This Is Gonna Hurt: Music, Photography and Life Through the Distorted Lens of Nikki Sixx (6 page)

Bouncing back and forth between my mother, who moved every few months, and my grandparents, who also roamed, I really never felt like I fit in anywhere. I realize now the damage that was done, but at the time I just felt like I could evaporate at any moment and wake up in a new city, with a new life and a new school, only to be unhinged again in the blink of an eye. It was the beginning of the disconnection that has always made me feel like a ghost…

I am constantly rummaging in my past, trying to find me, and sometimes I stumble upon memories that spawn even more digging. It’s not always such a happy thing. But I am so lucky to have all these skeletons rattling around in my closet. Through them my awareness grows, and thanks to that I feel inspired to make music, do photography, and even write these words.

As I explore this paranormal fantasy of my life, it becomes obvious that it isn’t a fantasy at all. My father abandoning me at such a young age left a ghost in his place, a huge hole that I tried filling with a million toxic concoctions. My mother, vacant and ghostly in her own way, was living the high life of the sixties and seventies and wouldn’t realize the hurt she was causing me until it was too late. I have had to learn to forgive to move forward.

And there was at least one more spirit I had to face.

Flash forward. I was sitting in my mansion. Married with kids and all the trimmings. Proud to be sober, not only off alcohol but cocaine and heroin, too. Mötley Crüe had just finished the Dr. Feelgood tour and we were rolling in success. Ferraris lined the driveway, custom Harleys overflowed the eight-car garage. Years of hard touring and smart business decisions had paid off.

It wasn’t enough.

Being off drugs isn’t always a cure-all. Once the numbness lifts, the original pain is still there. I don’t think that it was all my mother’s fault. But at that moment I couldn’t find a better target for my anger. I told myself that I was trying to be a good son by reaching out to her from time to time. And maybe I was. But now I see I also had something else in mind.

I picked up the phone and invited her to come down and stay with me awhile. Maybe if she saw the material success, the financial brilliance, the stable family man, she would have to recognize that I was right all along and she was wrong. Maybe then she would have to say, “I am sorry, son, I wasn’t there for you. I wasn’t a great mother.” And then all this anger would melt away. I felt that my misery needed to be shifted and lifted off me onto her.

Looking back, I think my head was big but my heart was crumbling.

Mom arrived at the house and we did all the usual stuff families do. I showed her to the guest room and she settled in. It’s weird sitting across the table from your mother when you two don’t really know each other. I was trying, really trying to connect, but that damn pang in my gut, the one that always got me in trouble, just wouldn’t leave things alone even for a minute, and suddenly there it was, bam, right between the fucking eyes…

“Mom, where is Lisa?”

Okay, there goes that happy moment.

Lisa Feranna was my sister, born about two years after me. I don’t remember seeing her, ever. All I remember is my mom telling me Lisa was in an institution somewhere, and it upset Lisa too much for us to visit her. She was comfortable there, with people who cared for her, and seeing us would ruin everything. I didn’t have a clear idea what any of it meant. I didn’t even know if she was handicapped or retarded or mentally ill. Once, someone in a club in Hollywood called me retarded, and I knocked the guy out—not because of the insult (I have heard worse), but because it somehow connected to my sister. To the unknowing, to the secret.

Whenever I would ask my half sister, Ceci, she told me the same things my mother had said. But how would Ceci know any more than I did? All we had was Mom’s word.

I can smell a rat a mile away, and that day at my house my intuition was on high alert. So I asked my mother and then waited to hear what she would say.

Again she told me Lisa was with a nice family who loved her very much. “They have always taken care of her, Nikki, and she is better with them than if I had raised her.” It was the ’60s, my mom said, and things were different back then. She had no way of caring for a child with the problems Lisa had.

I have always felt guilty that I didn’t think of Lisa very often when I was growing up. I went through life just accepting the situation: Lisa was not present in my childhood. I’ve never even seen a picture of her, much less one of us together. In my early years, moving around with my mother and grandparents, I felt like a tumbleweed blowing in the wind, only stopping when I got tangled up in something. Like barbed wire. No wonder I seemed to have forgotten Lisa. It feels like she was erased in all that moving back and forth. God, it’s confusing when this stuff bubbles up, and it fucking hurts.

