The Dirt (53 page)

When I was sixteen, she gave birth to a boy, Neil. I was working on a sound crew loading equipment for a Runaways concert when my mom screeched into the parking lot and told me that my son had been born. Despite having spent the last seven months with Tami, the reality didn’t sink in until I saw this cute teeny bald slobbering thing that my sperm had given life to. I looked at him, fell in love, and then went into shock. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with him. Fortunately, Tami’s parents and mine helped raise him, and I became the only kid in Charter Oak High School paying child support.

That year, a guy named James Alverson transferred into my school. He was a guitar player and it seemed like he wasn’t at school to learn but to form a band. The moment he stepped through the doors, he started eyeing and sizing up every eligible guy like a talent scout. He finally settled on me. I didn’t even have to sing for him: he liked me because I had the longest hair in school.

He found a bassist named Joe Marks and a drummer named Robert Stokes, both surfer dudes with long sideburns. From our first rehearsal, it felt good. James was a great guitar player, had long blond hair like mine, modeled his playing after Eddie Van Halen’s, and had a quirky, animated Rick Nielsen stage presence. When I started singing, I complemented him perfectly because I sounded like Robin Zander with his balls being pinched. James named us Rock Candy and put us to work learning “I Want You to Want Me” by Cheap Trick, “Sweet Emotion” by Aerosmith, and “Smokin’ in the Boys Room” by Brownsville Station for our first concert at a local prom.

We soon developed a great scam for getting cash: We’d pick some idiot in school who didn’t have any friends, find out when his parents were going out of town, and give him the sales pitch, which went something like this: “Hey, look, we know you want to be popular in school. Here’s an easy way to do it. When your parents leave, have a party at your house. We’ll play for free and make sure tons of chicks come. All you have to do is be home and maybe buy some alcohol if you can, and you’ve got a free band and your pick of any girl you want to take to your parents’ bedroom. What do you think?”

They always said yes. Then we’d spread the word at school, charge each person a dollar to get in, and, after three or four hundred people showed up, call the cops on ourselves and take off with about a hundred bucks each.

Between Rock Candy, surfing, Tami, Neil, crosstops, and angel dust, I didn’t have much time left over for classes and soon got kicked out. I worked sweeping up at a recording studio in exchange for rehearsal time for Rock Candy. But when I realized that I was on a fast track to nowhere, I decided to listen to my parents and try to finish school. Adopting the studio’s address as my own (so that my parents wouldn’t see my report cards and disciplinary notices), I enrolled in Royal Oak High in Covina, where I drank beer in the morning and then ditched the afternoon classes to jam with Tommy Lee, a scrawny, excitable kid who played with another band on the backyard party circuit, U.S. 101. Though everybody knew me in the school because of Rock Candy, Tommy was the only guy I really liked or bothered with. I fought with pretty much everybody else.

When my parents left town for a weekend, I booked a Rock Candy concert at my own house and made the band promise not to call the police this time. Nearly four hundred kids showed up but, instead of cops, my parents returned unexpectedly in the middle of the insanity. Strangely, they didn’t get pissed; they watched me sing and, afterward, my dad picked up on high school chicks while my mom served drinks.

After the party, they never said a word to me about it. Perhaps my parents had seen so much in Compton, they were just glad I was alive and enjoying life. That or they knew that if they tried to discipline me, I’d leave home and sleep at the studio or at Tommy’s. Whatever their reason, they let me get away with anything, even, eventually, dropping out of school.

My parents couldn’t stop me, my principal couldn’t stop me, and Horace, the biggest high-school football player around, couldn’t stop me. That’s probably what gave me a feeling of invulnerability that my experiences in Mötley Crüe did nothing to dispel. Without that, I probably never would have had the confidence to lead a ragged, punch-drunk band like Mötley Crüe when the opportunity came. The first thing I did when Mötley Crüe became famous was climb into a white stretch limo and ask the chauffeur to drive me to my old schoolyard, where I flipped off all the teachers and yelled “fuck you, assholes!” out of the window as loudly as I could. In my mind, they had failed me. I didn’t need them at all.

I did not think that I’d ever get taught a lesson, because I had no use for lessons. I didn’t read, I didn’t write, I didn’t think. I just lived. Whatever happened in the past happened, whatever’s going to happen in the future is going to happen anyway. Whatever is happening in the present moment was always what I was interested in. So when my moment of reckoning came, I had already committed thirty-four years of my life to invincibility. Not only did I not expect it, but I couldn’t even conceive of the possibility. Fate, however, has a way of finding your vulnerabilities where you least expect them, illuminating them so that you realize how glaringly obvious they are, and then mercilessly driving a spike straight into their most delicate center.

O
ur attitude was: Fuck Vince, dude. He was lazy, he didn’t care, he didn’t contribute to Mötley Crüe, and he had no fucking respect for any of us. He became a punching bag: united against motherfucking Vince. We even put a picture of him on the back of the toilet, dude, so that when we went to the bathroom we could piss on his face.

But the bottom line was that Vince never put us down when he left the band. We put Vince down. So which of us was the asshole?

I didn’t talk to Vince for three years, six months, and six days after he left—until I heard that his daughter Skylar had slipped into a coma and died. That night, I called him at home. His voice wasn’t even recognizable as the Vince I knew. He sobbed, babbled, and hurled abuse at himself for an hour or more over the phone. It was all bad.

“That’s against the laws, man,” he kept screaming, bashing the phone against something. “It’s against the rules of the universe.”

