by Tommy Lee
Though I couldn’t afford a new Styrofoam ice chest or a real refrigerator for the house, I had no problem buying a brand-new Corvette. The day I drove it off the lot, I went to the Reseda Country Club and picked up a girl. We walked out to the parking lot, and I placed her on the hood, spread her legs in the air, and started fucking her. Slowly, a crowd gathered, and the only thing I remember them saying was: “Yeah, dude! Nice car!”
To forget about Lita, I buried myself between the legs of other women. A small college girl who was attractive in a nerdy, bespectacled way moved into the other side of the building complex a few weeks after I started living there with Robbin. So one night, instead of going out with Robbin, I stopped by her house with a bottle of champagne, a bindle of cocaine, and a bunch of quaaludes. We partied all night and, as planned, ended up fucking. When I walked back to my apartment at seven in the morning, the manager was outside watering the flowers. Trying to suck up, I waved and smiled at him, as innocent as could be. He turned, looked at me, and dropped the hose. He just froze. I couldn’t figure out what his problem was. I walked into the apartment and accidentally stepped on Robbin. “Dude, what happened to you?” he exclaimed once his eyes adjusted to the light.
“I was fucking that nerd chick. What’s the big deal?” I asked.
“No, dude, go look in the mirror,” he said.
I went over to the mirror, which was a giant broken pane someone had probably smashed out of a building lobby one drunken night, and looked at myself. My whole face was covered in blood, from my chin to my nose. Evidently, she had been having her period when I went down on her, and I was too fucked up to even notice. By the look of it, it must have been her first day.
After a few weeks of fucking everything I could, I heard that a little punk rocker had introduced Lita to her new boyfriend, some guy named Don from a band called Heaven. Sure, I didn’t want her anymore, but that didn’t mean someone else was allowed to have her. Raging with illogical and hypocritical jealousy, I called Tommy. We met at my house, each grabbed a two-by-four plank, and walked over to Lita’s house to assess the situation. We unlocked the door and stood in the middle of the room with our weapons. The only person home was the little punk rocker, who cowered in the corner as we rushed him, beating him mercilessly over the head and chest, until finally breaking the boards over his back. We left him in the corner, with blood streaked all over the walls.
A few hours later, the phone rang at my new place. “Fuck you!” It was Lita. “You are such a fucking asshole.”
I explained my side of the story, and then she cut me down with a few well-chosen words that still ring in my head to this day: “That punk you just beat up didn’t even introduce me to Don!”
I felt especially bad that I had involved Tommy, because the night before I had fucked his girlfriend, Honey. She had called to tell me she had drugs. I went over to partake, and one thing led to another, which led to me naked in the bathroom looking for some kind of ointment to put on the scratch marks on my back. It was yet another image to keep out of my mind at their engagement party. He was my best friend, and probably would have understood. But I’ve never been able to bring myself to tell him about it.
Somebody told me there would be hot actress-type chicks kicking it at this party in Hollywood. So you know I was there. That’s how I met Honey. The first thing I noticed—the first thing I always notice—was that she had huge tits. She had an amazing body with the curves of a lingerie model—which, of course, she was. And she had a pretty face, but it wasn’t exactly soft or delicate—it was covered not with physical scars but more subtle emotional ones. I went into the bathroom with her to do some coke, and the next thing I knew I was leaving her bathroom the next morning.
That should have been the end of it. But, dude, I always fuck up: I’m too open, too easily led, too ready to fucking fall in love all the time. I obsessed on Bullwinkle because she could cum like a racehorse, and I flipped for Honey because she was a lingerie model and I was so flattered a real model would even talk to me. But I never took a step back to look at them as they really were: fucking crazy, dude.
Like Bullwinkle, Honey was violently jealous. One night at the Troubadour, a girl walked behind me and pinched my ass. Without even stopping to ask questions, Honey wheeled around and put her cigarette out in the girl’s fucking eye. Then Honey took her outside, twisted her arm behind her back, and fucking broke it. “Let’s see you pinch him now,” she spit as she walked away. I saw the girl at the Rainbow in a cast two weeks later. She was too scared to even say hello.
