The Heroin Diaries

by Nikki Sixx

* * *

  AUGUST 21ST, 1987 BROOME COUNTY VETERANS MEMORIAL ARENA BINGHAMTON, NY

  Parker Meridian Hotel, 2:40 p.m.

  Last night’s show was one of the best we’ve ever played. New York can be a hard audience to win over, but we got them…tore the place up. Great night, and we all celebrated together. Lots of whisky, champagne and lines for all, nothing but smiles on everybody’s faces…

  I even found myself not fighting with Vanity. I guess knowing I’m done with her drama has made me more forgiving. I didn’t see Bob, but I still didn’t do any dope. Going to Doug’s house in the Poconos in a couple of days…gonna BBQ and hang out.

  I’m going shopping before tonight’s show. I need some new T-shirts and boots.

  AUGUST 22ND 1987 NASSAH. COLISEUM L.W.F. ISLAND, NY

  Parker Meridian Hotel, 1:15 p.m.

  We’re leaving this hotel in a couple of hours. This fucking room is like a tomb. I’ve OD’d in here, fought in here, fucked in here (a few different chicks) and I need to get out. There’s room service trays all over the room, blood on the sheets and the towels are black from hair dye. I bet they’re gonna charge me some stupid destruction fee, and to be honest I didn’t (really) destroy the place. I mean the TV and furniture is all intact, ha ha.

  I think we’re gonna have a killer show tonight. Off to Nassau Coliseum then off to the Poconos, staying on some lake up there by Doug’s house.

  AUGUST 23RD, 1987 DAY OFF

  Poconos, midnight

  We all went to Doug and Jeanne’s house for a BBQ. A nice mellow night. Doug’s kids were running around. No drugs, just a few beers. We play Pocono Downs tomorrow. Vanity is getting a car down to NY to catch a plane back to LA. I’ll tell her on the phone when she gets there that it’s over. I have a feeling she won’t care. It’s the best for both of us.

  I’m gonna start cutting the bad people out of my life. I hope she does the same. One would be me. Goodnight.

  DOUG THALER: During the Girls tour, my wife Jeanne and I were living in Pennsylvania, and I would commute to Los Angeles each week. Mötley came out to our house the day before their show at Pocono Downs racetrack–I remember it was a beautiful Sunday evening. We even did some boating. Nikki was OK that day, but that was how he was back then, really in-and-out: he’d do something really shitty and look wasted, then the next day he would somehow pull it all together and be part of the group again.

  AUGUST 24TH, 1987 POCONO DOWNS RACETRACK, WOLKES BARNE, PENNSYLYANIA

  Backstage, 6:40 p.m.

  Everything smells like horseshit. I guess it would, right? It is a horse track. It reminds me of growing up in Idaho.

  I just told Fred I was done with Vanity. He said that’s probably for the best…I’m sure the guys will be relieved too. I wish her well.

  P.S. This place is huge. It looks like about 30,000 people. The weird thing is, there’s a racetrack around our stage…ha ha ha…

  AUGUST 25TH, 1987 WAR MEMORIAL ROCHESTER, NY

  Backstage, 7 p.m.

  Some kids broke into Vince’s room and stole his wallet and clothes. He had $5k in his wallet–he’s fucking pissed (I don’t blame him…).

  11:20 p.m.

  Vince is such an asshole sometimes. I’m sitting here backstage waiting for him to return from the hospital. In fact, so are the fans…waiting…nice. Tonight he was making a sandwich and he reached for the mustard to put on it. There was only Grey Poupon (my fave) which he hates, so he threw the mustard jar against the wall. It exploded and flew back and cut his hand wide open. He’s now at the hospital and we’re still waiting to play the fucking show. Nice move, bro…can we say spoiled brat?

  VINCE NEIL: Fuck, the mustard jar incident was pure Spinal Tap. It was me being a fucking idiot. I don’t like Dijon mustard but catering always had it backstage–they never had yellow mustard, even though I had been asking them for weeks to change the rider. So when I saw Dijon mustard yet again, I was pissed and I took the jar and threw it against the wall.

  The glass smashed, bounced right back and sliced my finger almost right off: it was just hanging by the skin. I severed the nerves, the artery, the tendons; blood was spurting out of it. We were about to go onstage but they had to rush me to the hospital because I was going to bleed to death, and a week later I had an eight-hour surgery to re-attach the finger. It was just a temper tantrum–me being Prince Vince.

