The Heroin Diaries

by Nikki Sixx

  I was expecting to interview Vince and Mick and no offense to them but Nikki and Tommy were the guys you wanted to talk to. Tommy was banging Heather Locklear and Nikki was banging everybody else. So I was thrilled when Nikki and Tommy walked in the studio, although I think they couldn’t believe this young kid was the DJ. They had loads of people with them. Everybody was pretty wrecked–I remember Tommy had just had a fight in the club downstairs with some dude who had dissed Heather.

  We started the show and I said, “Hi, I’m Joey Vendetta, Nikki and Tommy from Mötley Crüe are here, and we’ll be talking to them after this.” I put on a track from Girls Girls Girls and as soon as it started, Nikki handed me a bottle of Jack. It didn’t take much to make me want to chug it–I was a twenty-year-old being handed a bottle of Jack by Nikki Sixx, so I chugged half of it in one shot! I was hammered inside two minutes and I just thought, I’m fucked.

  Then Nikki asked me if I’d ever had cocaine. I said no, and he said, “Well, you’re starting tonight.” He took out a bag and it wasn’t just a gram–you’d have needed a shovel to move it. He scooped some up with his little fingernail and put it under my nose, and I sniffed some up each nostril.

  I didn’t know then that, when you’re drinking, cocaine helps to level you out, but in thirty seconds I went from Mr. Drunk to Mr. Super-Confident. When the record ended I started gabbling like Wolfman Jack on acid, talking 100 mph. I started interviewing Nikki and Tommy, and every other word was “fuck” or “bitch”–we were talking like we were sitting in a bar somewhere, rather than on air.

  Nikki said, “Can we smoke this?” And so we were smoking hashish during the interview. Everybody could hear us going psssssch while we were talking–it wasn’t too hard to figure out what was going on. Then Nikki got the blow out again, so the listeners could hear us smoking and snorting away.

  Suddenly Nikki said, “Let’s play a game–Guess What We’re Doing? We can give away tickets to our shows!” He grabbed a mic on a boom stand, pulled it towards his crotch and turned to face a metal wastepaper bin in the corner. He whipped his dick out and started pissing in it–there was no plastic bag in there so it was really loud. People were phoning in and asking, “Are you running water?” And Nikki started screaming, “No, I’m pissing in a wastebasket!”

  Then Tommy said, “Guess What I’m Doing, Toronto?” and pulled his cock out and started banging it against the desk. I said, “Um, there’s no need to do that,” but Tommy was saying, “Dude, just listen to the noise it makes!” Meanwhile, people were calling in, saying, “Is he banging his cock against the desk?”

  I decided to put people on the air, which was an incredibly stupid move. Our program director always told us to try to make the listener the star. Obviously because I was drunk and high I didn’t do any pre-screening whatsoever, so the first call went like this:

  Caller: Hello, I’m Megan.

  Nikki: Hi, Megan, how old are you?

  Caller: I’m twelve.

  Nikki: Oh good, I like twelve-year-olds. You get to hear the bones crack when you put it in…

  She just giggled. Thankfully she had no idea what he was talking about. When Nikki and Tommy and all their hangers-on left, I felt exhausted, like a hooker who’d been fucked by everybody. As I cleaned up all the beer cans and Jack bottles I realized that I might be fired on Monday, but I figured even if I was, I’d be a legend regardless.

  On Monday I got called in to see my program director. He told me to hold up my index finger on my right hand, which I did, and he asked me, “What does it do?” I said I don’t know, and he said, “It hits the OFF button on the microphones. You’re supposed to be the one in charge–now get out!”

  Mötley Crüe invited me to their dressing room at their Toronto gig, and Nikki and Tommy said it was the most fun they’d ever had on a radio interview. We got on really well. I wasn’t tight with Vince or Mick. Mick always seemed a real bummer, but now that I know how ill he was, and what he had to put up with from those retards Nikki and Tommy, I totally understand why.

  OCTOBER 23RD, 1987 DAY OFF

  Hotel, Toronto, 4 p.m.

