Friday 13th June, 1986. Part One--Nikki.
Once Nikki realized that it was Friday 13th, waking up next to Vanity suddenly made a hell of a lot more sense.
Of course, it made sense anyways--considering he did take her to bed last night--but it was just his luck to rouse from a deep, heroin-induced, slumber to find his mistress sound asleep where his wife should've been.
"Good morning, baby," Vanity's claws sank into the back of his neck while her lips--still dyed with whatever cheap lipstick she was wearing last night--pressed against Nikki's shoulder, causing an ungodly shiver to dart down the length of his spine.
She was an early riser--that, he learned the hard way. Whereas Christine would start to wake up early but let Nikki sleep in until he felt like getting out of bed, Vanity refused to let him lay in any longer than she did because she grew impatient very quickly.
And he thought that he was the codependent one. Vanity couldn't last an hour without Nikki before she went absolutely insane from boredom. It was times like that where he truly did ail for his wife.
I don't even remember taking her to bed last night, he thought to himself.
I wonder if Christine is waking up next to some random or if she's alone right now--which, the latter, seems pretty doubtful. Fuck.
"Did you wanna do something with me today?"
Nikki refused to raise his head at the sudden tumultuous nature of Vanity's voice, unusually crisp for a morning after a heavy heroin-binge.
Fuck off, Vanity.
"No," he rasped out, feeling her gasp against his shoulder blade. "I'm supposed to be at the studio in--" his eyes flicked up to meet the clock next to the bed, "--an hour. We can do something when I get done tonight."
"But..." she whimpered, perfectly unintentionally, mirroring Christine.
"'But' nothing. I have to go or Doc will beat my ass."
With a grumble, he got out of bed and turned to see her splayed out on Chris' side with the covers bunched around her torso.
"What will you be doing today? Don't you need your drummer to, you know, drum?"
"I already told you, like a million times, that we are not recording," she raised both brows as he snapped. "I'm just showing Doc whatever material we have so far, and when I say 'we'--"
"--You mean you?" Defeated, she asked.
Nikki nodded. Maybe she did pay attention to what he said sometimes.
"Yep. I mean me." He gulped, trying not to think about the way that she was quickly becoming Christine's replacement.
Every predicament, every trivial conversation, every single thing that Vanity did incited Nikki's thoughts to dwell on one question--the only question that he had managed to think about for the best part of five weeks.
What could've been?
Well, he knew what could've been. He knew that, had Christine not slept with Tommy, they would still be with one another and relatively at peace within their marriage.
But then he came to the conclusion--the same conclusion every single time he began to ponder the topic--that, eventually, she would get sick to death of the groupies and eager women that constantly herded the band.
She was already vocal with her dislike for them, so what would have stopped her from walking out whenever she felt like things got too heavy to handle?
Maybe her leaving was just as much for her own good as what it was for mine.
Nikki wasn't one hundred percent certain that her rendezvous with Tommy was the sole justification for her fleeing the scene, but he knew that she was too frightened to face him after, ultimately, getting wind of his awareness of her crisis.
And to anybody that asked, or even hinted at, Nikki about his wife's disappearance, he would constantly hit them with the "I don't care that she's gone," line--which was starting to ring true very, very slowly.
Of course, he cared deeply about Christine and her whereabouts, but he soon eased off on his expedition to locate her when Beth refused to offer any assistance.
Weeks spent deliberating her vanishing were weeks crammed full with agony, and a multitude of crazy notions that constantly made the bomb inside of his head feel like it was going to detonate at any given moment.
He just gave up. He tried to bite the gunmetal bullet struck between his teeth. He tried to confront the unavoidable and put his past behind him. But that was a hell of a lot easier said than done.
There was absolutely no way that man would ever be able to think about anything else that wasn't Christine.
This is insufferable. Utterly fucking insufferable.
Before Nikki allowed his brain to continue its ruthless torment, he tugged his leather pants on and reached for the tattered Mötley shirt that was slung over the chair next to Christine's dresser.
