The Dirt (21 page)

Ozzy hardly spent a night on his tour bus: He was always on ours. He’d burst through the door with a baggie full of coke, singing, “I am the krelley man, doing all the krell that I can, I can,” and we’d snort up the krell all night long, until the bus stopped and we were in the next city.

In one case, that city happened to be Lakeland, Florida. We rolled out of the bus under the heat of the noonday sun and went straight to the bar, which was separated from the swimming pool deck by a glass window. Ozzy pulled off his pants and stuck a dollar bill in his ass crack, then walked into the bar, offering the dollar to each couple inside. When an elderly lady began to cuss him out, Ozzy grabbed her bag and took off running. He came back to the pool wearing nothing but a little day dress he had found in the bag. We were cracking up, though we weren’t sure whether his antics were evidence of a wicked sense of humor or a severe case of schizophrenia. More and more, I tend to believe the latter.

We were hanging out, us in T-shirts and leather, Ozzy in the dress, when all of a sudden Ozzy nudged me. “Hey, mate, I fancy a bump.”

“Dude,” I told him, “we’re out of blow. Maybe I can send the bus driver out for some.”

“Give me the straw,” he said, unfazed.

“But, dude, there’s no blow.”

“Give me the straw. I’m having a bump.”

I handed him the straw, and he walked over to a crack in the sidewalk and bent over it. I saw a long column of ants, marching to a little sand dugout built where the pavement met the dirt. And as I thought, “No, he wouldn’t,” he did. He put the straw to his nose and, with his bare white ass peeking out from under the dress like a sliced honeydew, sent the entire line of ants tickling up his nose with a single, monstrous snort.

He stood up, reared back his head, and concluded with a powerful rightnostriled sniff that probably sent a stray ant or two dripping down his throat. Then he hiked up the sundress, grabbed his dick, and pissed on the pavement. Without even looking at his growing audience—everyone on the tour was watching him while the old women and families on the pool deck were pretending not to—he knelt down and, getting the dress soggy in the puddle, lapped it up. He didn’t just flick it with his tongue, he took a half-dozen long, lingering, and thorough strokes, like a cat. Then he stood up and, eyes blazing and mouth wet with urine, looked straight at me. “Do that, Sixx!”

I swallowed and sweated. But this was peer pressure that I could not refuse. After all, he had done so much for Mötley Crüe. And, if we wanted to maintain our reputation as rock’s most cretinous band, I couldn’t back down, not with everyone watching. I unzipped my pants and whipped out my dick in full view of everybody in the bar and around the pool. “I don’t give a fuck,” I thought to steady myself as I made my puddle. “I’ll lick up my piss. Who cares? It comes from my body anyway.”

But, as I bent down to finish what I had begun, Ozzy swooped in and beat me to it. There he was, on all fours at my feet, licking up my pee. I threw up my hands: “You win,” I said. And he did: From that moment on, we always knew that wherever we were, whatever we were doing, there was someone who was sicker and more disgusting than we were.

But, unlike us, Ozzy had a restraint, a limit, a conscience, a brake. And that restraint came in the form of a homely, rotund little British woman whose very name sets lips trembling and knees knocking: Sharon Osbourne, a shitkicker and disciplinarian like no other we had ever met, a woman whose presence could in an instant send us reeling back to our childhood fear of authority.

After Florida, Sharon joined the tour to restore order. Suddenly, Ozzy turned into a perfect husband. He ate his vegetables, held her hand, and went to bed promptly after each show, with neither drugs in his nose nor urine in his mouth. But it wasn’t enough for Ozzy to behave. Sharon wanted us to behave. When she walked into our dressing room to find a girl on her hands and knees, and the four of us standing there with our pants around our ankles and guilty-little-boy grins on our faces, she laid down the law. She wouldn’t let us do drugs, invite girls backstage, or have fun in any way that didn’t involve a board game. To make sure her rules were followed, she eliminated alcohol from our tour rider and appointed herself as sole keeper and distributor of backstage passes. We grew so frustrated that we had the merchandising company traveling with us make a new T-shirt. The front consisted of a smiley face riddled with bloody bullet holes. The back was a circle with a vertical column containing the words “sex, fun, booze, parties, hot rods, pussy, heroin, motorcycles.” A big red line was drawn through the circle, and below it were the words “No Fun Tour: ’83–’84.” We gave a shirt to everybody on the tour, including Ozzy.

