The Dirt by Tommy Lee Page B

talking and hanging out. Prior to meeting her, I had thought of most women the way I thought of my first girlfriend, Sarah Hopper, as pests who were sometimes useful as alternatives to masturbation. But Lita was a musician, and I could relate to her. She was nice, normal, and smart. In the furious tempest that my life had become, here was someone I could cling to, someone to help keep my feet on the ground.
    One night, Lita, Vince, Beth, and I were leaving the Rainbow when a biker started pushing the girls around and asking if they wanted to fuck him. The bikers had declared war on the rockers back then. We watched for a minute, and then walked up to him. We were in a good mood, so we didn’t hit him. We asked him to stop. He glared at us and told us to fuck off.
    I was wearing a chain around my waist, attached to a piece of leather and a buckle. I whipped the chain off my waist and started swinging it in the air, trying to crack heads. Suddenly, a couple more people joined the fight. One of them, a hairy six-foot-four beast, charged at me like a bull, knocking the wind out of me and pushing me back into the bushes. I reached for the chain on the ground, and he grabbed my hand with his leather glove, stuck it in his mouth, and bit it through to the bone. I screamed and, in a rush of adrenaline, grabbed the chain and started whipping him across the face with it.
    All of a sudden, he pushed me back, pulled out a gun, and said, “You’re under arrest, motherfucker.” In the commotion, I didn’t even realize that the two people who had joined the fight weren’t the biker’s friends, but undercover cops. They cracked me seven times across the face with their billy clubs, breaking one of my cheekbones and blackening an eye. Then they handcuffed me and tossed me into their squad car. From the backseat, I saw Vince running away like a glam chicken, probably because he’d just been arrested at the Troubadour a few weeks before for hitting a girl who didn’t like the U.S. Marines outfit he was wearing.
    “Fucking punk,” the big cop yelled at me. “Hitting a cop. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
    The car screeched to a halt at the head of an alley. He grabbed both my elbows with one hand, dragged me out of the car, and threw me on the ground. Then he and his partner started kicking me in the stomach and face. Whenever I turned onto my stomach to try to shield myself from the blows, they’d roll me onto my side so that they could kick me where it hurt more.
    I went to jail that night covered in smeared makeup, fingernail polish, and blood. They charged me with assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer. I spent two nights there with the cops threatening to put me away for five years without parole. (The police, however, didn’t end up pressing charges because a scandal soon developed when dozens of people accused the cops of harassing them and beating them up on the Sunset Strip.)
    Lita hocked her prized Firebird Trans Am for a thousand bucks to make my bail. We walked three miles from jail back to the Mötley House to meet the band in time for a show at the Whisky that night. Afterward, accompanied by the sounds of Tommy’s girlfriend Bullwinkle smashing everything of value we had in the house, I pulled out a lined yellow notepad and vented my anger:
    A starspangled fight
    Heard a steel-belted scream
    Sinners in delight
    Another sidewalk’s bloody dream
    I heard the sirens whine
    My blood turned to freeze
    See the red in my eyes
    Finished with you, you’ll make my disease .
    No, that last line wasn’t right. As I crossed it out, the door flew off its hinges, and Tommy crashed to the ground, his head cut open and Bullwinkle towering over him like an angry moose.
    “Your blood’s coming my way,” I scribbled beneath the crossed-out line.
    Better, but not perfect.
    The next morning, a lawyer came by with an eviction notice. We had been in the house for nine months, constantly drinking, fighting,