He let out a deep sigh, suddenly presuming that those dresser drawers had been emptied of their contents and nothing remained in the white wooden compartments that, at one time, hosted Christine's favorite belongings.
If Nikki ever got over his nauseating lament and decided to take a look inside, he would've been absolutely thrilled--or possibly painfully downcast--to find the very first Valentine's Day gift that he had ever gotten for her.
To anybody that bared witness to such an item, they never would have thought that a silver crucifix turned coke spoon would hold such sentiment to Christine, but it did.
Valentine's was always a wasted holiday for the pair. He never saw the point in it, and she always told him that she didn't need red roses or chocolates to know just how much she was adored by him.
But that shifted in '83 when Nikki decided to present Chris with her very own 'crucifix'--that she hardly ever wore but always kept in her purse--and changed the game forever.
It was a crucial commodity in her day-to-day life, and Nikki often admired the way that she cherished such an unusual gift.
Again, he forced himself from his thoughts and splashed the borderline Baltic water on his face, squinting at the excess liner from last night bleeding into his pale eyes.
Pushing a hand over his face, making sure to get his thumb all the way under his eye, Nikki exasperated a sigh at the abrupt alteration in his appearance.
The circles underneath his dull, lifeless orbs were so dark, he wasn't sure whether they were a manifestation of his days-long heroin binge, or if they were just specks of liner that had gathered atop his skin after days--or possibly weeks--of poorly practiced self-hygiene.
Regardless, he looked like shit. And the stubble that was starting to overtake the lower half of his complexion made that more than obvious.
Vanity had kept on at him about shaving, and he truly didn't think her request was even remotely valid until he got the first glimpse of his reflection in days...and, needless to say, he agreed with her when she told him that he needed to snip away at his stubble.
Being clean shaven was always something that just happened. Christine never explicitly said anything about it, but he knew that she preferred it when he made the effort to shave, and so did he to be honest. But Nikki didn't have anybody to impress anymore, so he didn't see why he had to bother.
But he did. To get Vanity off of his back and her whiny voice out of his fucking head, Nikki took to his face with whatever razor he had next to the sink, between bottles of lotion and perfume, and began to shave away the product of his ever-present recession.
As soon as the shitty excuse for a beard had been removed, the only thing he had to work on was making his grief less apparent.
But, once again, that was a lot easier said than what it would be done.
Nikki, after freshening himself up, proceeded to reject Vanity's thirty-five questions about where he was going--despite knowing that his destination was simply the studio--and grabbed at his bike keys that, for some reason, sat in the fruit bowl.
Without Christine, he never truly had any feeling of order in his life. Not that she provided an actual sense organization, but she helped to deliver a kind of stability that he really needed around the place.
And then, as Doc requested, he was hauling his ass over to the studio with a fistful of potential songs, and a piece of music that he was just so fucking ready to get out there.
Nikki could have bestowed 'Five Years Dead' or 'Rodeo' upon both Doc and Doug that day, but he decided to really, really, pull it out of the bag with what he gave to them.
He wanted to show them his favorite piece. The piece that he knew would earn the most stunning response. The piece that he knew, had it been released, would shock each and every single person that would listen to it...
"Oh, It's--it's..."
"Interesting," Doc cleared his throat and finished Doug's sentence, leaning forwards a little with the piece of paper between his fingers. "It's very fuckin' interesting, Nikki."
"Thanks--"
"--That was not a complement," he scolded, "the fuck is it supposed to be in reference to? Because if it's about what I think it is, then Christine can and probably will try to fucking sue you for this!"
She is not going to fucking sue me, shit for brains.
Nikki--in a state of pure disbelief--glared at Doc as he seethed, clamping his mouth shut or else he'd begin to maliciously contend with his manager.
