Draft #1 for my HSC Drama Monologue

This is, as the title says just my first draft for my monologue. My intention is to leave the audience perhaps feeling empathy for drug addicts or at the very least think twice before criticising and calling them scum. I am adapting it from the Heroin Diaries, by Nikki Sixx and I am actually playing Nikki Sixx, but in a way that the audience is oblivious to whether I am male or female.
Feedback would be much appreciated if anyone actually reads my blog.

Monologue Draft #1

When I was 15 years old I remember the Iggy and the stooges song "search and destroy" reaching out from my speakers to me like my own personal anthem. It was a theme I would carry for decades as my own hell-bent mantra. The song might as well have been tattooed across my knuckles 'cause there could be no truer words for a young, alienated teenager.

Alice Cooper was another musical hero. Like Nostradamus, Alice must have seen the future when he sang "welcome to my nightmare"...or at least my future.

Yet Alice's nightmare was show business, and this, this is something else entirely. This is me welcoming you to a genuine living nightmare that I endured, a nightmare so bad that it ended up killing me, twice.

But now I know it wasn't only the drugs- it was also my past unknowingly haunting me, and even a lethal cocktail of narcotics couldn't seem to kill the pain.

I guess if we could mix these two songs together you'd have the theme song of my adolescence.
On Christmas day 1986 I was a member of one of the biggest rock'n'roll bands in the world. I was also an alcoholic, a coke addict and a heroin addict heading into a pill-popping downward spiral of depression.

Musically I always thought of my band as a nasty combination of punk, rock, glam and pop mixed together with a lot of sarcasm, anger and humor, love and hate, happiness and sadness. Of course, depending on the recipe, there was always larger or smaller amounts of sex in there too. I mean what is rock'n'roll if it's not sexy? Sleazy? Usually, Chauvinist? Always.

So Christmas Day 1986, that day wasn't even that special. I was an addict well before then and stayed one for a while afterwards. Perhaps that day just brought my condition home to me. There is something about spending Christmas alone, naked, sitting by the Christmas tree gripping a shotgun that lets you know your life is spinning wildly out of control.

Over the years people have tried to say that being in my band turned me into an addict...but I don't think it did. That stroke of genius was all my own.

Even as a kid I was never inclined to dodge a bullet. I was always the first one to take it right between the eyes. I was stubborn, strong-willed and always willing to put myself in harms way for the betterment of chaos, confusion and rebellion- all the traits that made me famous and later, infamous.
The ingredients for success and failure all wrapped up in a nice package, with the emotional stability of a molotov cocktail. Then when I moved to LA in the late '70s and discovered cocaine, it only amplified these charming characteristics... But alcohol, acid, cocaine... they were just affairs. When I met heroin, it was true love.

After we made it big my band had given me more money than I knew what to do with, so naturally I spent it on the only thing I wanted to do: drugs.
Before the band, I lived only for music: after it started I lived only for drugs. OK so maybe the band gave me the resources to become an addict, but you know what? If it hadn't, I'd have found some other way to do it.

I guess all of us get to live out our destiny, even those of us who have to choose the worst one imaginable. So why did I take this strange, dark trip? Well, I have a little 1-2-3 theory on this.
1-My childhood was shitty. My Dad left when I was 3 years old and never came back.
2- My mum tried to love me, but everytime a new guy came on the scene I'd be in the way and she'd shuttle me off to live with my grandparents.
3- I was born an addict. It's no surprise I grew up feeling angry, unloved and somehow needing...revenge.
Revenge on who? on the world? on myself?

And How did I become a junkie? Well one year 2 major things happened to me, I had an album go platinum and I crashed my porsche, drunk, dislocated my shoulder and started smoking heroin to numb the pain. The problem was I carried on smoking- and then started injecting- long after the pain was gone.

Fuck, there were clues I was becoming a junkie. You'd need to be pretty self obsessed to miss them, but if I was one thing back then it was self obsessed. When Vince went to jail for 20 days I didn't even visit or phone our singer once, it never even occurred to me. It would have been a waste of valuable drug time.

By the end of our 1986 tour I was on my way to becoming a full blown junkie. I'd OD'd after a show in London and been left for dead in a dumpster. I turned up strung out to be Tommys best man at his wedding with syringes hidden in my cowboy boots. And I'd stayed home freebasing rather than attend my own grandmothers funeral- the woman who had loved and raised me. And things got worse. Much worse.

As I'm reflecting here all sorts of feelings are bubbling to the surface, I realise now that I'd totally lost perspective, Music took a backseat to the voices in my head and demons in my closet.
And a question that often comes up for me, how the fuck am I still alive? Simply put I think I'm still here cause I've still got stuff to do, music to write.

I mean I'll probably meet my maker doing something so uncool like golfing or gardening. I can see it now, sitting up there with Bon Scott, Sid Vicious and Hendrix hearing someone reading my obituary from below "NIKKI SIXX DIED TODAY...FUCKING GOLFING..."

OK, enough humor (you tend to make fun of death a lot once you've died and come back a few times)
You know, they say to keep what you have you have to give it away. I believe that. I also believe you can be cool as fuck, not give a fuck and kick ass in life without being fucked up. I'm still the first person to say "Fuck You", but I'm faster to say "I Love You"

I'm the same person, but I'm also a different one. You see there's Sikki, and then there's Nikki, Many years sober and in control, rather than outta control and crazed. Occasionally it occurs to me that I may be the kind of person that the Sikki of '86 would have hated. That's okay 'cause I don't think I'd like to know Sikki now, so we're even.

Things back then got so convoluted, polluted and distorted that I ran with what I was given, I turned it into my armour, my defense mechanism, my weapon of self destruction.

Part of me (Nikki? or Sikki?) thinks this was all part of a master plan to expose all these raw nerve endings of dysfunction so I could heal. But addicts, we think everything is about us, don't we?