This Is Gonna Hurt: Music, Photography and Life Through the Distorted Lens of Nikki Sixx (19 page)

Especially not with just nine days between them, I didn’t. I am not in my twenties, high on fame and drunk on money. I don’t need either one and so I was putting my foot down firmly, some might even say stomping it.

Fast forward: October 2009.

It’s chilly outside and everybody is still asleep. I just put a fire on, to match the radio that’s been on low all night. Coffee in hand, I write. It’s a Sunday and life is perfect right now.

As I sit here I know I have all my kids’ unconditional love and they have mine. I know nothing will happen to them in this life or once I am gone that they cannot handle. I work harder and harder every day to make sure of that. Little lessons and messages I hand out to them like Halloween candy. The biggest gift I can give is listening to how bad it hurts when they fall down. Not always saving them, maybe just holding them, emotionally and physically, too. Being a father is the biggest challenge and greatest reward I ever have received.

Nothing compares to this.

I promise you this: if you’re not a parent yet, with the birth of a child comes a haunting of your mortality.

It didn’t happen upon my first child’s birth but soon after. That’s why there are wills and trust funds. After the diapers are gone, “We the Parents” have to still cover their asses.

We the Parents of the United States of America realize what we never knew before: not everything is about us, and there is a reason to be alive other than our own needs.

Note to self: get back to writing book.

Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do. Not because they’re too hard to handle or because someone is holding a gun under your chin. Because that’s life.

Life is not always about you, as hard as that is to guzzle down.

“Ego is just fear in action,” I’ve heard slurred so many times at AA meetings. As I like to say, “Your ego is not your amigo.”

My ego was in high gear the day of that phone call. “I am not going on tour,” I said, but such grandiose statements almost always fall short. You end up feeling defeated because you couldn’t cut the head off that poisonous snake, your ego, no matter how hard you swung the machete.

Ego overtakes the idea of God.

I say the
idea
of God, because I have a hard time with “God.” I like to say “my understanding of a god,” or my higher power, something bigger than myself to believe in. Karma even falls under these Sixxism-type guidelines.

A sliding scale of your spirituality is better than a complete, grandiose statement that nothing exists other than yourself. Earn it as you learn it. Fake it till you make it. Shake it but don’t break it. (OK, not that one, but you get the point.)

Note to self: stop rambling.

I did go on that tour of Europe. I did then return home for only nine days with my family and Katherine before leaving them again for the American Crüe Fest. I didn’t like it, but I am part of something bigger than myself. I did it with a good attitude and to be honest, as hard as it was, I had a good fucking time.

Last note to self: think before you pull the trigger. The head you blow off may be your own.

Here are some of the ramblings I committed to my journals during those two tours.

Europe Goes to Hell
FLIGHT TO MOSCOW FROM LOS ANGELES
MAY 30, 2009

There is something to be said about having a simple deck of cards, a quiet moment (maybe at sunrise or sunset), and a vigorous game of solitaire.

Now, I am being partially facetious but, at the same time, honest and introspective. Just take a moment to look at this through the eyes of a trailer-park-trash high school dropout world-traveling Zen-type O-negative (and positive), grade AAA personality.

You have to go out and get yourself a deck of cards. Hopefully, they will already be well worn, but new is good too. In the end, all that really matters (whether they’re those cheesy strip poker cards or a standard deck from your local 99-cent store) is that you have fifty-two cards.

I used to play with my grandmother’s cards every day after school, and one day I asked how many cards were in a deck. She said, “There would be fifty-two if you hadn’t lost ten of them building that house of cards.” So there we have it. She gave me unconditional love even when I lost ten cards from her favorite John Deere deck. That meant I had been playing the game all along with no chance of winning. She knew that the whole time. That woman was wise. She was so wise that she probably knew she would be teaching me this lesson thirty years later, once she had graduated to the next level.

OK, so now that I am older, I get it. (Thank you, Nona.) I see that it doesn’t matter if you win or lose in solitaire. It’s the game of repetitiveness that untangles all that is in you and is balled up into a sphere of stress. Unnecessary anger, scattered thoughts like a random, out-of-control, emotional roller coaster that rides through your mind, or the need to be more than you need to be.

Solitaire says, “Stop, enjoy the kiss, the sweet succulent flowers, and your child’s smile or the roar of a plane overhead, even sirens in the distance. Life is just life.”

I like getting to that place in life, that perfect moment in an imperfect world. Being in a moment is not easy, because we make it that way. This is not hard work, even if at times it hurts to just be in the moment.

I could go on for hours, if you’re still awake. So, just in case you’re zoning out, let me take you back to the rough-and-tumble world of solitaire! Do you have your cards yet?

