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up for all the years he had abandoned me—but in retrospect I think I wanted to feel connected to someone, to talk to him and maybe, in the process, learn something about what made me so crazy. I called my grandmother, then my mother, and they told me that last they heard he was working in San Jose, California. I called information, asked for Frank Feranna, and found him. I wrote the number down next to the phone, and downed a fifth of whiskey to work up the courage to dial it.

    He picked up on the first ring, and when I told him it was me, his voice turned gruff. “I don’t have a son,” he told me. “I do not have a son. I don’t know who you are.”
    “Go fuck yourself,” I yelled into the receiver.
    “Don’t ever call here again,” he snapped back, and hung up.
    That was the last time I ever heard his voice.
    I cried for hours, removing records from their cardboard sleeves and throwing them against the walls, watching them smash to pieces. I grabbed the pieces of vinyl and scraped them up and down my arms, making crisscrosses of raised red flesh punctuated by beads of blood. Though I didn’t think I could sleep that night, I somehow did, waking up in the morning strangely calm with the resolve to change my birth name. I did not want to be saddled for the rest of my life as the namesake of that man. What right did he have to say I was not his son when he had never even been a father to me? First, I killed Frank Feranna Jr. in a song, “On with the Show,” writing, “Frankie died just the other night / Some say it was suicide / But we all know / How the story goes.” Then I made it legal.
    I remembered that Angie was always talking about her old boyfriend from Indiana, a guy named Nikki Syxx, who used to play in a Top 40 cover band and later with a surf-punk outfit called John and the Nightriders. I loved his name, but I couldn’t just steal it. So I decided to call myself Nikki Nine. But everybody said it was too punk rock, and punk was now too mainstream. I needed something that was more rock and roll, and Six was rock and roll. So I decided that anyone who thinks surfing has anything to do with punk rock doesn’t deserve such a cool name, and I soon applied to have my name legally changed to Nikki Sixx. It was like stealing his soul, because for years people would come up to me and say, “Nikki, dude, remember me from Indiana?” I’d tell them that I’d never been to Indiana, and they’d say, “Come on, man, I saw you with John and the Nightriders.”
    Years later, on the Girls, Girls, Girls tour, I was channel-surfing in a hotel room and saw a strange, sallow-skinned character with long hair being interviewed. I heard the words “He’s the devil” and stopped to watch. It was him, ranting and raving: “He took my name and sucked my soul out and sold it to you all—I was the original Nikki Syxx. And he is using my name to spread the word of Satan.” Nikki Syxx—or John as he was now called, appropriately enough since John is the saint in the New Testament who tells of the apocalypse—had become a born-again Christian.

    fig. 8

    London, clockwise from upper left: John St. John, Dane Rage, Nigel Benjamin, Nikki Sixx, Lizzie Grey

    ANGIE CONVINCED ME TO MOVE in with a bunch of musicians behind a flower shop across from Hollywood High School. There were wanna-be rock stars everywhere in the house: sleeping in the bathtub, on the front steps, behind the sofa cushions. And somehow one of them burned the place to the ground one afternoon. I returned from the record store to find the house smoldering, surrounded by curious high school students. With my bass in hand—I always took it with me in case someone in the house stole it—I ran inside to see if I could rescue anything else of mine. I noticed that there was a piano still standing that a guy who had left town to visit his parents had been renting, so I wheeled it out of the house, around the corner, and all the way to a music store on