The Dirt by Tommy Lee Read Free Book Online Page A

courage. As soon as he picked up, I went right into my speech about London and how we were on our way to the big time and how we could use his advice or his support or any kind of instruction he might have. Maybe we could tour together one day.
    “Are you done, mate?” he asked.
    I was done.
    “I got your photos and music,” he continued. “And I see what you’re trying to do. But I can’t help you.”
    “Man, I think we’re going to be the biggest band in L.A., and I think it would be good for us to—”
    He cut me off: “Yeah, well, I’ve heard that before, mate. My advice would be to keep your day job. This kind of music is never going to make it.”
    I was devastated. He went from being my idol to my enemy: a bitter rock star sitting on a throne of shit in his mansion in London.
    “Well,” I said, “I’m sorry to hear you feel that way.” And I hung up and stared at the phone for half an hour, unsure whether to laugh or cry.
    In the end, it just gave me more motivation to succeed and make Brian Connolly rue the day he ever insulted me. Our manager was David Forest, a flamboyant party fiend who ran the Starwood along with Eddie Nash, who was later mixed up in the John Holmes murders (when the porn star was involved in the fatal beating of four people at a drug dealer’s home in Laurel Canyon). Forest, ever charitable, gave me and Dane Rage jobs at the club cleaning and doing carpentry in the afternoon. It worked out so that at night London would play and drop confetti and make a mess, and the next day we’d get paid to clean it up.
    It was through Forest that I was introduced to the decadence that the commingling of disco and rock had brought to the L.A. club scene. I’d sit in the office with him and people like Bebe Buell and Todd Rundgren, who would poison my impressionable mind with tales of Steven Tyler overdosing and Mick Jagger getting head backstage while groupies sat around nodding off on smack. Or I’d see local heroes like Rodney Bingenheimer and Kim Fowley partying. I had all the free rum and Cokes I wanted, plus I learned all about drugs whose names I had only heard of before. Real drugs. And I loved them.
    I was young and pretty and had long hair. I’d lean against the wall at the Starwood in stiletto heels and supertight pants with my hair in my eyes and nose in the air. As far as I was concerned, I had made it. I would sleep until I had to get up and do something to make money, like telemarketing or selling crap door-to-door or working at the Starwood. At night I’d go to the Starwood and drink and fight and fuck girls in the bathroom. I really thought that I had become my fucking heroes: Johnny Thunders and Iggy Pop.
    Now that I look back on it, I realize how naive and innocent I was. There were no jets or sold-out stadiums then, no mansions or Ferraris. There were no overdoses or orgies with guitar necks stuck up some chick’s ass. I was just some cocky little kid in a club who, like so many others before and after him, thought that a sore prick and burning nostrils meant he was king of the world.

I question a lot of things and form my own opinions. They’re just as valid as a rocket scientist’s or anyone else’s. Who says you have to believe something because you read it in a book or saw pictures? Who is it that gets to say, “That’s the way that it is”? When everybody believes the same thing, they become robotic. People have a brain: they can figure out things for themselves, like how a UFO flies.
    When I was in elementary school in the fifties, at the height of the Cold War, we had duck-and-cover drills. They told us that if the hydrogen bomb dropped, all we had to do was get under our desks and put our hands over our heads. Today it seems ridiculous that a desk is going to protect us from radiation and complete devastation, but it made perfect sense at the time to the supposedly intelligent and informed people we called teachers. I remember writing in big letters on my