Not Dead & Not For Sale (8 page)

1992
.
WE WERE TOURING AND “SEX TYPE THING”
was out as a single. The tour consisted of us taking turns driving an RV while crisscrossing the country playing small clubs. Our first show was in Orange County with my Huntington Beach friends cheering me on. On my twenty-fourth birthday, we were in the middle of nowhere, so we camped out for the night. Robert made us tuna burgers, we got crazy drunk, and had a ball. The world was still young and fresh. We were still indestructible.

Sometimes at our concerts we got concerned at the number of skinheads in the crowd. I hated that. They weren’t who we wanted to perform for. Whatever energy we were exerting was not meant to stimulate them. “If you don’t want this vibe,” I’d say, “go to a Pantera concert.”

In New York, where we didn’t have much of a following, we played at a place called the Bank at Houston and Ludlow. A few years later I’d be scoring dope at that very corner. But for now, we were just trying to score with the music industry. Metal radio was playing us—“Sex Type Thing” was seen as a metal song—and that both bugged and pleased us. It bugged us because we didn’t see ourselves as metal. It pleased us because we were on the radio. And besides, the same thing was happening to Soundgarden and Nirvana. If they could be confused for heavy metal, why not STP?

Down in New Orleans, we found ourselves in the wrong neighborhood in the wrong hotel but were too dumb to know. We kept partying.

One night Dean drank too much and got sick all over the RV. Robert came waltzing into the hotel room with the new Stray Cats record and said, “Now I know why they called it
Choo Choo Hot Fish
.” Dean spent hours cleaning up his puke.

Little by little, the record started catching fire until we got word that MTV’s
Headbangers Ball
wanted to interview us. That’s when Dean and I bonded big-time. Rather than be interviewed, Dean suggested that he bring his acoustic guitar to the MTV studios in New York so we could perform an acoustic version of “Plush.”

We were overstimulated from touring and, to sleep on the plane, we took a handful of powerful pills—my first—that coated our brains and numbed out the world. When we got to the fancy hotel in New York, I vomited in the lobby. Dean barely made it up to the room before he vomited all over the bathroom. When we got to MTV at six that morning, we were high as zombies, and yet …

Dean played his most heartbreakingly soulful version of “Plush”—and I sang it with more relaxed feeling than ever before or since. It was chill and it was mellow, an acoustic statement still being played on radio stations some eighteen years later. This is a story that seems to have a somewhat happy ending. It is a false ending, however, because my story only became more painful.

WHEN
CORE
FINALLY BEGAN TO FLY,
it soared, generating four top-five hits, two of which went to number one. I remember management or the label or someone in a suit coming to us and saying, “It’s happened! The big break is here! Aerosmith wants you to open for them!”

I looked at Dean, Robert, and Eric, and saw the same expression on their face that was on mine.

“No,” we said. “That’s the worst thing that could happen to us. We’re not opening for Aerosmith.”

F
REEZING-COLD LONDON IN THE WINTER OF
’93.

Core
had blown up beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. We were nonstop traveling, promoting, selling records.

This was our first tour outside the United States. It had been many months since I’d seen Mary. She was now seventeen and emancipated from her parents after having left them in California. I hadn’t forgotten her, but I had disciplined myself not to call. Suddenly my discipline collapsed. I called L.A. I learned she had switched agencies and was working in Paris but, miracle of miracles, she happened to be in London at this very moment. My mind went crazy. This couldn’t be coincidence. This was fate. Fuck cupids! We were brought together by Aphrodite herself.

I called her and asked, “Would you come to my hotel?”

“Yes.”

Mary arrived wrapped in wool. She glowed. She kissed me on the cheek. The hotel had a private bar, small and intimate. Our chitchat was small and intimate. She explained how she had sued for her independence from her parents and was completely on her own. Mary looked sensational. In the year since I had seen her, she had traveled the world. She had done shows in New York, Tokyo, and London. She was confident, she radiated sophisticated energy, she was irresistible.

“You’re a whole new person,” I said.

“You are too. You’ve become a star.”

Her words were still few, but they were all the right words.

She asked me if I wanted her to walk me to my room.

“You can stay over if you like,” I said. “I’ll sleep on the couch.”

She stayed, and I didn’t sleep on the couch. Our sexual connection was even more powerful than I had anticipated. We became one. The heavens opened.

“Go on this tour with me,” I said. “Stay.”

For five days she stayed with me as the bus bounced through the hills and hedgerows of England and Germany. At the end of the fifth day, she had to go back to work.

“I am in love with you,” she said.

