Sex, Drugs, Ratt & Roll: My Life in Rock

by Stephen Pearcy

  More than once I went to the bathroom to take a piss, took a look at myself in the mirror, and bashed it with my fist. And then I’d just pass out.

  In 1997, when Jewel was one, the guys in Ratt started to make noise about getting back together. We hadn’t really made the effort to mend any fences, but our catalog needed stimulation, which is to say, people weren’t buying our albums anymore. So we started to see the wisdom in making a new record. The result was Collage, with Robbie Crane from Vertex coming in to help out as best he could. It was a strange album, not only because we didn’t have anything new to say, but because Juan chose to no longer be part of our group. We said we were Ratt, yet without Juan and Robbin, we weren’t, really, at all. Nevertheless, we filled up a record’s worth of time with B sides and old Mickey Ratt material.

  The Collage tour started off as well as could be expected. After our long hiatus, audiences were psyched to come out and see us, and we functioned as a band with a minimum of bickering. I even started to think that maybe we’d put some of our differences behind us. Then midway through the tour, I was out on the edge of the stage at an enormous festival when suddenly I lost my footing and I fell off the stage. It was a sheer drop of ten feet or so, and I landed directly on my knee, and the kneecap more or less imploded.

  Oh, man, I thought, the old pain flaring inside me. This is so not good. . . .

  Maybe I was just older. But the pain felt more intense than anything I’d ever experienced, and it just wouldn’t go away. Being run over by a car truly had nothing on this. I went into shock immediately, and I ended up at the hospital. The tour was over that night. I was flown back to our house in Studio City, and on that flight, I actually thought about taking myself out. I really did. I was in so much pain.

  The doctors patched me up. I’ve always been lucky like that. But the first few months of my recovery were living hell. If I’d been a little out of control with my opiates before, well, now I was literally eating pain pills by the dozen. Drinking shitloads of booze right along with them, too. And then trying to help care for the kid on top of all that.

  I was in pretty terrible shape there for a bit. I was on crutches for six months, and I felt like an invalid, just like I had when I was in high school. Crutch my way out of bed. Crutch to the kitchen to get myself a beer. Crutch my way to the baby. Then to the bathroom. There was no escaping myself or the constant dull ache that spread from my leg through my whole body.

  Take the easy way out, I kept thinking to myself. You know how to do it. . . .

  Jewel was probably the only reason I got through it. I had a child to look after. So even if I was never going to be nominated for dad of the year, at least I knew that I had to keep myself in the game, for her sake.

  Painkillers were central to my life. You name it, I had it. The worst part about pain pills is that the more you use them, the less they work. I’d been abusing opiates for my own cloudy-headed pleasure for decades. Now that I needed them for legitimate purposes, they weren’t working according to plan. I moved up to heavier shit, like hospital-grade Demerol. Eventually I had to find a Dr. Feelgood. It wasn’t right, but I felt like I had to have a bunch of those pills around constantly.

  “Stephen, Jewel’s crying. Can you change her diaper?”

  “Really? My knee is killing me, and I’m supposed to change the fucking diaper?”

  The healing process was probably tougher on me mentally than it was physically. I’d gotten through this whole thing once when I was a teenager, and I just wasn’t sure if I could do it again. Some mornings I’d wake up, look around at the walls, the woman sleeping next to me, and my ruined leg, and just think to myself, How the fuck did I get here? Wasn’t I, like, playing Madison Square Garden just a little while ago?

  My ego was bruised. I wanted to be the Stephen who was on top of the world, not the Stephen dragging around a busted leg—a guy on stages, not crutches. It would take a river of booze to turn my head around. As soon as I felt comfortable getting behind the wheel of a car, I reclaimed my bar stool at Mexicali. It was there that I met a guy who revealed to me, after a couple of drinks, that he had a good heroin connection.

  “Ever try it?”

  “I’ve smoked it,” I admitted. “Pretty fun. But that stuff’ll get under your skin. My buddy’s off God knows where because of it.”

  The dude shrugged. “I’m just saying, if you ever need some, I can hook you up.”

