The Dirt (38 page)

I tried to sit up to figure out what was going on. I thought it would be hard to lift my body. But to my surprise, I shot upright, as if I weighed nothing. Then it felt as if something very gentle was grabbing my head and pulling me upward. Above me, everything was bright white. I looked down and realized that I had left my body. Nikki Sixx—or the filthy, tattooed container that had once held him—was lying covered face-to-toe with a sheet on a gurney being pushed by medics into an ambulance. The fans who had been following us all night were crowded into the street, craning to see what was going on. And then I saw, parked nearby, the silver limo that had carried us around all night, that had carried me to my…

Something not as gentle as the hand on my head, something rough and impatient, grabbed my foot. And in an instant I shot down through the air, through the roof of the ambulance, and landed with a painful jerk back into my body. I struggled to open my eyes and I saw adrenaline needles—not one, like in
Pulp Fiction
, but two. One was sticking out of the left flank of my chest, the other was in the right. “No one’s gonna die in my fucking ambulance,” I heard a man’s voice say. Then I passed out.

When I woke up, there was a flashlight shining directly into my eyes. “Where did you get your drugs?” a voice barked. I groaned and tried to clear the fuzz and pain out of my head. “You are a heroin addict!” I tried to move my head to avoid the flashlight beam that was burning into my skull. “Where did you get your drugs?” I couldn’t see a thing. But I could feel tubes running into my nose and needles taped against my arms. If there was any sensation I could recognize in a delirium, it was a needle in my arm. And a cop. “Answer me, you filthy junkie!”

I opened my mouth and sucked in what felt like the first breath of my entire life. I almost choked on it. I coughed and wondered why I had been given a second chance. I was alive. What could I do to celebrate this precious miracle of a second life? What could I say to show my appreciation?

“Fuck you!”

“Why, you little junkie scumbag motherfucker!” the cop yelled back at me. “Who gave you those drugs!”

“Fuck you!”

“That’s it. If you don’t tell us…”

“Am I being held on anything?”

“Uh, no.” Luckily, I didn’t have any drugs on me when I passed out. Robbin or someone must have flushed everything left in the room.

“Then fuck off.” I passed out again.

The next thing I remember, I was standing shirtless in the hospital parking lot. There were two girls sitting on the curb crying. I walked to them and asked, “What’s up?”

Their faces went white. “You’re alive!” one of them stammered.

“What are you talking about? Of course I’m alive.”

They wiped their eyes and stared at me speechless. They were real fans. “Say, can you guys give me a ride home?”

An excited sweat broke out on their faces, and they nervously led me into the passenger seat of their Mazda.

I
rolled over and answered the phone, half asleep. I was the first one to get the call.

“Nikki’s in the hospital. He OD’d.” It was our tour manager, Rich Fisher, on the line.

“Jesus. What? Is he dead or alive?”

“I’m not sure,” Rich said.

“Call me back right away and let me know. All right?”

I started to dress so I could visit him at the hospital—if he was alive. The phone rang again. It was Boris, the limo driver who always worked for Nikki. He said that he had seen Nikki’s drug dealer jump out of a hotel-room window and run down the street yelling, “I just killed Nikki Sixx!” Then he saw an ambulance pull up and medics carry Nikki out on a stretcher with a sheet covering his face.

I never cry. But that night I did. Tears rolled down my face and, for the first time in as long as I could remember, I didn’t think about myself. For all the shit he put me through, I really loved that arrogant son of a bitch. I stared at the phone, not sure who to call or what to do. Then it rang again. Chuck Shapiro was calling. A reporter had woken him up asking for a quote for an obituary for Nikki. So it was true.

Panicked but always levelheaded, Chuck had me wait on the line while he placed a call to Cedars-Sinai, the hospital the ambulance had brought Nikki to.

“I’m calling about Nikki Sixx,” Chuck blurted when the receptionist answered.

“He just left,” she told him.

“He just left? What do you mean? I thought he was dead.”

“Yeah, he just left. He pulled the tubes out of his nose, tore the IV out of his arms, and told everyone to fuck off. He walked out with only a pair of leather pants on.”

O
n the ride home, the radio stations were reporting my death. The girls looked at me with big, wet eyes and asked with genuine concern, “You’re not going to do drugs anymore, are you, Nikki?”

I had felt so alone and monstrous on tour, as if I had nobody that cared for me and nobody to care for. In that car, I realized that I was one of the luckiest guys in the world. I had millions of people who cared for me and millions of people I cared for. “No way,” I told them from the bottom of my heart.