  FRED SAUNDERS: I couldn’t believe it at the upstate New York show when I saw Vince Neil pouting and throwing this fucking mustard at the wall. It bounced back and sliced his hand right open. Vince said, “Well, I guess that the tour’s over,” and Nikki said, “Bullshit–there are two hundred people on this tour.” The tour continued, and for weeks Vince had to wear these gloves that looked like boxing gloves. Like I said, what a piece of work.

  AUGUST 26TH, 1987 WAR MEMORIAL, VACA, NY

  Hotel, 2:15 a.m.

  Bored…going to sleep. This is a ghost town. There’s nothing on TV or the radio, no clubs…no room service. Even the bar is closed. This is surreal at best. I think I must have died in NY and this is Nikki Sixx’s hell. Bad time to have quit sniffing glue…

  But at least I don’t have a cast on my arm from a mustard jar, ha ha…

  2:30 p.m.

  OK, it’s official…I have cabin fever.

  We woke up early and came here to the beautiful Utica (exactly). We have a show tonight here. Poconos to Utica is like going from the pot to the frying pan for me. I mean, I’m the first to admit the countryside is so pretty here. It’s green and the air is clean. Everybody looks like they’re taken from a Norman Rockwell painting or from the cover of a postcard. Dogs are running around wagging their tails as a squirrel scampers up a tree with his newest trophy (an unopened acorn). I looked up at a cloud as it was slowly drifting by changing shapes from a heart to a smiley face. To top it off, this ice cream truck just drove by playing a nursery rhyme song out of tune. There are a trail of kids running down the street after it, yelling and screaming, “Ice cream, ice cream!”

  God save me…I’m in hell.

  P.S. The good news today is I finally spilled the beans on the phone to Vanity. She just said OK…no emotion at all. I guess she really didn’t care–cool.

  AUGUST 27TH, 1987 DAY OFF

  Hotel, Landover, Maryland, 2:15 p.m.

  Got in late from the show in Utica last night. Pretty good show considering the squirrels and ice cream trucks. I just woke up. Need to order some coffee and breakfast. What am I gonna do today, diary?

  I’m so bored. I smell trouble. Thank God for Halcions…I slept so good…

  AUGUST 28TH, 1987 CAPITAL CENTER, LANDONER, MD

  Hotel, 2 a.m.

  Now that was fun! I just went and broke into housekeeping and picked up 20 or so garbage pails. Then I collected loads of chairs. Everybody was asleep or doing stuff in their rooms. I balanced the chairs against the room doors all along my corridor, filled the buckets with all kinds of shit–piss, water, beer, basically anything I could find–and put them on the chairs…

  I sprayed hairspray on every one’s door, set it on fire, knocked the door and ran. I had my system down pat…hairspray, light, knock, hairspray, light, knock, etc etc. So then when everybody opened their door, their door was on fire and then this bucket fell on them and soaked them!…ha ha ha…

  Fred Saunders was fuckin’ some chick, so he came to the door with a big fucking hard-on and the bucket fell on his dick. He ran down to my room and said, Sixx, fuckin’ come out, I’m gonna kick your fucking ass! I said, Fuck you, dude! and he kicked the hinges off my door. But as usual, he didn’t do anything ’cause he saw how much fun I’d had.

  I love Fred, I hope he can get it back up…I’m sure I’ll hear about it tomorrow.

  Backstage, Capital Center, 11:55 p.m.

  Band was tight as hell tonight, everything was right in the pocket. Damn, I love it when all pistons are firing…great crowd.

  Not a lot to do here. Gonna go look for a club or something with F
red and Tommy. I’m sure Fred has a little ace in the hole. If not, I know some of the truck drivers said they were getting a shipment of krell in.

  P.S. I just got a blow job from this girl who started crying and thanked me afterwards. What the fuck?

  FRED SAUNDERS: Ace in the Hole was like our tour catchphrase. A friend of mine gave me a gift of an 1888 silver dollar coin that he had machine-drilled hollow so it would hold a gram of coke. I’d carry it around. You just had to twist it to open it and there was the coke. If we were out in a club, Nikki and Tommy or Vince would ask me for Ace in the Hole if they wanted a little jolt.

  Sometimes we would get to the hotel in a new city, check in, and Nikki and Tommy would start ringing my room right away and pester me for Ace in the Hole. I’d say to them, “Come on guys, we’ve got a job to do”–there would often be interviews or an in-store signing. But those guys wouldn’t quit hounding me.