  Of course it wasn’t too long before I decided to take him up on it. I never got a stash for myself at first: Just on the way to the bar, I’d go over to his studio and smoke. Then I’d pop over to Mexicali, dig into some brews, have lunch, waste away most of the day. Then, on the way home, I’d have another little smoke, just to level me out, help me deal with the wife. . . .

  Heroin did a number on the knee pain, I will say that. It got my mind off the physical agony inside me. It got my mind off everything, really. I grew to love and depend upon that blankness—the peace, that utter lack of worry. Soon I was buying a little stash to take home with me, and holing up inside my studio for hours at a time.

  “Stephen?” Melissa said, banging on my door. “Want some dinner, honey?”

  “No, I’m writing. Please don’t bother me.”

  Smoking heroin will keep you high for a couple of hours, unless you’re constantly smoking it and have to keep chasing that dragon all the time. I wasn’t there yet. I’d sit back, relax, watch the tar evaporate, and suck the sweet smoke into my lungs. I don’t believe Melissa ever had a clue.

  “What’s that smell?” she said, wrinkling her nose, when I opened up the door of my studio after a long afternoon spent in the pleasure of my own body.

  “Hash,” I said, brushing past her. “I’ve been smoking some really good hash. So, try to be mellow, okay?”

  Still, even as my substance abuse issues steadily grew harder for me to ignore, I never lost sight of the fact that I had a little kid. This is special, I told myself, on an almost daily basis. She’ll only grow up once, so don’t fuck it up. Don’t miss it. I would always play with her, spend time with her, laugh and stare into her eyes. She was growing up to be a playful, gorgeous little toddler, always smiling.

  “Your dad loves you,” I told her, every day. “Hey, can I tell you a secret, kid? Huh? Can I tell you Daddy loves you so much?”

  We horsed around together and drew with crayons. When I felt like I needed space from the house and my domestic situation, I’d pop Jewel in her stroller and we’d go out on long, slow walks together, as I tried to get that knee back into something resembling working order. I had no trouble communicating with my daughter, even when her vocabulary consisted of about five or six words. We had a heart connection.

  Getting along with her mother was much more of a challenge. We bickered and fought a lot. Rarely did I feel carefree in our relationship. But when Melissa started to talk about getting married, when Jewel was three or four, I listened to her. Maybe marriage would provide some perspective for us—shift things a bit, make us more like other couples we knew, couples who got along.

  “I think it would help us,” she said. “But it would also be good for Jewel.”

  “I guess it would be good for her,” I admitted. “Most parents are married.”

  “So, you’re okay with it?” Melissa asked. “Are you serious?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I guess so. We’ll be together, you and me.”

  “Man and wife,” Melissa said, giggling. “And baby makes three.”

  We were married in the summer of 2000, out on Catalina Island. Chris was there, and Melissa’s dad, and of course my mom and some of my family. Jewel was along for the ride, our perfect little flower girl. Melissa looked incredible, dressed all in white. Yet of course, I wouldn’t have been satisfied if I didn’t get smashed for my own wedding. I was so high on pills and smoke and booze that I could barely stand up straight.

  “Stephen?” the minister asked me, sternly. “Do you take this woman to be your law
fully wedded wife?”

  I squinted my eyes a little, felt a sweet little opiate rush. Through my haze of Percodan and Valium, we all looked so beautiful.

  “I do,” I mumbled.

  We were official now. But nothing had changed. If anything, it was worse—now we felt obligated to each other. We were still getting on each other’s nerves, constantly at each other’s throats. Taking part in a legal ceremony had fixed none of that.

  I started not coming home. If a fight developed, I always had a set answer: “I’m out of here.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to go cool off, and wait for you to change your attitude. I’ll be at a hotel. See you in a day or so.”

  Hotel rooms were my portable party spots. They reminded me of all the years I’d spent on the road, although this time, I was partying by myself. It was so much calmer, so much less stressful than back in the Ratt days. Now, all I needed was a balloon of heroin and a couple of grams of good weed, and I’d just celebrate my independence for six or eight hours. I’d sit back, break out the notebook and the pen, and write song lyrics. That was living life. . . .

