The Heroin Diaries: Ten Year Anniversary Edition

A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star

Nikki Sixx

• Publisher: MTV Books
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781416525325
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

The shocking, gripping, and at times darkly hilarious bestselling memoir of Nikki Sixx's yearlong war with a vicious heroin addiction, featuring exclusive new content. When Mötley Crüe was at the height of its fame, there wasn't any drug Nikki Sixx wouldn't do. He spent days—sometimes alone, sometimes with other addicts, friends, and lovers—in a coke- and heroin-fueled daze.The highs were high, and Nikki's journal entries reveal some euphoria and joy. But the lows were lower, often ending with Nikki in his closet, surrounded by drug paraphernalia and wrapped in paranoid delusions.Here, Nikki shares the diary entries—some poetic, some scatterbrained, some bizarre—of those dark times. Joining him are Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars, Slash, Rick Nielsen, Bob Rock, and a host of ex-managers, ex-lovers, and more.Brutally honest, utterly riveting, and surprisingly moving, The Heroin Diaries follows Nikki during the year he plunged to rock bottom—and his courageous decision to pick himself up and start living again.

NOVEMBER 1^ST, 1987

DAY OFF

Van Nuys, noon

I’m reading On the Road by Kerouac again. I feel so connected to writers like Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. I hear people say they wish they were old enough to have lived thru the ’60s and other people say they should have been around in the 1920s. This was a time when I would have loved to be alive Their ability to shock society with their words and fillet the law with their freedom leaves me envious.

I’m drug-free (today) and feel sooo alive. It’s good to be home. So far the cockroaches of my life haven’t discovered I’m home yet. I’ll be outta here before they come to feed on my weakness. Karen seems amazed that I’m lucid. That makes two of us. Maybe I’m beating this thing little by little . . .

P.S. I love these lines from the book I’m reading. To me this describes Mötley to a T:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently . . .

KAREN DUMONT: Whatever he did, Nikki managed to put a good front on for me. He was stronger than anyone I know at making things look OK. The fact that he functioned so well while doing massive amounts of drugs shows how good he was at keeping things together.

There were times that he looked really rough, but I naively just put it down to him being a lazy slob. He’d laugh at me telling him off, but he was never nasty to me and I never realized how badly he was doing. I had always thought being messed up brought the nasty side out of people. Vince was more like that-he was scary.

NOVEMBER 2^ND, 1987

DAY OFF

Van Nuys, 3 p.m.

Home sweet home. I had breakfast this morning with Karen. I actually cooked . . . I think she was just being kind ’cause I could hardly eat the eggs, they were like rubber. I told her about the new video being based on the movie Taxi Driver. She said she didn’t know if MTU would have the balls to play it. That’s fine by me. It’s becoming so boring, a bubblegum channel, and there are all these cheeseball bands coming out and just ruining everything.

I honestly don’t think anyone understands what Mötley is or they wouldn’t try to copy us. We’re a train wreck, a bastard child between punk rock and heavy metal, and some people somehow think it’s cute. If only they knew. We would rather slit your throat than be part of this . . . so I hope MTV DOESN’T play it.

I went to the dog park with Whisky. Wow, there are a lot of hot girls there! Maybe I should have showered a week ago when I said I would . . . they probably thought I was a homeless guy. That’s better for me.

CHICKS = TROUBLE . . . and meeting a chick in a dog park is a perfect setup for disaster.

P.S. Today’s my last day home. Gotta go back on the road tomorrow.

RODEO

Laughing. like gypsies, show to show

Livin’ my life like a rolling stone

This is how my story unfolds

Traveling man, never at home.

Can’t find love so I sleep alone

This whisky river has a long way to flow

All that I know is life on this road.

NOVEMBER 3^RD, 1987

MUNICIPAL AUDITORIUM, MOBILE, AL

Van Nuys, 8 a.m.

Limo’s here, I have a noon commercial flight to New Orleans where our jet will take us to Mobile, I never unpacked (again). Maybe I’ll just throw these clothes away and buy new ones on the road . . . there are holes in most of them anyway.

On the jet, 5 p.m.

Sitting here on the jet waiting to take off. I think Vince must have pulled an all-nighter . . . he looks a little tattered around the edges. Me? Yes, it’s usually me that’s tattered, or better yet shattered, It’s amazing what a few days without a hangover will do for your disposition. I’m feeling creative, which for me means life. I struggle between creativeness and being somewhere between slump and completely dry.

Backstage, Mobile, 7 p.m.

Just got to the gig. I’m so tired I couldn’t sleep on the plane much, I’ve been thinking about my mother and father a lot. The last few days it seems, when I don’t do drugs, that’s what I do. I guess maybe the drugs are a part of me killing the pain, but for once thank God I didn’t do anything the last few days. It’s nice to not have been still up when the limo showed up.

I’m gonna go over and see Slash and the guys . . . they join the tour tonight. Now the bad news for them Tom Zutaut told me they were a younger, crazier Mötley. Does that sound like a challenge or what?

