I handed (Ozzy) the straw, and he walked over to a crack in the sidewalk and bent over it. I saw a long column of ants, marching to a little sand dugout built where the pavement met the dirt. And as I thought, “No, he wouldn’t,” he did. He put the straw to his nose and, with his bare white ass peeking out from under the dress like a sliced honeydew, sent the entire line of ants tickling up his nose with a single, monstrous snort. (Hawkins’ note: I’ve actually seen this part of the story recounted with some admiration by stoners. “Wow, he’s hard core, man!” The next part of the story always seems to be left out)

He stood up, reared back his head, and concluded with a powerful right nostriled sniff that probably sent a stray ant or two dripping down his throat. Then he hiked up his sundress, grabbed his d*ck, and pissed on the pavement. Without even looking at his growing audience — everyone on the tour was watching him while the old women and families on the pool deck were pretending not to — he knelt down and, getting the dress soggy in the puddle, lapped it up. He didn’t just flick it with his tongue, he took a half-dozen long, lingering, and thorough strokes, like a cat. Then he stood up, and, eyes blazing and mouth wet with urine, looked straight at me. “Do that Sixx! — P.104

But, now, I was confronted with a new problem: What do you do after the orgy? The only thing I could think to do after the orgy was to have another one, a bigger one, so that I didn’t have to deal with the consequences of the last one. Vince was on the news every day, and I was so junked out I’d ask, “Why is Vince on the news?” And someone would say, “That’s for the manslaughter charge.” And I’d just say, “Oh yeah,” and shoot up again.

Vince was my bandmate, my best friend, my brother. We had just finished the most successful tour that a young band could possibly have had that early in its career; we had experienced some of the best times together; we had shared everything, from my girlfriend to Tommy’s wife to the room service groupies. And I didn’t call him, I didn’t visit him, I didn’t support him in any way whatsoever. I was, as usual, only interested in indulging myself. Why wasn’t I there for him? What was the reason? Were the drugs that powerful? When I thought about Vince, it wasn’t with pity; it was with anger, as if he was the bad guy and the rest of the band members were innocent victims of his wrongdoing. But we all did drugs and drove drunk. It could have happened to any of us.

But it didn’t. It happened to Vince. And he was sitting in rehab contemplating his life and his future while all I could do was sit at home and contemplate the next hit of cocaine to send up my veins. — Nikki, P.135

After two days of light junk sickness, I realized that I was indeed an addict. The band had changed from a lighthearted, fun-loving imp to some sort of bitter, callus-skinned nomadic creature. We were tired, we hadn’t stopped in years, and I’d become crass and mean.

But here I was in a country where fans gave me little dolls, drew cartoons for me, said they loved my hair, and came up to me crying. Through my sickness, I could sense that for the first time I was getting some of the love that I had been searching for all along through music. And in return I terrorized the country, destroyed whatever got in my way, and drank everything I could to blot it all out. I was weak, from love, from addiction, and from self-disgust. — Nikki, P.149

I coughed, I gagged, I coughed again. I awoke, and the room looked upside down. I was on the shoulder of the dealer who was carrying me out the door like an old trash bag. I gagged again, and vomit came pouring out of my mouth. He dropped me to the floor. My body had turned blue, there was ice down my pants from Andy trying to wake me up, and I had a large welts all over my arms and chest from a baseball bat. That was the dealers idea: he thought he could put me in so much pain that my system would shock itself back into action. When that tactic failed, he had evidently decided to throw me in the dumpster behind his tenement and leave me for dead. But then I vomited on his shoes. I was alive. I considered that my second valentine of the night.

Of course, I didn’t learn my lesson. No one in the band ever seemed to learn his lesson, no matter how many warnings God gave. Two nights later, I was at it again. — P.150

I had no control. So once I set foot inside my house, I hardly ever left. Nicole and I shot up between five hundred and one thousand dollars worth of drugs a day. We went through bags of heroin, rocks of cocaine, cases of Cristal, and whatever pills we could get our hands on. — Nikki, P.151

As I shot more cocaine, paranoia set in and soon I hardly let anyone in the house. Nicole and I would sit around naked day and night. My veins were collapsing and I would scour my body to find fresh ones: on my legs, my feet, my hands, my neck, and, when the veins everywhere else had dried out, my d*ck. When I wasn’t shooting up, I’d patrol my house for intruders. I started seeing people in trees, hearing cops on the roof, imagining helicopters outside with S.W.A.T teams to get me. I had a .357 magnum, and I’d constantly hunt for people in the closets, under the bed, and inside the washing machine, because I was sure someone was hiding in my house. I called my home security company, West-Tech, so often that they had a note in the office that patrol men were to answer my calls with caution because I had pulled a loaded gun on so many of their employees.