"The song, as a whole, seems fuckin' great, alright? If it weren't blatantly obvious that Christine was the muse for such a piece of writing, then I would have no issue in letting you put this out there--"
"--How are you so sure that she prompted this song?" confidently, Nikki counter-argued.
Doc wasn't one hundred percent certain that 'You're All I Need' was penned with the estranged wife of Nikki Sixx in mind, but he would've been willing to bet a hell of a lot on the fact that she heavily inspired it.
He knew, just as well as everyone else, that Sixx was silently struggling to get to grips with the withdrawal of Christine from his life, and it was only a matter of time before he inscribed his deep-rooted woe into a soul-crushing ballad.
"How do you know that this song isn't just written from the viewpoint of some random guy that's had his heart broken, and needs to articulate a response to his ex-partner--"
"--Are you hearing yourself?" Doc quirked a brow, leaning backwards in the leather swivel chair. "That whole line perfectly depicts where you're at right now. Emotionally, you are distant from everyone and the only way to articulate a response is through powerful lyrics and a catchy fuckin' guitar riff! Nikki, if you're trying to play this off as a random story as told by a random guy, then you are crazier than what I first thought."
Vince and Mick stared at Nikki like he was beginning to go completely demented, Doug was still speechless, and Doc looked as if he was about to strangle the ever-living fuck out of him.
"Okay, and what if it is about Christine? What would be wrong with that?" Nikki proposed, brushing his thumb underneath his chin.
"Oh, gee, what would be wrong with that?" Doc mocked his pose, watching his eyes cloud over with frustration. "Nikki, she would have every fucking right to sue you!"
He sounds like a damn broken record.
"She is not going to fucking 'sue' me," he asserted while his heart raced at the sheer idea of it.
"And how the hell do you know that? Because, as she has shown us all recently, she's quite unpredictable, Nikki!"
"She's always been unpredictable," trying to seem unbothered, he responded. "What makes you think that she will even listen to this song to know that it's about her?"
"Because if this ends up on the album and Tom thinks it's strong enough to release as a single, Christine will eventually hear it! And she isn't fucking stupid!"
His brow raised. "That's debatable."
"Nikki," Doc warned, rubbing his temple, "just think about what you're doing. Please?"
"I have thought about it, and I know that I'm confident it's gonna be a fucking hit. Just give it a chance, man."
"And why the fuck would I purposely jeopardize this album and your career--actually, all y'all's careers--by permitting a glorified fucking diss-track for the wife that you couldn't seem to keep, no matter how hard you tried!"
Confused as to where Doc's sudden bitterness had stemmed from, Nikki began to examine the lyrics that he had, hastily, scribbled onto that paper the night that his gut feeling was leading him to theorize his wife's most dangerous liaison.
Though the lyrics were vicious and violent, the sentiment was totally unmistakable. Nikki's despondency bled through the verses, tearing out the heart of anyone who took the time to read the words that had been written, while simultaneously tearing his heart out.
He knew that, had the song been released, his entire body would ache whenever he'd hear the opening riff, but how else was he to illustrate his anguish? Talking about his feelings couldn't seem to scratch that itch at the very back of his brain--it was, to put it lightly, fruitless. So jotting down several lines of nothing but harm and depression was the only thing he saw fit.
"All I'm saying is, it's a great fucking song, but you can't use it. Tom is gonna love how sick and twisted it is, but he'll also realize that this," he waved the sheets of paper in the air before slapping them to the oak table, "is way too fucking risky. It'll crush Christine, too."
"I don't give a damn if it'll crush her. Did she ever stop to think about how bouncing on Tommy's cock would fucking crush me?! I doubt she ever thought about my feelings, so why should I think about hers?"
Visibly bothered by Nikki's upheaval, Doc turned to Doug in hopes of his partner offering some form of aid. But, as expected, he was simply no use.
"She always thought about your fuckin' feelings, Nikki."
"What?" turning to Vince, a brow raised, he inquired.
