Slash

I kept it up for a while; well, Ronnie Stalnaker did, actually—one of his jobs was to keep drugs and trouble away from me and me from them. He’d regularly come through and clean the place up, probably as a way to see if I was behaving. I never did; it was much too fun of a challenge to figure out how to sneak my druggie friends into the apartment without Ronnie finding out. It was always a feat because Ronnie lived right next door.

It wasn’t going to end well with Ronnie—he got a bit obsessive about his job and went a bit Single White Stalker—but at this point he’d done nothing but prove himself to be a very loyal bodyguard, despite all of my efforts to fuck with him. For example, one night, while we were on tour somewhere, I decided to end the evening by throwing my bottle of Jack into the TV set in my hotel room before I passed out. It exploded, of course, and Ronnie came in. We were a number of stories up, but Ronnie decided that we weren’t going to pay for that TV. He climbed out of my window, across the ledge of the building, and into an adjoining room, where he stole that TV and replaced it with the one I had broken. That is dedication.

Another time when we were in Dallas, Duff and I had adjoining rooms connected by a door and we invited over too many friends with piles of coke. Our party lasted all that night and well into the next afternoon. Things got out of hand, of course, and a big glass coffee table got smashed, and I walked all over it barefoot and bled everywhere. At some point someone kicked the dividing door off the hinges and tipped the beds over and smashed all of the lamps. There were too many of us behaving badly for Ronnie to deal with, so he came up with a plan to get us out of the hotel without the management noticing. He somehow herded us into a service elevator and snuck us out of a loading dock and onto the bus. The hotel had heard all of the noise and was very aware of the party going on, but Ronnie had kept security out of there somehow for an hour or so. We thought we’d gotten away, until the cops pulled us over a few miles down the road at a convenience store where, if memory serves, I’d actually just stolen a bunch of candy.

We were lined up against the side of the bus and taken in for trashing the hotel rooms. It was expensive and I can say in all honesty that it was the last time I’ve ever really destroyed a hotel room. Sure, I’ve been through a couple of TV sets and done a few other stupid things since, but that was the last time I engaged in total annihilation because I got the bill for that one.

Ronnie was clearly dedicated but regardless, it wasn’t easy keeping my first apartment in shape. The first blow came when my younger brother, Albion, or “Ash,” stayed there while I was away on tour. Ash is a great graffiti artist, and when I returned, I found that he’d covered every wall with an amazing mural that I had no interest in having in my home. I was so pissed off but I only told him that what he’d done was “inconsiderate.” He was only sixteen after all. Since then Ash has gone on to form Conart, one of the most cutting-edge T-shirt companies around; the designs are based on his art.

Ronnie painted over the mural, he cleaned up, he did everything else to keep us in there as tenants. That place was pretty simple: I had a microwave, I had a refrigerator full of the usual bachelor-pad supplies and condiments. There wasn’t much, but even so it all got beaten up pretty fast. After all, West Arkeen came by all of the time and the two of us got to smoking a lot of crack together. We’d hit the pipe and listen to music and slowly climb the walls. In those tweaked-out days I spent with West, I fully realized what a great guy and an awesome fucking mess he was. To complement his influence, I had another musician friend, Jay, whose place I went to a lot to get high on smack. All things considered, slowly, despite my financial resources, but surely my living conditions became as gritty as they’d been when I was living in a storage unit.

I WENT THROUGH AN INTERESTING succession of girlfriends at this time; just a handful that I’d see over at my place, each on different nights. At some point during these months my manager had the brilliant idea of having me present some award to someone or other at the MTV Video Music Awards. I can’t even remember who we gave it to, but my copresenter was Traci Lords, the porn star, and Alan thought that it would be funny for me to be up there with her. Obviously he saw the advantage of the sensational aspect, which was not a bad idea at all.

So Traci and I met backstage and we started talking and then we started dating immediately. She was really good-looking and a bit of a dichotomy—as I soon found out.

