|
|
No, he
didn't just eat a
shit sandwich, but he will.
(Photos
courtesy Tony Byner)
|
I. The Load Out
For
most of his life, Jef Hickey has taken rock ’n’ roll’s
loudest, dumbest, truest and most irresistible messages to heart,
perfecting the art of life as a never-ending Kiss chorus. Sure, many
people pledge themselves to sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, but
few have done so with the self-destructive verve of the former
Studio City resident. Three spiked rings decorate his dick like
medals of valor. He’s contracted gonorrhea (six times), crabs
(four times), syphilis (three times) and herpes. For more than a
decade and a half, with lab-rat consistency, Hickey carpet-bombed
his cortex with enough pills to stock a hypochondriac’s medicine
cabinet. At 15, he established himself as Boston’s hardest-working
rock serf, unloading equipment for bands like Motorhead and Twisted
Sister at almost every club in town. At 17, he lived a louder,
crueler, dramatically less uplifting version of Cameron Crowe’s
rock ’n’ roll heartwarmer Almost Famous, joining Megadeth
on tour as a roadie and discovering the thorny allure of hard drugs
and anal sex with Canadian strippers.
But
now he’s 35 and just paroled from a three-year stint in a
Sheridan, Oregon, federal prison where he shared an 8-by-12-foot
cell with another inmate and a broken-tailed cat that never purred
and constantly brawled with the prison’s two other feline
residents. Even if drug issues and parole restrictions weren’t
clouding his future employment prospects, well, the rock ’n’
roll road life that seems like an adventure in your 20s can become a
grind in your 30s. How do you grow old in rock ’n’ roll when you’re
not actually a rock star? Jef Hickey hasn’t really figured out an
answer for that one yet, but he’s going to find out soon enough.
***
Despite
his advancing years, Jef Hickey continues to project a slouchy,
fidgety, teenage charm. His civilian wardrobe consists of jeans and
more than 700 concert T-shirts, all of them black. In prison, he cut
his hair short and kept it its natural brown, but in the past it has
been blue, magenta and various other neon hues. His pale skin blazes
with color too: He’s got a naked female werewolf tattooed on his
right arm; his ex-wife as a vampire spread-eagled across his chest;
a giant vagina with hammer-like pistons coming out of it on his left
forearm. His deep-set green eyes change from messianic to catatonic,
depending on the chemical weather inside his brain. The changes are
less pronounced now that he’s no longer doing drugs, but even
completely sober, he’s still a mercurial personality, full of
amped-up enthusiasms one day, crashing hard the next. He’s a
disarmingly candid, funny, nonstop talker, and a fan of bold
gestures. While in prison, Hickey had the word LIBERTINE
emblazoned across his stomach to remind himself of his former
existence: the pinballing from groupie to stripper to hooker, the
chronic prowl for pills and dope, his perpetual disdain for
convention.
That
tattoo is his 17th. He got his first one, a 4-inch blue spider on
his neck, in 1984, when he was 15, the same year he started working
for free at a Boston rock club called the Channel. By then, he was
already a regular there, where he’d camp out in the parking lot in
the afternoons waiting for musicians to arrive so he could ask them
for autographs. Then one day, a lazy roadie asked him if he wanted
to help set up that evening’s show. “Next thing I know, I’m
unloading Motorhead’s gear,” says Hickey. “And just when I
think it can’t get any better, someone hands me a backstage pass
so I can stay and load the truck after the show. It was like someone
handed me a skeleton key to the world of rock!”
Hickey
liked that world much better than his day-to-day existence. At
school, he was a
misfit — a good student who wore spiked belts and heavy metal
T-shirts while his classmates favored suede moccasins and classic
rock. In his own family, Hickey was something of an outsider too.
Unlike his younger brother and sister, he was adopted, which, he
says, “left me with latent abandonment issues I’ve been dealing
with for the last few decades.” When he was 12, his adoptive
parents divorced. Two years later, his adoptive mother remarried,
and Hickey clashed with his new stepfather. “I refused to wear a
tuxedo at the wedding,” he says. “Instead, I wore a Judas Priest
T-shirt. Things kind of went downhill from there.”