Listen up

Listen up

There’s a devil in the church

Got a bullet in the chamber

This is gonna hurt

—“This Is Gonna Hurt,” Sixx:A.M.

I started to hammer my mother with more questions. Do you talk to the family that cares for her? Is Lisa OK now? How old is she?

My mother just sat there, looking down at the table.

Then came my final bullet.

“Mom, I want their phone number.”

Silence.

Lisa, I don’t remember what you look like anymore,
the years have decayed my memory

But if I could imagine you as anything,

LISA 1
fig.37c

LISA 2
fig.37c

I’d imagine you like this…Love your brother.

HEAVEN
fig.37c

“Tell me the number. I want to go see her. Please…I don’t understand any of this and I need to…”

She had the phone number memorized. Amazing.

Trust me when I say that, as a father, I understood for the first time the pain my mother must have felt putting my sister in that home. I saw it on her face, and my heart softened.

I wrote down the number and took a deep breath. I had no idea what I was going to do next, but somehow I felt prepared.

You say it’s all a crisis

You say it’s all a blur

There comes a time you’ve gotta face it face it

—“This Is Gonna Hurt,” Sixx:A.M.

I left the room and headed for my library. I sat in the overstuffed leather chair behind the desk and reached for the phone. Finally ready for some answers, yet I still didn’t know if I had the balls to spit out my questions. I punched in the seven digits.

A simple “Hello.” There was no “San Jose Medical Hospital,” or even an official-sounding answering machine saying, “We’re out of the office and bla bla bla…” Just a simple “Hello.”

I felt numb and cold. I am sure I sounded shaky, but I began my explanation, zombielike.

“My name is Frank Feranna…” I said to the phone. I had barely begun when the man’s voice on the other end said, “We were wondering when you were gonna come back.”

He told me that his father ran the facility and he grew up with my sister Lisa. They took care of about four people, but Lisa had been there the longest. He remembered when I used to visit Lisa, and he and I would play together since we were around the same age. They didn’t understand why I stopped coming.

I was in shock. I had no idea what he was talking about, no memory of any of the things he was describing to me. Even today I can’t remember him, or the visits, or even Lisa. Sometimes it feels like they’re all ghosts. Other times I think
I’m
the ghost.

Hanging up, I looked out the window. I didn’t know what I felt.

Lisa Marie Feranna, born November 12, 1960,

in San Jose, California

Father, Serafino Feranna

Mother, Deanna Feranna

Brother, Frank Carlton Feranna (now Nikki Sixx)

Born with Down’s syndrome

90% deaf and 100% blind

Crippled and paraplegic

Confined to a wheelchair or bed

She never weighed more than sixty pounds, so she spent her entire life dressed in children’s clothes, and her Sunday shoes never had a scuff because she never took a step.

Her greatest pleasure, he told me, was to sit in her wheelchair and listen to the local rock radio station. She loved music and since she was almost completely deaf, she really needed it loud. That made me smile.

With Mötley Crüe, I played shows right down the street from where Lisa lived. She may even have heard the rumble of my bass while thousands of people sang along to the music that was inspired by the tear in my heart. What the fuck has happened to me? The coffin had cracked open and the skeletons were about to come to life.

When I got off the phone, my mom was still sitting at the kitchen table, and as I sat down I knew nothing between us was ever going to be the same.

One night, years later, I got a call from Vince Neil, who was weeping into the phone. He said someone had called him to say that my sister was dead. My heart stopped as I thought of my half sister, Ceci, and wondered what the hell had happened. Vince said the call had come from San Jose and then it hit me. Not Ceci. Lisa.

The problem with procrastinating is that sometimes it bites you in the ass. At that moment, as Vince hung up the phone, it hit me.

After all the conversations with my mother, after the phone calls with the family that was taking care of my poor sister, after all the anguish…I got busy. I went on tour, I went through a divorce, and I fucking lost connection to that feeling that I had to make Lisa’s life right. And now she was dead.

MOTHER
fig.01101

I have had to forgive myself for a lot of things in my life, but this was the hardest.