The Dirt (25 page)

“Dude,” I said to a collective couch of wives, “even if Vince took Razzle on a fucking joyride, they should be back by now. The liquor store is only around the corner, so what the fuck are they doing?”

That’s when we began to worry that maybe they’d crashed or been jacked for cash. I had no clue. Then we heard ambulances careen past the house, whip around the corner, and squeal to a halt. I sobered up on the spot. I think everyone did, because there was no doubt who those ambulances were for.

We ran out of the house. The road curved around to the left, making it impossible to see what was around the corner. We walked and walked and walked—it seemed like forever—watching the red flashing lights bounce off nearby buildings.

When we turned the corner, there were fire trucks, ambulances, police cars, and dozens of people in shorts standing on the corner just gawking. I turned my head to see what they were gawking at, and the first thing I saw was that red fucking Pantera. It was smashed—not head-on but at a slight angle—into another car, and its passenger side had collapsed on itself like an accordion. The road was littered with shit: glass, metal, plastic, and, in the middle of it all, a fucking Chuck Taylor high-top. It was the shoe that Razzle always wore.

In my mind, though, I just couldn’t make sense of anything: Why was Razzle’s high-top in the middle of the street? Where was Vince? What was going on? What should I be doing, saying, thinking, screaming?

Then I saw him. Vince. He was sitting on the curb, his arms wrapped around his ankles, rocking back and forth. I ran toward him, and as I did, I saw Razzle out of the corner of my eye. He was being carried on a stretcher toward the open back doors of an ambulance. I figured that he was all right, though obviously in need of some serious attention, considering the state of his side of the Pantera.

Vince was covered with blood, and just rocking and making this strange sound that seemed to come from such a painful place that I don’t think I can even call it crying. I didn’t know if he was in pain, shock, or just freaking out. I tried to talk to him but a cop knocked me out of the way. He handcuffed Vince and shoved him into a police car. I drove with Beth and the Hanoi guys to the hospital.

After two and a half hours of waiting in complete silence, a doctor finally came into the waiting room. His gloves were bloody and his mask was pulled down around his neck. My eyes filled with water before he even spoke. The tears just hung there suspended, covering my eyes like contact lenses, until the dreaded doctor spoke those dreaded words: “Your buddy Razzle didn’t make it.” And then the dam burst, and tears drenched my face.

I
t had started out as a barbecue to celebrate the kickoff of our third album, but nobody wanted to go home. Beth was tearing out her hair because she was a neat freak and hated it when my friends came over to the house and got their germs everywhere. Our marriage was based not on love, but on drugs, alcohol, and her 240Z—and I was miserable. I’d stay out as late as I could, and drink from the moment I woke up until I went to sleep so that I didn’t have to deal with her nagging.

The party was a revolving door of people, but a few never left, like a couple of girls with apartments in the complex, an NBC anchorman who lived next door, and Tommy. Fortunately, he had split up with Honey; I hated being in the same room as them—not because they constantly fought but because I’d fucked her at least half a dozen times behind his back. Mick arrived on the third day, and I was surprised to see him there, since he rarely drank with us. He preferred to lock himself alone in his room, where he probably partied more than we ever did, judging by the way his body was beginning to bloat from constant alcohol consumption.

I finally got some sleep on the third night of the party. I woke up the next afternoon and looked out the window. Washed up on the beach was what looked like a small black whale. I slipped on jeans and a Hawaiian shirt and ran downstairs to take a closer look. And there was Mick, passed out in the sand in black leather pants, leather boots, and a leather jacket with the noonday sun blazing down on him. The clothes had clearly once been wet, because now they were dried out and clung to him like old, wrinkly skin. It looked like he was decomposing into the sand.

I wanted to bring him inside, but he mumbled something about just wanting to be left lying there. So I left him there, looking like E.T. when he was sick, and headed back into the party.

That night, the booze ran out. I had just bought a ’72 Ford Pantera, which is a fast, beautiful car, and Razzle wanted to see what it was like to ride in. It was bright red on the outside, with a sleek black leather interior. We were both fucked up and shouldn’t have driven, especially since the store was only a couple blocks away and we could have easily walked. But we just didn’t give it a second thought. Razzle wore high-tops, leather pants, and a frilly shirt—a twenty-four–seven rock-and-roll god, he wouldn’t ever be caught in the jeans and Hawaiian shirt that I was wearing.

We screeched into the parking lot and picked up a couple hundred dollars in beer and liquor to keep the party going. The car had no backseats, so Razzle held the bags of booze in his lap in the passenger seat. On the way home, we were driving along a hilly road that wound up the coast. It was full of little dips and hills, and as I was heading up a slight incline, there was a small bend ahead, just before the top of the hill. It was dark, and for some reason the streets were wet. Since I hadn’t been outside that night, I wasn’t sure if it had been raining lightly or if the streets had just been washed. As I approached the bend, I noticed that the gutter on one side of the road was full and was draining water and sewage into the gutter on the other side.

