The Dirt (23 page)

“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 to 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.”

Then she climbed onto the windowsill, stepped out to the ledge, and was gone. I picked up the phone and called Mick, Tommy, and Vince to tell them what had just happened and how much I loved England.

The next day was the kickoff of the Monsters of Rock minitour. While we were traveling in the States with Ratt, we had gotten into the habit of biting each other. Tommy would grab Vince or a security guard, and clamp his teeth down on an arm until he broke the skin. It was all affectionate, of course, but it hurt like hell if you weren’t fucked up.

I was so drunk and coked up at that first show that I walked up to Eddie Van Halen and tackled him. Then I reared my head up, lifted his shirt, and sank my teeth into his bare stomach. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” his wife, Valerie Bertinelli, bellowed. “Biting my husband? You fucking freak!”

Eddie stood up, dusted himself off, and narrowed his squinty eyes. I couldn’t tell whether he was turned on or offended. Before I had a chance to apologize, Vince ran up to him like a savage dog and sank his teeth into his hand. And that threw Valerie into hysterics: Nobody bites the hand that Eddie Van Halen uses to play guitar with.

I must have bitten Angus Young, too, because his brother Malcolm walked up to me in a rage. I was wearing platform boots, and Malcolm’s face was eye level with my belly button. “You fucking bastard,” he roared at my navel. “You can bite my brother, fine! But if you fucking bite me, I’ll bite your fucking nose off, you dog-faced faggot.”

I think I said something like “you and what stepladder,” because before I knew it, he was attacking me, climbing up my leg and clawing at my face like a crazed cat. Doc McGhee pulled him off and, holding him by the scruff of the neck, threw him outside the dressing room. We could hear him scratching at the door and hissing as Doug told us the news.

“Congratulations,” he said. “After this tour, you’re opening for Iron Maiden.”

“Fucking cool, now I don’t have to go home,” I said, thinking about my midnight visitor the night before.

“By the way,” Doc continued, “Bruce Dickinson would like to meet you.” Bruce was Iron Maiden’s new singer, and though his literary, galloping heavy metal was never my favorite music, he was still a legend.

Doc walked out the door and, holding Malcolm at bay with his right hand, signaled to Bruce and a woman who was with him. They walked into the dressing room: My heart dropped into my hands and my testicles shrank to the size of Malcolm’s little fists. I tried to stammer hello to them, but found myself tongue-tied. There she was, the girl who had crawled in my window the night before. And I didn’t know if she was Bruce Dickinson’s wife, girlfriend, manager, personal assistant, or what.

It was on the Monsters of Rock and Iron Maiden tours that the tedium began. In Hollywood, gigging was a way of life. But gigging was not the same as touring. When you gig, you get to go home afterward. Touring is an endless parade of anonymity: faceless people, identical hotel rooms, and indistinguishable cities, always changing but always the same. In America, at least we had the consolation of watching our star rise as we toured. But in Europe, nothing seemed real or relevant. On past tours, I would sit in my hotel room and write postcards to my grandparents in Jerome, Idaho, population four thousand, telling them how lonely I was and how much I missed having a home to go to. But after my reunion with my mother, I didn’t want a home anymore. I became crazier and more reckless, subconsciously putting myself on the same self-destructive path my mother had been on. My rock-and-roll fantasy wasn’t just about success and decadence and rebellion anymore, it was also about pain and death. I was sure I was going to die before I was twenty-five. I think we all thought that.

Tommy and I began breaking glass bottles over each other’s head and twisting the lightbulbs out of makeup mirrors and swallowing them whole just for fun. When Vince was in a bathroom with some groupie or waitress, we’d sneak in, not because we wanted to double-team her but because we wanted to sneak the drugs out of Vince’s pants pocket while he was preoccupied. As singer, Vince had the hardest time recuperating from all the partying: He was usually so thrashed that the only way he could make it through most shows was if we called a doctor to shoot his ass full of cortisone before going onstage.

At the Ritz in Paris, Vince was trying to get to the front desk for a phone call, but he was so fucked up he couldn’t figure out how to open the glass door at the hotel entrance. So he kicked through it, shattering the glass and sending the brass door handle clattering to the ground. He picked the brass handle off the floor, handed it to the concierge, and took the call as if nothing had happened.

