The Dirt (15 page)

I
had been listening to him brag for an hour. He had dirty red hair, shaven in a halfhearted attempt at a mohawk, and a cuff in his ear—not even a real piercing. Like every other punk-rock poser, he had been hanging out at the Whisky A Go-Go that night, watching the dying gasps of the L.A. punk scene. David Lee Roth and Robbin Crosby and Stephen Pearcy from Ratt were partying with us at the Mötley House that night. And the little punk kept trying to prove that he was more rock and roll than any of us, that he was tougher and more street than me, though he was clearly just a rich, self-deluded brat from Orange County. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore.

“You ain’t a fucking punk, you motherfucker!” I leapt off the sofa, slammed his head against the table, yanked his ear, and pressed the lobe flat against the wood with my fingers. Then, with the whole room watching, I hammered a nail straight through his earlobe and into the table.

“Aaaaaaauuuuuggggghhh!” he yelled, and writhed in pain, stuck to the table like a dog on a tight chain.

“Now you’re punk rock!” I told him. We turned up the stereo and kept partying like he wasn’t there. When I woke up the next afternoon, he was gone, but the nail was still mysteriously in the table. I tried to avoid imagining what he must have done to escape.

I had reached a new place in life. No longer was I the downtrodden, victimized, sniveling, untalented wanna-be begging the cool guys to let me join their band. I was in the cool band. I was recording my very own album with my very own songs. We had our own apartment in the middle of the scene that was the only place to be after hours. And we traveled around in Cadillacs that Coffman rented for us. Ungrateful, we’d kick the doors in and destroy them without a thought for the cost.

When we went out together, four male degenerates dressed like female sluts, people were drawn to our energy. If we walked into the Troubadour, everybody came with us. If we split, the club emptied. It felt like we were becoming the kings of L.A. It seemed like every guy wanted to be us and every chick wanted to fuck us, and all we had to do was simply be a band.

It was the best time of my life, but it was also the darkest. I was a walking terror. The chip on my shoulder had grown to the size of a large boulder, and if anyone even tried to touch it, I’d smash it in their face. Man is like a rottweiler or a tiger; he’s a very beautiful animal, but if he gets pissed off and you’re standing in range, you’re going to go down, no matter who you are.

At least, that’s the kind of man I was. One night, after waking up and drinking all day, Vince and I arrived early for a show at the Whisky A Go-Go. When I walked in, a jock with feathered hair sneered, “Who do you think you are? Keith Richards or Johnny Thunders?”

I didn’t say a word. I grabbed his face and started smashing it into the side of the bar, shattering glasses and covering the counter with blood. The bouncer walked up to me and, instead of kicking me out, smiled. “Cool, dude,” he said. “We’ll get you some free drinks for that. Do you mind if I call you Muhammad Ali, Sixx?”

He walked Vince and me upstairs, and we continued swigging Jack Daniel’s. But while I was getting a hand job from a girl at the bar, Vince slipped away. I combed the entire club, and asked everyone if they had seen him. It wasn’t until later that night, when I was leaving the club, that I found him passed out underneath a blue Ford Malibu, with his feet sticking out the side like a car mechanic. I dragged Vince home, where we found a girl handcuffed to his bed. Though Tommy was nowhere to be seen, she was one of his victims, the daughter of a famous athlete. I saw her recently, working on the pirate ship at Disneyland. It was good to see that she was still around handcuffs.

Vince passed out with the girl still handcuffed to his bed. When he awoke at midnight, the girl was gone, Tommy was back, and we all went out again.

There was a party at the Hyatt House that night, with about sixty people jammed into a room. A thin, tan, huge-breasted girl I knew in a form-fitting stretch dress grabbed my hand and, slurring and stumbling, pulled me into a small, closet-size room. She drunkenly tore open my leather pants, grabbed my dick, pushed me against the wall, hiked up her dress, and maneuvered me inside her. We fucked for a while, then I told her I had to go to the bathroom. I went into the party and found Tommy. “Dude, come here.” I grabbed him. “I got this chick in the closet. Follow me, and don’t say a word. When I tell you, start fucking her.”

In the closet, I stood directly behind Tommy. He fucked her while she grabbed my hair and yelled, “Oh, Nikki! Nikki!” After Tommy and I went a few rounds with her, I slipped back into the party and grabbed a scrawny kid in a Rolling Stones concert jersey, probably someone’s kid brother.