Eventually, I was reduced to crawling up to Sharon on my hands and knees and pleading, “I really have to get laid. I’m going crazy.”

“No, you can’t, Nikki,” she said firmly. “You’re going to get a disease.”

“I don’t care about diseases,” I cried. “I’ll get a shot. I just want to get laid.”

“Okay,” she relented. “Just this once.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

She led me by the hand to the side of the stage and said, “So, which one do you want,” as if I were a little kid picking out sweets.

“I’ll take the one in red, please.”

That same night, Carmine Appice left the tour. He had played with Vanilla Fudge, Cactus, and Rod Stewart, and was somewhat a star in his own right, so he thought he should be selling his own T-shirts. With uncharacteristic magnanimity, Sharon granted him permission. But when fans brought T-shirts back for Carmine to sign, all of them had a big hole over the breast: Sharon and Ozzy had cut Carmine’s face out of all his T-shirts. They got in a big fight, which concluded with Carmine quitting and Tommy Aldridge returning to the band to replace him on drums.

Whenever Sharon left the tour, Ozzy returned to complete decadence. In Nashville, he shit in Tommy’s bathroom and wiped it all over the walls. In Memphis, he and Vince stole a car with the keys still dangling from the ignition, terrorized pedestrians on Beale Street, and then destroyed it, smashing the windows and gutting the upholstery. Days later, we happened to arrive in New Orleans on the second night of Mardi Gras. The town was on fire. Tommy, Jake E., and I got into a knife fight at a bar on Bourbon Street while Vince and Ozzy toured the strip clubs. When we all returned to the hotel, drunk and covered with blood, Mom was waiting for us: Sharon had flown into town, and she forbade us to hang out with Ozzy again.

Sometimes, when Sharon was gone, Ozzy would break down like a child lost without his mother. In Italy, he bought a blow-up doll, drew a Hitler mustache on it, and kept it in the back room of our bus. On the way to Milan, he kept talking to it, like it was his only friend. He told the doll that there was some kind of conspiracy, and everyone had turned against him and was plotting to kill him. When he went onstage that night, he was wearing Gestapo boots, panties, a bra, and a blond wig. He seemed to be having a great time at first, but after a few songs, he snapped and started crying. “I’m not an animal,” he sobbed into the microphone. “I’m not a freak.” Then he apologized to the audience and walked offstage.

That night in the hotel room Mick and I shared, he asked if he could use the phone. He picked it up and said, “England, please.”

I grabbed the receiver out of his hands and hung it up. “Dude, you can’t call England. I don’t have that kind of money.”

So he called collect. Sharon accepted. “I’m just calling to tell you that I want a divorce,” Ozzy said, as soberly and seriously as he could.

“Shut up and go to bed,” she snapped back, then hung up on him.

For some reason, our tour manager had the bright idea of putting obnoxious me and quiet Mick Mars in a room together: We were like
The Odd Couple
. I’d get frustrated writing a song and take my guitar into the hallway, where I’d smash every single light. Then I’d come back into the room, trailing my broken ax behind me and asking Mick, “Say, can I borrow your guitar?” We regularly came to blows, usually because I was partying or bringing girls to the room. After I pulled a clump of his hair out when he wouldn’t let me borrow his guitar, I was finally given my own room. It didn’t help Mick find any peace and quiet, though, because not long afterward, a hotel guest called the police after she saw Tommy streaking down the hall, and the cops accidentally arrested Mick instead.