At
Boston’s rock clubs, however, Hickey felt completely at home.
After that first Motorhead concert, he started taking the 45-minute
train ride into the city three or four days a week to help bands set
up their equipment in the afternoons and load it in their trucks
again after they finished playing. Afterward, usually at 2 or 3 in
the morning, he’d walk to Boston’s South Station, where the last
evening train had already departed and the first morning one didn’t
leave until 5 a.m. “I’d sit in this vestibule with some of
Boston’s smelliest bums,” Hickey recalls. “I’d be jacked up
on adrenaline from the show, and scared shitless of getting mugged
or beaten up, so I never slept. Sometimes I did my homework.”
It
wasn’t the easiest way to earn a little validation, but Hickey was
hooked on the camaraderie he felt backstage and the feeling of being
a necessary part of the thing he loved most in the world. “I must
have polished a million cymbals before I realized I hated to do it,
and so did the drum tech — that’s why he’d find someone like
me to do it for him,” he says. “But I also knew that Lars’
[Ulrich, Metallica’s drummer] cymbals looked cool under the lights
during ‘Creeping Death’ because I polished them.”
In
January 1986, Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine asked the 17-year-old
Hickey if he wanted to work for the band on its U.S. tour. “It was
my official excuse to quit high school,” Hickey says. “I left
with the clothes on my back.” Hickey washed the band’s dirty
laundry between shows. At night, he slept in its Ryder equipment
truck, stretched out on speaker cabinets and cradling a shotgun
across his chest, guarding against thieves. In the daytime, he went
out and bought drugs for everyone. “I was spending my 10 bucks per
diem on food, so I couldn’t buy any for myself,” he says. “But
sometimes, they’d give me some table scraps, you know? That’s
how I discovered my love of speed and cocaine.”
After
thousands of miles and dozens of shows, Megadeth’s tour ended in
Los Angeles. Hickey’s classmates back in Massachusetts had just
graduated. He was only a semester away from earning a diploma
himself, but he saw no reason to pursue it. “After that tour, I
knew what I wanted to do with my life,” he says. “I mean, how
else was I gonna go to places like Japan and South America without
shaving my head and putting on a uniform?”
II.
Rock ’n’ Roll Animal
Jef
Hickey has three testicles, but the third one, he says, is
physiologically negligible, a non-functioning half-lump of vein and
tissue, good only for winning bar bets. So there must be some other
explanation for his extreme ballsiness. “When we used to run
around together, it was like hanging out with a fucking monkey on
crystal meth,” says Colin Malone, the pudgy raconteur behind the
popular public-access scuzzfest Colin’s Sleazy Friends. “The
thing about Jef is that there was absolutely no fear. He never
thought, ‘If I do this, this bad thing could happen.’ He always
just thought, ‘If I do this, I’ll get high. If I do this, I’ll
have lots of fun.’ And he always forgot there might be a third
part, too, where he’d have to pay for his actions.”
Fearless,
obsessively persistent, quick on his feet and, perhaps most
importantly, congenitally parched for approval and acceptance — it’s
almost as if Hickey had been genetically engineered for rock ’n’
roll pit-crew work.
“You
could be in Japan, Europe, wherever. Jef could go out empty-handed,
and within an hour he’d come back with a handful of something,”
says former Queens of the Stone Age bassist Nick Oliveri. “One
time we were on a plane, and he just went up to this stewardess and
asked her if she had any drugs. I was like, ‘Are you crazy?’ But
the next thing you know, the stewardess was having us sign her CDs
and giving us pills and things.”
Hickey
pursued women with the same candor and enthusiasm, and with so many
groupies in search of sticky backstage validation, there were plenty
of women to choose from. Eventually, however, the algebra of excess
began to undermine him. “I started doing so much cocaine, my dick
was completely useless,” Hickey recalls. “So when girls would
come around and say they were willing to do anything to meet the
band, I just started throwing meat at them. That’s what they had
to do to earn their backstage pass. I’d make them strip down and
stand in the corner while we pelted them with the deli tray. After a
while, it became like this daily event. “All the bands would stop
sound check and gather round, just to watch me throw meat at some
chick.”
