The Dirt (48 page)

Strangely, after Heather and I split up, a couple of drunk assholes kicked the shit out of Corabi and me while we were walking down the street. As I was lying in a hotel bed recuperating, there was a noise at my door and I looked up to find Honey letting herself into the room. It was the first time I had seen her in nine years. She walked to the bed, bent over, gave me a blow job, and left without a word. I haven’t seen her since.

As I lay there confused and empty afterward, I realized just how lonely I was without Heather, because after seven years of marriage you look around for your friends and realize they’re long gone. But at the same time, I was excited. I was excited to fall in love again, not with another girl but with music. There was a whole new school of bands coming out—hard, heavy shit like Pantera and Prong—and, with Vince gone and a tattooed dirtbag like Corabi in, we finally had the tools to get into some real shit.

A
fter Tommy and Nikki’s binge, they committed themselves to sobriety so that they could try to repeat the success of
Dr. Feelgood
with Bob Rock in Vancouver. For them, there was no middle ground. Not only were alcohol and drugs forbidden, but so were red meat, cigarettes, and caffeine. We popped vitamins all day and worked out mornings with a trainer.

But, unavoidably, there were nights when we fell off the wagon. The first time was when Snake from Skid Row came up to visit us. Tommy, Nikki, Snake, and I hit a strip club and then a local bar. Nikki, who was already obliterated, asked the waitress how much the kamikazes were. She told him they were $3.50. So he reached into his pocket, handed her a fistful of bills, and said, “As much money is here, that’s how many kamikazes I want.”

Fifteen minutes later, a group of waitresses walked up with nine trays of kamikazes and arranged them on the table. We pounded them until we couldn’t drink any more and climbed into the band van. “Crab,” Tommy asked me, “have you ever been with a hooker?”

“No,” I stammered.

“Well, let’s get you a hooker, then.”

Life was so normal and easy when these guys were sober, but when they were fucked up, they’d squeeze a whole lifetime of adventure, mayhem, and decadence into a twelve-hour span. On the way to Richards Street, where the prostitutes hung out, we pooled our money. I had one hundred dollars, Tommy had eighty dollars, poor Snake had six hundred dollars, and Nikki had twelve dollars left over from his kamikaze binge. We pulled four really cute hookers into the van and took them back to the hotel to party. Tommy hooked the girls up with some weed, Nikki pulled out a couple bottles of Jack, and we started partying. Tommy was separated from Heather but wanted to call her and check in anyway. “When I come back,” he said, “this party is going to fucking start.”

A half hour later, he pushed open the door and walked in with his pants around his ankles, yelling at the top of his lungs and bum-rushing one of the prostitutes. At that exact moment, one particularly bitchy hooker looked at her watch and said, “That’ll be another two hundred dollars each.”

All of a sudden, the party went quiet and the kind of dark, somber cloud that appears whenever anyone mentions money hung over the room.

“What do you mean, two hundred dollars?” I asked.

“It’s been an hour, and it’s two hundred dollars an hour.”

Nikki went ballistic. He threw his Jack Daniel’s bottle across the room, and it shattered on the wall over the bitchy hooker. He ran after her, threatening to slice her in half. And faster than you can say, “Don’t go away mad,” the room was girl-free.

There were just the four of us left, sitting on the couch. The hookers had left with all our weed and money, and Nikki had thrown our last bottle of Jack against the wall. Snake popped open a beer from the minibar and shook his head. “Dudes, what just happened?” he asked. Then he smiled wickedly: “Yeah, the bad boys of rock and roll, Mötley Crüe and Skid Row, just had to pay girls eight hundred bucks to talk to us. We’re pathetic.”

Unbeknownst to me, Tommy and Nikki had decided that the night was not over. While Snake kept me busy with small talk, they snuck into the hotel kitchen and stole a fifty-gallon vat of tomato sauce. Then they swiped my room key from the front desk, pulled the sheet back from my bed, covered my mattress with tomato sauce, and remade the bed.

When I returned to my room that night, I noticed that it smelled like spaghetti but didn’t think anything of it. I pulled back the sheet and put my hand down on the bed, and it squelched in something. I looked at my hand, and it was covered with red, like something out of
The Exorcist
. I was so drunk, however, that I thought if I ignored the tomato sauce, that would somehow show Tommy and Nikki that they hadn’t gotten the better of me. So I went to sleep in it.

The next morning, I left a box with a dozen cream puffs outside Nikki’s door and rang the bell. He opened the door, looked down the hall, then noticed the cream puffs. An hour later, I saw the empty cream puff box in the hallway. Then, at the gym later that day, I watched him explain to the trainer why he felt too sluggish to do any of the exercises.

After that, it was all-out war with Nikki. He would take me out to a bar and get me drunk, then while I was talking to a girl, he’d take a taxi back to the hotel, fill my keyhole with Elmer’s glue and broken matchsticks, and return to the bar. Once I was good and drunk, he’d bring me back home and watch out of his peephole while the hotel staff took my door off the hinges so I could crash for the night.

