Hella Nation - Evan Wright [130]
IN THE DRESSING ROOM after the show, Nikki and Tommy lie with their backs on the floor, passing a mask back and forth that they use to suck pure oxygen from a tank.
Their grueling schedule calls for two more hours of post-concert promotions—a question-and-answer period from the stage, a meet-and-greet with fans, and an event in which they will give away a signed guitar for charity.
“I felt terrible a couple nights ago,” Vince says. “The guy who won our guitar didn’t have any hands. I tried giving him the guitar, and I just blurted out without thinking, ‘Dude! You don’t have any hands!’ ”
Nikki leaps from the floor, rejuvenated with his pure-oxygen blast. “Vince, did you see that chick in the front row motioning the whole time?”
“The one stroking her hand over her mouth like she wanted to suck my dick? This must be the horniest fucking city we’ve played.”
“The power of rock never stops amazing me.” Nikki shakes his head. “The little girl sitting there. She’s fourteen years old watching the band, and she’s getting achy down there, and she doesn’t know why.”
BY ONE IN THE MORNING they have signed their last autograph of the night. Mick and Vince go straight to the hotel to meet their girlfriends, who have flown in from Los Angeles. Tommy and Nikki climb into the crew van hoping to find a hot meal somewhere. The van driver informs Dave, the tour manager, that most restaurants are closed in downtown Cleveland at this time of night, but the driver’s brother-in-law, who comes from Rome, runs one of the finest Italian restaurants in Little Italy. He’s kept it open especially for Mötley Crüe and has laid out a sumptuous feast.
“Dude,” Tommy cuts in, “let’s just go to Taco Bell and get some burritos.”
“Burritos,” Nikki repeats. “I’ll be sliding my burrito into Donna in a few hours when we get to New York.”
“One of the things people don’t expect about Mötley Crüe is that we are computer literate,” Tommy lectures on the drive to Taco Bell. “We’re having a cybercast of our concert in New York. I read all the e-mail that comes into our website.”
“Dude, Donna just sent me this e-mail today,” Nikki interrupts. “She used her digital camera to take a picture. She’s on her knees, and her ass is right in front of the lens, and she’s got both her hands on her cheeks pulling it wide open.”
“Digital cameras rule!” Tommy shouts.
“I sent her this nasty picture back,” Nikki continues, “where there’s jizz going down my legs. Thank God I’m sober. Imagine if I e-mailed it to the wrong person.”
The late-night Taco Bell in downtown Cleveland is a bulletproof-glass fortress protected by an armed guard who waves Mötley Crüe off when Tommy tries opening the door of the van to go inside the restaurant. The guard grunts a few syllables, directing the van to the drive-thru line.
Because of the garbled drive-thru speaker system and the poor grasp of English demonstrated by the Taco Bell employee on the other end, ordering the couple dozen different varieties of burrito for the Crüe and their crew turns into a twenty-minute ordeal.
Sensing hurt feelings on the other side of the squawk box, Tommy becomes convinced the Taco Bell employees are going to tamper with their order. He climbs over the driver’s head in the front seat of the van to peer into the kitchen window of the Taco Bell. “I want to make sure nobody’s busting a nut in my burrito,” he informs his bandmates, watching intently.
When the food arrives, it is apparent that there is no spoiled-rock-star hierarchy in the van. Tommy hands out crew members’ burritos and hot sauce packets before taking his own. The band members and crew members eat. The silence doesn’t hold for long.
“Do you think Mick’s piling it into his old lady right now?” Tommy says, pondering the sex life of the band’s least talkative member, as he tears into his second or third burrito.
“He’s probably riding her now, got his hat on backwards,” Nikki says between munches. “I wonder if Mick gets all freaky. Gets