  “Hey,” I’d say nonchalantly when I returned. “How’s it going?”

  “Oh, great. Have a good time?” Melissa spat.

  “Still stuck on bitch, huh?” I turned on my heel. “Guess I came back too quick. See you in a couple of days.”

  I realized pretty quickly I wasn’t cut out to be anyone’s husband. I tried to be a good dad, at the very least, but it was the strangest period. By the early 2000s, I hadn’t been on top of the music world for a good long while, yet I was still selling records and still getting checks in the mail, royalties flying in. Not bad—and yet somehow, not so good. Since I was never completely clueless, I knew that things weren’t exactly going to turn around right away. I had to reevaluate who I was, and what I could give to the world. But I had the baggage of an entire life of partying to deal with and the bad habits that came with it.

  Life was gradually starting to spiral out of control for me. Then, in June of 2002, I got the news that I’d been waiting to hear for a long time. My brother—my partner in crime, my right-hand man, our Ratt leader, the King—was gone. Robbin had died.

  He’d been HIV-positive since 1994, on and off drugs and in and out of rehab. Losers had surrounded him. He’d never locked the door to his place, and nearly all of his treasured goods, his gold records and his guitars, had been looted. His weight had ballooned to epic proportions, and his music career had almost completely petered out. But the news still shocked me. He had been my best friend and my closest musical collaborator. Now he was gone forever.

  The grief over Robbin dying combined with my own feelings of helplessness, and together they created a psychic sludge that surrounded me on all sides. I was trapped in a marriage that wasn’t turning out right. I felt myself sinking downward.

  I received a phone call from the director of an independent film called Camp Utopia. Some months prior, I had agreed to score the film for him.

  “Stephen, hey, man, I need a favor.”

  “Huh?” I was in a haze of confusion and grief. I was searching my pockets to see if I had any bits of heroin to smoke.

  “Our main actor, he just backed out—listen, do you think you could come out for filming this weekend?”

  “For what reason?” I turned my pockets inside out. There was nothing there.

  “We were all talking about it—we’d like you to play the role of Timothy Bach, the cult leader who happens to slaughter his whole following!”

  It was just insane enough to attract me. Why the fuck not?

  I drove about an hour outside of Los Angeles to the site where they’d be filming, in some national forest at the foothills of a clutch of mountains. All the actors looked young and bright and ambitious, so excited to be on the set of an indie horror film.

  “Hey, aren’t you that guy—?” one of them began.

  “Yes,” I said shortly. “I’m that guy.”

  I was looking around for anything to get fucked up on. I didn’t have any smack with me, but I had a few pills, which I swallowed in the first few minutes of being on set. I had never really acted before. Sick with grief, I wondered why I was beginning my career as a thespian at this particular moment.

  “Stephen, Dr. Timothy Bach is a madman—a serial murderer,” the director explained to me. “He’s a real creep. Think you can go there for us?” I couldn’t stop thinking of Robbin. Not for a single moment.

  “Watch me,” I said.

  The film had a couple of sexy scenes: A young, dark-haired female costar got naked and lay on top of me. The set was cleared. It was just me, the director, and her. She writhed on top of me, pantomiming sex. I could feel her hot breath on my cheek.

  “SAY MY NAME,” I ordered her, reading off a cue card.

  “Timothy Bach, Timothy Bach,” she cried, bouncing up and down. “You’re my hero. . . .”

  We pretend-had-sex for a while. Then I took a sword and chopped her head off and carried it around with me. I proceeded to slaughter the entire cult after that, chopping off limbs, heads—anything I could get Timothy’s hands on.

  Home wasn’t good. I found myself out on the East Coast for a while, in Philadelphia, shacking up with some funky little pop tart who had dated some professional hockey player. He was out of the picture, I was in for that moment.

  It was the strangest thing. She was a good-looking chick in her early twenties with a septum ring whom I’d met in some bar when we were out on the road. We didn’t have a sexual relationship. She didn’t give a shit about Ratt. She just liked to drink. So that’s what we did.