I retaliated by putting a blow-up love doll on Nikki’s door with a sign that said “Welcome sailors,” and posting notices all over the hotel inviting single men to his room. Then Nikki pulled out all the stops: While I was sleeping, he spent several hours gluing an entire room service tray to my door, sticking on every plate, napkin, utensil, and even filling a glass with Elmer’s glue so that it looked like milk. Then he doused my whole door with hairspray, set it on fire, knocked, and ran back to his room. Mick was always too smart for anyone to pull pranks on: he covered the hallway leading up to his room with flour so that he could track the footprints of anyone who dared to mess with him.

That year was probably the best time of my life. Everyone was on new territory creatively and just having stupid, harmless fun. Mick had never worked with a second guitarist, Nikki had never worked with a second lyricist, and the band had never written songs through just jamming. We couldn’t wait for Mötley fans to hear what we’d done. We thought we had really made an intelligent Mötley Crüe record, with a lot of commentary on the kooky shit going on in the world, from the Rodney King riots in L.A. to the latest fury over music censorship.

The last song I wrote for the record was called “Uncle Jack,” which was about a relative of mine who had sexually molested my brothers and sisters. Just as we started recording, he was arrested and charged with statutory rape and sexual assault of twenty young children, all of which he had documented with pictures. But two months later, he was let out of jail because the wardens and the court were worried that the other inmates were going to kill him. So now that he was free, where did he find a new job? A Catholic elementary school.

As we were finishing the record, my mother called and told me he had been arrested again. While teaching at the Catholic school, he had moved in with a woman and her two sons, aged eight and three. She worked at night and he worked during the day, so he spent most of his time unsupervised with them. After just a few months, the woman he was living with was killed in a car accident. When her ex-husband moved back into the house, he discovered that the guy had been sodomizing both boys. I was livid when I found out that he was still destroying all these people’s lives, so Nikki said, “Why don’t you want to write a song about it?”

I wanted to release the song as a single and donate the money to centers for abused children. We were ready to make a difference and show the world that Mötley Crüe was still a circus, but a circus with a heart.

When we finished the record, we went on a press tour. Everywhere we traveled, fans went berserk. In Milan, a group of contest winners attacked me and starting tearing off pieces of my clothing for souvenirs. I looked over at Nikki. “Get ready for it, Crab.” He beamed. “It’s going to be like this all the time.”

I
t was a perfect time for a midlife crisis. I had just turned thirty, which didn’t seem that old. But all these younger rock bands were appearing and I was beginning to feel like a dinosaur. On top of that, I had just been kicked out of the band I had spent the last ten years with and I had left my wife. Ever since Sharise and I had moved into a huge mansion in Simi Valley to raise our daughter, Skylar, our fighting had escalated, most memorably on my birthday when she caught Robert Patrick and me talking with a future porn star named Lenay at the Roxy and hit me in the nose with a glass, which started a complete ruckus that ended with both of us kicked out of the club.

I had begged Doug a long time for help. I told him that I was having a lot of problems, between my wife and my confusion over feeling aged out of rock music at thirty. I explained to him that I was badly in need of help. If the band was upset at me for missing rehearsals, I wanted them to understand that it had nothing to do with them. I loved Mötley Crüe. I would have done anything for them.

I don’t know if Doug ever told the band about our conversation. Because the next thing I knew, after our fight at rehearsal during the rainstorm, Doug was calling my house and saying, “The band doesn’t want you around anymore. I’m willing to release you from your management contract tonight, if you want.” I was stunned. I expected that we’d cool off for a week, then I’d get a call from Nikki and we’d start working together again. I just muttered, “Okay,” and hung up. I didn’t know what else to say.

If Doug had been more than a yes-man, he could have saved the band. All he had to say was, “Come back and let’s talk about it. We will get you a counselor and talk about your problems.” Clearly, what I was going through wasn’t a drinking problem, but a mental problem that was leading to drinking and skipping rehearsal. But instead, he called and fired me and told me not to speak to anyone in the band. That was it. What could I do after that kind of treatment? I had two choices: I could kill myself or I could go to Hawaii with a stripper and get over it. I chose the latter.

I grabbed the first chick I could find, a porn star named Savannah, and took her to Hawaii. She was a gorgeous platinum blonde with soft, perfect curves. Despite the fact that a million guys were jacking off to her movies every day, she was extremely insecure, like a lost little girl. With the band out of my hair, I couldn’t see any reason to stay sober, so we brought all the pills and coke we could carry with us. After staying up for four days straight at the Maui Hilton, Savannah took one pill too many and dropped to the floor convulsing. I called an ambulance and followed her to the hospital. I’d never seen anyone look so beautiful and innocent while lying overdosed in a stretcher.

When she returned to the hotel the next day, we picked up right where we had left off and started partying again. But I was older and for some reason not only could I not get as fucked up as I used to, but I couldn’t recover as quickly. By the time I returned to L.A., I was a mess. I flew to the clinic in Tucson again to dry out. Savannah sent me a different porno picture of herself every day, until the sober police found my stash and busted me. By the time I completed treatment, she was dating Pauly Shore.