Tattoos & Tequila: To Hell and Back with One of Rock's Most Notorious Frontmen

by Vince Neil

  The second week she didn’t come at all. I left messages at different times of the day; I couldn’t get hold of her. I didn’t know what was going on. I had no idea.

  After eighteen days, I was released at 12:01 A.M. of the next day. I assumed Beth was coming to pick me up. I left messages, you know: “Please pick me up; I get out at midnight.” But there was nobody there to pick me up.

  I got this really bad feeling. I’m not sure if I have ever felt more alone. My friends and exes and people who work for me would probably tell you that one thing they all have noticed is that I don’t like being alone and that’s why I constantly have to have a woman by my side. It’s true I don’t like being by myself. As I was standing out there in the dark, it hit me that everything I had, everything I’d achieved, all the outward trappings… all of it didn’t amount to shit. I had nobody who cared about me. A gaping hole opened up in my midsection. It was like I was little and my mom had forgotten to pick me up from school. Only it was worse because I was a grown man. I had nothing to show for it.

  I wanted to scream, to cry, to get totally wasted and beat the fuck out of somebody. Instead I went back into the jail. I was like, “Can I please use your phone?”

  I called this guy; he was my sponsor for AA. His name was—what was his fuckin’ name? His… name… was… Keith! That’s right; his name was Keith. He was a great guy. He came to pick me up. I didn’t even remember where the house was ’cause I had literally only slept there one night; all the houses looked the same. After an hour or so of driving around we finally hit upon a house that looked vaguely familiar. I’m like, I think this is my house!

  Nobody was there. The pool and backyard looked vaguely familiar, but the curtains were closed, so I couldn’t look through the windows to check the furniture.

  I broke a glass pane in the back door, unlocked the dead bolt, went in.

  It was my house, all right… but the place was empty. Everything was gone. I was like, What the fuck happened? There was no bed. There was nothing. Beth had taken every stick of furniture. She’d even taken the fucking ice trays from the refrigerator. My new car, a Camaro Z28, was still in the garage, but she’d taken the keys.

  The only other thing she left was the twelve-thousand-dollar diamond-bezelled gold Rolex watch that Doc McGhee had given me for staying sober.

  It was lying on the bare expanse of carpet in the bedroom, right where my bedside table used to be.

  I immediately got on the phone and called her parents, her friends, and anyone else I thought might know where she was, but they all claimed they hadn’t heard from her and didn’t know where she was. Frankly, I didn’t give a fuck about her, or the furniture; I just wanted to find her so that I could at least stay in touch with my daughter.

  Oh yeah, and I wanted my fuckin’ car keys back.

  I struck out on both counts. I remember it cost like six hundred bucks or something to get a new set of keys. It was a couple of months before I heard from Beth. Little Beth was like three. I’d been the one who insisted on naming her after her mother; I wanted a tiny version of her to adore. I hated not seeing her. Finally Beth called and she was like, “We’re done; I left you; I’m gone.” And I was like, No shit, I think I figured that out.

  I don’t really remember her reasons she gave for leaving, but she had her reasons. To these women, if you talk to them, they’ll tell you I’m a handful. There’s a lot of shit in my life. You know especially when I was drinking and doing drugs. It was… it was obviously not… I know it was not fun for them. Lia, my current wife, didn’t have to go through it because I don’t do drugs anymore. My wife before that, Heidi, she didn’t have to go through the drug thing, either; I did drink a lot at that time. But the first two, Beth and Sharise, absolutely. Especially Sharise, my second wife, Skylar’s mom… the one I’m about to meet in the story line.

  But one thing I can say: All of these women knew what they were getting into when they hooked up with me. There were plenty along the way who decided they didn’t want to be a part of this. They’re the ones who moved on.

  I didn’t see Beth again until about ten years later, when she and Little Beth came to a Crüe concert in Florida. The two of them ended up moving around a lot over the years; they are very close. Little Beth now goes by the name Elle. A few years ago she turned down an acceptance to Juilliard because she decided she didn’t want to spend her life… singing opera. She sang soprano and mezzo-soprano—I guess she gets her high vocal range honestly. For a while she was trying to be a country singer. She visited me last Thanksgiving. She’s trying to get on track as a writer—that’s a plug, because she’s a beautiful and intelligent blue-eyed brunette. I love listening to her talk. She’s very smart and knows what she wants. And she seems to love me, even though I wasn’t there during her life. I love her so much I can’t start to describe it.