  AUGUST 29TH, 1987 CAPITAL CENTER, LANDONER, MD

  Hotel, 3:10 p.m.

  Just woke up. I sat in the room with Tommy and Fred and did coke all night, talking, listening to music, drinking. Right now I feel like shit. I’m so tired and hungover. I still feel drunk.

  On the jet, 1 a.m.

  The band sucked so bad tonight. Everyone was hungover.How can we kick ass last night and suck tonight? I wonder if any of the fans that saw both Landover shows thought they saw two different bands.

  AUGUST 30TH, 1987 HAMPTON COLISEUM, HAMPTON, VA

  Mars was knee-deep in Mars-ade and Vince lost his voice halfway through the set. I know for sure I was just sucking ass as well. We never suck like Aerosmith did in their drug days–I mean, we don’t forget our own songs or anything. We just lose the groove and lag or pull the music. We’re more metal and Aerosmith is more groove-oriented, so when we suck it just sounds like the engine is outta time. It feels…whatever…

  Hotel, Hampton, Virginia, 5 p.m.

  I need to stop.

  I don’t care about our shows some days–just how am I gonna find some drugs? Coke, pills, heroin, I don’t give a fuck. Just gimme something, anything…I feel like I’m dying and I don’t know why.

  AUGUST 31ST, 1987 DAY OFF

  We have six shows in the next eight days before we get any time off.

  I’m depressed…this tour seems to be going on forever.

  NIKKI: I used to look at the tour dates and think, When is this going to end? And when it does, what do I have to go home to? It was a very confusing time. I resented that management just put us on the road and left us there. Tommy and Vince were both married–it must have been hard for them to keep things together. I was different. I felt detached from everything.

  We knew we needed a break or something was going to break. We asked for time off and Doc always said no. I was so immature and fucked up that I didn’t know he was actually breaking the band up, little by little. In the end, 15 percent of nothing is nothing, so our management was killing the goose that laid the fucking golden egg.

  DOC McGHEE: I always had a real problem with this line of argument of Sixx’s. Sure, the tours were too long for them, but only because of the way they behaved on them! Don’t forget, these were guys in their twenties who were only being asked to work two hours per day. What about all the guys who get up at 5 a.m. to lay bricks and only get two weeks off a year? If Mötley Crüe was burned out on the road it was purely because they had stupid fucking drug habits. It’s not rocket science.

  SEPTEMBER 1987

  I’M OVER DRUGS AND I KNOW THEY'RE OVER ME…

  SEPTEMBER 1ST, 1987 COLISEUM RICHMOND, VA

  Backstage, 7:55 p.m.

  Just got a massage. My body is torn up, my hands are cut up and bruised, all part of trying to break your bass at every turn of a chorus. I have my bass strings so high so I don’t fret them out. Mick says playing my bass is like playing a telephone pole with high-tension live wires on.

  On that note–time to crack the whisky and go make a mess of the youth of Richmond’s minds.

  SEPTEMBER 2ND, 1987 CIVIC CENTER ROANOKE, VA

  Hotel, Roanoke, Virginia, 2:30 p.m.

  Flew in after the Richmond show last night. I wanted to raise some hell but it was too late and there’s nothing to do in Roanoke. I called Fred but he said everybody had gone to bed. He told me to come down to his room for an Ace in the Hole. He chopped out a couple lines for me and we were hanging out listening to Merle Haggard but I guess I was just too fucking tired to keep going. I came down to my room to look in the phone book for hookers…and I just woke up. I still had my clothes on…even coke isn’t working lately.

  Amazing what sleep does for you. I just put on Diamond Dogs by David Bowie, one of the greatest albums ever recorded.

  Gonna order breakfast…bye.

  SEPTEMBER 5TH, 1987 ALPINE VALLEY, EAST TROY, WI

  Hotel, 5 p.m.

  We had the last couple days off. It’s been very uneventful so I haven’t written. I’ve been sleeping a lot…weird. We’re taking a chopper into the gig in an hour–big show. Sold out. I don’t know who’s playing with us. I guess it doesn’t matter ’cause everybody is there to see us anyway.

  P.S. Mick is like a fucking puppet to this bitch. Why does he always let these chicks lead him around by the nose? And if she mentions God one more time I’m gonna stab her in the face with her crucifix.