So what did I do after that, dude? I fucking moved in with Honey. We found a condo on Gower Street in Hollywood. The day I came home carrying my first gold and platinum records for Shout at the Devil, she got jealous over a photograph of some girl she had found and threw a plate at me, which hit the case the gold award was in and shattered it.
I never got jealous like she did. At one of RTB’s parties, we were all sitting around the Jacuzzi. She gave me a blow job, then I told her to suck RTB’s dick. I thought that was good business sense: Do a favor for the producer. Of course, I was too fucked up to remember that he had no interest in shit like that. He never seemed to partake in the girls or drugs at his parties.
The only time I got pissed off was during the Ozzy tour. We were in Buffalo, and I was stoked because I had seen snow for the first time in my life. Backstage, a fan came up to me and said, “Hey, dude, your wife has a great-looking gash. You’re a lucky man.”
I was wasted and had just come offstage, so I grabbed him and said, “What did you say?”
“I said that your wife has got a fine pussy.”
I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about, but it sounded like a flat-out insult. So I swung and punched him in the fucking side of his head. He hit the ground unconscious. It was a good, solid hit, and I was proud of it. We waited on the tour bus while our manager, Doug Thaler, talked to the kid and tried to convince him not to press charges.
“What was that all about?” I asked Doug when he climbed onto the bus. It turned out that Honey had sold photos of us fucking to a magazine called Celebrity Sex, and hadn’t told me about it.
We pulled over at the nearest 7-Eleven and grabbed the issue. It was full of head-on action shots I had taken one night and the headline was something like “Tommy Lee’s Gal Pal Tells (and Shows) All.” I could have killed that bitch for trading off my newfound fame behind my back. But what did I do instead?
After the Ozzy shows, the tour bus dropped me off outside our condo. I walked to the door, swigging off a bottle of Jack I’d been drinking since the night before. Honey was waiting in the kitchen in a cleavage-bursting black dress. I was ready to cuss her out but she interrupted me. “Guess what?” she asked.
“What?”
“I found a minister, I bought some rings, I got everything set.”
“For what?”
“I wanna get married.”
“To me? But you just fucking sold our pictures to a porn mag and didn’t even tell me.”
“It was going to be a birthday present for you. And I needed the money to buy the rings for our wedding. So I couldn’t tell you.”
I tried to think for a moment, but the alcohol wouldn’t let me. Out of my mouth came the stupidest words I’ve ever spoken: “All right, fuck it. Let’s do it.”
My parents were horrified. They offered me a hundred good reasons not to get married—I was too young, her jealousy would only get worse, they didn’t want a woman who would sell our intimate photos to a porn mag as a daughter-in-law. I refused to listen to them, but fortunately circumstances soon intervened.
The real problems began when we were home fighting because a girl was calling the house and hanging up. I didn’t even know who it was, but Honey kept insisting I was cheating on her. After an hour of shouting, she calmed down and agreed that maybe the girl was just some random freak. So I went to the kitchen to make a peanut butter sandwich. All of a sudden, she ran into the
room, pulled open the silverware drawer, grabbed a butter knife, and plunged it into my back. The bitch was so fucking whacked that it actually penetrated the skin and slid in right next to my shoulder blade. I had to drive myself to the emergency room with a knife sticking out of my back.
We were always either fucking like porn stars or fighting like wrestlers. One night we went with RTB to one of the first WrestleMania matches, and she started picking a fight with me because she’d found a girl’s phone number in my pants pocket and, on top of that, my mother had talked to her on the phone and accidentally called her Jessica, which was Bullwinkle’s name. I had never been to a wrestling match before. But she wouldn’t fucking shut up and let me enjoy it.