  Back to the past: June 1986.

  I was out of jail. I was a free man again. I had about eighteen months of court-mandated sobriety behind me—I was not squeaky clean but a lot cleaner than I’d been since I was probably fourteen years old.

  It was time to live a little.

  I ordered a house full of furniture and got a couple of my buddies to move in with me. It was cool; I had no wife to tell me what to do anymore. Why not enjoy it?

  Around this time, the band was sort of on a hiatus. While I’d cleaned up, the rest of the guys had continued their downhill slides. Following his grandmother’s funeral, Nikki resolved (once again) to kick drugs so he could write for the next Mötley album, which we were due to record. Tommy was recovering from torn ligaments on both sides of his ankle—he’d wiped out on his dirt bike doing a wheelie in front of his house. He couldn’t play the drums until he was healed. Mick was in his own private world, as usual. With nothing else to do, I started spending a lot of my time at the Tropicana, a strip club in LA that featured female mud wrestling.

  The Tropicana was on Western Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard, which is kind of a shitty part of town. Did you see the movie Stripes? Remember in Stripes when they had the mud wrestling? That was actually in the Tropicana. Yeah. I actually knew some of those girls who were in the movie. They worked at the Tropicana. It was just a fun place to go to. For rock guys like me, strip clubs are different than for regular guys because you usually can fuck the girls at strip clubs; a strip club is basically a place to go for the specific purpose of getting laid. You get them when they get off work and then you take them home.

  I didn’t only go to the Tropicana. I went to a lot of different places in those days. There were strip clubs, nightclubs, bars. On Friday nights I’d go to the Tropicana. On Thursday nights I’d be at Carlos’n Charlie’s. On Wednesdays I’d be at the Rainbow. It kind of depended on the day. Carlos’n Charlie’s was cool; it was right across from the Roxbury. The last time I went there I was sitting at my table with a bunch of girls and my security guard and all of a sudden a gunfight broke out inside the place. It was fucking scary. I was on the floor crawling to the door.

  The Tropicana sort of became my hangout because I dated a couple of the waitresses there. And probably three or four different girls who wrestled there, too. Let’s face it. The Tropicana was like my mini-mart for pussy.

  After I’d been going there for a while, I decided to build my own mud pit. I put it behind the house, next to the pool.

  I would have the girls come over and wrestle. It’s not that I loved wrestling so much, but it was more fun than the strip clubs. And the girls were a lot cooler and a lot of fun. After closing time or whatever, we’d bring a dozen or so girls back to my place and stage our own private female mud-wrestling contests while me and my buddies sat around in bathrobes drinking cocktails. I also invited all the local drug dealers to come and hang out, because where there were drugs there were chicks. They sure were fun times. At one of the parties some guy in a suit, who I’d never seen before that night, handed me a rock of cocaine the size of a fucking golf ball as a way of thanking m
e for my hospitality. I was like, “Thanks, dude! Come again.” And he did. In fact, he practically moved in. His name was… call him Whitey. The house already had beer on tap in the bar. Now we had a resident drug dealer. Speaking of which, even though I was doing drugs on a pretty regular basis, I kept going to Narcotics Anonymous and Cocaine Anonymous meetings. That’s where the hot chicks were! Especially the cocaine chicks. They’re just good-looking girls trying to get off doing blow. Believe me I know the routine (see Lovey above). It’s a great place to go meet girls.

  Sharise Ruddell was one of the dozen or so girls I’d regularly bring over from the Tropicana to entertain the guys. And yes, I know, every account of Sharise begins with the fact that she was a mud wrestler. But she didn’t do it for long, and she has since become a very successful businesswoman with a thriving clothing line…. I think you’ll be hearing from her later. But she could wrestle her ass off, and that’s why I first noticed her.