Rock
’n’ roll, nudity, himself as the center of attention: Hickey
liked that combination. But, content as he was with his peripheral
role in the rock ’n’ roll universe, he longed to make a bigger
splash somehow. And yet how to do that? “I knew early on I didn’t
have much musical talent,” he admits. “Even today, I know just
enough basic chords to get through sound check.” But Hickey did
have a talent for writing, and in the early ’90s, he started
freelancing for publications like International Tattoo
Art and Sex, Tattoos & Rock ’n’ Roll. And
in 1995, when Hickey discovered a fledgling porn rag called New
Rave, he saw an opportunity to step up his adventures in
flesh-based journalism. To get the publisher’s attention, Hickey,
who was on tour with Type O Negative at the time, started sending
him pieces of the hotel rooms he was staying in. “I sent him a
doorknob, a drawer, towels, a toilet seat, a bad painting of a ship.
That way, when I got to L.A., I’d have a place to stay.”
New Rave’s
publisher, started the magazine mostly because he needed a place to
run ads for his extensive phone-sex operation. He had very little
interest in the editorial end of New
Rave, and he liked Hickey’s style. Thus, when Hickey took over
the reins at New Rave, he had the freedom to do pretty much
whatever he wanted. His first move as editor: hiring East Village
auteur Richard Kern to shoot Type O Negative’s Peter Steele
cavorting with two porn stars. His second: commissioning a treatise
on vaginal odor from angry white malcontent Jim Goad.
To
publicize New Rave, Hickey shipped thousands of complimentary
copies to U.S. Army troops stationed in Bosnia. Closer to home, he
sent free subscriptions to hundreds of churches across the country.
Hickey loved his new life as grandstanding crotch Barnum. He had his
own spacious office in New Rave’s Wilshire Boulevard
headquarters. He was getting a regular salary for penning cover
stories like “Wonder Drug GHB: Ejaculate of the Gods?” He was
road-testing strippers and hookers on New Rave’s dime. He
was still hanging out with rock stars, but instead of just
schlepping their equipment around or scoring them drugs, he was
pairing them with porn stars and persuading them to appear in his
magazine. “Marilyn Manson was totally down for it,” Hickey
remembers. “He wore fishnet stockings and duct tape, and posed for
one picture with a silver vibrator sticking out of his ass.”
A
few months into his new gig, Hickey even started dating a celebrity
of sorts, Sandra Margot, former cast member of Gorgeous Ladies of
Wrestling, America’s first all-female wrestling TV series,
and, under the name Tyffany Million, star of Jailhouse Cock, Beaverly
Hillbillies, Splatman, and more than a hundred other
hardcore porn videos. A sharp, ambitious blond, Margot was known for
her voracious sexuality and her hard, tan body. Thousands of hours
at the gym plus some extensive scalpel work had given her the figure
of a bionic Barbie.
She
and Hickey fell for each other at a party he’d invited her to at a
Hollywood bikini bar. “He asked me if I wanted a drink, and I said
‘Sure,’” she recalls. “Then, out of nowhere, he puts his
hand up my dress and, not even knowing me, sticks his finger in my
asshole. I didn’t even flinch, though, because I knew he was just
trying to get a reaction out of me. And right there he said he knew
I was his girl.”
For
Margot, however, it took more convincing. That happened later that
evening, when she, Hickey and Colin Malone retreated to a back room
so the latter two could snort some cocaine. When Margot sat on
Malone’s lap and started kissing him, Hickey responded as if he
were watching a scene from one of her videos. “He just whipped out
his dick and started jerking off,” says Margot. For an
exhibitionistic porn star, it was more romantic than a bouquet of
long-stemmed vibrators.
Together,
the duo made Pam and Tommy seem as staid as a pair of plastic
wedding-cake toppers. Shortly after their initial greeting they
moved in together. For several months, they lived in tidy sin. “Jef
liked to get really high on blow and then clean my house,” says
Margot.