  Wow two days off in a row. I have such a hangover…some kid in this band last night told me and Tommy he kicked in the doors of the venue here when we were sound checking on the Theatre of Pain tour…I remember that. All the fans came rushing in…ha ha ha…Then after we spoke for a bit he went onstage with his band V05. You should have seen these guys’ hair! It was to the ceiling! But the little fucker could sing his balls off. He told me, You just watch, I’m gonna be a star someday…

  I told him, Be careful what you wish for…

  NIKKI: Well, that kid got his dream–he later joined Skid Row and became Sebastian Bach. I always like that kind of story. How often do we get to see someone get exactly what they wish for?

  OCTOBER 24TH, 1987 CIVIC CENTER, OTTAWA, ONTARIO, CANADA

  Backstage, Ottawa, 4:30 p.m.

  Don’t really feel like writing. Nothing new really going on. I’m doing pretty good–my track marks are healing. I got a little addicted up here in Canada, but I kicked it with sleeping pills…nothing new to me.

  Tonight is gonna be a good show but tomorrow is Maple Leaf Gardens–how fucking cool is that? Sold out–I wish Nona could have seen this…

  OCTOBER 26TH, 1987 DAY OFF

  Hotel, Toronto, 3:30 p.m.

  Last night’s Maple Leaf Gardens show was insane…we were so good. We were all looking at each other with big smiles, it felt like the old days.

  Another night in this hotel. Right now, I need two things…to get outta this hotel and to get outta this hotel. We’ve been here it seems like a week. I’ve basically moved in…I’ve duct-taped the drapes shut, no housekeeping allowed in again. I have scarves on top of all the lamps. Room service trays are everywhere you look and I have my NY Dolls poster above the bed. It’s really quite nice in here, but time to go. The band wants to go visit the local strip club tonight–it’s always like shooting fish in a barrel.

  P.S. I still haven’t called home once. There’s really no reason to. I’m sure Karen is doing fine…as long as the ghosts don’t come crawling out of my closet.

  OCTOBER 27TH, 1987 THE FORUM, MONTREAL, QUEBEC, CANADA

  Hotel, Toronto, 1 p.m.

  Just got room service. Need to start to pack up my room ’cause they’re coming for luggage at 1:30. Then we take the jet to Montreal and after the show we fly to NYC. In the afternoon we fly to Bermuda ’cause we’re doing an MTV contest there called Mötley Crüise to nowhere.

  Tonight is the last night with Whitesnake–thank God!

  * * *

  Random lyric

  POISON APPLES

  Took a Greyhound Bus down to Heartattack and Vine with a fistful of dreams and dimes. I was in, had a taste for a life of slime. When push came to shove, the So far out didn't know that music was the drug and the band always got to play. Sex, smack, rock, roll, mainline, overdose. Man, we lived it night and day.

  We loved our Mott the Hoople, it kept us all so enraged. And you love us and you hate us and you love us. ’Cause we're so fuckin' beautiful!

  * * *

  ROSS HALFIN: When Nikki fucked girls on the Girls tour, he did it pretty quietly because he wanted to get them off on their own to his room and do it with his drugs. The only exception was Montreal. There was a girl backstage after the show who was up for a gang bang and forty-three of us did her. Tommy went first, Vince went second, I was third because, for some reason I forget now, Nikki wanted to be nice to me, then Nikki went fourth. The only person who didn’t want to was Mick.

  That girl was OK, oddly enough, but there was also a repulsive Hells Angel girl with a shaved vagina there. She had bad teeth, horrible tattoos and a bullet belt, and I still have a picture of the tour manager, Rich Fisher, going down on her while Nikki watched, laughing. The fact that she was so awful appealed to Nikki: he always liked doing the worst thing imaginable. And normally he did it.

  NIKKI: To me,
ugly has always been beautiful and beauty usually turns out to be very ugly. When I was younger I always hated my face. It was too sweet and innocent–no armor to protect the exposed nerves. That’s one of the reasons I distorted it through makeup and theatrics later in life. When I take photographs I’m attracted to documenting the darker, truer side of life or fantasy. Girls? Back then, the sooner it was over, the sooner I could go off the deep end. What they looked like only interested me if they stood out from the crowd. A fucked-up biker chick was more interesting to me than a model—who they were was what interested me. Broken people attract broken people. I was like a guy getting ready to jump off a building without a net. The sooner I got the sex over with, the sooner I could hit the pavement…and kill the pain.