As the car rounded the curve, I shifted into second gear for the final stretch home. But as I did so, the wheels chirped and the car suddenly slid sideways in the water, to the left—into the lane for oncoming traffic. I tried to maneuver out of the skid, but as I struggled with the steering wheel, a pair of lights bore down on me. Something was coming over the top of the hill and heading straight for us. That was the last thing I saw before I was knocked unconscious.

When my head cleared, Razzle was lying in my lap. I forced my mouth into a smile for him, as if to say, “Thank God, we’re all right,” but he didn’t respond. I lifted his head and shook it, but he didn’t budge. I kept yelling “Razzle, wake up!” because I assumed that he had been knocked out, too. It was like we were in our own little world. I didn’t even realize that this was taking place in the Pantera until people began looking and reaching into the car, pulling Razzle out to the street.

I started to climb out of the car, but the paramedics rushed over and laid me on the pavement. “They reek of alcohol!” a medic yelled at the officers as he bandaged my ribs and the cuts on my face. I thought they were going to take me to the hospital, but instead they left me sitting on the pavement.

It seemed like a bad dream, and at first all I could think about was my car and how badly it was totaled. But then Beth and some people from the party arrived and started freaking out, and it slowly began to dawn on me that something bad had happened. I saw a decimated Volkswagen and paramedics loading a man and a woman I didn’t know into an ambulance. But I was in such a state of shock that I didn’t realize this had anything to do with me or real life.

Then a police officer walked up to me. “How fast were you going? The speed limit’s twenty-five.”

I told him that I didn’t remember, which was true. Only later did I recall the speedometer needle pushing sixty-five.

He gave me a Breathalyzer test, which I would have refused if I was in my right mind, and I measured .17. Then he read me my rights and, without handcuffing me, led me into the back of his squad car. At the police station, the officers glared at me. They kept asking me to tell them what happened, but all I could say was, “Where’s Razzle?” I figured that they had put him in another room to give a separate statement.

The phone rang, and the commanding officer left the room. He came back and said, coldly, “Your friend is dead.” When he spoke those words, the impact of the accident finally caught up with me. I felt it not just emotionally, but physically, as if I had been smashed with a hundred whiskey bottles. My ribs tore at my torso so bad I could hardly move, and pain shot through my face every time I spoke or winked. I thought about Razzle: I would never see him again. If only I had gone alone, or walked, or sent someone else for booze, or left the liquor store thirty seconds later, or skidded at a different angle so that I was dead instead. Fuck. I didn’t know how I could face anyone—his band, my band, my wife. I didn’t know what to do with myself.

The police sent me home as the sun was coming up, and Beth and Tommy were waiting for me. They tried to comfort me, but I didn’t respond. I was confused. I didn’t know how to make this new reality fit into the way my life seemed just twelve hours before. I was still the same person, but somehow everything had changed.

The next day, the phone didn’t stop ringing: friends, relatives, reporters, enemies were all calling and asking what happened. Then, as quickly as it had begun, the phone stopped ringing. After an eerie morning of silence, my managers called: The police had decided to arrest me for vehicular manslaughter. I went to the precinct and turned myself in.

The parents of the couple who were in the Volkswagen were at my preliminary hearing. They looked at me like I was Satan. Lisa Hogan, the girl driving the car, was in a coma with brain damage, and her passenger, Daniel Smithers, was in the hospital in traction. He also had brain damage. As I stood there, I knew I should be in jail for what happened, even if it was technically an accident. If I had been just an ordinary guy, without fame or money, I probably would have been locked up on the spot. But instead I was released on a twenty-five-hundred-dollar bail until the trial, though I was told that if the trial didn’t go well, I was looking at seven years in prison and the end of my career.

When I came home after the hearing, our manager, Doc McGhee, told me that I had to check into rehab. I told him that I wasn’t an alcoholic and there was no way I was going to be treated like I had a problem. I wasn’t a wino lying in a gutter. But the court had required me to get treatment, and he had found a place that was more like a country club. He said that it had tennis courts, a golf course, and a small lake with boats. He drove me there the next day and I went along peacefully, figuring that it would be nice to get a vacation from all the newspaper headlines calling me a murderer. It was on Van Nuys Boulevard, and I walked into a very cold-looking hospital with barred windows.

“Where’s the golf course?” I asked Doc.

“Well,” he said. “I’ve got good news and bad news.”

There was no good news: It was just a little hospital, where I had to detox and go through intense therapy for thirty days. As I sat in that hospital—reliving the accident again and again with therapists, reading editorials in the paper saying that I should get life in prison to discourage drunk driving, and crying my eyes out every time I remembered Razzle and his high-tops and his happy-go-lucky British accent—I thought that this was it for me.

I had gotten maybe one phone call from Tommy or Nikki when I first checked in, but that was it. No one in the band called or visited after that. They either weren’t being supportive or were being told to keep their distance. I was alone, and they were probably moving on without me. I imagined Nikki auditioning new singers and leaving me to seven years in prison and a life of scorn as a walking murderer, the butt of jokes on talk shows to be rerun until the day I sink to hell.