In
1996, they decided to go to Las Vegas and get married. The ceremony
took place at the Graceland Wedding Chapel, with an obese Elvis
impersonator on hand to bless their union. “Normally, he sings
songs, but we just gave him a bunch of fried chicken and Pepsi and
asked him to eat really loudly,” says Hickey. After exchanging
vows, Margot tore off her top and the happy couple posed for their
wedding photos.
Like
many newlyweds, Hickey and Margot argued over money. Hickey says
that his new bride no longer wanted to dance or do movies. She says
that he’s the one who wanted her to stop. Whichever was the case,
she didn’t think his salary was enough for both of them to live
on. “That’s when I started taking kickbacks at New Rave,”
says Hickey. “It cost between $6,000 to $10,000 to put a full-page
ad in the magazine. I’d tell a video company to give me two grand
in cash instead, and then I’d tell my boss that we needed to give
them the first ad free in order to get more.”
But
along with more money to spend on Margot, Hickey also had more money
to spend on his other great loves — pills and cocaine. “He would
mix all kinds of stuff and go up and down chemically,” says
Margot. “And then he started constantly checking up on me, calling
me 20 times a day from work. I’d be at the grocery store, or out
having coffee somewhere, and he’d pop up out of nowhere and ask me
what I was doing. If any other guys tried to talk with me, he’d
get all bent out of shape, and that really started to irritate me.”
Margot
struck back by telling New Rave’s publisher about Hickey’s
ad-sales tricks, effectively ending his tenure there. “It was a
terrible thing that I still regret,” says Margot. “But I was so
angry with him, because he was making my life a living hell.” A
few months later, on Valentine’s Day, she served him with divorce
papers. While she says the timing was unintentional, Hickey
considered it the ultimate slap in the face. He didn’t bother with
a traditional pen-and-ink reply. “I stuffed the papers in a Ziploc
bag and shit all over them,” he says. “Then, I FedExed them back
to her lawyer.”
III.
Cock ’n’ Roll
When
you see sun-kissed kewpie dolls flashing their tits with
trained-seal compliance on late-night Girls Gone Wild
commercials, you probably don’t think about early-’80s
girl-power icons the Go-Go’s. But they actually played a critical
role in drunken exhibitionism’s metamorphosis from hand-held
psychodrama to lucrative mass entertainment. In the midst of the
band’s Top 40 heyday, connoisseurs of strange video began trading
a tape featuring a flaccid Go-Go’s roadie named Dave who had the
beat but not the boner: His vigorous but futile efforts to jerk
himself off were accompanied by onscreen commentary from Belinda
Carlisle and Kathy Valentine, among others.
“Everybody
had heard about the Go-Go’s tape, and everybody wanted to make
their own version of it,” says Hickey. Thus, spectacles like
Hickey’s backstage deli-tray toss and whatever other scenes of
groupie exploitation they could immortalize were captured on
videotape. “We’d do a new one for almost every show. Sometimes,
it’d just be 45 minutes of me begging some girl to show me her
tits,” Hickey says. “Sometimes, there’d be more.” When
Hickey first started making such tapes in the late ’80s, he didn’t
see their commercial possibilities. But while casting around for a
new source of income after his New Rave gig ended, Hickey
started thinking about the old tapes he used to make.
“It
just seemed like the next logical step after New Rave,” he
says. “We put rock stars and porn stars together in photos, so why
not video too?” Hickey convinced a company called Notorious
Productions to give him $2,000 to produce a video, and together with
a former colleague from New Rave, Toby Dammit, he created
Tales From the Road: Crew Sluts. They brought a handful of porn
stars to Ozzfest, and using Biohazard’s tour bus as their main
location, staged dramatic re-enactments of tawdry groupie sex. “The
guys in Biohazard didn’t want to be in it, though, and neither did
Sepultura or Slayer,” Hickey says. Instead, he conducted
interviews with a couple of roadies to give the proceedings a touch
of authenticity.