It was so funny to me that everyone thought I was dead that, as soon as I returned home, I walked to my answering machine and changed the message. “Hey, it’s Nikki. I’m not home because I’m dead.” Then I went into the bathroom, pulled a lump of heroin out of the medicine cabinet, rolled up my sleeve, tied off, and with one sink of the syringe plunger realized that all the love and concern of those millions of fans still didn’t feel as satisfying as one good shot of heroin.

I woke up the next afternoon sprawled across the bathroom floor with the needle still dangling out of my arm. The tile floor was covered with blood. My blood. I passed out again.

Somewhere, far away, a phone rang.

“Hey, it’s Nikki. I’m not home because I’m dead.”

M
y biggest regret as a manager is that I let Vince think he could get away with murder. I remember sitting with Vince after the accident with Razzle, and the lawyers said to him, “The judge wants you to do some time.” Vince looked up at them and—I’ll never forget these words—said: “I can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t?” I asked him.

“I have to go on tour.”

“Oh fuck,” I slapped my head. “Why didn’t I think of using that as your defense? My client, Vince Neil, is innocent of manslaughter and cannot serve time because he has to play some concerts. Case closed.”

In Vince’s mind, he thought he was above the law. And walking away from that disaster with a few weeks in a luxury jail and a twelve-thousand-dollar Rolex certainly didn’t teach him otherwise. Now he had every excuse in the world to do what he wanted, because nothing could stop him. Guys like Mick, who never said more than seven words to me in my first five years with the band, had eaten shit for so long that they knew what it was like to be nothing. (Of course, Mick was a pretty depressed guy after all that and such a pushover that I always thought he should have his own television show:
Do You Want to Take Advantage of Me?
)

My real nightmare managing the band began when I tried to keep Vince sober while he was on probation. In Orlando, Florida, on the
Theatre of Pain
tour, we were so sick of his antics that we left him in a hotel room with two bodyguards and told them to just beat the shit out of him. The guy’s biggest enemy was always himself; on the
Girls
tour, he was making a sandwich backstage in Rochester and threw a fit when all they had was a jar of Gulden’s mustard, not French’s mustard. So he slammed the glass bottle against the wall and severed the tendons in several fingers on his right hand. We had to cancel the show and airlift him to a hand specialist in Baltimore.

Of course, Vince can’t entirely be blamed for his behavior. As his managers, Doug and I condoned it to a certain extent by allowing it to continue, perhaps because the band was so popular. But, finally, we had to put our foot down. And what shocked us most is that it wasn’t because of Vince. It was because of Nikki.

Now Nikki, the king of the losers, had begun to unravel on the
Girls
tour. Neither Doug nor I wanted to be around him, so we drew straws to see who would accompany the band to Japan. I drew the short one: Mr. Udo, the promoter there, is one of my best friends. Every time he takes a band to Japan, he puts his reputation on the line for them. And it was no different for Mötley Crüe. Except that Mötley Crüe couldn’t give a fuck. They are savages with cash who care nothing about nobody, even each other.

The first thing that happened when we arrived in Japan was that Tommy got caught with pot in his drum kit. Mr. Udo bailed us out of that and, a few days later, we were all leaving Osaka on the bullet train after a show. These clowns were in full costume, with makeup running down their faces and chains and tattoos everywhere. Nikki and Tommy went completely out of control. If you flew above the train in a helicopter, you would have seen all these Japanese people scurrying like cockroaches out of the car we were in. If you zoomed in, you would have seen Nikki throwing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and hitting a Japanese businessman in the back of the skull. Lower the microphone and you would have heard the guy screaming and the blood pumping out of his head. It was just brutal shit. Brutal.

When we pulled into the Tokyo station, there were hundreds of policemen running alongside the car. “Hey, Nikki,” I said. “Your fan club’s here.” And he was so wacked out that he didn’t realize they’d sent the riot squad after him. He thought it was an adoring Japanese public.

They hauled Nikki and me to jail. And, as we were sitting there, he said to me, “So, dude, how do you like these tattoos? What do you think the cops will think of them?”

I thought about my life in Miami: I had a pretty good business going before I moved to the West Coast to manage these guys. I’d played guitar, produced albums by Styx, the Ohio Players, and the Average White Band, managed nice guys like Pat Travers. Life was so peaceful and easy back then. “I don’t know,” I replied to Nikki. “But I’ll tell you this: If they let me get my hands free, I’m going to beat the living shit out of you.”