The Dirt (40 page)

I
t was as simple as this: I saw how ugly and bloated I looked. I saw how close Nikki had come to dying. And I saw how our managers were so sick of us they were going to quit. In fact, I was so sick of us that I was ready to quit if something didn’t change.

So I cut out the drinking. You can only stop when you want to stop. And I was ready to stop. I didn’t like the feeling of being vulnerable when I was drunk, because in that state it’s easy for people to take advantage of you. And I was badly damaging my bones, because I was getting so rotted I’d make a reckless move and wake up the next morning in crippling pain, which I’d anesthetize with more liquor until I was so drunk I’d do something stupid again.

Sober, I lost twenty pounds and a hundred wrinkles within a few weeks. Whenever I craved a drink or felt frustrated, I’d just curl my fingers into a circle as if I were holding a shot glass, yell “boom,” and snap my hand toward my mouth, as if I was hammering a shot of tequila. That was my boom, my therapy. I think it scared a lot of people, but it made me happy. It was also a lot cheaper than rehab.

Nikki, Tommy, and Vince, in the meantime, checked in and out of rehab so many times I could never keep track of who was where. Nikki thinks rehab did the band a lot of good. But I don’t believe it. I would visit them in rehab and see therapists tearing those guys apart until they felt like zeroes. They’d get humiliated and degraded and stuck in rooms with people who had real problems, people who had been raped by their father or seen their mother get killed. Tommy, Vince, and Nikki didn’t have problems like that: They were so fucking young they hadn’t even begun to live. The whole process was hardest on Tommy, I think, because he’d gotten to the point of being ultratemperamental when he was rotted and, after a blowup at his house on Christmas Eve, he needed to get sober to save his marriage. He was just a baby when the band took off, and I guess you lose your sense of perspective when you’re a teenage millionaire.

The deal we made was that before we started recording the new album, we all had to be sober. So the guys would check into rehab, go on a binge, then check into rehab again to sober up for a week. It was like an expensive vacation, because all these therapists and clinic owners would do was take as much money out of those guys as they could and keep it whether the guys got sober or not. Maybe, if you were lucky, they’d use your tens of thousands of dollars to buy you a free key chain after ninety days of sobriety. The way I see it, you can only quit when you want to, and all the rehabs in the world aren’t going to help you. That’s my opinion—because not going to rehab worked very well for me. My only vice now is collecting old guitars. Maybe that’s why I’m the boring guy of the band.

Even though I quit by myself, I still had to go to group meetings and therapy. Our management was trying to do some kind of extensive plastic surgery on the band, and we had to see all these doctors who would try to brainwash us into behaving differently. Once a week we’d have to go to relationship counseling like an old bitter married couple. There, we’d learn how to talk to each other instead of fighting or we’d discuss our feelings and whatever was going on that week.

It bummed me out. First of all, it messed up my day having to go there and sit through something I wasn’t into and didn’t believe in. And secondly, it hurt my feelings that the rest of the band wasn’t strong enough to see through the superficial therapy bullshit and just get along on their own. Every therapist wanted us to let loose and cry, and I hate crybabies. Grown men who cry in the middle of a fucking crisis will die, because you can bet your ass that the enemy won’t be crying. They’ll be killing your weak ass while you cry! My father taught me, “When you’re a child, be a child. When you’re a man, be a man.” I became so sick of seeing everyone in the band bawling their eyes out. Go back to the second grade if you want to cry, suckass.

The ideas behind all that expensive therapy were so simple: Stay away from alcohol and drugs and things that make you misbehave; think before acting on a negative impulse; and share your feelings instead of keeping them bottled in where they destroy you and those around you. We all knew that beforehand. The only bad habit we had was therapy. But I went every week anyway without a complaint, because I didn’t need a therapist to tell me that if we wanted to be a great band again we had to stick together like a band.

We moved to Canada to record our next album, and the substance-abuse therapists came with us—on our dime. When we finished and returned to L.A., I was walking through a shopping center in Beverly Hills buying furniture for a new house I had moved into with Emi and couldn’t really afford. From across the street, a woman yelled, “Mick!” She looked like a bag lady, and reeked of alcohol. She was so rotted she could hardly walk. I said hi to her and moved on.