I was in a strange place; I was mildly famous, I was infamous, but I was still stuck in a raggedy, heathen mentality in terms of my quality of life. At that time, I could have had $15 million in the bank, but I wouldn’t have changed my lifestyle at all; I didn’t have a car, I was happy to have my one-room apartment that looked like a generic hotel room, and needed nothing more—that was where my head was at. At the same time, I knew how to be a gentleman, which is entirely what Traci Lords expected on a date. So somehow we hit it off.

But Traci didn’t want any part of being seen in public with me; if we ever went anywhere where anyone might be paying attention, she’d put me through this stupid ordeal where I’d have to come in after her and meet her inside, as if by accident. Obviously I was recognizable, so she always insisted that we scoot in some back alley entrance. Personally, I don’t think anyone who ever saw us gave a shit; it just made going out in public with her a huge pain in the ass. Call me naive but I didn’t get it; I had no idea who she was hiding from. From what I understood she wanted to keep a low profile because she didn’t want to be exposed as a groupie slut or one of the porno chicks that guys like me dated. I was never one of those guys who was judgmental about that stuff and never understood those who were; in fact, the only reason I knew her was that I’d seen her in this movie where she was bent over holding her ankles and she looked amazing. I truly appreciated that, so I figured everyone else appreciated that, too. I didn’t get her whole charade at all.

At that point, Traci was done with porn and was working on her singing career as well as trying to cross over into regular movies. That was why she didn’t want to be seen as a porno actress fucking a rock star—she wanted to change all that. She had talked me into playing on one of her songs and coming to the studio somewhere in Vancouver where she was recording her album. All I can say is that she was hooked up with the least talented, shadiest “music producers” I’ve ever seen and I told her so. Nonetheless, I helped her out on a few tracks, but nothing was going to keep that whole album from being a joke.

Everything we ever did together was very overly formal and very proper; it always seemed to me that she was living up to some idea of herself that wasn’t anywhere close to who she really was. Honestly, all that I wanted to do was get into her pants.

Of course, once I started dating her, West brought over a copy of New Wave Hookers so we could check it out. It was very entertaining but somewhat of a tease because after a month of dating we still hadn’t slept together. Our “relationship” was starting to become more of a bother than it was worth.

Traci had called me early one week to make plans and that same day West came by with a huge pile of crack. We stayed up for the next two days, and by the time Traci showed up to go out with me, West and I were crawling around on the carpet looking for rocks. I knew she was coming but I couldn’t help it: we were a mess, the only person that would have been okay with it would have been a crack whore. My place was a fucking pigsty on every level and it didn’t help that West was there like some resident pygmy: he was only about five four and had stringy blond hair that was really greasy after two days of smoking crack. West always had this permanent grin on his face that became more and more disturbing the more wasted he was. This particular afternoon he was so wasted that he openly leered at Traci. He was so high, that he thought nothing of going over to my bookshelves, retrieving New Wave Hookers, pointing to the cover, saying “That’s you, isn’t it! You’re Traci Lords!” He kept grinning at her.

Now Traci was the kind of girl who was after a man who was going to provide her with the things she wanted in life: nice clothes, nice cars, a nice life. And while I could have done that, I was nowhere near mature enough to realize that that is what most girls are after—especially girls like her. I didn’t see it that way at all back then, because the way I’d been living, I had barely paid attention to the finer things. But there she was in the middle of the afternoon, in a completely dark apartment that smelled like burning tires after our forty-eight-hour crack party. And there was West, short, shiny, and drooling. And there I was, too.

Traci took a long slow look around. “I’ll be right back,” she said in her pouty little voice. “I forgot something in my car.”

“Yeah, cool,” I said. “Then we’ll take off.” I was high, and not particularly aware of time passing, but I soon realized that she’d been gone far too long to ever be coming back.

I was this lone guitar player with a snake, just doing my thing, shooting my scene.

MY NEXT HOME WAS A HOUSE IZZY AND I rented up in the Hollywood Hills, and that lasted for about a