The Dirt (34 page)

I had gone to Fresno with no cash, assuming that we’d soon be making money from our gigs. But there were no gigs, and I was broke. So I borrowed ten dollars from the drummer for food. After a few days, all I was hearing was, “You owe me ten dollars.” They were getting lessons for free, and all they could think about was money and greed. I picked watermelons in my spare time to earn extra change for food, but I didn’t make enough to repay my debt. So the band ended before it even began. They drove me home, only so that they could hit up my aunt Thelma for ten bucks when she answered the door. Greed is usually the greatest obstacle to success, right after selfishness.

(I was later able to repay Aunt Thelma, who went on to become Mötley Crüe’s biggest fan. She saved every news clipping, subscribed to every metal magazine, and, despite being partially deaf, went to every concert she could. When her husband died, however, she disappeared. I eventually found her living in a house with no heat, no plumbing, no carpet, peeling paint, and a collapsed roof. I sent her money to fix up the place, and every time I saw her afterward, I’d slip her a few hundred for gas and water bills. She would always tell me that she couldn’t understand how anybody could have as much money as I had given her. Like my father, she never lost some of the innocence of childhood.)

When I returned home after Fresno, my friend Ron was living in the shed behind my parents’ house. I really had it rigged up by then. I had a black light, which shone on red and green psychedelic posters on the walls. I had a TV, which I had found discarded on a street corner, and I still used the homemade stereo I had made so long ago out of my sister’s phonograph. Ron and I loved crosstops, which were basically trucker speed that you could buy in packs of one hundred for ten bucks at any pharmacy. We’d swallow fistfuls and hitchhike as far away as we could get, then return home from Whittier or wherever we were when the speed wore off at dawn.

After speed, I started getting into Seconal, which was a heavy painkiller that I’d wash down with sloe gin. I got so strung out that my doctor told me I’d die if I didn’t quit. So I stopped cold, which was the stupidest thing I could do, because going cold turkey on painkillers like that could have put me into a coma. When you get older, you worry about death and your own mortality a lot more than when you’re younger. However, with cloning (which I’m sure has already been done with humans in secret), we’re just one step away from scientific resurrection for the chosen ones (that is, the rich).

I never really got into psychedelics. While I was hitchhiking, someone I met offered me a tab of mescaline. I took about half the tablet, which was the size of a Rolaid. When nothing happened, I took the other half. And then it hit me like a billy club. I was fucked up for three days. I was seeing people shrink and walk through walls and float into the air, and nothing made sense. All I could think was, “When am I going to come down?” I tried some orange microdot acid once, and the same thing happened.

I was running so wild and getting so many dirty looks from my family that I figured it was time to find my own place. I didn’t have any money, so I moved in with some bikers in Orange County. It was like being with the Garcia Brothers again, because I was far too scrawny and innocent. When they spilled beer on the floor, they’d pick me up and use my long hair as a mop. They didn’t want to get their Levi’s dirty, they’d explain. And I wouldn’t argue. They all packed guns, because other bike clubs would steal their motorcycles, file down the numbers, and keep or sell them.

Nowadays, I have a good radar for trouble. I’ve been through it. When I see it coming, I duck because I know what happens when it hits you. But back then, my trouble radar wasn’t in operation. So I didn’t duck when a friend of mine named Mike Collins brought his ex-girlfriend, Sharon, to a party we were having. She was an earthy five-foot-two brunette with auburn coloring in her hair and a face like Ali MacGraw.

We started dating right away, but she was much more serious than me. Her mother and father had broken up when she was young and, even though she was only sixteen, she craved the security that she had lacked in her childhood. Though she was after marriage from day one, I knew that I couldn’t be a husband. I wanted to be a guitarist, and that was it. I was only nineteen, and had no plans of getting a job or settling down in any way whatsoever. I knew it would take a while to make it in rock and roll, and I was prepared to put in the time. Nonetheless, she came home from work one evening and, with a vague smile on her face, broke the news to me: “I’m pregnant.”

“No,” I told her. “I’m not stopping. This is what I want to do.”

She said she was keeping the baby, and she found me a job at the Laundromat where she worked at the time. I was playing after-hours clubs with a band called Wahtoshi (which we thought meant number one in Chinese). We’d play until 6 A.M., then I’d sleep for two hours, go to the Laundromat at 8
A.M.
, and work until it was time to play music again. A few months after my son, Les Paul (guess who named him), was born, Sharon was pregnant again. My dream couldn’t have seemed any further away.

I was stuck in everything I had spent my whole life trying to avoid: a wife, two kids, a regular-guy job at a ridiculous Laundromat. All this responsibility was coming down on me when I wasn’t ready for it, and I couldn’t bear the weight. I started having horrendous hot flashes. All of a sudden my body would grow feverish, and I’d slip into another world that looked and felt a lot like hell. Other times, I’d black out for hours at a time: I’d wake up in bed or onstage or in the street and have no idea how I got there. I was going through some sort of transformation: Either I was going insane or I was in some sort of strange mental cocoon that was part of the process of changing from a boy to a man.

I didn’t know which way to turn. I couldn’t abandon my wife when she was pregnant, and I sure as heck wasn’t going to give up on becoming a great blues or rock-and-roll guitarist. So I turned to the only person who I thought could help: God. I began talking with Him, praying, asking for mercy and help and guidance. I may not know how we got here—we may be rejects from alien societies or we may just be some master race’s experiment in a petri dish called the world—but someone or something started this whole thing in motion, and at that time I had to believe it was God. Because if I couldn’t believe in God, I couldn’t believe in anything. And if I couldn’t believe in anything, what was the point in going on with my life?