Released
in 1997, the tape sold poorly, and the company that bankrolled it
showed no interest in a follow-up. Still, Hickey felt his concept
had potential, so he pitched it to a 22-year-old porn director named
Matt Zane. An aspiring musician with an interest in Morrisonesque
shamanics and Satanic self-determination, Zane was considered a
maverick for incorporating piercing, techno music and various other
youth-culture trappings into the staid, almost fetishistically
conventional world of porn videos. “I told him I could introduce
him to rock stars,” says Hickey. “He was skeptical at first, but
after he realized I really could hook him up with these people, he
ran with it.”
Zane
hired Hickey to work as Zane Entertainment’s publicist, and
together they started work on a series of “cockumentaries”
called Backstage Sluts. Their timing could not have been more
perfect. By 1997, retrogressively male, cartoonishly rebellious, nu-metal
and rap-rock was fast replacing Lilith Fair and indie-rock
sensitivity with caveman-like dick swinging. What better way for its
practitioners to express their hardcore bona fides than by aligning
themselves with hardcore porn?
Outside
half of Motley Crue, no one had ever mixed rock ’n’ roll with
hardcore porn in the commercially available form that Backstage
Sluts did. In between scuzzy, no-holes-barred sex scenes, Backstage
Sluts featured scuzzy, no-holds-barred interviews with Insane
Clown Posse, Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst and Wes Borland, the ladies
of Nashville Pussy, Sugar Ray’s Mark McGrath, and Korn’s
Jonathan Davis, among others.
The
porn industry didn’t think much of the results, but thanks to the
growing popularity of the musicians featured, mainstream media
outlets like Spin, Rolling Stone, MTV and even the BBC
took notice. VH-1 was particularly enamored of rock-and-porn
cross-pollination, devoting several specials to the trend. For a
while there, Zane was showing up on the channel even more often than
Lenny Kravitz.
And
Jef Hickey? He was showing up on VH-1 about as often as Alan
Greenspan, which is to say, never. And nowhere else in the media,
either. “Basically, Matt fucked me, and I was so fucking high, I
let him,” charges Hickey. Zane, however, shrugs off such
indictments. “The point I always made to Jef was that if you watch
the first two Backstage Sluts movies, the opening credits
say: ‘Directed by Matt Zane and Jef Hickey.’ If the media wanted
to interview me rather than him, could I help that?”
While
the savvy Zane released his band Society 1’s first album, rented a
mansion off Sunset Boulevard and hobnobbed with rock stars, even
throwing a bachelor party for Jonathan Davis, Hickey felt cut off
from the success of the thing that he’d largely created. Backstage
Sluts was poised to become a long-running, reality-porn
franchise: a raunchier, hardcore precursor to the Girls Gone Wild
series. Zane was making hundreds of thousands of dollars from the
tapes, but Hickey’s salary as Zane’s publicist was his only
financial reward.
Eventually,
he quit Zane Entertainment. “I had this crazy idea that he should
buy me out for a thousand dollars, so he did,” he says. “Everyone
told me, ‘You’re an idiot for selling out that cheap.’ But the
truth was I wasn’t getting a percentage of the sales anyway.”
Hickey
promptly spent the $1,000 on drugs. For many years, he had preferred
pills and powder over needles, but now he was shooting up heroin on
a regular basis. With money scarce and his habit growing
increasingly expensive, he moved into an underground, dungeonlike
storage space in the back yard of a porno-loving dentist’s house
in 1998. “There weren’t any bathrooms in it, so I had to piss in
a bottle because I was always too high to leave my room,” Hickey
says. “After a while, I realized my addiction had taken over, and
I needed to get away from Los Angeles. When I got an offer from the
band Quicksand to go on tour with them, I took it.”
Quicksand’s
offer was only slightly more lucrative than the $10 a day that
Megadeth had paid him in 1986. “I got one month’s rent and $15 a
day,” Hickey says. But that gig led to a job with Buckcherry, and
then a series of other gigs as well. In early 2000, Hickey got a
call from the Motorhead roadie who 15 years earlier asked him to
help unload the band’s equipment at the Channel. He was recovering
from surgery, and wanted to know if Hickey was interested in
replacing him as Lemmy’s bass tech for the band’s upcoming tour.
