The Heroin Diaries Read online

  TOMMY LEE: Back around Girls Girls Girls, we were starting to make shitloads of money. With money came success, power, overindulgence and experimentation. Sixx and I, in particular, took a lot of narcotics, and he would always want to push things: “Hey, how about taking these two drugs together? How about heroin and cocaine at the same time?” That period led us to this really dark fucking place. We all went to that place at various times–but Nikki seemed to like it there more than any of us.

  DECEMBER 28TH, 1986

  Van Nuys, 9:40 p.m.

  After I binged last night–or was it tonight–I was convinced yet again that there were people coming to get me. It was more than just shadows and voices, more than just fantasies…it was real, and I was scared to my core.

  My bones were shaking…my heart was pounding…I thought I was going to explode. I’m glad I have you to talk to, to write this down…I tried to keep it all together, but then I gave in to the madness and became one with my insanity…

  I always end up in the closet in my bedroom. Let me tell you about that place, my closet. It’s more than a closet–it’s a haven for me. It’s where I keep my dope and where I keep my gun. I know when I’m in there I’m safe, at least until I get too high. I can’t be out in the house–there are too many windows and I know I’m being watched. Right now it seems impossible that cops are peering in from the trees outside or people are looking at me thru the peeohole at the front door. But when the drugs kick in I can’t control my mind…

  Today, last night feels like a lifetime ago. But the sick thing is I could do it again tonight.

  NIKKI: This was the crazy routine I had at the time. I would start out freebasing or mainlining anywhere in the house: the front room, the kitchen, the bathroom. But as soon as the coke-induced psychosis kicked in, as soon as the insanity began, I would make a beeline for my bedroom closet. That was my refuge. I would huddle in there, surrounded by my drug paraphernalia and guns, convinced that people were in the house trying to get me, or a SWAT team was outside preparing to bust me. I would be too scared to move until I came down. The only way to bring myself down quicker was heroin. Heroin would make the madness go away: it was the easy solution. It seemed to make sense at the time.

  DECEMBER 29TH, 1986

  Van Nuys, 4:30 p.m.

  I’ve been thinking about last Christmas Eve when I picked up that girl in a strip club, brought her back here on my bike, took her home the next day, then had Christmas dinner all by myself in McDonald’s. I haven’t made much progress I see.

  Today I’m listening to Exile on Main Street, reading, laying around…tanning in the backyard, naked…today I feel like my old self. Sometimes I feel like I have two personalities. One is Nikki and one is…Sikki.

  ROSS HALFIN: As a photographer I’ve shot Mötley Crüe many times over the years for magazines and got particularly close to Nikki. I remember the first time I ever met him in LA we got on pretty well and decided to go for a drink that night. We sat talking in a booth. Vince Neil was in another booth with a girl, arguing, and Vince suddenly stood up and punched her in the face. I asked Nikki, “Should we sort it out?” And Nikki just laughed and said, “Let them sort it out themselves.”

  JANUARY 1ST 1987

  Van Nuys, 6 a.m.

  Vanity showed up yesterday with a mountain of coke…it kind of altered the day. I’d been doing good until that point. I’d got a good night’s sleep for the first time in days. I even managed to take a shower and pick up my guitar.

  But since this is a new diary, let me tell you about Vanity…she used to be a backup singer with Prince, or so she says. We meet for all the wrong reasons and have only one real thing in common–drugs. I mean, she’s a sweet girl, as much as I’m a sweet guy. She has flowing brown hair and chocolate brown eyes and has an ability to look very pretty, but usually, like me, looks like hell. As they say, misfits attract misfits…truer words could not be said.

  Mötley is back in the studio next week and I told the guys I had some new songs. The truth is I haven’t written much of anything. I just can’t seem to focus on anything these days except…the usual.

  So we did a few lines while Vanity cooked up the base. She was talking, talking, talking about us going out tonight for New Year’s Eve, but both of us knew that we were going nowhere. The more she talked, the more all I could hear was my head talking…the craving, a wet palate, for a hit on that glass pipe…it was beautiful and it was ugly all at the same time.

