This Is Gonna Hurt: Music, Photography and Life Through the Distorted Lens of Nikki Sixx (11 page)

I immediately got on the phone with our manager, Allen, and started a mission to save Mick’s life. First thing was the crazy girlfriend. She had to go. Not only was she feeding him pills by the bucketload, she was spending his cash faster than anyone could imagine. In the living room was a pile of designer clothes that almost touched the ceiling. Nearly all of them had the price tags still attached. It looked like some kind of pathological hoarding that I read about. Sort of leaves you feeling cold to see something like that happening right before your friend’s eyes. He was definitely in a fucked-up situation with this chick.

Next came the fact that Mick’s house was infested with mold, which was infecting his lungs. He needed to move out right away, so I took him under my roof for a few months. His head had been shaved due to the fact that his hair had become so knotted from not showering for almost a year. So Mick Mars was living in my guest room, kicking prescription meds, girlfriendless. It didn’t look like a Mötley album was going to happen anytime in the near future for sure. After we had settled into a routine came the doctors, one after another…day after day…until finally Allen found the doctor who got Mick sorted out. Mick not only had to deal with his spondylitis, he had to have his hip replaced. The saddest thing for me came while sitting in the hospital next to Mick after he had kicked the drugs and had his hip replaced. I asked him, “So did Tommy or Vince come hang with you today?” He looked down and said, “No.” They hadn’t visited him at all.
This band runs on rock n roll, but sometimes I wonder if there is any soul in it…

VINCE & ME, GERMANY
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TRIPOD GIRL
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Interlude

KILLER’S INSTINCT

H
e said it like it didn’t mean a thing. “Blood and guts.” Softly again and then louder, “It’s just blood and guts.” It made me feel like I was really part of something. Like a gang. It’s like our motto, and we will live and die by it. I felt special that day, but not in a retarded-type way. His name was Robert Benedetti. He owned Sunset Strip Tattoo, and at the time he was the benchmark of real tattooists. I was changing my skin like a slithering poisonous viper, eyes glossed over gray, wriggling out of my dead one and seething with pain as I emerged with a new skin, fresh and hungry.

These places, where I hung from the middle of the night till early in the mornings, transforming myself into a killing machine, were the alternative to the norm. The underbelly, I say with endearment. I’ve always clung to the underbelly like a baby wolf clings to his mother’s tit until, finally weaned, I, too, am ready to kill. This day was not unlike any other in 1988: wake up, obsess, find a way to fill the void. Drive fast toward demise or faster toward the murder scene in my head. If I could see it, I could kill it. The target? Rock and roll. The industry and all the scumbag gatekeepers who would tell me no.

So I accelerate and sharpen my blade. The sooner I get there, I’d think, the sooner the blood would flow. Not unlike a serial killer fantasizing about a bloodbath. Warm, inviting, rich and sticky, not unlike a mother’s womb. We nurture the concept, we see it, smell it, and, if we’re truly off the tit, we are ready to kill and taste it.

The things that make me sick make you sicker. The things that make you scared make me squirm like a little girl on prom night, giddy and wiggling in her wet panties. The things I hate, you probably love and the things I love, you don’t understand. Have you turned into the ad campaign being forced down your throat between the commercials for Doritos and the ones for tampons? Are you keeping up with your neighbors Mr. Jones, until one day you find out his name is Reverend Jim and he just started pouring the Kool-Aid. Things are not what they seem until they’re bursting at the seams. What lies under the skin are blood and guts. And truth.

Now, as you read this you say, “What a condescending, psychotic asshole.” Well, you know what, I love you, too. The point of all this gibberish is just that you too need to write it down, scribble it, use a voice recorder, jam, create, doodle…But don’t just sit there, wallflowerish, and ponder…what?

When I ponder, I ponder death, and usually not my own. I am pushing you, even if it’s off a cliff, to create. Write that book, that song; pore over the concept of redecorating your life. I meet people all the time who say they’re not creative. Bullshit, motherfuckers, you
are
creative.

I do not and will not claim to always love these little outbursts of mine, but goddamn it, I try and so should we all. It’s only through change that things change (duh) but, if this is so, then why does so much stay the same (or stay the strange?). I know life is a process of growing. I know death is when the growing stops. I know they say energy is wasted on the youth and this I say is true. I need more energy now to get through my day than I did ten, twenty, thirty, or forty years ago.

So we fight the clock, wake up, sharpen the blade, and see if anybody is out there on the battlefield ready to die. I kill for a living, but I do it with a heart. I will take your head for a trophy but only to show other warriors that success can be theirs.

Lawyers, record company executives, accountants, and all their puppets come to mind. Some come to be mounted, some just thrown in the alley and forgotten.

Today is one of those murderous days. As I type, my hope is to not get too much blood on my computer. I guess one could say I’ve softened over the years. Now I think before I swipe, thrust, or cut. Sometimes I’m aware that I am calmer and at peace.

May God be with you and not with me. He will only slow me down. Now get off your ass and change what you don’t like about your life. You get what you focus on. Trust me on this if nothing else. I am living (and dying) proof.

CEMETERY, MILAN, ITALY
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M
y first taste of therapy came when I was sent to the principal for knocking out a kid with my lunch box. I went to the office, and the kid went to the nurse. I felt justified due to the months of torture I endured on the bus rides to school every day. I would climb aboard the bus and two older boys would tell me I couldn’t sit down unless I gave them my lunch money. Even when I did, they would abuse me, pushing me under the seats and sitting on me for the twenty-mile trip to school.

Having no luck asking the driver for help, I decided one day to fill my metal lunch box with rocks. When the usual happened, I handed over my lunch money. As we pulled up to school and exited the bus, I called out the kid’s name (I can’t remember it for the life of me), and when he and his friend turned around I swung my lunch box and hit that motherfucker in the face with everything I had. Blood splattered everywhere, and he hit the dirt with a thud. As I wound up for another swing, to level the second bully, he took off in a dead sprint for the nearest teacher. They told me I broke the first bully’s nose, and now all the other kids were scared of me.

The principal asked me how I could do such a violent thing for no reason, but what really stung was when he said, “What’s wrong with you?” It’s a question that has come up more than once since then. At the moment there was no leather couch for me to lie down on as I told of my wretched life, or a $350 bill owed at the end of the session. There would be plenty of time later for that.

CAMBODIA
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Somewhere inside, I have a fantasy that I can create something to help people change their lives. But maybe like a self-help book as written by William S. Burroughs. The sneer and snot of rock n roll is as much a part of me as the tattoos on my arms. Still, showing how I got here alive might make a positive difference in somebody else’s struggle, just like certain books helped me through mine. That hope is a big part of what this book is about. It’s what makes me passionate about getting it right.

Writing for me is therapy, like self-help with a pencil and the nearest tablet or notebook to write it all down. My life is on the pages of a million journals, scraps of paper, computer files. I’ve even been known to write on myself. It’s like WWF wrestling with a schizophrenic. After the second or third round you go back to your corner, rethink what you wrote, then rewrite it again and again, all whilst taking uppercuts and flying arm bars from yourself.

Since
Heroin Diaries
came out I have heard from thousands of teenagers and others who say or write things like,
“Nikki, your book inspired me to do better things with my life than waste it on drugs and alcohol, thank you…”
I am so glad something I wrote could help them.

Many of those kids are probably like me as a teenager. Back then I was an eyesore with a dream. It took a lot of crazy, angry, self-destructive behavior over a lot of years to get me from there to here. I had every right to be pissed off—at my family, at my tormentors, at the world. It was the kind of rage that can kill you.