Roxana Shirazi - The Last Living Slut - Born in Iran, Bred Backstage

“Matt, we’re leaving. Sorry.” I dragged Abigail away.

“You’re gonna fuck Tommy Lee at the festival, aren’t you?” Matt shouted after us. “I know it!”

In the lobby, the hotel guards were still kind, smiling though we looked like we’d been in bloody battle. We stumbled into daylight. The weekend had begun. The warm buzz of coffee and cake brewed in homes around us. My white cotton dress was stained red and slimy white, and my white stockings were running with blood. I looked like a virgin bride who’d been gang-raped. Abi looked like a rag doll.

We fell into the first taxi we saw, tumbling into the backseat. The taxi driver looked about eighty. He did a double-take and crossed himself. I stared at the big picture of the Pope hanging by his rear-view mirror. The Pope stared back.

When I returned to LA in September to see my friends, Scott bombarded my phone with messages. I’d been on a roller-coaster ride of debauchery, trying to forget about him and remember why I’d originally been seduced by rock ‘n’ roll. I’d been on tour with Ratt, Whitesnake, and Def Leppard, and seduced younger bands like Aiden and Black Stone Cherry.

And I had been with a member of Papa Roach at the Download Festival. Tiger eyes blazing on a mischievous face, rippling muscles roaring on his chest, and unrelenting slices of ink tattooed all over his G.I. Joe arms. “All–American soldier you are,” I had muttered to him as my two vixen vampy girlfriends and I had pulled him into our hotel room at Download. There the Papa Roach soldier had fucked me and two of my friends all night, taking turns, blowing his load over and over again until I wondered whether he was on Viagra or just a natural scientific marvel. His tattooed arms were giant bulks as he held me down again and again, then Tasha, then Vanna until my friends and me got out of breath and exhausted, and told him to leave our room.

But none of these experiences gave me the feeling of liberation, recklessness, degeneracy, and depravity I’d thought rock ‘n’ roll embodied. At most, they were amusing diversions. I couldn’t let my heart get taken back to a place where it would be trampled on again, so I ignored Scott’s messages and tried to get on with my life.

Eventually, he pulled me back in—taking me out on proper dates, showing me off to his friends, and being considerate and romantic. Soon I found myself telling him I loved him—that I wanted to cook for him, buy him gifts, bring him women to have threesomes with, and give him all my love.

But once again I paid the price for breaking the rules of groupiedom. One night, two days before a show he was playing with L.A. Guns at the Whisky, he told me he’d be bringing another girl to the gig.

“You’re very pretty, but you can’t just have sex,” he said. “You get emotionally involved. You want to be special. But you’re not.”

I felt my heart just cave in.

“There’s so many guys out here tonight—go have fun with them,” he said.

“But I just want one guy,” I said, feeling the lump rising in my throat.

So while Scott played the Whisky, I walked up and down the Sunset Strip like a zombie. I must have looked destitute. When Taime Downe of Faster Pussycat saw me standing outside the Roxy, he took one look and gave me a massive hug. I just stood there, frozen, staring into space. I couldn’t believe I’d allowed myself to get here again.

That was the moment when I understood it all at last.

I was full of heart, full of beautiful love, full of the sunshine my mother and grandmother had fed me every morning, noon, and night in Iran. I wasn’t the simple, stagnant, sexless, meek, subservient accessory these rockers seemed to want as girlfriends. I had tried my best to be, but my mind had kept getting in the way. I had too much passion, sexuality, and wild spirit for them.

I was coming to terms with the fact that I was made up of two very strong, conflicting sides. One was the academic, whose home was the university library and whose passion was absorbing books on gender theory and postmodernism. The other was the nymphomaniac in love with rock ‘n’ roll, who only felt at home sidestage at a concert watching her favorite bands and lovers performing.

Living these two separate lives had exhausted me. It had split me in half.

But that moment of self-knowledge wasn’t enough to heal me. When I went back to England a few nights later, I began to get panic attacks. A weird feeling of fear would come over me, and I wouldn’t be able to breathe. Then I started feeling disconnected from reality, as if my senses were underwater. This scared me even more, which only increased my panic attacks. And then came the horrific nightmares. I felt drained. I would sleep all day, and wake up with my left hand shaking. I felt like I was losing my sanity.

Around April of that year, my doctor finally checked me into a psychiatric ward. The psychiatrist there diagnosed me with post-traumatic stress disorder. I was given Valium and antidepressants, and put in the ward for a month.

It was a hellish existence. Patients wandered the corridors in a zombie-like state. Some had Parkinson’s disease; others had post-traumatic symptoms like I did. We had to have the lights out by eleven p.m. and were awakened at seven a.m. Even so, I had no desire to leave, although I could have checked myself out whenever I wanted. I couldn’t understand why I was so ill—why the panic attacks and nightmares, so horrific they seemed sent from Satan, had engulfed my existence. I wondered if my shredded heart had made my brain give up on me. I had been so in love, and suffered one crushing letdown after another in the space of fourteen months at the hands of two men I had absolutely adored. I think I was experiencing a nervous breakdown. But the antidepressants eventually helped numb my heart to the pain of Dizzy and Scott.

I had once thought of the world of rock ‘n’ roll as a wondrous place, full of free love and free spirits. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t the sex that had led me to this place—it was the love. And in rock ‘n’ roll, love is a dirty, dirty word. Perhaps the backstage world was actually too conservative and limiting for my wild spirit. Rock ‘n’ roll had sold itself as a utopian playground, but as a groupie I wasn’t allowed to be as wild as I wanted to be. What was required of me was just a mere fraction of who I was. I wanted free love, creativity, an abundance of sex and poetry, broken taboos; I wanted to be taken places I’d never gone before. I wanted that thrill I’d felt climbing down into my grandmother’s cellar all those years ago.

This is why my encounter with the embodiment of rock ‘n’ roll, Nikki Sixx, for dinner, was the final nail in the coffin. The god of depraved sex and degenerate acts, the epitome of excess and free-spiritedness, the human whose quest for experience knew no boundaries turned out to be nothing more than a businessman, committed to marketing, gardening, and early nights. That night took the color out of that world for me. Having moments of fun here and there with rock stars had splattered me with fleeting orgasms but no continuity. They were nothing more than a series of little snapshots, like the fleeting images spliced together in the moving-picture box from my childhood in Tehran.

The week after my dinner with Nikki Sixx, I agreed to a date with another kind of man: a well-known politician who had been working tirelessly on environmental issues. Finally, here was someone honorable, intellectual, and compassionate I could sit down with for an intellectual conversation. It was about time I left the world of rock ‘n’ roll and went forward in life with a respectable man.