The Dirt (75 page)

It was my first step toward straightening out all the crooked roads of my past. I never realized before that I had the power to break the chain of secrecy and dishonesty and irresponsibility that I had inherited. And I could do that simply by having a solid relationship with my wife and family, so that my children wouldn’t spend their lives lost and hiding from everything like I had.

Of course, those resolutions are easier spoken than applied. Thanks in part to our fucked-up backgrounds, Donna and I haven’t had the most easy marriage. But I’ve learned that human relationships, like band relationships, take work and compromise. And I’m putting everything I have into this one. We even started seeing a family counselor, which is great, because for the first time there is someone in my life who sits there, listens to me, and isn’t afraid to call me out when I’m full of shit or lying to myself, which I’ve always been very good at. I’ve spent so long being a rock-and-roll cliché that I don’t want to be a father cliché as well.

Recently, Donna found out that she was pregnant with a girl, our first child together. My father’s name was Frank, and Frank was the name that was forced upon me when I was born. But in refusing to keep that name as a teenager, I overthrew my family and my past. Now that I’m fortyone, I want it back again. So Donna and I have chosen a name for the girl: Frankie Jean. (The Jean comes from Donna’s mother’s name, Jeanette.) The way I look at it, we’ve taken our families, glued them together, and finally closed the circle on my father. As I write this, my knees are on the floor and I’m praying that I can keep the circle together, unbroken, forever.

T
he moment the doctor saw me, he took me off the Zoloft and Wellbutrin. But I continued to hallucinate from the aches and pressures in my bones. I still heard the radio voices, and the bed undulated every night.

I went to my orthopedic specialist to beg him to put me back on pain medication. I told him that my shoulders and neck had frozen, that I had to crank my guitar up a notch whenever I played, and that I had to move my whole body in order to tilt my head back. He didn’t need to hear all that. He just looked at me, more scrunched up than ever, and said, “You’re losing the battle.”

And he was right: the ankylosing spondylitis was taking over. The gray ghost was winning. The doctor put me back on pain pills and gave me a drug that was basically lightweight psychological Valium. The gray ghost could have my body, but I was going to keep my mind, thank you very much. Slowly, the voices in my head died down and my bed stopped rocking at night. Now, I only feel insane half the time; the other half I
am
insane.

A few years back, I had met a thin, mysterious girl named Robbie, an underwater photographer who had blown her ear out during a two-hundred-foot dive and was now working in the production office on tour to see how creatures above sea level behaved. She talked with the intelligence and wit of a forty-year-old, though she was only in her twenties. The way she carried on a conversation was something I could never do: everything she said sounded composed and thought out. I was so captivated by her that after the tour I wrote down her phone number, left her a message, and eventually flew to Tennessee to visit her. I did not return alone.

As Robbie and I spent more time together, and she became my only friend, I realized that she was the woman I had been trying to find all my life, but had failed to miserably. She wasn’t into drinking or drugging or nasty stuff, and, consequently, she has helped me stay on the straight and narrow. Plus, she wasn’t after my money, because she had her own company, Nature Films, which supplies photos and footage for my second-favorite things next to the guitar: the Discovery Channel, the Learning Channel, and the National Geographic channel. Vince has Heidi, Nikki has Donna, and now I have Robbie. Whenever I see her shots on TV, I smile and say, “That’s my old lady.”

I’m an old fart now, so it’s hard for me to tour with the band. But I’m not as burnt out as I was during
Generation Swine
, because I realized that what makes me happy is playing what I wrote in the original ad in
The Recycler
that first led me to Mötley—“loud, rude, and aggressive.” Nikki’s an old fuck too, but he still wants Mötley Crüe to take over the world. That will never change about him. He always says, “I want to win.” And I know he still can. If I didn’t believe that, I’d be with Tommy.

When I returned home from the
New Tattoo
tour, Robbie looked at me and smiled.

“What?” I asked her.

“It’s coming back,” she said.

“What’s coming back?”

“The purple people eater.”

The wild magenta aura that Tom Zutaut first saw, that I lost during the
Girls
tour—it had returned. But it’s in the black stages now, sort of a waning purple.

W
hile we were touring in Japan, Heidi called. It was 5
A.M.
, so I knew that something had to be wrong. She said that my manager, Bert, was at his home in Nashville and trying desperately to reach me. I called him, and he could hardly force the words out.

“You’re the only one I can talk to,” he said. “When I saw you go through this, I never thought that it would happen to me.”