  OCTOBER 28TH, 1987 DAY OFF

  Hotel, Bermuda, 8 p.m.

  Just got into the hotel. Man, it’s dead here. The bar isn’t even open. Doc is here–he keeps looking at me like he’s expecting my head to spin around and spit green pea soup on him at any moment. When I say something, he laughs, but it’s a nervous laugh, like a person waiting on impending doom. Maybe it’s good–managers need to live in fear. I’m gonna watch TV…I know…weird! I snagged a sleeping pill from Fred so I can sleep.

  The last few days I’ve been eating like a horse. I guess my body needs some nutrition. I put it through the ringer in Canada.

  DOC McGHEE: The Mötley Crüise was a competition and the idea was that the winners had no idea where they were going. So we took them to the Bermuda Triangle. MTV was involved, and on the first day I got a call from an MTV guy saying two of the competition winners were being held in customs. It was two guys–the customs officers had opened their luggage and found flying gear, girls’ outfits and dildos in there. I had to go down to customs to get them out.

  That evening we had a welcome cocktail party and the two guys turned up in full drag. Tommy didn’t realize and thought one of them was gorgeous–he told me, “Dude, she’s fucking smoking!” When I explained they were two guys, Mötley didn’t really want to be around them. Bizarrely, it turned out that one of them designed costumes for Mötley and just happened to have won the competition.

  DOUG THALER: When Mötley came back from Bermuda they told me all about these two wild cross-dressing kids who were on the cruise. I later went on to manage one of those wild cross-dressers in a band called the Toilet Boys. By then he was going by the name of Miss Guy.

  OCTOBER 29TH, 1987 DAY OFF

  Hotel, Bermuda, 2 p.m.

  Me, Tommy and Fred got Vespas and rode around the island this morning. We wore our helmets backwards and acted like kamikaze pilots. I haven’t laughed so hard in a long time. We took some pictures…I can’t wait to get them developed. OK, I gotta take a shower (it’s been over a week) and go to this boat for some contest or other.

  We fly home tomorrow. Gonna shoot a video for You’re All I Need with Wayne. I promise not to let Sikki rear his ugly head. I can’t wait to see my dog that I’ve hardly met.

  DOC McGHEE: We all sailed out to an island for a limbo contest. I thought, I can never ask Mötley Crüe to limbo, they will fry my ass, but Vince is so fucking twisted in the head that he wanted to limbo. The contest was for couples only, and when Vince and Tommy went up to the gay guy in charge, who was called the King of Limbo, he said they couldn’t do it. He had no idea who Mötley Crüe was. Vince started going crazy and yelling that it was his fucking party so he could do what he wanted, but the King still wouldn’t let them. Then the King started to limbo under a twelve-inch bar and Vince was so pissed off that he started throwing bits of chicken at him. He hit him in the face and the King of Limbo stormed off so then I had MTV and an angry crowd on my back. Great. Just great.

  OCTOBER 31ST, 1987 DAY OFF

  Van Nuys, 11:30 p.m.

  Spent today filming the video for You’re All I Need with Wayne. I wonder if I should send Nicole a copy?

  I told management I need to change my room name when the tour starts back up to Sharon Needles. They didn’t like that very much so of course that’s gonna be my new name. Rather fitting if you ask me.

  WAYNE ISHAM: Before the video for “You’re All I Need” we had a long talk over what we wanted to do. We’d seen this news story about a guy who killed his girlfriend, which Nikki related to events in his own life–he kept saying there was a personal angle, but I never really understood what he was talking about. Plus he always loved the Sid and Nancy idea, so we wanted a video about a self-destructive relationship.

  The video started with the police putting a girl’s body in an ambulance and arresting her boyfriend, then it went back to tell their story. There is a lot of yelling and screaming but no actual violence–not that that stopped MTV from banning it, as usual. They said it was too literal and implied violence.