After the match, Vince, Beth, RTB, Tom Zutaut, Honey, and I piled into RTB’s limo and headed for the Tropicana to watch mud wrestling. Honey had been nagging the whole time and, because I was ignoring her, kept getting fiercer and fiercer to goad me into a response. “Your mom’s a fucking cunt anyway,” she snarled. “I don’t know why you even still talk to her.”
“Please don’t call my mom that,” I sighed.
“Well, she is a cunt.”
I have a long fuse, which gets somewhat shorter when I’ve been drinking. Honey had just about burned what was left of that fuse to the bottom, and I could feel my body preparing to explode. The trick to dealing with women like Honey is not to let them provoke you, because then they’ve won. I always seem to end up letting them win. “Listen, you bitch.” I glared at her. “I’m not going to tell you again: Don’t call my mom a cunt!”
“She’s a cunt, cunt, cunt. Cunt!” Honey yelled.
“That’s it!” I turned to the driver. “Pull the car over. This fucking bitch is out of here!”
The driver pulled up to the curb, and I ordered Honey out. She refused and started punching me. So I grabbed her and dragged her onto the sidewalk. Then I reached back into the car, grabbed her purse, and threw it against the wall of the building behind her, splattering whatever shit was inside all over the ground.
She ran at me, screaming. “Your mom is a fucking cunt and you know it. That’s why you’re such a spoiled little brat who loves his mother’s cunt so much? Cunt, cunt, cunt!”
I drew my arm back and, before I could even think about what I was doing, squeezed my hand into a fist and fucking smashed her right in the grille, dude. Her hands flew to her mouth, and she dropped to the ground. I stood there shocked that I had actually lost all restraint—I’d never even dreamed of hitting a chick before. Then I jumped in the limo and slammed the door shut. As we drove away, I looked back and saw her kneeling on the pavement and spitting teeth into her hand, which was dripping with mucusy strands of blood.
“She would have driven any of us to do that,” Tom Zutaut said, reassuringly. “But someone’s got to help her find her teeth.”
He stopped the limo and jumped out to console her and pick up teeth.
The engagement was officially off.
When we left the Ozzy tour to do some shows on our own, bringing along Ratt for extra entertainment, the world—our world—wasn’t the same anymore. I heard “Shout at the Devil,” “Too Young to Fall in Love,” and “Looks That Kill” everywhere; there was hysteria whenever we showed up at record stores to sign albums; and when we performed in towns we’d never even been to before, thousands of kids would show up. We were in a new world—one I’d always wanted to be in since I saw that first rock concert in a gymnasium in Jerome. But I was just an Idaho kid. I didn’t know what to do in this new world or how to act. So I improvised.
After a concert at the Bronco Bowl in Dallas, Texas, a blond and a brunette in spandex and tube tops stumbled backstage before the show and said they wanted to do the whole band. It was either Vince or I who came up with the great idea of telling them that they’d have to work for it. We grabbed a champagne bottle off the hospitality table, and told the brunette that if she wanted to fuck us, she’d have to take the bottle and sit on it in the middle of the room.
“If you’re not still sitting on that bottle when we come back, then you can’t fuck the band,” Vince said as we went onstage to play.
After the show, she was still there, squatting in the middle of the room.
Vince ducked into the production office to get a blow job from two other girls (simultaneously), then we brought the two spandex girls out to the van.
Vince and Tommy took the front seat, and Mick and I sat in the back. The girls climbed into the front seat with Vince and Tommy and peeled off their clothes, which took a good five minutes because they were so tight. By the time they were off, Vince and Tommy were already fucking them doggy style. The girls were bent over the top of the seat, so the blond grabbed at my pants as she was being fucked while the brunette did the same to Mick. They fumbled, unsnapped, and unzipped until they were blowing both of us.
When we pulled into the hotel, we told the girls they had to remain naked. We took the elevator to Vince and Tommy’s room, and started drinking and getting stupid. The blond was sitting with her legs spread open on the bed, and that gave us ideas.
Tommy came back from the bathroom with a tube of toothpaste, so we stuffed it up her cap first. Then we figured it just wasn’t fair to leave her with toothpaste but no toothbrush. “What else do we have?” Tommy asked.