  DOC McGHEE: Mick was the closest thing to being a punching bag in Mötley Crüe. He was the easiest to pick on because he was the quietest and he never fought back. Mick’s just a really good kid who wants to be happy and he’s never been happy. When Nikki and Tommy got loaded they were pretty mean, gnarly guys and as soon as Mick and Emi got together they just fucking beat at them nonstop. You know what sums their relationship up? The time that Tommy was running naked down the hallways of a hotel in Ohio and the police arrived, went to the room next door and arrested Mick for it.

  SEPTEMBER 6TH, 1987 DANE'COUNTY COLISEUM MADISON, WI

  Hotel, 4 p.m.

  Touring with the same band for support gets so boring after a while. I guess if it was a band I really loved and not fucking Whitesnake, it wouldn’t be so bad. This is actually worse than when we toured with Iron Maiden…I remember being backstage listening to them and thinking all their songs sounded like the theme from Bonanza, with the gallop and all. I really can’t wait for Slash and the guys to come out.

  My fave support so far was Cheap Trick. I am and always will be the hugest Cheap Trick fan…and they are the greatest guys ever. We’ve got a show tonight…maybe I’ll go late so I don’t have to hear Whitesnake. The sad part is, I love Rudy Sarzo to death–maybe he should play in Mötley and I should go to the nuthouse.

  RICK NIELSEN: Mötley Crüe and Cheap Trick toured together in Europe and America. We used to be real bad together. The guys in Cheap Trick were never heroin addicts but we’d drink and party hard. I would see Nikki stumbling around sometimes, but I didn’t know exactly what was causing it. I knew when drink was involved, though, because I was normally there drinking it with him.

  SEPTEMBER 7TH, 1987 LA CROSSE CENTER, LA CROSSE, WI

  Hotel, 3 p.m.

  Another show tonight but I’m ready to go home and make music. I’m over drugs and I know they’re over me.

  I woke up at 9 a.m. for some odd reason. I am playing Sweet’s Desolation Boulevard nonstop…great songwriting. They were always sold to the world as a pop band but like the Raspberries they were a metal band at heart. We could all learn a lot about hooks from those guys.

  I’m on a mission to take the band to a new level musically. I think we’ve just scratched the surface. Me and Tommy are having a lot of talks about what’s next…I’m excited. I want a Number 1 album that knocks the world on its ear.

  SEPTEMBER 8TH, 1987 FIVE SEASONS CENTER, CEDOR RAPIDS,' IA

  Hotel, 5 p.m.

  I wrote a cool song today. All I have to do is listen to Whitesnake to know what NOT to do.

  We fly back home to LA after the show tonight. Thank fuck�
�But what will happen? I have changed my phone number at home and have had a 10 foot security gate and fence installed around the house while I’ve been away. I’m determined…

  * * *

  I’m a digital anti-Christ analog poltergeist Like a cannibal watch me beat my meat Shoot my gun right between the sheets

  Like a criminal I’m on the take I rattle nerves like a rattlesnake Anti-trust public enemy Steal your fruit and I shake your tree You just love to hate me

  All the preachers say All the teachers say All the speeches say I’m so whoreable

  * * *

  SEPTEMBER 9TH, 1987 HOME

  Van Nuys, 11 a.m.

  It’s great to sleep in my own bed again. To say I’ve decked out my pad is an understatement. Ralph Lauren, crushed velvet comforters, burled walnut antiques, gargoyles, Persian carpets…everything from the 1800s. God, I love this place, except for the memories…but maybe they can fade.

  The gate and fence around the house looks so medieval…I love it. Jon Roberts really set me up nicely.

  I just called the office to get my new phone number and spoke to Karen Dumont. I told her Vanity had really trashed my house while I was gone, she didn’t clean up after herself at all. Karen told me she was looking for a place and would be interested in housesitting when I’m back on tour. I told her I would think about it, but between me and you, she would be doing me a favor. I’m always worried about some crazies breaking into my house while I’m gone.

  5 p.m.

  Just got off the phone with Robbin. He’s coming over to pick me up in his new Ferrari and we’re gonna catch a movie. I drove my Harley today. The battery was dead so I jumped it down Valley Vista and headed up and down Ventura Boulevard. Went to an antique store and bought an insane antique silverwear set in a walnut case. Wow…they just don’t make things like they used to.