The Dirt (9 page)

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 notebook the words
duck and cover
, with quotation marks around them and a giant question mark. What a joke. That little turtle was bullshit.

I used to save stacks of notebooks and sheets of paper with stuff I had written down since I was a kid. Over time, a lot of what I’ve written has become true. In 1976, when my Top 40 band White Horse was on its last legs and ready to be shot, we were rehearsing in the living room of the house where we all lived when the bass player walked in and said, “Well, this certainly is a motley-looking crew.” After rehearsal, I went upstairs to my room and wrote those words down in my notebook—
Motley Crew
, then below it, in bigger letters,
MOTTLEY CRU
—and said to myself that I had to have a band called Mottley Cru. I wanted White Horse, who were actually a good band, to start playing originals and become Mottley Cru. “Why not try originals? We’re starving anyway,” I told them. They answered by voting me out of the band. So I left with everything: the PA, the lights, the van.

I placed an ad in that classified paper,
The Recycler
, that read: “Extraterrestrial guitarist available for any other aliens that want to conquer the Earth.” I was calling myself Zorky Charlemagne at the time, so I used that name in the paper and received some real bizarre phone calls, but not from anybody who seemed sane. I ended up in a Top 40 band called Vendetta, which made me enough money to buy a Marshall stack and a Les Paul. I bought another Marshall stack and Les Paul when I returned from a tour of Alaska, and placed another ad in
The Recycler
. Usually people will write an ad that begins with the letter A, like “A righteous guitar player seeks band,” just so they can be at the top of the listing. I didn’t care, because I knew my ad would jump no matter where it was. It read: “Loud, rude, and aggressive guitarist available.”

The guy with the Hitler mustache from Sparks responded. But I told him that I didn’t like his music and I’d be wasting his time and mine if I tried out for him. I think he respected me for that. Some cheesy band in Redondo Beach that went on to become Poison or Warrant or some other name that wrecked the eighties called because they’d seen me play at Pier 52. I didn’t call them back. To quote Andy Warhol, “Everybody has fifteen minutes of fame.” To quote myself, “I wish they didn’t.”

I think Nikki finally found the ad and phoned. We talked for a little while and arranged a day to meet. I crammed my guitar and Marshall stacks into a tiny Mazda that belonged to my friend Stick and drove to North Hollywood. Nikki and I said hello like two complete strangers: neither of us remembered having met the other before. He had changed his name and his hair was all blown out, jet-black, and hanging over his face; I wouldn’t have been able to recognize him if he was my own father. It took another week or two before he asked, “Hey, aren’t you that weird guy who came in the liquor store one day and…” I couldn’t believe it: He had really grown into himself.

Nikki said he’d left his old band, London, because there were too many people trying to tug the group in too many different directions. Now he was trying to put together his own project and realize his own vision. I pretended like I agreed, but I knew that he was still young and musically naive, and I could influence him to evolve my way. At that rehearsal, we played a few of the songs Nikki had written—“Stick to Your Guns,” “Toast of the Town,” “Public Enemy #1.” They had this sissy guy, whose name I won’t mention, playing guitar. The first thing I did when I walked in was say, “He ain’t gonna make it.” So they told me that if I wanted him out, I had to tell him. It was day one and they already had me doing their dirty work.

There was also a real bony little kid there, with a giant growth on his chin that looked like a Chicken McNugget. He said he’d been pushed or fallen down the steps at Gazzari’s the night before and busted his lip. I don’t know if that was what was on his face, but it seemed like a permanent second chin. The kid claimed that he could play the drums, though he seemed too young and scrawny to be any good. But when he started playing, he wasn’t a sissy. He hit hard. His name was Tommy.

And, come to think of it, it wasn’t Nikki who found the ad in
The Recycler
at all. It was Tommy. He called. He left the message. He made it happen. And, man, could he play.

D
uuuuuude. Fuck yeah. Finally. How much room is Nikki going to get, bro? Fuck. The dude tried to put his own mother in jail. I love him; we’ve practically been married for twenty years. But sometimes it’s dysfunction junction over there. I’m not like that. I’m a hopeless fucking romantic. That’s a part of me that a lot of people don’t know about. They know everything there is to know about another part of me, but not a thing about my heart. Dude, it’s bad, but it’s all good. All fucking good.

My fate was sealed with my first crush on this rad little girl who lived down the street from me in Covina. I used to chase her all over the place. I’d follow her around on my bicycle and spy in her window at night like a pint-sized stalker. All I wanted to do was kiss her. I had seen my mom and dad kiss, and it looked pretty cool. I figured I was ready to try it for myself.