We toured with Ozzy on and off for over a year, taking time off to play solo shows or gig with Saxon. In the meantime, we received our first gold and platinum record awards, heard ourselves on the radio for the first time, and started getting recognized in the streets outside Los Angeles. It was all happening quickly and, as a result, all of our relationships began to break down. The day the tour ended, the bus dropped me off in front of the house where Lita and I lived. I stood outside for ten minutes with my suitcase in my hand, unsure whether to walk in or not. When I did, I hugged her and didn’t say a word. I just stood there. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. Something had turned off inside of me during the tour, and I had no idea how to turn it back on.

When Lita left a few days later for her own tour, I was relieved. I was in no shape to carry on a relationship with her, especially with both of us constantly traveling, and I had no idea how to interact with a woman I respected anymore. By the time she returned, I had already arranged to move across the street and live with Robbin Crosby. The day I moved in with him, life returned to complete destitution and depravity. He had just one bed, and was kind enough to let me sleep in it while he crashed on the floor. Instead of a refrigerator, he had a Styrofoam chest filled with bags of ice. It had a hole in the bottom, and the water constantly leaked all over the kitchen floor. The manager of the building hated me and warned every day that if he caught me throwing loud parties or drinking alcohol by the pool or misbehaving in any way, he’d throw me out on my tattooed ass.

Though I couldn’t afford a new Styrofoam ice chest or a real refrigerator for the house, I had no problem buying a brand-new Corvette. The day I drove it off the lot, I went to the Reseda Country Club and picked up a girl. We walked out to the parking lot, and I placed her on the hood, spread her legs in the air, and started fucking her. Slowly, a crowd gathered, and the only thing I remember them saying was: “Yeah, dude! Nice car!”

To forget about Lita, I buried myself between the legs of other women. A small college girl who was attractive in a nerdy, bespectacled way moved into the other side of the building complex a few weeks after I started living there with Robbin. So one night, instead of going out with Robbin, I stopped by her house with a bottle of champagne, a bindle of cocaine, and a bunch of quaaludes. We partied all night and, as planned, ended up fucking. When I walked back to my apartment at seven in the morning, the manager was outside watering the flowers. Trying to suck up, I waved and smiled at him, as innocent as could be. He turned, looked at me, and dropped the hose. He just froze. I couldn’t figure out what his problem was. I walked into the apartment and accidentally stepped on Robbin. “Dude, what happened to you?” he exclaimed once his eyes adjusted to the light.

“I was fucking that nerd chick. What’s the big deal?” I asked.

“No, dude, go look in the mirror,” he said.

I went over to the mirror, which was a giant broken pane someone had probably smashed out of a building lobby one drunken night, and looked at myself. My whole face was covered in blood, from my chin to my nose. Evidently, she had been having her period when I went down on her, and I was too fucked up to even notice. By the look of it, it must have been her first day.

After a few weeks of fucking everything I could, I heard that a little punk rocker had introduced Lita to her new boyfriend, some guy named Don from a band called Heaven. Sure, I didn’t want her anymore, but that didn’t mean someone else was allowed to have her. Raging with illogical and hypocritical jealousy, I called Tommy. We met at my house, each grabbed a two-by-four plank, and walked over to Lita’s house to assess the situation. We unlocked the door and stood in the middle of the room with our weapons. The only person home was the little punk rocker, who cowered in the corner as we rushed him, beating him mercilessly over the head and chest, until finally breaking the boards over his back. We left him in the corner, with blood streaked all over the walls.

A few hours later, the phone rang at my new place. “Fuck you!” It was Lita. “You are such a fucking asshole.”

I explained my side of the story, and then she cut me down with a few well-chosen words that still ring in my head to this day: “That punk you just beat up didn’t even introduce me to Don!”

I felt especially bad that I had involved Tommy, because the night before I had fucked his girlfriend, Honey. She had called to tell me she had drugs. I went over to partake, and one thing led to another, which led to me naked in the bathroom looking for some kind of ointment to put on the scratch marks on my back. It was yet another image to keep out of my mind at their engagement party. He was my best friend, and probably would have understood. But I’ve never been able to bring myself to tell him about it.