"Christine was always thinking about you and how you felt, man. That's why she left--to spare you the pain of having to look at her after finding out what she did to you."
"She did not do that for me," he told the blonde, that bomb inside of his brain ticking away. "She did that because she was too much of a fucking coward to face up to what she did--but that's fine."
"She isn't a coward, don't say that, " Vince warned. "She just did what she thought was right."
Why the fuck is he suddenly on Christine's side? I thought he was supposed to be my friend...
"And walking out on me, taking everything, moving to some other fuckin' city, and completely avoiding the fact that she had to talk to me about this was what she felt was right?!"
"When you put it like that, it sounds fuckin' nuts--"
"--Because it is fuckin' nuts! She didn't have to go, she didn't have to leave her entire life behind because she made mistake after mistake, but she did! And I don't give a solitary fuck that this is going to hurt her feelings because, as of the moment she walked out, Christine is fucking dead to me."
Despite the fervor with which he spoke, the four of them were certain that his words were insignificant. Of course, he was hurting, but nobody wanted to take his words literally.
Nikki adored Christine with every fiber of his being and would until his very final breath. Hearing such venom drip from his lips was jarring, to say the least.
"Stop saying shit like that, Nikki! You know that you don't mean it, I know that you don't mean it, Christine will know that you don't mean it--but when she hears this song... it's gonna break her damn heart."
"And?! I don't fucking care!" He asserted.
Well, I do care. Just a little bit.
"You are going to break her heart," Vince repeated himself.
"I. Don't. Care."
"You do! You do care, Nikki!"
"No, I do not care! And even if I did give a single morsel of a shit about her, why do you care so much?"
"Because she is my friend!" he spat, eyeing resentment wash it's way over the bassist's scorned features. "She is more of a friend to me than what you have ever been."
Maybe she fucked him too.
"Are you seriously writing a song about murdering your fuckin' wife because she had sex with another man?! And are you purposely showing this song to us right now because Tommy isn't even in the same country as us to contest this--this bullshit?!"
"The fuck--" Nikki looked to Doc, wondering if he was thinking the same, wondering if Vince was serious too, before he glared at him again. "Yes? That is exactly what I'm doing!"
Vince let a snarl tear through his throat, "this is sick. Even for you, this is fucking sick. You are trying to romanticize murder and--" he grabbed the sheet from the table, "embarrass your wife for the sake of a shit song that probably won't even end up making it to the album."
"Embarrass my wife?! You mean like what she has done to me?" Again, the four of them glared at Nikki as if what he was proposing was completely absurd.
"Stop playing the hard-done-by husband card when YOU have been just as much of a slut as what Christine has!"
"I'm not trying to make people feel sorry for me, Vince! I'm trying to make a fucking hit for this album, which is more than what I see you doing--"
"--Oh, don't turn this around on me, asshole! Just because you're being called out on your wicked lyrics, doesn't mean you can make this into a group bashing session!"
Vince would've liked to assume that, after that conversation, he would be the one that Nikki's twisted death fantasy revolved around. Well, maybe he wouldn't like it, but he was pretty certain that he would be next on Nikki's hit list.
"It ain't nice when the shoe is on the other foot, is it?"
His eyes landed on Mick at the very end of the table, his sunglasses barely covering the dilated-to-within-an-inch-of-their-life pupils behind them after they spent forty minutes snorting cocaine with two of the co-producers before Doc had even made his appearance.
"The fuck are you saying?"
"I said, "It ain't nice when the shoe is on the other foot, is it?"" He sat forward a little, tipping the glasses to his nose. "You've hurt that girl a hell of a lot more than this, and suddenly you're vilifying her?"
"You are kidding me, right?" Mick shook his head, glaring at Nikki. Completely impassively.
"Correct me if I'm wrong but in the--however many--years that you have been married to Christine, you've slept with more women than what you can even try to estimate despite her knowing about your ineptitude to keep your dick in your pants, but still carrying on as nothing had even happened because she loved--hell, she probably still loves--you and wanted to make it fucking work."