  Then everything went wrong, just like it always does. The base fucked up Vanity’s head and she started speaking in riddles, ranting on about Jesus and spirituality like she was still with fucking Prince, or something…She was making no sense and I couldn’t take it, so I started yelling at her to go fuck herself and fuck Jesus and get the fuck out of my house. Then she was gone and I was back in my closet with my grandfather’s gun pointed at the door, needles and dirty spoons on the floor…terrified because people had slid under my front door like vapor and were in the house and were coming to get me.

  I fucking hate that shit. I’m OK now but nobody would believe what happens inside my head…it’s haunted. Now that I’ve come down it seems like a sick play I saw in a theater. Thirty minutes ago I could have killed somebody, or better myself. Now I’m OK…I need a padded cell, I’m telling you.

  Oh ya…Happy New Year…

  JANUARY 1987

  ONE COULD SAY THAT I’VE BEEN HAVING A 10CC LOVE AFFAIR

  11:30 a.m.

  Here comes the New Year…same as the old year?

  Pete said I really must open those Christmas presents soon…

  NIKKI: Vanity came and went during different periods of my addiction. She was a wild black chick who had sung with Prince: she’d also been his lover for a while. At the time I thought of Vanity as a disposable human being, like a used needle. Once its purpose was fulfilled it was ready for the trash, only to be dug up if you were really desperate.

  Maybe the manner in which I’d met Vanity should have told me this was to be no normal relationship. Back in ’86 I used to hang out with a guy named Pete: in fact, he was semi-living in my house. Pete was a six-foot-six cross between Keith Richards and Herman Munster and looked like the coolest rock star around, except that he couldn’t play shit. We used to sit in my house watching TV and snorting coke and pointing out girls that we’d like to fuck. Then I’d phone the Mötley office and they’d get us the girls’ numbers so we could call them. It was a sick lil game we played…never really realizing we were playing with people’s lives.

  We saw Vanity on MTV, and when Pete said, “Dude, that’s Prince’s old girl,” I said, “Excellent–he’s got a tiny dick.” The office rang Vanity and arranged for us to meet. She opened the door naked, with her eyes going around in her head. Somehow I had a feeling that we might just hit it off.

  We became drug buddies: sometimes, you could even just about call us boyfriend and girlfriend. Vanity also taught me how to really freebase: the first time I based was with Tommy when Mötley just started and only a few times after that. So up until then, I’d been mostly snorting or injecting. But as soon as she showed me the real ins and outs of cooking up a good rock…it was love.

  Not her. The drug.

  EVANGELIST DENISE MATTHEWS: Webster’s Dictionary assassinates the word Vanity, describing its meaning as worthless. What a bold mistake that was. God forgave me for that ugly name. You might say I was a collector: I collected a long list of vile addictions throughout my journey of paranoia, boldly going where most have not gone before, hiding behind the face that launched a thousand nothings.

  Most don’t call me Vanity any longer. My friends call me Denise; the Saints call me Evangelist. It doesn’t really matter; I don’t answer to Vanity. I would much rather be a fish stuck in a pond with a starving shark than take on such a foul name of nothingness. I am this new creature in Christ and I persevere to keep changing for the better.

  JANUARY 3RD, 1987

  Van Nuys, 5:20 p.m.r />
  Dear diary, here is a typical holiday day in my rock star paradise.

  Wake up around noon…if I’ve been to bed. See if I’m alone. If I’m with somebody else, try to remember what her name is–but that hasn’t been happening too much lately. Girls have kinda stopped coming around…

  Crawl out of bed, feel hungover or dope sick. Wipe last night out of my eyes. Wonder if I need to shower. Decide that I don’t…I’ll only get dirty again.

  On a good day, pick up my guitar. On a bad day, flop in front of MTV. Most days, do both. Do a little bump to wake me up. Some people use coffee for that…we all have our little rituals. Then it starts…

  The itch starts. The coke makes me edgy, so I have a little sniff of my breakfast blend and a valium or two to calm me down. But I need Jason. If his answering machine is on, I sit here twitching until he phones back. When the phone rings–if it’s Jason–it’s the best thing in the world. If it’s not, I want the person at the other end to die. Sometimes I wonder if they know that I am strung out, and they are calling just to torment me.