In Germany, we got high with Claude Schnell, the keyboard player from Dio, in his hotel room. When he ran out of the room to get something, we decided to fuck with him. We picked up the two tiny European beds in the room and threw them, piece by piece, out the window, followed by his chairs, desk, television, and dresser. Two brand-new Mercedes-Benzes were parked below the room, and each piece of furniture managed to land on one. Suddenly, the German police were knocking on Claude’s door with rottweilers. His whole band had to pack up and leave the hotel, which banned Dio for years, while we stayed there guiltily. I may not like their
Intermission
album, but I’ll always give Dio credit for not telling on us.

In Switzerland, after the Iron Maiden tour, we weren’t so lucky. Tommy and Vince bought flare guns and fired one in their room. A giant ball of fire shot out and ricocheted off the walls before setting Tommy’s mattress on fire. He and Vince were so amused that they ran to find Doc to show him the flaming bed. But when they returned to the room with him, they discovered that they had locked their keys inside. By the time the maid let them in, smoke was billowing from under the door. For some reason, they didn’t kick us out of the hotel until the following day, when we used the giant balls of metal attached to the room keys to break all the glass windows in the elevators. We were really fucking bored of Europe.

Adding an extra element of awkward tension to the Maiden tour was the fact that the mystery bathroom-window girl hung around Bruce the whole time. Every time I saw Bruce, he would offer me fencing lessons, because he was really into swordplay. I kept turning him down, though, because I was sure he was going to use the fencing lesson as an excuse to accidentally stab me to death for fucking her.

When Maiden’s drummer, Nicko McBain, was busted on the border between France and Germany for carrying hash, no one in the band bothered to warn us back at the venue, where we were always the last to leave because we were partying. I always thought that this was a purposeful act of revenge, because when we finally reached the border, customs officials and dogs swarmed onto the bus as we snorted and swallowed everything we could find. When they went through Tommy’s bags, a giant lump of hash fell onto the ground. It sat there for minutes, looking like a dirt clod, as we sweated nervously. Then, the official searching Tommy’s bag zipped it up, looked around the bus, and walked toward Vince. He stepped on the hash, and it stuck to the bottom of his shoe like a piece of gum. The officers then made me strip, put my arms against the wall, and bend over so that they could look up my ass. I tightened my sphincter muscle and tried as hard as I could to shit on their heads. I pushed and pushed and pushed, but couldn’t get any results.

After the border incident, we started planting bugs in Iron Maiden’s dressing room to find out, first, if they were responsible for the intense search and, second, who the fuck that girl was. Except for Nicko, none of them seemed to like us. On the last night of the tour, Bruce even walked up to Mick and challenged him to a duel. I think he thought that Mick had messed around with that girl.

By the end of the European tour, we sounded terrible. Vince was getting so fucked up every night that no doctor or medication could make him sound good onstage. Our last show in Europe, at the Dominion Theatre in London, was our worst. We looked ridiculous because our style was beginning to evolve from
Road Warrior
darkness to more colorful, theatrical one-piece court jester suits. For the show, I wore a dark green outfit, painted my bass the same color, and put on matching moccasin shoes. I looked like an overgrown leprechaun. There must have been a butcher shop or something nearby because, throughout the show, fans kept catapulting leg bones and animal heads and strange sausages at us. We took it as a compliment until Tommy’s drum tech, Clyde Duncan, collapsed to the ground. We looked over, and he had a dart sticking out of his back. Tommy, with one hand, pulled the dart out while playing.

Minutes after that, the dry-ice machine blew up. A strong odor of what smelled like hot dog juice wafted across the stage and clung to my clothing, and a wet puddle formed around my feet. The road crew, I assumed, was pouring hot dog juice onto the stage as an end-of-tour joke. I thought it was a pretty lane prank, but when I looked back at Tommy, he seemed panic-stricken. His drum set was surrounded by water, and I assumed they had poured hot-dog juice all over him, too.

After Vince croaked through our last song, I splashed through the water on the stage to find Tommy. He was leaning over Clyde and the smell of hot dogs was unbearable. I moved in closer and discovered that the smell was actually Clyde’s burned skin. The dry-ice machine had blown up in his face, frying his skin like a kosher red-hot and sending water running down the stage, which sloped forward. Clyde was still in agony when we flew back to America afterward. Fortunately, we had a lot of painkillers.

At the time, we didn’t think of drugs as addictive. They were just something that we liked to do all the time to keep ourselves from getting bored. We weren’t addicted: We were just constant users.