen, politicians, athletes, astronauts, journalists, actors, and industrialists, and then he would sprinkle the table with some assorted rockers, whether it was me or Trent Reznor, who lived a few hundred yards up the canyon. It was the original Dinner for Five long before there was ever a TV show.
I hung out with people with all kinds of views and all sorts of experiences at these things, and I learned a lot about human behavior. Some of the people I thought would be arrogant and condescending were the nice
st folks I could ever hope to meet, and some of the guys who had accomplished the least in their life acted like their shit didn’t stink. I hung out with oil barons. I sat next to Frank Borman, who is an ex-astronaut and the CEO and chairman of the board of Eastern Airlines. This guy was the commander of the Apollo 8 and was one of the first guys to fly around the moon. He was on the NASA review board that investigated the fire on Apollo 1. And I was just sitting next to him, sipping wine and cutting prime rib or filet mignon like we were colleagues. I’m sure half of these people thought I was a crazy homeless person, but it was something I looked forward to every week—one of the few things.
Tim was a beacon of hope for me. He had acquired so much wisdom in his life; it was contagious. He once told me, “You haven’t made it until you get people to pay you for just being you! No particular skills or services required.” Winona Ryder’s dad, a famous plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills, bought him his house. Tim’s her godfather. He had people who were interested in him who broke him out of prison in Texas, people who got him out of Switzerland and got him asylum in this country. He interacted with all sorts of important people, and he’d say, “It is not that I have sold out to them, because I am still Tim, but a lot of these people put a lot of money and stock into my ideas.”
While I was with Tim he would pick up girls even though he was in his late sixties or seventies. He’d sometimes have two at a time. He had Viagra and would try to get hard, but he really wasn’t interested in sex anymore. So he would give up and send the girls over to my corner. Faithful Al would be stiffy in a jiffy and fuck every girl that came through the place—all these hot, young college chicks. That lasted for a while until he started dating Aileen Getty; he fell head over heels for her. Getty is the granddaughter of billionaire oil baron J. Paul Getty, but she’s not into money, capitalism, and the hoity-toity lifestyle. She had given millions of dollars to homeless organizations in Hollywood. She was a heroin and cocaine addict most of her life, and, while I was lucky and only caught hepatitis C, Aileen was diagnosed as HIV positive more than twenty years ago. But Tim didn’t care. He loved her. I hung out with them a bunch of times when I wasn’t busy being his hallucinogen guinea pig.
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