The Dirt (3 page)

fig. 1

From upper left: Rob Hemphill, Frank Feranna (a.k.a. Nikki Sixx), and friends in front of Roosevelt High School, Seattle

I
was fourteen years old when I had my mother arrested.

She was mad at me over something—staying out late, not doing homework, playing music too loud, dressing like a slob, I can’t remember—and I couldn’t take it anymore. I smashed my bass against the wall, threw my stereo across the room, tore my MC5 and Blue Cheer posters off the wall, and kicked a hole in the black-and-white television downstairs before slamming the front door open. Outside, I systematically threw a rock through every window in the town house.

But that was just the beginning. I’d been planning what came next for some time. I ran to a nearby house filled with degenerates I liked to get stoned with and asked for a knife. Someone tossed me a stiletto. I popped out the blade, extended my bracelet-covered left arm, and plunged the knife in directly above the elbow, sliding it downward about four inches and deep enough in some places to see bone. I didn’t feel a thing. In fact, I thought it looked pretty cool.

Then I called the police and said my mother had attacked me.

I wanted them to lock her away so I could live alone. But my plan backfired: The police said that if, as a minor living in her custody, I pressed charges, they’d have to put me in a juvenile home until I was eighteen. That meant I wouldn’t be able to play guitar for four years. And if I couldn’t play guitar for four years, that meant I’d never make it. And I was going to make it. There was no doubt about that—at least in my mind.

So I struck a plea bargain with my mother. I told her I wouldn’t press assault charges if she’d back off, leave me alone, let me be me. “You haven’t been there for me,” I told her, “so just let me go.” And she did.

I never came back. It was an overdue ending to a quest for escape and independence that had been set in motion a long time ago. It began like Richard Hell’s punk classic “Blank Generation”: “I was saying let me out of here before I was even born.”

I was born December 11, 1958, at 7:11
A.M.
, in San Jose. I was as early as I could be, and, even back then, probably still up from the night before. My mother had about as much luck with names as she had with men. She was born Deana Haight—an Idaho farm girl with stars in her eyes. She was witty, strong-willed, motivated, and extremely gorgeous—like a fifties movie star, with stylishly short hair, an angelic face, and a figure that inspired double takes in the street. But she was the black sheep of the family, the exact opposite of her perfect, pampered sister, Sharon. She had an untamable wild streak: completely capricious, prone to random adventure, and constitutionally unable to create any pattern of stability. She was definitely my mother.

She wanted to name me either Michael or Russell, but before she could the nurse asked my father, Frank Carlton Feranna—who was just a few years away from leaving her and me for good—what I should be called. He betrayed my mother on the spot and named me Frank Feranna, after himself. And that’s what they wrote on the birth certificate. From the first day, my life was a cluster fuck. At that point, I should have crawled right back in and begged my maker, “Can we start over?”

My father stuck around long enough to give me a sister who, like my father, I have no memories of. My mother always told me that my sister had gone to live somewhere else when she was young and I wasn’t allowed to see her. It wasn’t until thirty years later that I discovered the truth. For my mother, pregnancy and children were warning signs telling her to slow down—advice she heeded for only a short time until she started dating Richard Pryor.

fig. 2

Nikki’s mother, Deana

fig. 3

For most of my childhood, the idea of a sister and a father was beyond my comprehension. I never thought of myself as coming from a broken home, because I had no memories of home being anything other than my mother and me. We lived on the ninth floor of the St. James Club—then known as the Sunset Towers—on Sunset Boulevard. And whenever I got in the way of her lifestyle, she’d ship me to stay with my grandparents, who were constantly on the move, living in a cornfield in Pocatello, Idaho, or a rock park in Southern California, or a hog farm in New Mexico. My grandparents constantly threatened to take legal custody of me if my mother didn’t stop partying. But she would neither relinquish me completely nor slow down. The situation took a turn for the worse when she joined Frank Sinatra’s band as a backup singer and started dating the bassist, Vinny. I’d watch them rehearse all the time, with stars of the era like Mitzi Gaynor, Count Basie, and Nelson Riddle passing through.

When I was four, she married Vinny and we moved to Lake Tahoe, which was becoming a mini–Las Vegas. I’d wake up at six in the morning in the little brown house where we lived, ready to play, but I’d end up alone, skipping rocks in the pond outside until they got out of bed around 2
P.M.
I knew not to try and wake Vinny, because he’d knock me out. He was always in a terrible mood, and at the slightest provocation would take it out on me. One afternoon, he was taking a bath when he noticed me brushing my teeth from side to side instead of up and down, as he had taught me. He stood up, naked, hairy, and beaded with water like an ape caught in a hailstorm, and smashed his fist into the side of my head, knocking me to the ground. Then my mother, as usual, turned red and attacked him while I ran to the pond to hide.

That Christmas, I received two presents: my father stopped by our house while I was outside playing and, as either a feeble gesture to absolve his guilt or a genuine effort to be a father with the little means available to him, left me a red plastic circular sled with leather handles. And my half sister, Ceci, was born.

We moved to Mexico when I was six, either because my mother and Vinny had made enough money to take a year’s sabbatical or because they were running from something (most likely someone in a blue uniform). They never told me why. All I remember is that my mother and Ceci flew there which meant that I had to cross the border in the Corvair with Vinny and Belle. Belle was his German shepherd who, much like Vinny, constantly attacked me for no reason. My legs, arms, and torso were covered with bite marks for years. To this day, I still can’t fucking stand German shepherds. (It somehow makes sense that Vince just bought one for himself.)