I was in love with her, and I told her so.

“What will happen now?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

As Kiss: Eric (Peter Criss) Scott (Paul Stanley) Robert (Gene Simmons) Dean (Ace Frehley)

I
DIDN’T GET HIGH
—not seriously high—till the next summer. We were back in the States, still promoting
Core
, this time on tour with Butthole Surfers, Flaming Lips, Firehose, and Basehead. This was the Barbecue Mitzvah Tour. By then we were the hot band—the majority of the fans were coming to see
us
—but out of respect for the alternative founding fathers Butthole Surfers and Flaming Lips, whose current hit was “She Don’t Use Jelly,” we only co-headlined.

The tour was drug-heavy and sex-heavy. I couldn’t see myself passing up the delicacies that came with being a rock star—cocaine, alcohol, Lady Lay. So we rolled into New York, where we stayed at the Royalton Hotel. There was something deadly decadent about the place. What the Hollywood Hyatt House—the one called the Riot House—had been to an earlier rock generation, the Royalton was to ours. It was decidedly postmodern, low-key, high-energy sleek, a place where herointhin models melted into the dark walls and mirrors. Everything about the hotel made you—made me, made all of us—want to get high.

Mary was in New York. She had been befriended by the magician David Blaine. She had turned eighteen. We hadn’t seen each other for a while. That afternoon she came to the hotel. Her mere presence excited me, renewed all my feelings, had me wanting to be with her and her alone. We went shopping for vintage clothes. I spotted a scarlet dress at a boutique in SoHo. When she tried it on, we drifted into a noir from 1947.

“I’ll wear it tonight,” she said.

“Perfect.”

Back at the hotel, I told her good-bye, arranged for her tickets to the concert, promised that we’d meet afterward, and took a nap.

That same day, a few of the musicians had put in their orders for bags of China White. I had never shot or snorted heroin before. But I had studied heroin culture. The truth is that I loved heroin culture. I was intrigued by it.

I had a friend in high school who was a junkie. I loved the work of William S. Burroughs and the brilliance of Charlie Parker. I loved the aesthetic of the Rolling Stones. I knew about John Lennon’s heroin period. In the mideighties, I had been greatly influenced by Perry Farrell and Jane’s Addiction.

I associated heroin with romance, glamour, danger, and rock-and-roll excess. More than that, I was curious about the connection between heroin and creativity. At that point, I couldn’t imagine my life, especially now that I was entering into the major leagues of alternative rock, without at least dabbling with the King of Drugs. So I put in my order.

That night, just for the hell of it, STP dressed up as Kiss. We had the one-piece suits, the black wigs, and the makeup applied by a former Kiss employee. Before hitting the stage, I snorted the China White. The opiate took me to where I’d always dreamed of going. I can’t name the place, but I can say that I was undisturbed and unafraid, a free-floating man in a space without demons and doubts. The show was beautiful. The high was beautiful.

The thing about heroin, at least for me, was that I used to be afraid or ultra-self-conscious when I walked into a bar or club. But on dope I could be Superman or any man. I didn’t care what anyone thought of me. Dope was my savior. The ultimate equalizer, or so I thought.

After the show, I didn’t want to talk to or see a single solitary soul. It’s not that I didn’t want to see Mary in her scarlet dress or didn’t want to revisit our noir movie. I simply had to be alone with this feeling.

“What should I tell Mary?” my roadie asked. “She’s waiting for you.”

“Tell her I have food poisoning.”

It was a shitty excuse, and Mary knew it was a lie. Mary always knew my lies. There was this karmic thing between us. We were drawn to each other like shipwreck survivors. I had never heard a woman speak so openly of depression, for example. When Mary spoke that way, I was riveted by the sadness; I was riveted by her extreme moods, riveted by her needs, her fears, her beauty, her hunger for me, my hunger for her.

Mary herself, by the way, never admitted to a lie. She had a motto for it: “If you get caught, lie lie lie!”

IT WAS AT MY FRIEND RICH CONKLIN’S APARTMENT
that a sympathetic woman heard me complain I was coming down with some sickness I couldn’t name. A veteran of the “wars,” she simply said, “Oh, honey, you’re dope sick.” So I left the party in a hurry and drove downtown. That’s where I scored a package with an intriguing design: a smiling baby riding a dragon through the clouds while a group of angelic ladies looked on with wonder. The package contained China White. The design became the cover of
Purple
, the second STP record.

This was the first and last time I ever found white dope in L.A. The heroin was always black tar from Mexico.

Not such a good state