  And when Jason doesn’t call at all? That’s when the fucking joneses start. Being dope sick is the worst feeling in the world. I hope it never happens to you. Unless you have it coming…I could name a few. When you’re junk sick, you’ll do just about anything for a fix. It’s all you think about…it haunts you.

  Eventually I go to my cottons, squeeze some lemon juice on them, and try and wring out a few cc’s. I’ve done it all. Once I even shot up some weird stuff I found stuck in the bushes outside a drug dealer’s house–then I found out it wasn’t some lucky find on my part, it was fucking crystallized brown sugar. Man, I thought I’d hit the mother lode when I found that baggy.

  But when Jason finally shows up, he makes everything better. It’s like he’s got the power to heal…and that prick shows his power every chance he gets.

  VINCE NEIL: You know the problem with Nikki Sixx? He can’t do anything just a little bit. He can’t do a little bit of coke–he’s got to do all the coke. He can’t take a little bit of heroin–he’s got to take all the heroin. He can’t just have one sip of wine–he’s got to drink the bar out. There’s no middle speed for that dude–it’s zero or ten.

  JANUARY 4TH, 1987

  Van Nuys, midnight

  Bob Michaels came over tonight. We drank a few beers, had a couple lines…Bob is a good guy. He gets fucked up with me but he’s not like me…he’s normal.

  BOB MICHAELS: Nikki Sixx and I had been friends ever since the day in 1983 that he moved in next door to me. I remember seeing this real tall guy in six-inch heels with lots of black hair and makeup, and thinking, Who the fuck is that? But we became friends real quick. That building was Party Central: I think everyone who lived there was involved in either supplying or consuming narcotics. Robbin Crosby from Ratt lived downstairs from Nikki, and Tommy was around all the time.

  I stayed friends with Nikki when he moved into his next house, on Valley Vista Boulevard in Van Nuys, but by then he was struggling with all kinds of addiction–heroin, alcoholism. Nikki would put anything into his arm that he could–heroin, coke, and loads of other things that should never be put into an arm. Personally, I pinpoint his problems from Vince Neil going to jail in 1985. That made Nikki think for the first time: What would happen if the band stopped? Maybe it scared him, because that’s when his drug habit started to get out of control.

  JANUARY 5TH, 1987

  Van Nuys, 9:30 p.m.

  Listening to the Dolls and the Stooges. Wow. Amazing. Then mix in some John Lee Hooker or Buddy Miles. Then the first Aerosmith album…I love music…This is life, like Burroughs, or Kerouac, or Ginsberg…the flames who burn bright.

  Other people hide away from life. People like me, or Keith Richards, or Johnny Thunders–we live it. We’re right here, feeling everything, in the moment…the only way to be truly alive is to confront your mortality…

  NIKKI: I really used to think this way. Keith and Johnny lived like this, so why shouldn’t I? I know it looks crazy now, but at the time, it seemed the only way to live. I was just another wasted, confused, unraveling millionaire rock star.

  MICK MARS: Nikki was always trying to rebel. He had enough money to act like Sid Vicious, and he always loved him, so that’s exactly what he did: he role-played the part of Sid. Of course, it never seemed to occur to him that Sid ended up killing himself. Did Nikki take so many drugs back then because he was unhappy? Well, I’m pretty unhappy now, and I’m not taking them!

  JANUARY 6TH, 1987

  Van Nuys, 11:30 p.m.

  There’s this funny thing about heroin…the first time you do it, you throw up, you feel sick and you can’t move. You lay on your back and your head spins and your body flips…you say to yourself, this is the stupidest drug ever. Only the dumb of the dumb would ever do it again.

  So why did I do it again? Because my heroes did it…because I idolize my heroes because they didn’t care; and I really don’t care about anything.

  Heroin, once it became my friend, became like a warm blanket on a cold night. Now I can’t imagine living without it. I can’t imagine not having it. I don’t get sick from it now–I get sick if I don’t do it.