  Sharise stood out from the other girls. She was an Amazon, with blond hair, a fabulous rack, and a killer body that looked great covered in mud. An incredible specimen of womanhood, she fought dirty and she won every time. Later, when we were recording Girls, Girls, Girls, I suggested we pose for a band photo at the Tropicana and have Sharise and some of the other girls dancing onstage in the background. She’d once dated Bret Michaels of Poison (the only other major rock star who deigned to be interviewed for this book); pictures of Sharise and Michaels posing together in a swimming pool can be seen on the inside sleeve of Poison’s Open Up and Say… Ahh! There aren’t many women who can say they’ve had their picture on the inner sleeves of albums from two different bands. That is the case with Sharise. She was a stunner.

  I don’t remember exactly what brought us together. She’d come over to the house with the other girls, but she was a cut above, you know? We just hit it off. She was hot looking, and fun, and it seemed to work. When we started going out, she stopped dancing. Instead, she developed a shopping habit.

  And instead of wrestling with the other chicks she fought with me all the time.

  Sharise Ruddell Neil Vince’s Second Wife

  My mom was the homecoming queen and my dad was kind of the Fonz, captain of the car club. He had the convertible ’57 Chevy; he had the old ’Vette with the cutouts in the side. He had a bunch of hot rods. My dad lived in Norwalk. My mom went to a Christian college nearby. It’s in the Valley, near Knott’s Berry Farm. They call it the Inland Empire. They met and by twenty, twenty-two years old they were having me, the eldest of four, two boys, two girls. My dad owns a construction company; my mother was a florist. Just a normal girl. That was me.

  I grew up in Huntington Beach. My parents put us all in Christian school. We lived in this little bubble. I was the leader of my pack of siblings. Anybody messed with my siblings, they messed with me. You got completely punked if you ever said anything to any one of my siblings. Growing up a tiny girl, I had to develop like a Napoleon complex. If you stepped to me, I stepped back twice as hard.

  In junior high I got in trouble for reading Surfer magazine in Bible class. The slits in my skirts were way too high. They were supposed to be two inches and they were eight inches. Then my parents put me in public school. I was the only girl on my high school surf team. I was that girl. But my parents still made me go to Sunday school every Sunday as long as I lived under their roof. I graduated high school at seventeen. I was out of the house the next day.

  I was not a rocker by any means. I was kind of a punker, like a surf punk. I didn’t even follow rock ’n’ roll. I did love Van Halen and Led Zeppelin, but that was the extent of it. I was really more like Prince, TSOL, Siouxsie and the Banshees. That was where my musical tastes were. When I met Vince I didn’t even know who he was.

  After high school I moved to Huntington Beach. I had a boyfriend there and I knew everyone. I lived on Main Street by the pier. All the pro surfers were my friends. I hung out in the surf shops. I lived in my bikini. And no shoes. That’s who I was back then. The quintessential surf chick. I helped out at the surf contests with my pro-surfer boyfriend. I was completely immersed in that culture. I loved it. Of course I had to have a job. I worked at night. My first job was as a telephone solicitor. I’d actually pretend to call people. I’d just dial TIME because I hated to talk to people. Then by the time I became nineteen or twenty I’d had enough. I had to get a real job. I became an office manager for a life insurance company; I became a nine-to-fiver.

  About the mud wrestling at the Tropicana: For the record, I actually started as a round girl. And I was never a stripper. Never! I was the girl who walks around the ring in her bikini between rounds, holding the card. How it happened was this girl I met brought me to the Tropicana and I watched. And literally all the girls were just wearing their bikinis, which I lived in anyway for free—all day long people saw me in my bikini. And so it didn’t seem like that big of a deal to me to wear one and get paid. And then I saw the girls wrestling and I thought, That’s not so hard. I can fake wrestle another girl in my bikini in the mud for that much money. I watched my friend do it and I was like, “I can do that. Why not?”