SLASH: We were really excited to go on the road with Mötley. We had a lot in common—we were both from LA and were total hell-raisers. We had toured Canada with the Cult and played with Iron Maiden and Alice Cooper, but Mötley Crüe was cool and they were at their peak. It was a chance to hang out with a bunch of guys who had been around a lot longer and test the water to see if we were crazier than them.

LIVIN’ IN THE KNOW

TV says 10 dead for christmas,

stalker on the loose

Another freeway shooting,

and I’ll be hangin’ by a noose.

I can’t seem to shake it, I can’t bend the spell.

Special thanks to Mom and Dad for bringing me to hell

NOVEMBER 4^TH, 1987

CIVIC CENTER, ALBANY, GA

Backstage, 6:10 p.m.

Spent the night in Mobile last night. So good to see Slash. Guns N’ Roses was awesome last night but our fans can be so brutal. They just stood there for the most part and stared-they just don’t want to see anybody but us. Maybe some day we will do “An Evening with . . .” but Doug says that is suicide. Anyway I think they’re gonna be huge but what do I know? I thought the same about the Ramones . . .

Last night I drank very little (half a bottle of Jack) but I can feel the demons in my head knocking and I don’t wanna let them in (or out).

NOVEMBER 5^TH, 1987

DAY OFF

Hotel, New Orleans, 1:30 p.m.

Today I’ve decided to write my mother a letter . . . probably with no real intention of mailing it.

DEANA RICHARDS: Tom always told me that eventually he would tell Nikki the truth of what happened when he was a child—that Nona and my sisters had taken Nikki a way from me, when I always wanted him back. I always prayed that Tom would tell him that, because I wanted Nikki to know the truth more than anything else in the world. But Tom never did.

One time in 2001 Tom had gone out to join Nikki on tour and they were passing through Seattle. I went to the airport to meet Tom for an hour and asked why he still hadn’t told Nikki the truth, but Tom just said, “He won’t listen.” I asked him, “What do you mean he won’t listen? Nona has been dead long enough now for you to tell Nikki the truth, and I think you’re dragging your feet.”

I looked at Tom and said, “I should have been strong enough to fight you guys. You could never have taken Nikki away from me if I had been strong enough to fight you.” And he looked at me and said, “Yes, we could have!” He had a look on his face, and venom in his voice, and I suddenly realized he’d been part of the plan all along.

My daughter Ceci has literally saved my life, because there have been a few times that I thought I just couldn’t go through the pain anymore and I wanted to end it all. Because Nikki and I were separated all those years, but I never, ever wanted it.

TOM REESE: Bullshit! I never said that to Deana. She is just on a big guilt trip. She twists the truth and she tells lies as she has done all her life. I’ve told Nikki the truth many times Deana was so full-on on drugs for so many years that don’t know how many brains she’s got left, really. I’ve told her before, the way that she goes through life but I’m not going to get into this anymore. I’m seventy-eight years old and I just don’t need it.

CECI COMER: There are so many things that Nikki doesn’t know about the life my mom and I had back then. She always acted like everything was OK but often it wasn’t. She had a stroke in the ’80s and got really sick one winter, and we ran out of food and oil in the house we were renting. I ate ketchup on toasted bread and woke up with frozen hair so many times that year. Mom always loved Nikki and wanted him with us, but we had some hard, hard times.

I think Mom and Nikki’s relationship is too common and very sad. It takes the focus off the right things and keeps them in a dark place. By now all the stories are so convoluted and everyone seems to suffer from se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Acknowledgments
• A Short Medical Dictionary
• A Short Alternative Medical Medical Dictionary with Dr. Lemuel Pillmeister
• Key Players in These Torrid Tales (Otherwise Known as Partners in Crime)
• Ten Years Later
• Introduction
• October 1987: Merry Christmas. Well, That’s What People Say at Christmas, Right?
• January 1981: One Could Say That I’ve Been Having a Locc Love Affair
• February 1987: When I’m Losing my Mind, The Only Thing that can Save me is Heroin.
• March 1987: Blood was Spurting all Over the Closet...and I was Just Slamming the Drugs Anyplace Under my Skin Praying They Would Take the Pain Away...
• April 1987: Does my Illness Hang Off of me Like a Fucking Smell?
• May 1987: He Asked me to Get on my Knees and Pray to god to Lose this Obsession With Drugs
• June 1987: Maybe Having These Dealers Follow us is a bad Idea
• Intermission: A Head-On Collision was About to Happen yet I was too Stubborn to Take a Hint
• July 1987: This has Become the Airport Blowjob Tour
• August 1987: Pretty Good Show Considering the Squirrels and Ice Cream Trucks
• September 1987: I’m Over the Drugs and I know They’re Over Me...
• October 1987: Drugs Make it Better–Drugs Make it Worse
• November 1987: P.S. I didn’t tell Anybody but I Scored a Balloon of Pers
• December 1987: ...He Says if you don’t Change your Ways you Won’t Live Until the end of the Year
• My Life After Death: That’s not Very Rock N’ Roll, is it?
• More Post Humous Adventures
• About the Author
• Copyright