“Who was that freak?” Emi asked.

“Her?” I replied. “That was our therapist.”

fig. 3

From left: Bob Timmons, Vince, Mick, Rich Fisher

A
s soon as I emerged clean from months of on-and-off rehab torture, one of the first people I saw was Demi Moore, the very person who had first whispered the letters
A.A
. in my ear. She was in Vancouver filming a movie while we were starting to work on
Dr. Feelgood
. And word on the street was that Demi and Bruce Willis had separated. We had dinner at my producer Bob Rock’s house, and afterward, she asked if I wanted a ride back to her hotel. Sometimes a ride home is just a ride home, but being a rock star I naturally assumed I was being offered another kind of ride.

I knew I was sober for real this time when I turned that ride down. The reason was Brandi Brandt. Since the age of seven, when I started smoking pot in Mexico, there was hardly a day that went by when I hadn’t gotten fucked up. I’d been successfully avoiding reality for twenty years solid. So when I finally got off heroin, I didn’t know what to do with myself. Sobriety was terrifying. I had a whole life to catch up on. And I didn’t know where to begin or what to do with myself.

I didn’t go to clubs anymore and I hadn’t been laid in so long that me and my right hand were basically engaged. I became so confused and agoraphobic that I went to see a psychiatrist. All the rehab and therapy had peeled back the onion so deep that I didn’t feel like Nikki Sixx anymore. I felt like that little boy in Idaho, supergeek and friend to Allan Weeks. I needed to learn all over again how to be a man, because I realized that all along I had been nothing but a little boy: immature, impulsive, and highly susceptible to the evils of the world.

The therapist suggested that I try a new drug called Prozac. Though I didn’t want to take any drugs, even legal ones, he said that I had become chemically unbalanced. My substance abuse, he explained, had knocked the production of something in my brain called serotonin out of whack. He gave me two boxes, each filled with ten samples of this new wonder drug. As I walked out the door, I popped two pills and, by the time I was home, I felt calm.

Maybe it was a placebo, but within two days I was able to leave the house and even socialize a little. I went on a date with Lisa Hartman, but she was too busy for me (though she evidently wasn’t too busy for Clint Black). In fact, most of my so-called friends didn’t have time for me anymore. Some of the guys from Metallica walked up to me at the Cathouse and offered to buy me a drink, but when I said I was sober, they walked away and wouldn’t speak to me. Same with Slash, same with everybody.

Fortunately, an old friend named Eric Stacy, who played bass in Faster Pussycat, had also just gotten out of rehab. I invited him to live with me so we could both sit around and feel like dorks together. Every now and then, we would venture out to a club and try to pick up chicks. But either we had forgotten how or we never really knew how. We’d say, “Hi.” They’d say, “Hi.” Then there would be an awkward silence and we’d say, “Never mind.”

Eventually, Rikki Rachtman, who ran the Cathouse, felt so sorry for me and my right hand that he set us up on a blind date with Miss October (though a date isn’t so blind when you know it’s with a
Playboy
centerfold). I was an emotionally vulnerable rock star on Prozac exploring a new world of sobriety and she was a Playmate on the rebound. It was a bad combination. Brandi, a voluptuous brunette with sparkling childlike eyes, had just broken up with Taime Downe of Faster Pussycat after finding a used rubber in his trash can.

The first night we slept together at her house, the phone rang. It was Brandi’s mother. Through the receiver, I could hear her mom talking about a guy she had met a while back named Nikki and how she was thinking of calling him because she had really liked him.

I recognized that voice: It was Brie Howard, one of the girls we had auditioned as a backup singer on the
Girls
tour. I had completely forgotten about her. We had a fun couple of nights rolling around together. But I had no idea she was Brandi’s…

“Uh, Mom,” Brandi said. “I wouldn’t advise calling Nikki. Maybe you should call that nice record producer I saw you with the other week.”