DEATH & LIFE
fig.dl31

First, you lay them out before you, and immediately it seems like you’re facing an impassable enemy. An army of suited-up warriors ready to defend their ground and take yours if need be.

And then it starts, the war, the battle. Somebody is going down and you pretty much know the cards are stacked against you. After all, if you’re lucky, there are fifty-two of them and only one of you. (Unless you’re a bipolar borderline zooid-type personality.)

But like life, you have to go into this battle. Now, how do you go? Do you slowly flip over the cards and pray for the right one to appear? (As some do in life. I used to.)

Do you flip over the cards and get frustrated (maybe even let out a little grunt or curse the deck) when the card you really need is just under the card you don’t? (I’ve done that, too, and I wasn’t the smartest guy in the world to be cursing at little pieces of paper.)

Or do you flip them over, look at your cards, look at your opportunities (or maybe the lack thereof) and either make your move or flip over the next batch, and so on and so on?

I will tell you this, you’re either going to win or you’re going to lose, and it’s not the end of the world either way, my friend. But it is a lesson in how we should live. I taught my kids that losing is actually cooler than winning. I remember one of their voices answering back, “Dad, that makes no sense,” and I said to them, smirk on my lips and deck in hand, “It will in thirty years.”

You see, to win, to conquer, to activate the loss of others, to crush and destroy can seem wonderful, but isn’t the hunt as invigorating as the kill? Once you get what you want (the new car, the new girl, the new computer, the new house), we feel the game has to start over. I don’t know about you, but I love looking into the mouth of the lion. I smell my own fear when I get that close. That fear is high octane on steroids and it’s 100-proof poison…It will shorten your life, if you care. So, as I age, life has given me some other, introspective ways to live, too…

Just let it happen and, I promise you, all that is magic will appear.

Or leave your mouth open long enough and, I promise you, a bug is going to fly down your throat and you’re gonna choke to death. So shut your mouth, open your eyes, and play along with life. And stop waiting in line to win, mouth gaping, panting, outta breath…you forgot to breathe because you want it so bad. You can’t will life. It will kill you. There is more of it than there is of you. Just wait in line patiently to see what’s going to happen. I promise you, as an individual—a solitary person—you will get just what you need, win or lose. I promise a fairy-tale ending and you will be the champion of the world.

I say this as I play solitaire forty thousand feet above Europe, heading toward Russia for the first time in twenty years. I wonder if it has changed as much as I have. Funny how life has simplified itself down to just a deck of cards and a fleeting thought of my grandmother. Seems as though I am right back where I started…

P.S. When I said there are fifty-two cards in the deck, don’t forget the two extra cards, the jokers.
There are always jokers in life
.

solitaire

noun

1. any of various card games played by one person, the object of which is to use up all one’s cards by forming particular arrangements and sequences.

ORIGIN early 18th cent.: from French, from Latin solitarius (see solitary).

MOSCOW, RUSSIA
JUNE 1, 2009

The first thing I noticed flying in over Moscow was how green it was. It seemed to go on forever into a new kind of green that I didn’t remember from when I was here in 1989. I thought maybe I was just coming down off the drugs then, and my eyes were still fogged over or something, but when I was in the van going to the Mötley Crüe press conference, Tommy noticed the same exact thing, saying, “Can you believe how green it was flying in?”

Last night I went for a walk to Red Square, where the first thing I noticed was the cobalt blue sky jumping up from behind these huge red buildings. The courtyard, twice as wide and deep as a football field, was slowly draining of tourists. It was 10:00
P.M
. and the sun was still somewhat out. I noticed police drinking from bottles of something that appeared to be vodka. Not far off in the distance, leaning against the Kremlin walls, were Russian girls, smoking, laughing, and showing off their long legs and short skirts. The tourists were all but gone by then, except, of course, for me…I am always finding myself in the weirdest places at the wrong time. I guess I didn’t feel like I was in enough danger so I ventured up the side of the buildings and made my way around back. I climbed through trash, shattered glass, and the remnants of someone’s makeshift home but there was nothing back there worth pulling out my Nikon for. No characters to shoot. It had been abandoned for one reason or another. (Maybe the vodka-drinking police were rousting the ratlike humans out of boredom.)

So, on worn Chuck Taylors, I did an about-face and headed toward the prostitutes, who quickly stopped laughing as I approached. It seemed like they were scowling at me more with every step I took. I had a pocket full of rubles so I figured I would get them to pose for a few portraits, but it wasn’t me they were getting pissy about. It was my camera. In a deep, loud, Russian voice the brunette said something to the crack-whore-skinny blonde who then yelled it to the drinking cop who then barked something at me that didn’t sound anything like “Welcome to Red Square.”