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Alas, even educated Americans are too intimidated to point this out—so heroin is still "evil" in that disingenuous way that helps books like this one sell big. And if Nikki’s betters won’t speak out honestly on the topic, we can hardly expect him and his idiot hessian friends to get it. So naturally, they’re all eager to blame heroin, "the worst drug in the world," while all too obviously in love with its notoriety.
A roadie explains that at first nobody worried about Nikki because everyone thought that, like his hair twin Tommy Lee, he "…was just snorting coke and drinking." And after all, mixing cocaine with a fifth of Jack Daniels never hurt anybody. It’s hilarious how self-righteous these scum get on the topic of opiates, as when a friend of Nikki’s protests, "I used to do loads of pot and coke with Nikki, but I’d never do heroin"—a wonderful instance of the snobbery of churls, as parodied in "Sammy Hagar Weekend" by Thelonius Monster:
We’re sittin’ in the parking lot at Anaheim Stadium…
We’re gonna drink some beer
Smoke some pot
snort some coke
And then we’ll drive, we’ll drive over 55….
No smack in that list, you’ll notice! Just good, wholesome coke! Perhaps the worst thing about cocaine, aside from its repellent demographic profile, is the fact that it encourages the cult of celebrity; on coke, everybody’s famous, and they all play the doomed celebrity as Nikki does here, narrating themselves in the third person and imagining themselves as the protagonists of a tragic, heroic narrative.
The trouble is that Motley Crue is not the stuff of tragedy. It’s the stuff of Spinal Tap. Indeed, this book reads like Hunter Thompson rewritten by Nigel Tufnel. Every rock cliche you ever heard can be found in its pages, even "Welcome to my nightmare." But Nikki and the friends interviewed for their recollections of his crisis are hopeless at depicting the nightmare, taking refuge in cliches like "dark" and "pain." Tommy Lee explains that drugs "led us to this really dark fucking place," then, realizing he’s onto a good adjectival thing, amplifies his remarks, stating that said place was, in fact, "dark as fuck."
This darkness amounts to shameless plagiarism of the works of Hunter Thompson, right down to the imitation-Ralph Steadman graphics splattered across this book’s 400 glossy magazine-style pages. Except that Thompson was one of the funniest and least boastful druggies who ever wrote, recounting his ubermensch adventures as slapstick comedy. Nikki’s just not smart enough to do anything like that.
There isn’t even any suspense or risk involved in all his drugging, because Motley Crue are stars, and stars are not subject to the drug laws. This is illustrated by an entry in which Nikki describes how a couple of Chicago cops come into Motley Crue’s dressing room and see the band snorting lines off a mirror. Not only do the cops not arrest them--they actually give the boys their cards, then tiptoe urging the band to call if any other cops give them trouble. Try that with a couple of Chicago’s finest, you non-celebrities, and you’ll be able to do your own memoir, Three to Five in Joliet: Not as Fun as You’d Think.
So nothing much happens in these pages until Nikki finally manages to have his overdose. For the 383 pages preceding that inevitable o.d., Nikki sits in his mansion sulking in the dark. Nikki’s repetitive entries of snorting up mounds of coke alone in his mansion are duller than Samuel Pepys on a wet Sunday.
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