I’ve learned in life that if you chase something for long enough, pretty soon it will start chasing you. After a while, my neighbor started following me around everywhere, and we became crazy about each other. One time, we somehow ended up behind a bunch of bushes in this cool grassy shaded area that nobody could see. The little bushes had small bright red berries growing from them. They were the color of her lips. Without even thinking, I picked a berry off one of the bushes and held it between our mouths. Then we wrapped our lips around the berry and kissed for the first time. It felt so romantic and magical: I thought that if we kissed with this little red berry between us, we’d somehow become something else. Maybe she’d turn into a princess and I’d become a knight and take her out of Covina on my white horse. We’d gallop to my castle as the neighbors looked on, wondering who this beautiful prince and princess were. And we’d live happily ever after. Unless somebody ate or destroyed the magic berry. If that happened, we’d return to Covina and be just two dumb little kids again. That’s how it’s always been in my life: There’s always a storm cloud lurking in the distance, waiting to fuck up everything good and perfect.

I went to a dream analyst recently and he told me I inherited that storm cloud from my mother. Her life was like that: Everything good was surrounded by tragedy. Her name was Vassilikki Papadimitriou, and she was Miss Greece in the fifties. My dad, David Lee Thomas, was an army sergeant, and he proposed to my mom the first time he ever fucking saw her. They were married within five days of meeting, just like Pamela and I would be almost forty years later. He didn’t speak a word of Greek; she didn’t speak a word of English. They drew pictures for each other when they wanted to communicate, or she’d write something in Greek and my dad would struggle to make sense of the odd characters using a Greek–English dictionary.

She tried six times before me to have a child: five times she miscarried and, when she succeeded the sixth time, my brother died within days of his birth. For some reason, they weren’t supposed to be here. I don’t know how she had the courage to try again. But when she became pregnant for the seventh time, she refused to even get out of bed for nine months in case something went wrong.

Just after I was born, my parents left Athens and moved to a Los Angeles suburb called Covina. It was hard for my mother. She used to be a totally rad model, and now here she was in America making a living cleaning other people’s houses like a fucking servant. She was always embarrassed by her job. She was living in a new country with a stranger who had suddenly become her husband. And she had no family, no friends, no money, and hardly spoke a word of English. She missed home so much she named my younger sister Athena.

My dad worked for the L.A. County Road Department, fixing the highway-repair trucks and tractors. My mom always hoped he’d make enough money so she could quit her job and hire a housekeeper, but he never did.

The dream-analyst guy said that my mom passed a lot of the day-to-day fear she lived with in America on to me, especially when I was a young child. She would talk to me in Greek, and I wouldn’t be able to comprehend a word she was saying. I had no idea why I could understand everybody else around me, but I couldn’t make out a word my mother was saying. Experiences like that, the analyst said, led to the constant fear and insecurity I feel as an adult.

I walked into a session with the analyst once in a short-sleeved shirt, and he looked at my tattoos and fucking flipped out. I told him about my parents and how they used to communicate when I was a child. At my next session, he said he’d been thinking about my family all week and come to a conclusion: “At a very young age, you watched people draw pictures and communicate with them. Now, you use those tattoos as a form of communication.” He pointed out that a lot of the tattoos were symbols of things that I wanted in my life, like koi fish, which I got inked long before I ever had a koi pond in my house. I also have a leopard tattoo, and one of these days I’m going to have a fucking leopard. I want one on my couch just chilling when I get home from a tour.

PEOPLE SAY THAT YOU CAN’T PREDICT your future, that nobody knows what life has planned for them. But I know that’s bullshit. It’s not just the tattoo images that later became reality for me. It goes much further back. I predicted my future when I was three and, in a childish effort to make louder and better noises, arranged pots and pans on the kitchen floor and whaled on them with spoons and knives. My friend Gerald tells me now that I knew in my soul what I wanted to do back then. And the day I started making that racket on my mom’s cooking shit was the day I manifested it. But I didn’t know it at the time. I was stupid.

When the milkman came by playing an accordion, I decided that I wanted to learn squeezebox instead. So I abandoned the kiddie drum set that my parents had bought me in order to keep their clean dishes off the floor, and started taking accordion lessons with my sister. When a dance teacher stopped by pimping lessons, my sister and I got so excited we joined a tap and ballet company, which was great because then I could dance with girls. I didn’t give a shit about playing baseball in the park with the other guys: I just wanted to hold girls.

After dancing, I got excited about piano, but it turned out to be just mundane fucking repetition, playing scales over and over until I wanted to kill people, starting with my piano teacher. Then I saw a guitar at a pawn shop and developed an obsession with guitar. My accordion was an electric DaVinci, and I’d turn it up until the distortion was nasty and play “Smoke on the Water” until my mother cracked and bought that pawnshop guitar. I played it through my accordion amplifier as loud as I could, with the windows open so that everyone in the neighborhood knew that I had a fucking guitar. I’d even take it out in the yard and rock out so that everybody could see me. I don’t know why I wanted people to notice. I’m still that way: I do things because I love them, but I also want the recognition. It’s brought me a lot of happiness and gotten me into a lot of trouble.