“Of
course I wanted to replace him,” says Hickey. “I was fucking
psyched. I mean, 15 years ago, I was happy just having Lemmy sign my
record. And now I’m going to be teching for him for a whole tour
— it was like the coup de grâce.” In an article that had
appeared in Sex, Tattoos & Rock ’n’ Roll in 1994,
Hickey had fantasized that Lemmy was his real father. “In my eyes
and ears, Lord Lemmy is louder than Evel Knievel, stronger than
Gorilla Monsoon and smarter than Mr. Wizard,” he rhapsodized. Now,
as the tour started up, he was working for him every night, keeping
his bass in good repair and making sure he had a lit cigarette and a
glass of Maker’s Mark and Coke waiting at the end of every show.
In
Canada, however, a customs agent threatened their nightly routine,
refusing Hickey entry because of a prior conviction. As everyone
else in the entourage moved onward into British Columbia, Hickey had
no option but to retreat to a nearby motel. Twice over the next 24
hours he tried to make it through customs, but he was thwarted both
times. Finally, he decided to simply walk across the border
illegally. “It was only a hundred feet away from my motel room,”
he explains. “I could look out my window and see the Canadian
license plates on cars that were parked across the street.”
Crossing
through a playground, then over a 1-foot ditch, Hickey ventured into
Canada. Unfortunately, Vancouver, the site for that night’s show,
was still more than 20 miles away, and Hickey had no money left. “I
just started walking,” Hickey says. “After a couple hours, I
found a cab that was willing to take me the rest of the way on the
promise that I’d pay when we got there.”
Impressed
by Hickey’s long march in the name of rock ’n’ roll, Lord
Lemmy rewarded his loyal charge with a big lump of speed. Then, he
says, Motorhead’s guitarist Phil Campbell offered him a hamburger.
“I was starving because I hadn’t eaten for a long time, so I
said, ‘Sure,’” Hickey says. “And because my nose was so torn
up from all the speed I’d just snorted, I couldn’t smell.” He
could taste it, though, and high as he was, it only took him one
bite to realize that Campbell hadn’t given him a hamburger at all,
but rather a patty of shit stuck between a bun. “That was my
appreciation for being so dedicated to the band,” Hickey says. “A
shit sandwich.”
Hickey
says Campbell’s prank didn’t really bother him. “I mean, that
was just Phil Campbell being Phil Campbell, you know? The guy’s
twisted. Really twisted. He’s English. He sticks Sharpies up his
ass to sign autographs. He sells ass art at the merch booth.” Even
so, Hickey’s ex-girlfriend, Rachell Burns, believes the incident
hurt him much more than he’s willing to admit.
“He
would have done anything for those guys, and they literally shit on
him,” she says. “After all the dealing, all the pimping he’d
done for them, that’s what he was worth? It broke his heart.”
IV.
True Romance
Long
before they’d ever met, Rachell Burns had been a fan of the
articles Hickey used to write for Sex, Tattoos & Rock ’n’
Roll. “His sense of what life should be like is so distorted,
and yet he makes it real,” she says. Inspired in part by his
writings, Burns became a tattoo artist herself. Years later, the
pair met when a friend of Hickey introduced them. “He said he knew
this chick who could do some tattoo work for me for free,” says
Hickey.
Burns
was in town for a convention, staying in a suite at the Safari Inn
in Burbank. “When I went over there I said, ‘Do you have any
idea where you’re staying?’” Hickey remembers, referring to
the motel’s role in Quentin Tarantino’s lovers-on-the-lam
screenwriting debut, True Romance. Burns, it turns out, had
chosen to stay at the Safari because True Romance was her
favorite movie.
Further
bonding took place as Burns tattooed a flaming pentagram on Hickey’s
right elbow. It helped, no doubt, that Burns was a tall, sultry
beauty, right out of a Tarantino movie. Tattooed on the knuckles of
her right hand were the letters T, U, C and N. Tattooed on the
knuckles of her left hand were the letter R, E, U and T. When she
laced her fingers together, the message “TRUE CUNT” appears.