Bert’s son had been playing basketball the previous afternoon with some friends when he suddenly collapsed. A brain aneurysm had killed him on the spot, with no previous symptoms or warnings. After Japan, I flew directly to Nashville to stay with Bert. When Skylar died, he had been right there with me. Now it was my turn, because I knew exactly what he was going through.

Tommy, Nikki, and Mick can rag on me about whatever they want. But they don’t know—they wouldn’t even be able to fathom—what it’s like to watch as your child dies. If they just put themselves in my shoes for a second, they would hate it. They could never go through that pain. Maybe then they’d understand why I fucking drink so much.

My time with Bert was another reminder that life was short and love was rare. When I returned to L.A., I pledged to tie the knot with Heidi. After going out for seven years, which was longer than I had ever been married, I realized that she was my soul mate. Other women had dated me for the good times—the Ferraris, the Porsches, the mansions, not to mention the incredible sex—but only Heidi had ever stuck around for the bad, through death, depression, and money problems. Heidi knew not to expect a rock-and-roll fairy tale, an expense account of twenty thousand dollars a month for purses, or a husband who had made it through life without the deep scars, guilt, and anger that come with having killed a good friend in a car crash and lost a four-year-old daughter to cancer. Supposedly, eighty-five percent of couples don’t even make it though the death of a child, whether they are the natural parents or not. But somehow Heidi and I made it out the other end not just as lovers but also as best friends.

We set a wedding date, and then celebrated the decision by going to watch the Kings play hockey. After the game, we ran into Tom Arnold, who introduced us to some of the players. They all wanted to party somewhere, so I suggested the Havana Room, a private cigar club in Beverly Hills mostly for producers, actors, lawyers, and a plastic surgeon or two. I think I’m the only rocker who’s a member.

We were all getting sloshed there—except for Tom Arnold, who doesn’t drink—when Mel Gibson, who was sitting alone at the bar, asked if he could join us. Eventually, the party wound down to just me, Mel, and Heidi at 3
A.M.
The staff wanted to close, but they didn’t want to kick us out. So they let us stay there by ourselves and smoke cigars.

We left the club an hour later and drove to my house, shot pool, and took goofy Polaroids of each other until six in the morning. I passed out, but Mel still wanted to rock. Heidi shook me back to life in the afternoon, laughing, “I can’t believe I had to kick Mel Gibson out of the house.” Sometime after sunrise, she had called him a taxi to take him back to the Four Seasons. That evening, Heidi and I turned on the news, which was broadcasting a story about how the Havana Room had burned down. They said that two gentlemen had stayed at the club late and thrown their lit butts in a trash can, which caught fire and set the place ablaze. Now, on top of everything else, I was an arsonist.

Not long afterward, Heidi and I had a small but beautiful Beverly Hills wedding to the tune of Van Morrison’s “Crazy Love” and a coterie of bridesmaids consisting almost entirely of Playmates. After everything I had lost, I had a woman who was the most beautiful bride, the most amazing person inside and out, that I had ever met. She was the only woman I’ve dated who could just be one of the guys, from putting money in strippers’ G-strings on our first date to smoking stogies with Mel Gibson on our last date as an unmarried couple. I asked one of my closest friends in the whole world to be the best man at the wedding: Nikki Sixx. Afterward, Heidi and I returned to our house in Beverly Hills and adopted two German shepherds that like to bite Nikki.

I suppose the rest of the band would make fun of me for belonging to a cigar club, living in Beverly Hills, racing cars, and trying to be some sort of entertainment mogul (I recently started a production company with Marco Garibaldi; his wife, Priscilla Presley; and some stockbrokers from Chicago—we might even hire Doug Thaler to work in the mail room). But what they don’t understand is that I’m doing the same things I always have. Instead of getting drunk with Tommy and Nikki and their drug dealers, I’m doing the same thing with Mel Gibson. Instead of kicking back and living the good life at the beach, I’m living the good life at the Havana Room. It’s important to be true to yourself, and not lose your identity by trying too hard to conform to everyone else’s expectations and rules.

After the insanity of the
Girls
tour, I think we lost sight of ourselves. Mötley Crüe became a sober band, then we became a band without a lead singer, then we became an alternative band. But what everybody always loved Mötley Crüe for was being a fucking decadent band: for being able to walk in a room and inhale all the alcohol, girls, pills, and trouble in sight. I suppose a happy ending would be to say that we learned our lesson and that it’s wrong. But fuck that.