  “Hey, let me buy this one. . . .”

  “It’s on me,” I said, laying my wallet down on the bar. “You’re the one putting me up. Drinks are on me.”

  “You’re too generous.”

  “No,” I said, smiling sadly. “I’m not that.”

  Every night for weeks, we hit the bars and sucked back Jack or gin and tonics or vodkas on the rocks. Come closing time, we’d stumble home to her little brick apartment in South Philly and crawl into her bed, fully clothed.

  I was running away from everything that mattered. You got a little girl at home, Stephen, I told myself every time I looked in the mirror. What are you doing here, man?

  I tried to silence the voice. I ate, I drank, went to clubs, stayed out all night. I found her stash of painkillers and dove in.

  IT WAS FALL IN PHILADELPHIA. MY heart was turning brown, dying.

  November came, then December. Snow began to fall. I walked out into the cold with my leather jacket on, shivering. Flakes flew into my eyes and mouth. I breathed in the cold winter air, sensing something awakening in me. Was I going to die one of these nights? I welcomed the thought of it, some days. I wondered who would miss me, exactly.

  I’d like to say it was thoughts of Jewel that brought me home, and that’s partially true. But I was also having way too much trouble getting heroin. I knew my connections back in L.A. They were reliable. I said good-bye to my dark-haired septum-ring chick and got onto a plane, heading for the place where it would never snow.

  My wife met me at the airport.

  “Hey there,” she said. We shared a long silence.

  “You didn’t have to pick me up,” I said, finally. “I could have taken a taxi.”

  “I didn’t want you to get lost.”

  Reconciliation was always on my mind. Jewel had grown up in the few months I’d been gone. When I looked at my kid in the face, noting her longer hair, the shape of her head, her clearer eyes, I couldn’t believe I’d gone out on the road at all. But heroin really helps you not experience any of the tough emotions. Remorse and shame, they’re not really part of the heroin equation. Booze isn’t too bad in that department either, now that I think about it.

  If me and smack had been flirting before Robbin’s death, we were fucking now. I’d started out real slowly, rationalizing my behavior
by telling myself that I was smoking, not banging, but it had caught up with me. I might have been back home, but I was a slave to something that had nothing to do with family.

  Melissa and I labored painfully to improve our relationship, but when we fought, we fought loudly. Once you get past a certain point in your relationship, the littlest thing can set you off, and for me and Melissa, it could be anything.

  “Why do you and Mom always yell at each other?” Jewel asked me once, with such confusion that I started tearing up immediately.

  “Kiddo,” I sobbed. “I’m really sorry. . . . I don’t mean to put you through this stuff. . . .”

  “Dad, why are you crying? What’s wrong? Don’t worry, okay? Everything is going to be all right.”

  Heroin was my problem. And yet, it was also my greatest comfort. Heroin was my lover, my friend, and my enemy. It was my everything. Subtly, my life turned into a twenty-four-hour maintenance program. Making sure that the levels of opiate in my bloodstream were properly attuned became priority number one. If I didn’t have my smack, the day was simply fucking ruined.

  My connection lived right around the corner. He was dependable, close-lipped, prompt, and best of all, he never passed judgment.

  A balloon costs from sixty to a hundred dollars and lasts you a day or so, depending on your addiction. You can sit there and smoke it every ten minutes. Some people will smoke every half hour, or every hour. Beginners can get off once and stay good for half a day. It depends on your metabolism. It depends on what you’re going for.

  I always felt better if I had some tar in reserve. I kept a little bit in my car, a little bit in my studio. Something like a security blanket.

  I would hole up in my studio with my guitar, a good hunk of tar, aluminum foil, my Zippo, and think about better times. My happy times . . .

  On New Year’s Eve, just a couple of months after we’d gotten signed, we had a huge gig scheduled at the Santa Monica Civic. The mood backstage before the show was festive. My mother showed up early with my uncle Sal, and she walked around, a drink in her hand, smiling from ear to ear, inspecting things.