  The Tropicana was a two-story club, really pretty inside. It was in Hollywood. All the waitresses and the wrestlers were like the most beautiful girls, models and actresses. They did this at night and then they would go on their auditions and stuff during the day. The mud pit was kind of in the middle of the club. They had all the chairs around. It was just a square that had kind of a tarp formed around it, and then the mud was in the middle. But it was not mud, exactly. It was like a mixture of foam and this cement-colored grossness. It smelled awful. It was not cute at all. And it was cold. It was not heated. You’d get bachelor parties and stuff; there was a big bar and there were really pretty waitresses. The first couple of times I wrestled, I had to do some drinking… but I don’t want to get too much into this. I literally worked at the Tropicana for three months. I mostly round-girled, you know, where you carry the card for each round.

  Vince came in there one night. He was a regular. All the girls knew him. Everybody was friends with Vince. And that is actually how I met him. He had a party at his house; the girls invited me. It was a pool party in the summertime. Some of the girls said, “Hey, we’re going to Vince Neil’s house.” And I was like, “Who’s that?” And they were like, “He’s the singer for Mötley Crüe. It should be fun, you should come.” So I went. And I literally walked into this, like, 1980s family house in Northridge that he was living in. It was suburbia. Like endless mom and pop, a tract home in a neighborhood of families.

  I walked in, everything was beige. I thought I was going to walk into a rock star’s home—black lacquer, leather couches, a disco ball on the ceiling or something. But it was a completely normal little cute house. I didn’t even know who Vince was. I walked into the back and I was like, “Which one is he?” I didn’t even know. Because everybody just looked normal. There was not a lot of drugs; there was nobody getting wasted. It wasn’t a kegger; it was just like nice people sitting around the pool chilling out. Finally, somebody introduced me to him. I was like, “Oh, nice to meet you.” And that was it. Normal day, margaritas by the pool, and then I went home to Huntington Beach with my friends. The next time I met him, he had a Halloween party.

  Up to that point, I thought he was nice. But he was not my type. He had long hair. I don’t even think he was drinking then. I think he was sober. He was just a nice, pleasant guy. Then one night I’m working, I was round-girling at the Tropicana, and he came in, and after my shift I was walking to my car and he runs after me. He’s like, “Excuse me, excuse me.” And I was like, “Oh, hi.” And he was like, “Didn’t you come to my party? Isn’t your name Sharise? I’d really like to take you out to dinner.”

  I was petrified. I was like, Ohmygod! How do I get out of this? Because this guy is not my type at all. I’m into surfer guys, you know, totally built, baggy trunks, tan—that’s my type. And this guy was wearing laced-up snake p
ants with leopard shoes and a skintight T-shirt cut down the middle that he had clearly cut himself, and tons of gold, chunky gold jewelry. And he had long hair and I was just like, Oh my god, how do I get out of this without being rude? So I said I had to work. And he’s like, “What about the next night?” So I went ahead and gave him my phone number, thinking I’d blow him off when he called. All I knew about him at that point was that his band looked like girls, that they had ratty hair and he was the one with the white hair who’d somehow been in jail. People said he was cute, but not to me. But then he called and he said that he’d like to take me to dinner at L’Orangerie and he was going to send a limo for me. It was one of those offers you couldn’t refuse.

  I went and I ended up having a really nice time. He was very interesting, very well mannered. Worldly. He was so complimentary. He just knocked my socks off, what a gentleman he was.

  Afterwards we went to the Comedy Club and his manager was there, so we sat at their table and really had a nice time. Vince started to drink; he got a little sloppy. On the way home he tried to give me all the jewelry on his body. He was like, “Here, take my bracelet; take my necklace. I want you to have it. Here, you want my ring? What do you want? I’ll give you anything you want.” I had never met anybody like him. Of course I didn’t take anything. But, you know, he was so not what I was expecting. He was just very sweet and charming. I had a really nice time.

  Of course, what I didn’t know is I didn’t meet Vince; I met his rep.

  It’s like the comedian Chris Rock says: The first time a woman meets a man, she doesn’t meet him, exactly. She’s meeting his rep. His surrogate. That’s who I met first, the nice Vince. That’s the Vince I fell in love with.

  In September 1986, we signed a six-plus album deal with Elektra. I don’t know how much money we got, but it was a lot. Suddenly I was rich.