In the midst of this, a friend of my father’s happened to stop by. He was an older deacon who had grown a beard to appear sophisticated, though it only served to make him look even older (the only thing worse is beards on bald men, because they make them look like they have their hair on upside down). The deacon quickly perceived that I was on the verge of a serious nervous breakdown. “Do you want to get baptized?” he asked, rubbing his old gray beard. I told him that, yes, I did.

He brought me to his church and stood me in three feet of water. “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” he recited as he held my nose and dunked me backward into the water. “I hope this helps,” I thought to myself as I emerged baptized.

Nowadays, I don’t believe in the Christian concept of a God who created people for the sole purpose of judging and punishing them. After all, if one of the commandments is “Thou shalt not kill,” does that make God a hypocrite when he does things like flooding the world or destroying Sodom and Gomorrah? But at the time I needed the forgiveness. I needed someone to wash away my past and start me over again, fresh. It worked for a little while. I even formed a gospel band. But it was only a temporary relief, like Seconal. It killed the pain for a little while, but the pain came back with a new intensity. Every time I walked into church, I had a sick feeling inside that it wasn’t where I was supposed to be, that maybe I was just even more trapped by normality: Now I had a wife, two children, a shitty job, and, on top of it all, weekly services and church events to attend.

One afternoon, I was working at the Laundromat exhausted from lack of sleep, transferring a six-hundred-pound tub of wet clothes from the washer to the dryer. The tub was attached to a hook that hung from a conveyer belt on the ceiling, kind of like in a meat processing plant. And as I swung the tub toward the dryer, I lost my grip and it swung back and smashed my left hand. A flash of panic shot through my head: What if I could never play guitar again?

I walked into the main office, had it bandaged, and left for the day. I never returned. And though my hand eventually healed, Wahtoshi replaced me during my absence.

I told Sharon that I’d never work a day job again, and she turned so many different colors of anger and sickness and disgust that she looked like some kind of TV test pattern. She had gotten me a job at the Laundromat and now I was throwing it away. She was sick of playing mother and father at the same time, and it was clear that I was unable to do anything for myself. So, on Christmas, the day when everything seems to happen in my life, she took Les Paul and our five-month-old daughter, Stormy (a girl who would make me a grandfather three times over before I hit forty), and left me.

Now, on top of everything else, I had to make child support payments: two hundred dollars a month. And I wasn’t making a penny with music. Broke and in debt, I begged my parents to let me move back into their house. They did, and there I was, right back in the shed where I had started. I had taken a long time to go nowhere. On top of everything, the cops came knocking on my shed again, just like in high school. But this time they took me to jail, for nonpayment of child support, and I spent two nights trying to keep guys from fucking me in the ass and lighting my bunk on fire. Then, just when I thought I couldn’t sink any lower, came the news that would knock me into a pit of hell for the rest of my life.

I
first noticed it when I was nineteen. My hips started hurting so bad every time I turned my body that it felt like someone was igniting fireworks in my bones. I didn’t have enough money to see a doctor, so I just kept hoping that I could do what I usually do: will it away, through the power of my mind. But it kept getting worse.

When I was married to Sharon, she had encouraged me to see a doctor. He told me that I wasn’t living right, and if I exercised, the pain would go away. I walked away fifty dollars poorer. I knew the pain was a symptom of something other than just laziness. But I didn’t know what: Was it the way I strapped on my guitar? Were all the crosstops and Mini Thins somehow destroying my bones?

Then, one afternoon while doing my laundry, I started having trouble breathing. At first, it felt like someone had plunged a knife into my back. But as the weeks passed, the pain kept moving around my back. Next, my stomach started burning, and I worried that my whole body was about to fall apart. I thought that there was a hole in my stomach, and acids were leaking out and destroying my bones and organs. I’d grab hold of doorknobs, anchor my legs into the ground, and pull with my hands to stretch my back and ease the pressure on it. During gigs I couldn’t even pick up the Marshall head from the top of my stack anymore because my back hurt so bad I couldn’t lift my arms over my shoulders. It felt like my spine had been replaced by a petrified cactus.

When I returned home from jail, Aunt Thelma took me to see a back specialist. And that was when I first heard the two words that would make me a freak and misfit for the rest of my life:
ankylosing spondylitis
. What struck me most about the diagnosis was that the disease contained the word
losing
. I had lost.

Ankylosing spondylitis is a degenerative bone disease that I’m told is inherited, though I don’t know of any relatives who have it. It usually affects the joints and ligaments that allow the spine to move, making them inflamed and stiff. It is as if hot, quick-drying cement is growing on the inside of your spine, becoming so heavy over the years that it starts to pull you down. People think that I walk hunched over because I’m shy, but it’s because my spine is slowly forcing me down to the ground.

The doctor said I had an extremely rare form of the disease that begins in the teenage years, but it would stop when I was in my midthirties. But it still hasn’t gotten any better, and I’m far past my thirties. Some people say that time cures all wounds, but I think that time is the wound.

Until the doctors gave me painkillers, I used to eat fifteen Advil at a time to stop the ache. But it was never enough. I had to be alert to play the guitar, so I couldn’t knock myself out like I needed. It became more urgent than ever to get my career on track before the disease set into the joints in my hand and robbed me of the only thing I cared about in this world, playing guitar.

I started hitchhiking again. My friend Ron had gotten married, stuck in the life I was trying to avoid. So I drifted like a hobo with Mike Collins. Most weekends, Mike and I would hitchhike to nightclubs around Orange County, looking for good bands to jam with. At Pier 11, I found White Horse. They played cover songs—like “Free Ride” and “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo”—but they played them better than any band I had been in.