  It was a typical ballsy Crüe thing to do–they just loved to step up and do stuff other bands wouldn’t touch. Originally the band wasn’t even in the video, but the record label made us add some band footage, which we shot in my studio. I wish I could say I looked into Nikki’s eyes and saw the mental state he was in back then…but I didn’t.

  * * *

  Random Unused Lyric Nothing to share except these needles

  * * *

  NOVEMBER 1987

  P.S. I DIDN’T TELL ANYBODY I SCORED A BALLOON OF PERSIAN

  NOVEMBER 1ST, 1987 DAY OFF

  Van Nuys, noon

  I’m reading On the Road by Kerouac again. I feel so connected to writers like Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. I hear people say they wish they were old enough to have lived thru the ’60s and other people say they should have been around in the 1920s. This was a time when I would have loved to be alive. Their ability to shock society with their words and fillet the law with their freedom leaves me envious.

  I’m drug-free (today) and feel sooo alive. It’s good to be home. So far the cockroaches of my life haven’t discovered I’m home yet. I’ll be outta here before they come to feed on my weakness. Karen seems amazed that I’m lucid. That makes two of us. Maybe I’m beating this thing little by little…

  P.S. I love these lines from the book I’m reading. To me this describes Mötley to a T:

  Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently…

  KAREN DUMONT: Whatever he did, Nikki managed to put a good front on for me. He was stronger than anyone I know at making things look OK. The fact that he functioned so well while doing massive amounts of drugs shows how good he was at keeping things together.

  There were times that he looked really rough, but I naïvely just put it down to him being a lazy slob. He’d laugh at me telling him off, but he was never nasty to me and I never realized how badly he was doing. I had always thought being messed up brought the nasty side out of people. Vince was more like that–he was scary.

  NOVEMBER 2ND, 1987 DAY OFF

  Van Nuys, 3 p.m.

  Home sweet home. I had breakfast this morning with Karen. I actually cooked…I think she was just being kind ’cause I could hardly eat the eggs, they were like rubber. I told her about the new video being based on the movie Taxi Driver. She said she didn’t know if MTV would have the balls to play it. That’s fine by me. It’s becoming so boring, a bubblegum channel, and there are all these cheeseball bands coming out and just ruining everything.

  I honestly don’t think anyone understands what Mötley is or they wouldn’t try to copy us. We’re a train wreck, a bastard child between punk rock and heavy metal, and some people somehow think it’s cute. If only they knew. We would rather slit your throat than be part of this…so I hope MTV DOESN’T play it.

  I went to the dog park with Whisky. Wow, there are a lot of hot girls there! Maybe I should have showered a week ago when I said I would…they probably thought I was a homeless guy. That’s better for me.

  CHICKS = TROUBLE…and meeting a chick in a dog park is a perfect setup for disaster.
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  P.S. Today’s my last day home. Gotta go back on the road tomorrow.

  * * *

  RODEO

  Laughing like gypsies, show to show Livin' my life like a rolling stone This is how my story unfolds Traveling man, never at home Can't find love so I sleep alone This whisky river has a long way to flow All that I know is life on this road.

  * * *

  NOVEMBER 3RD, 1987 MUNICIPAL AUDITORIUM MOBILE, AL

  Van Nuys, 8 a.m.

  Limo’s here. I have a noon commercial flight to New Orleans where our jet will take us to Mobile. I never unpacked (again). Maybe I’ll just throw these clothes away and buy new ones on the road…there are holes in most of them anyway.

  On the jet, 5 p.m.

  Sitting here on the jet waiting to take off. I think Vince must have pulled an all-nighter…he looks a little tattered around the edges. Me? Yes, it’s usually me that’s tattered, or better yet shattered. It’s amazing what a few days without a hangover will do for your disposition. I’m feeling creative, which for me means life. I struggle between creativeness and being somewhere between slump and completely dry.

  Backstage, Mobile, 7 p.m.

  Just got to the gig. I’m so tired I couldn’t sleep on the plane much. I’ve been thinking about my mother and father a lot. The last few days it seems, when I don’t do drugs, that’s what I do. I guess maybe the drugs are a part of me killing the pain, but for once thank God I didn’t do anything the last few days. It’s nice to not have been still up when the limo showed up.