“How about the fucking phone?” someone, probably me, suggested.
We took the receiver off the hook and worked it inside until just the mouthpiece was hanging out. The girl sat there laughing the whole time, moaning occasionally, either because she was aroused or because she wanted us to think she was.
“I’m hungry,” Mick, who was watching bored from an armchair, grumbled.
We told him to fuck off, then realized that maybe a compromise was possible. I dialed room service and, suddenly, through the blond’s open legs, we heard a muffled voice: “Helloo, rhpmph suhhvissss.”
I bent over and recited our order into the girl’s crotch.
“Whhhttt rththmm?”
“Room two-two-seven,” I answered.
The brunette started laughing. Suddenly, Vince, in a flash of inspiration, turned to her. “What do you think you’re laughing at?”
She stopped and stared at him blankly. “Does your mother know where you are?” Vince asked.
“No,” the girl said.
“Don’t you think she’s worried about you?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Perhaps you should call her.” Suddenly it dawned on us what deviltry Vince was hatching. “What’s her phone number?”
She gave it to Vince, and he dialed it. Her mother answered and the brunette bent over her friend’s crotch. “Hi, Mom. I just called to say I’d be home soon. I’m at Sherry’s right now. Okay? Thanks.”
We didn’t just lose respect for the girls that night, we lost respect for ourselves.
When I returned to L.A., my half sister, Ceci, called and said that my mother had cracked and been committed to a mental institution in Seattle. I hadn’t talked to my mother since I left her standing at the Greyhound terminal six years ago and, though I was still so angry and bitter, I felt like I needed to see her again, to connect with some element of my past before I lost it all. So I took a plane to Seattle, saddened by the fact that we were having our reunion in a mental hospital. When I walked in, I hardly recognized her. Those six years had not been good to her. Once, she’d had it all: looks, talent, and wit. But now she looked more like Ozzy than my mother. I ran up to her and stopped short of hugging her. She fixed me with her eyes and the first thing out of her mouth was, “Did you write that song about me?”
“What song?” I asked, confused.
“‘Looks That Kill’!”
I was floored: There were so many things I wanted to say to her, so many things I wanted her to say to me. But that wasn’t one of them. I checked her out, put her in a cab, and brought her to my sister’s house. We hardly spoke the whole time. We were both too proud and stubborn t
o explain or apologize for anything. As we sat in my sister’s living room, flashing each other dirty, malevolent looks while my sister stood nearby, disapproving of both of us, I remembered why I had left in the first place. I just didn’t belong there. And so I stood up, left, and caught the next plane to Los Angeles, back to the relative sanity of my drug dealers.
THE FOLLOWING WEEK, WE LEFT FOR England to play a handful of dates on the Monsters of Rock bill with Van Halen, AC/DC, Dio, and, for one date, Y&T. The night we arrived in England, I was lying on my bed in a Novotel outside Nottingham when I heard a knocking sound on the bathroom window. I tried to tune it out, assuming that it was just my imagination. But it was persistent. Finally, I got up to look and discovered a leggy, beautiful blond standing on the ledge outside. I opened the window, and she looked me up and down. “Mind if I come in?” she asked, casual and polite, as if she were the neighborhood vicar stopping by for afternoon tea.
She very daintily stepped into the bathroom and asked: “Mind if I drop my knickers?”
“No, go ahead,” I answered, taken aback.
Though I was trying to seem casual, I’d never been more excited. “This is fucking cool!” I thought to myself. “I’m in England, the home of all my favorite bands—the Sweet, Slade, Bowie, Queen, the Sex Pistols—and there’s a chick coming in through the bathroom window, just like in the Beatles song.”
She took off her pants, so that they were hanging loose around one leg. I sat down on the toilet and she straddled me. With one hand on the towel rack and the other grabbing my hair, she got off. She stood up, pulled up her pants, and bowed slightly. “Thank you very much,” she said in her genteel accent. “It’s been an honor.”