"Bull shit! She knew about the other women, yes, but she didn't wanna fuckin' make it work. If she wanted to make it work, she'd have stayed--"
"--She did stay!" Vince barked. "She stayed with you for three fucking years even after she found out about the groupies on Ozzy's tour--the tour that she was on! She could have left you right then, but she didn't!"
"But that was the same tour that she fucked Tommy on. Right?!"
He nodded, "yes. It was. But that night she slept with Tommy was the night she found out about you screwing two groupies in the bed that she was supposed to be sleeping in--"
"--But the groupies didn't mean anything! Ever! She knows that the groupies didn't fuckin' mean anything--"
"--Does she?! Did you ever fucking tell her that the groupies 'didn't fuckin' mean anything'? 'Cause I'm sure as shit that she was fucking hurt when she found out about them!"
Well, she didn't show it.
Nikki blinked at Vince, hearing Doc shuffle in his space a little before he was making a beeline for the door--definitely, before one of them turned any more spiteful.
"I get that you're hurt Nikki, I think that I'd be pretty fuckin' down if I found out that Sharise had screwed one of you behind my back--but you need to seriously reconsider how you're going about this."
"And how are you suddenly so morally righteous, Vince?" He countered with brows raised, trying to calm himself before Mick stepped in once again. "Because I know for a god damn fact that had Sharise cheated on you--the same way that you have her--you'd be adamant that she would feel your fucking wrath!"
"But I wouldn't want the woman dead, you fucking psychopath!" Vince yelled, taking the lyrics literally.
"I don't actually want her dead. It's a metaphor--"
"--No it is not a 'metaphor' it is fucking debased. You're sick, Nikki."
Again, looking to Doug and Mick for some moral support was simply inefficacious. Neither party seemed to offer any form of assistance .
"I am not fucking sitting here, listening to you drabble on and on about how 'debased' this song is! It's gonna be a hit, alright?!" Nikki turned to Doug, eyebrows raised, "and you can tell Tom that this will be going on the album. If I have to do it my fuckin' self, then so be it."
The silence was deafening. Doug didn't want to say anything for fear of feeling the fury of Nikki Sixx, and Mick was just trying to understand the appeal of brutalizing a so-called ballad.
"So, you're still gonna go ahead with pushing this song? You know, knowing that Christine is going to know that this is about her?" Vince, after what felt like years, spoke up.
Nikki took a moment to weigh up the pros and cons that would come with releasing it.
The biggest pro was that it would be a hit. Lyrically, it was strong enough to be released, and would probably end up as one of the singles--just as Doc hinted at. 'You're All I Need' was also a ballad in theory--and eventually in practice--so Vince knew just as well as what Nikki did that it would be a fucking perfect opportunity for him to showcase his vocal abilities--especially because it was the first 'planned' ballad for the album.
He couldn't explicitly consider the cons to promoting that song, because he was fucking hurt. It was a testament to his true feelings, and of course, he wanted people to hear about the emotional trauma he had been subjected to. It was just a case of, like what Vince said, feeling bad for going out of his way to purposely embarrass Christine.
It was so obvious that the song was about her--truly, Nikki didn't know what the hell he was thinking when he said that it wasn't. If It wasn't apparent to the tabloids because she wasn't by his side at all times like she once was, then it would most definitely become as plain as day when they realized that he no longer carried his wedding band around his neck--especially after making a point of mentioning that he wore it at all fucking times.
"You're gonna do it aren't you?" Vince asked, his voice oozing disappointment because he genuinely cared about what that song was going to do to Christine--and, eventually, Tommy.
I don't give a fuck about Tommy.
"Yep. It's a perfect song," he let out a defeated breath because he couldn't seem to thwart Nikki's deluded plan. "I'd be a fucking idiot to let this opportunity pass me by."
"Well, you are definitely right about being a fucking idiot, Nikki."