The Dirt (73 page)

I
was talking to Ashley Smith, the publicist at our record company, when Tommy, being who he is, jumped in the middle of the conversation. He had nothing to do with what we were talking about.

When I told him to keep his mouth shut, he grabbed me by the neck. “Take your fucking hands off me right now!” I ordered him.

We were in the middle of a crowded airport and there were thousands of witnesses. If he didn’t watch himself, he was going to get thrown back in prison. So I warned him again: “Take your fucking hands off me.”

And when he didn’t, I knocked him to the ground. So I wouldn’t say that’s a sucker punch. I’d say he’s just a sucker who got punched.

Tommy can be the most fun guy in the world to be around. His only problem is that he is so scared other people won’t like him that he lies to make himself look better. That’s the way he is and that’s the way he always will be. He’s a chameleon. Whatever is in, he wants to do that. He never really stuck to what made him what he was, which was rock and roll. If hip-hop is in, he’s a hip-hopper. If punk is in, he’s a punk rocker. If Tommy had fucking tits, he’d be a Spice Girl.

W
hen Tommy was released from prison, he didn’t call anyone in the band. I didn’t find out until three days later that he was even out of jail. And the way I found out was because someone had seen him in a mall. I was furious. I had visited him almost every week. I did everything I could to keep him sane in there, even starting a letter writing campaign to get him an early release. So when he didn’t even let me know he was out, it felt like a slap in the face.

I called him and said, “What’s going on? Why didn’t you tell me you were out?”

“What’s the problem?” he bristled. “It’s not my job to report to you.”

Throughout the
Greatest Hits
tour that followed, he was cold and aloof. He was a time bomb ticking with resentment. It was only a matter of time before he blew. So when everyone turned against Vince after the fight in the airport, I saw it for what it really was: Tommy throwing gasoline on a fire. Sure, Vince was being a jerk to our publicist. But at the same time, Tommy took a bad situation and made it worse by grabbing Vince by the neck. On the plane afterward, Tommy became very emotional and started crying while Vince sat as far away as he could, sulking and indignant. They were like two little kids.

I’d seen this kind of thing happen between any two of us a million times. But, when the dust settled, we were a band. Everyone made mistakes. Everyone was an asshole sometimes.

On the plane, I told them the new game plan: “Listen, we’re right where we want to be: we have our own label now. So we can reissue our old albums with all the unreleased tracks the fans have been asking for, make a new album of pure kick-ass rock, and, by September of 2001, take some time off and work on whatever solo project we want.”

But Tommy wasn’t having any of it. Back in L.A., he refused to talk to Vince and make peace. And Vince refused to talk to Tommy. They were both wrong but neither would admit it, and I knew that if they would just sit down like Vince and I had after our fight on the
Swine
tour, they could settle their issues. But the best I could do was talk Tommy into finishing the tour.

“Fine,” he told me. “But I want my own tour bus. And I want my own dressing room. And don’t even think about putting me on the same airplane as that dickhead. I don’t want to see that asshole until the lights come on. And when we come offstage, you better fucking take him in one direction and me in the other. I don’t want to fucking run into him. Because, dude, I don’t trust myself.”

When we came home from the tour, a friend called and told me to turn on KROQ because Pamela Anderson was being interviewed. She said that she and Tommy were back together again, and that Tommy had decided to leave Mötley Crüe to record a solo album.

That was how I found out Tommy had left the band: from Yoko Ono on KROQ. I called Tommy, but he wouldn’t return my calls. I stopped by his house, but he wouldn’t answer the door. I wrote him letters and E-mails, but he never responded. He was just gone, as if the past twenty years of friendship and music didn’t exist. It hurt immensely. But it doesn’t anymore.

I
told my doc that I’d been having a hard time falling asleep and a hard time forcing myself out of bed in the morning.

He said, “You are depressed.”

I could have told him that. I’d been depressed for years. I was in pain every day and worn out from years of driving 780 miles to each gig with a band that’s still squabbling like tittie-babies. It was getting pretty hairball. My feeling when Tommy left the band was that if you’re not into what you’re doing, then you’re not going to do your best. And then you’re going to start resenting the people who you think are holding you back so that every petty little thing gets blown way over the top, like in the airport with Vince. So if Tommy wants to leave the band, let him get it out of his system and see for himself whether he was right or wrong. Like when I was in White Horse, they kept telling me I couldn’t play as good as everyone else so I followed my gut feeling and left to do what I really wanted. And, in the end, it was me who had the last laugh. So who knows what will happen with Tommy?

For my depression, the doctor prescribed Zoloft and Wellbutrin. I went home figuring I’d shake my lethargy, quit smoking, get some energy, and go out and do stuff. Nope. I took the pills and was instantly transported to another dimension. At night, I’d wake up in a panic, thinking that I was being abducted by aliens or observed by ghosts. But I’d look around and nothing would be there. Suddenly, weird shit would start dripping from the ceiling and rising out of the floor.

I called the doctor and told him what was happening, and he said to stick with the medication because my system would soon adjust. For three straight weeks, I was on a nonstop acid trip. Each day, I journeyed further and further out of my mind. When I walked on my beige carpet, I’d see the prints of my boots glowing phosphorescent orange. I was sure something was about to snap and I was either going to kill myself or take out one of my guns and spray the whole neighborhood. I knew my brain was thinking wrong, but there was nothing I could do to stop it.

Finally, I went to see a psychiatrist and he diagnosed me as a schizophrenic. Being depressed seemed like nothing in comparison with being a schizophrenic. The psychiatrist gave me another pill to keep the other drugs in check. And then he called my orthopedic specialist and told him to cut off the pain medication I took for my back because he was worried I was becoming an addict. I was never an addict—I’d make a ten-day supply of pills last a month. But now, thanks to all these doctors, I was schizophrenic and in constant pain from thirty years of cumulative bone disease. Plus, as a side effect from one of their pills, my hands started swelling and I couldn’t play the guitar.

My brother moved into my house to take care of me. And that night, my mattress started undulating under me and making serpentine movements. I thought it was my imagination again, but in the morning my brother asked what I had put in the bed to make it shake like it did. Now I had no idea what was real and what was illusion. I’ve always known that the things scientists and governments tell us are wrong, but now I was seeing proof for the first time. The drugs had opened up a window into the spirit world and there was no doubt that some of the things I was seeing really existed; but, in order to function in the everyday world, our minds have to narrow the field of perception to a small sliver of reality and exclude the rest. Unfortunately, as an inhabitant of Planet Earth, I had to go back to living in it. So I called the doc again and begged him to take me off the pills. He told me to be patient and wait to adjust.

That day, I started hearing a radio very faintly in another room. But when I plugged my ears, the music and voices grew louder. They were in my head. The final straw came when I was in bed and a marshy gray ghost pinned me to the mattress. I started yelling at him: “Let me up or I will break your fucking neck.” But he pinned me there for an hour. The next night, the gray ghost returned. But this time I grabbed him, and he disappeared. When I woke up in the morning with the usual aches in all my joints that made it so hard to even stand up, I realized that the gray ghost was my ankylosing spondylitis made flesh. That’s what had been holding me back my whole life.

That day, I called my doctor again and he assured me that these were normal side effects.

“I don’t think they are,” I said. “They feel like acid flashbacks.”

“Okay,” he sighed. “Then come in.”

As soon as I walked in the office, I could see in his eyes that he was afraid. I looked like death in boots.