“Congratulations,” I told him. “You are about to lose your virginity.”

“No, man.” He looked up at me, eyes wide and fearful. “I don’t want to!”

I pushed him toward the tiny room and locked him in there with the girl. I heard him crying and yelling, “Let me out of here, you bastard!”

I was so drunk that when I woke up the next day, I didn’t remember a thing—until the phone rang. It was the girl from the night before.

“Nikki,” she said, her voice trembling. “I got raped last night.”

My heart dropped into my stomach, and my body went cold. The memories of the night before came flooding back, and I realized that I had probably gone too far.

And then she continued: “I was hitchhiking home from the Hyatt House, and this guy picked me up and raped me in his car.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

At first, I was relieved, because it meant I hadn’t raped her. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I pretty much had. I was in a zone, though, and in that zone, consequences did not exist. Besides, I was capable of sinking even lower than that.

There was a homeless girl who was a fixture on the Strip: She was young, crazy, and always wore a Cinderella costume. One night, we picked her up and brought her home so that Tommy could try to sleep with her. And while he was in bed with her, we stole her costume. After she left the house in tears with Tommy’s clothes hanging off her, no one ever saw her in the streets again.

Once we had taken clothes from a homeless girl, there were no taboos. I even tried to fuck Tommy’s mother, but failed miserably; when his dad found out, he told me, “If you can get in there, you can have it.” After that, I started dating a German model or at least a skinny German who told me she was a model. She had photos of herself hanging around the guys in Queen, so I was impressed. Her upstairs neighbor, Fred, wanted to teach me how to freebase, and that annoyed the German girl, who we nicknamed Himmler. Every week, Himmler came by the house and we celebrated with Nazi Wednesdays. We walked around in armbands, goose-stepping and sieg-heiling. Instead of torching the cockroaches on the wall with flaming jets of hair spray, we scooped them up and burned them with their compatriots in the oven. When they died, they’d stand up on their back legs and then keel over while we barked at them in fake German.

“Hey,” she scolded, in her deep, guttural accent, “zat eez not vunny. Many millionz of people haft died in zee ovens.”

After we broke up, I dated a groupie with a narrow waist, a Sheena Easton haircut, and fuck-me eyes. Her name was Stephanie, her parents owned a luxury hotel chain, and she was smart enough to know that the quickest way to our hearts was to bring us drugs and groceries. I met her at the Starwood when she was hanging around the guys from Ratt. I loved dating her: We’d go to her apartment and do blow and quaaludes, and then I’d get to fuck her, which was great because I didn’t have any money to buy blow and quaaludes and I couldn’t fuck myself. (Though I’m about to fuck myself over with this story.) She would let me do anything: On one of our first dates, she took me out to dinner and I used a bottle of wine on her underneath the table.

One night, Vince, Stephanie, and I were hanging out at the Rainbow, eating quaaludes and escargots, and throwing up under the table every fifteen minutes. We got plastered, took her back to the house, and all ended up in Vince’s bed. That was never my scene: Tommy and Vince were always piling chicks together. But having a guy there wrecked the moment for me. I couldn’t get it up and eventually went back to my room, leaving the two of them alone. That was the last time I saw Stephanie naked, because once you put Vince in the same room as a girl with money and a nice car, it’s all over. They dated for months after that and were about to get married when Vince found a richer girl, Beth, with blond hair and a better car, a 240Z.

I don’t know how we ever dragged our incestuous, partied-out little selves to the next level as a band, because we didn’t even believe that a next level existed. It was just about packing people into our shows and making sure they left talking about us. We even called Elvira one night, who agreed to introduce us if Coffman paid her five hundred dollars and picked her up in a black towncar. The longer we lived together, the better our concerts became because we had more time to dream up stupid antics. Vince started chain-sawing the heads off mannequins. Blackie Lawless had stopped lighting himself on fire because he was tired of burning his skin, so I took over because I didn’t give a shit about the pain. I would have swallowed tacks or fucked a broken bottle if it would have brought more people to our shows.

fig. 12

With Elvira backstage at Santa Monica Civic Center, New Year’s Evil Show, 1982

fig. 13