  Isn’t it funny how that works?

  NIKKI: Cocaine made me high until I went too far and became wild and psychotic: heroin balanced that out and made me calm. I would self-medicate in my house for days with the obsessive addiction of a research scientist. Maybe I saw it as a yin and yang thing? It all made sense in my junkie wonderland.

  TOMMY LEE: The first time I took heroin was at Nikki’s place at Valley Vista Boulevard. He was taking it and I thought, Fuck, I want to try this shit. I shot up on his couch, pulled the needle out and immediately had the biggest rush on the planet. I was just lying there, then within a minute I had to rush to his bathroom, spraying throw-up through my fingers. Then I came out really high, walked back to his couch and just passed out. Later I thought, I’m not sure that I like this. The needle hurt on the way in, there was a very short really high point, then I threw up and passed out. What the fuck is this?

  I asked Nikki, “Are you sure about this shit?” But unlike me, Sixx seemed to be pretty fucking sure.

  JANUARY 8TH, 1987

  Van Nuys, 3:25 a.m.

  Sometimes, if I didn’t know better…I’d think that my dealer is trying to kill me.

  * * *

  Little mean faces Here I sit in the dark Letting my insanity run away Little mean faces stare back at me Chanting rhythms of my fate I know they’re not real And I’m sure I’m really quite sane Because if I was crazy I would have given them all little names

  * * *

  10 a.m.

  Pete won’t admit it, but he’s got a habit too.

  Noon

  TO-DO LIST:

  Buy guitar strings

  Buy food

  Call management back Return decorator’s call Get more locks for the doors Replace busted back window

  NIKKI: My house was a site of constant misadventure. All sorts of mayhem would unfold. One day I would get a strippers’ pole put in my bedroom because I thought it was classy. A few days later I would tear it down because I’d decided it was crass. There were constant spontaneous décor rethinks. It was very confusing even for such a confused time. It tends to be that way when you’re going insane.

  JANUARY 9TH, 1987

  Van Nuys, midnight

  I love this house…the times that I don’t hate it.

  It’s funny how I never even saw the place before I bought it. Nicole chose the place for me, then we moved in, made it our heroin den, and hardly left for months. Now Nicole has moved out and I’ve got Vanity. I’ve gone from a junkie to a crack head…is that progress?

  But I love prowling around this house from room to room. I love that it’s so dark: a house that can keep secrets. I don’t want to ever leave here but I have to…’cause rehearsals start next week.

  NIKKI: The house was on Valley Vista Boulevard i
n Van Nuys, LA. My former girlfriend Nicole had chosen it for me. I was touring Theatre of Pain with Mötley, and she would view properties in LA, video them and bring the videos out on the road to show me. It took me about a minute to say yes. What was the big deal? I had so much money then, I could have bought anywhere.

  I hired an interior decorator who would turn up for meetings with her fabrics and samples, and find me strung out of my head. She’d step over the needles, and the empty coke bindles, and the comatose naked girls on my $25,000 Persian rugs with cigarette burns on them, and she’d never even bat an eyelid. I must hand it to her—she was very professional.

  My house was full of red velvet hangings, gothic furniture, antiques and gargoyles that loomed at you out of the darkness. It was a house to lose yourself in–and to lose your mind in.

  JANUARY 10TH, 1987

  Van Nuys, 9:40 p.m. p.m.

  Today I made myself pick up my guitar, knowing that I have to write more songs for this next album. I managed to string it, but the writing just wasn’t happening…that scares me, because music is all I have to live for. Tommy and Vince and even Mick have their families to go home to at the end of the day. Music has always been my family, and now I’m losing that too…every corner of my mind is filled with spiderwebs and fear…

  JANUARY 11TH 1987

  Van Nuys, 11 p.m.

  Me and Pete spent the day shooting the breeze. Pete talks like he has loads of things going on, but he never really gets his shit together. He still owes me the $9,000 bail I posted for him after he got busted on probation with track marks on his arm. He says I’ll get it back one day…whatever…