I couldn’t understand a single thing in his crazy talk other than the fact that the guy was in extreme pain and had probably crawled inside a bottle to hide. I don’t know how he ever made it through that and managed to become a human being again. I don’t think he even remembers me calling.

A
t first, Sharise thought it was the flu. Skylar was complaining of stomach pains, headaches, and nausea, so Sharise put her to bed. That night, Skylar’s symptoms worsened. Her stomach started hurting so badly that she doubled over clutching it. When Sharise tried to take her to the bathroom, she discovered that Skylar was hurting too much to even walk. She wiped the dirty blond hair out of Skylar’s face, dabbed at the tears with a Kleenex, and drove her to the hospital.

That was when she called me at the Long Beach Grand Prix after-party. I drove to the West Hills Medical Center with more speed and adrenaline than I had used in the race and joined Sharise, who was crying on her mother’s shoulder in the hospital emergency room. The last hour had been a nightmare, they said. The doctors had assumed that Skylar’s appendix had exploded. But when they anesthetized her and began the procedure for an appendectomy, they found her appendix healthy and intact. Instead, they saw that a cancerous tumor around her abdomen had exploded, spreading cancer all through her body. The tumor, they said, was the size of a softball. I couldn’t understand how such a large tumor had appeared in Skylar: I always associated cancer and tumors with old people. Not my four-year-old.

After another hour, they let Sharise and me into the intensive care unit to see Skylar. When I saw her attached to all these tubes and machines, for once in my life I didn’t know what to do. This was my daughter hooked up to a life-support system. When I had seen her just a weekend ago, she’d been running circles around my legs trying to make me dizzy.

Sharise and I sat side by side without a word for the first time in two years, waiting for Skylar to stir. After an hour, she rolled around, mumbled something about Cinderella, and fell back asleep. Sharise and I looked at each other and wanted to cry with relief.

The next day, Skylar was almost fully conscious and lucid. And she was as scared as I had been the night before when I saw all the tubes and machines. She asked where she was and why she was there and what all this stuff was. We explained as gently as we could that she had something growing in her stomach, like a flower, but it wasn’t supposed to be there so the doctors took it out. She smiled weakly and said she wanted to go home.

I asked the doctors when I could take Skylar home, and they said that she needed to be transferred to the Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles first to make sure that they had removed all the fragments of the tumor. I had heard of the hospital because it was run by the T. J. Martell Foundation, which helps children with leukemia, cancer, and AIDS. Since Mötley Crüe had done a lot of charity work for the T. J. Martell Foundation over the years, like playing against Fleetwood Mac in their first rock-and-jock softball game benefit (we won), I called Tony Martell in tears and he made sure Skylar received the best care possible.

I rode to the Children’s Hospital in an ambulance with Skylar and, the moment we arrived, they ran a CAT scan on her. The thought of her being blitzed with radiation at such a young age sickened me, but I had no choice. Heidi had returned from Florida, so she waited with Sharise and me for the results. We sat there awkward, uncomfortable, and chewing our fingernails to the skin. When the doctor returned, whatever jealousy and ill will remained among the three of us was banished forever by the news. There were tumors, the doctor said, on both of Skylar’s kidneys. They would have to operate again to remove them. When we told Skylar, she buried her face in Sharise’s chest and asked again when she could go home. “Soon,” we told her. “Very soon.”

Music studios, strip clubs, concert halls, and any semblance of my past life disappeared as the hospital became the center of my existence. Even the divorce that Sharise and I had been wrestling over for two years was put on hold. Every day, Sharise, myself, our parents, or Heidi sat with Skylar in her room, praying that we could take her home soon. We kept saying just one more operation, just one more treatment, just one more day and it would all be over. But every day, the news got worse and worse.

When the doctors brought Skylar into the operating room to remove the tumors on her kidneys, they pulled back the flaps of her skin and were horrified by what they saw. The tumors were so large that simply removing them would have been fatal. They sewed her up yet again and told us she would have to undergo more radiation treatment. This way, they said, the tumors would shrink to a size at which they could be safely removed.

Gradually, I began drinking again to cope with the pain. I would stay at the Children’s Hospital as long as they’d let me, then I’d drive straight to Moonshadows in Malibu and get liquored up with the regulars until I couldn’t remember my own name. The next morning I’d wake up, drive to the hospital, stay all day or maybe even sleep over, and then get blitzed at Moonshadows. I knew it was wrong to be drinking at this time, but it was the only way I could keep from going completely crazy. My entire being was reduced to just three emotions: anxiety, depression, and anger. I was angry all the time. When some guy in a blue BMW cut me off on the Pacific Coast Highway, I slammed on the brakes and yelled, “Fuck you!” The guy stepped out of his car, I stepped out of mine. Heidi, who was in the passenger seat, yelled in horror, “What’s wrong with you?!” I stepped back into my car, spat on the windshield in anger, and was preparing to peel out when the guy threw himself over my hood and refused to move.

“That’s fucking it!” I yelled at Heidi. I stormed out of the car, slammed the door so hard the mirror fell off, pulled him off the hood by his shirt collar, and punched him in the face in front of a crowd of gawkers. I punched him so hard that my knuckles split open to the bone. The guy dropped to the ground with blood streaming out of his face as if it had been split with an ax. Passersby had to call an ambulance to scrape him off the ground. I left before the cops arrived and gunned it to the hospital. I wasn’t going to waste any more time on this piece of shit.