I had been onstage performing for tens of thousands of people; now I was alone. I had sunk into a subhuman condition, spending weeks at a time in my closet with a needle, a guitar, and a loaded gun. — Nikki, P.152

The day after I returned home from Tommy’s wedding, there was a hand-delivered letter from our accountant, Chuck Shapiro, waiting for me in the mailbox. “You have been spending five thousand dollars a day,” he wrote. “Five thousand dollars times seven is thirty-five thousand dollars a week. Per month, that’s one-hundred forty thousand dollars. In exactly eleven months, you will be completely broke, if not dead. — P.164

And so I fell right into the spider’s web. Stuck in freebase, I lost what little remained of the self-control I had been practicing since rehab and became a completely dysfunctional paranoid. One afternoon, there were some people hanging out in my living room, and Vanity and I were holed up in the bedroom. We turned on the radio, which was attached to speakers throughout the house, and listened to the music while we lit up some freebase. As we were smoking, the music stopped and a talk radio program began. I pulled out my .357 magnum and took another hit. As I was holding the freebase in my lungs, I yelled at the radio, “You motherf*ckers, I’ll f*cking shoot you. Get the f*ck out of her.” I think I somehow thought that the voices coming from the radio were actually the people in my living room, which was on the other side of the door. The voices didn’t stop when I yelled at them, of course, so as I exhaled a sweet puff of white smoke into the air, I unloaded my .357 through the door.

But the voices continued. “I’ll f*cking kill you, I’ll f*cking kill you!” I yelled at them. I kicked open the door and saw that they were coming from a four-foot-tall speaker in the corner. I loaded another clip into the gun and littered the speaker with .357 hollow-point Magnum shells. It fell on its side. But the voices continued: “Hi, this is KLOS, and you’re talking to Doug…”

I f*cking flipped out, and everybody cleared out of my living room while I tore the poor speaker apart until, eventually, the voices stopped. I think Vanity must have, in a moment of ludidity, figured out how to turn off the radio. — P.167-168

My grandmother was getting sicker and they wanted me to come visit her. But I was so smacked out, I kept ignoring the calls — until it was too late. My grandfather called crying one afternoon and gave me directions to her funeral, which was to take place the following Saturday. I promised him that I would be there. When Saturday rolled around, I had been awake for two days straight, I shot up some coke to give me enough energy to put one foot in front of the other, crawled off the sofa, started to dress, and fumbled around trying to find directions for an hour. Then I changed my clothes three times, and puttered around looking for car keys and worrying about how I’d find the funeral home before I decided it was too complicated and I just couldn’t get my act together. I sat back down on my couch, cooked up some freebase, and turned on the TV.

I sat there, knowing that as I watched Gilligan’s Island, the rest of my family was at her funeral, and the guilt started to seep in. She was the woman who had put up with me when my mom couldn’t, the woman who had dragged me across the country from Texas to Idaho like I was her own son. Without her willingness to take me in every time, whether she was living in a gas station or a hog farm, I probably never would have been sitting in a giant rock star house shooting up. I’d be doing it under a bridge in Seattle.

After six months of touring Girls, my existence had disintegrated to the point where every waking moment was about drugs: I went onstage to get drugs, I came offstage to find more drugs, I used my per diem to buy drugs, and I traveled to each city only to see if anyone had new drugs. Heroin, coke, freebase, Jack, zombie dust: They all had been controlling my life for a year straight. And, like a bad relationship, the longer they stayed in my life, the more miserable and out of control my life became. — P.197-198

The next day, the three if us boarded a plane to Hong Kong. I was so dirty that no one would sit in my row. Finally, Mr. Udo, wearing a business suit, took the seat next to me.

“Nikkie-san, I must talk to you,” he said gently in my ear. “Last time my friend was like this, he died.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I told him, not really caring.

“My friend was Tommy Bolin.”

“Really?” I suddenly grew interested.

“You are a lot like Tommy-san,” he continued, “You hold a lot of pain from your past. And when you hold pain inside like that, sometimes it hurts you. And it makes you hurt yourself. I can see that you are very creative, like Tommy-san. But you are killing your creativity. I spent a lot of time with Tommy-san, and I told him that I was his friend and that he needed to quit. He told me he could not quit. He died before the year was over. So I am telling you now that you need to quit. You are going to die. I am your friend. You are like Tommy, and I don’t want to lose you, too.” — P.201