The
pair moved in together in late 2000, but over time Burns began to
realize how discouraged Hickey had become, how he’d lost much of
the high-voltage spirit that had animated the old articles that she’d
found so inspiring. “After keeping company with so many hot
players for so long, I think he was really frustrated,” she says.
“He wanted to make more of himself, but at the same time, it was
like he had relegated himself to doing grunt work as a crew guy. He
was really miserable, and I think he was really wanting to wind his
life down.”
Never
one for nuance, Hickey kept his works in a coffin-shaped box beneath
the leopard-print loveseat in his living room. Dozens of plastic and
ceramic skulls helped contribute to the room’s living-dead vibe,
as did Hickey’s collection of World War II morphine kits, rare DEA
task-force patches, and other drug-related memorabilia that he’d
acquired via Ebay. Gold records from Pantera and Type O Negative,
framed backstage passes and an autographed poster of Jenna Jameson
added notes of celebrity, while black candles and the tranquilizing
flicker of MTV2 provided the only illumination. “I had this white
Ikea blanket that he’d wrap himself in, like a shroud,”
remembers Burns. “There was blood all over it, from him spiking
himself. He was really gaunt, and he’d rise up in his shroud and
start screaming at me, with his eyes all red and his hair sticking
to his face. It was like coming home to a corpse in a tomb.”
Between
nodding out to Mudvayne videos, the corpse was also FedExing
packages of methamphetamine to Washington, D.C. In the fall of 2000,
following his stint with Motorhead, Hickey had been touring with the
band Downset when he ran into a stripper he knew in the nation’s
capital. She wanted to buy some meth, and when Hickey found out how
much she was paying for it there, he told her it was much cheaper in
California. “She asked me if I could introduce her to my dealer,”
he remembers. “And I did what any junkie does in that situation
— I gave her the hookup.”
Hickey
was also hoping to get some free heroin for making the referral.
What he hadn’t expected was his dealer’s insistence that he stay
involved indefinitely. “His supplier didn’t want to deal
directly with anybody because he thought it was too risky, so he
coerced Jef into being the go-between,” says Joanne Hepworth, a
Washington, D.C., attorney who would eventually serve as Hickey’s
court-appointed defender.
After
arresting one of the D.C. dealers, DEA agents uncovered Hickey’s
involvement. “It wasn’t that hard to figure out,” says
Hepworth. “He was using his real name on some of the packages.”
On
October 24, 2001, nearly a dozen law enforcement officials paid him
an unannounced midnight visit. “They were really nice guys,”
says Hickey in retrospect. “They were asking me questions about
Marilyn Manson, stuff like that. One guy was a really big fan of my
ex-wife’s movies.” After rummaging through his things for an
hour, looking for more evidence of his involvement in the meth ring,
they handcuffed him and took him away. A few days later, at the
Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City, he was outfitted with
prison khakis and given the choice of shipping his street clothes
home or donating them to charity. Somewhere in the Midwest a needy
redneck now has his very own vintage “Reign in Blood” Slayer
T-shirt.
V.
Story of His Life
Upon
his release from prison this week, Hickey headed toward a halfway
house in El Monte. He’s planning to obtain drug counseling through
a nonprofit organization called Musician’s Assistance Program, but
beyond that, his future is uncertain.
“When
you leave here, they give you a plane ticket and an apple. Then you
have 11 hours to check into your halfway house and start over,”
Hickey says. “Every time I was just about to grab the ring in the
past, I kicked myself in the nuts. But I also keep coming back, so I
know I’m going to do something. And I know I’m going to do
something different and great. I just want to leave a stain on pop
culture somehow.”
To
this end, he’s currently writing a novel about two wide-eyed
ingénues who move to L.A. in search of fame and adventure.
“It’s
a fun story about drugs, porn, rock, sex, revenge and attempted
suicide,” Hickey exclaims. “But no one dies, no one gets sick,
no one really gets hurt. I think people would love to read a story
like that, don’t you?”
|
