Motley Crue's Circus

The next day, the girl is gone (the blow job was merely "all right"), and Lee is in bed propped up on his elbows as the bus speeds from Atlanta to Greenville, South Carolina.

He shows me the tattoos on his wrists — the names of his sons, Brandon and Dylan, written in their childlike scrawl with a Sharpie and then retraced by a tattoo artist. If only, he says wistfully, things could work out with Pamela.... These kids mean more to him than anything in the world, and she is their mother.... His voice trails off and his eyes fill with tears. He wags his finger at me and forces a laugh. "I'm not going to cry," he says. And, for now, he doesn't.

Three days into the tour, Mick Mars is spending his day off in Tampa hanging out in his hotel suite, playing guitar and watching a VH1 special featuring Patti LaBelle. He has a rolled-up towel stuffed in the crack under his door, but it's not to prevent a draft. He keeps it there for the same reason he puts a balled-up tissue in his peephole. He doesn't want anyone peering in. "This way when I go like this," he says, pulling away the tissue and placing a bright-blue eye over the hole, "they don't know I'm there." Hunched over, he strains his eyes upward to meet mine. Quietly, he adds, "I'm a freak, aren't I?"

Mars has always felt this way — before the Crue, he was in a band called Vendetta that he found after he placed this ad in an L.A. paper: "Extraterrestrial guitarist available for any other aliens that want to conquer the Earth." These days, even when he's lounging in black sweat pants and a black thermal shirt that's three times too big for his five-foot-nothing frame, Mars resembles a sickly goth creature — the gentle, friendly kind that you want to take home and nurse back to health. He's sparing with words, and when he does speak, it's usually to crack a self- deprecating joke. On the subject of finding a new girlfriend, he says, "I'm holding out for the right woman. I'm thinking about Angelina Jolie, but she is too young, too. How old is Charlize Theron?"

Mars, the oldest member of Mötley Crüe, was born Bob Alan Deal in Huntington, Indiana, in 1951. He started messing around with drugs — trucker speed and the barbiturate Seconal, mostly — when he was in his late teens, around the same time he got his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Sharon, pregnant. (His oldest son, Les Paul, would be followed by two other children.) In the years since he was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, Mars has had on-again, off-again romances with a variety of different substances, but alcohol and pills have always been his favorites — the only things that helped him forget the agony he was suffering.

"When I was on OxyContin," he says, "I was convinced cat women with cat faces were crawling all over me and trying to suffocate me and shit. And not cat women like Halle Berry, because that would have been kind of fun." Mars finally got off the pills in November. He has a "sober coach" on the road with him who gives him his daily meds — anti-convulsives, anti-rejection pills for his titanium hip and anti-inflammatories.

It's all worth it to be back with the band that he never really considered broken up. "In my own Mick Mars world," he says, "I knew someday we would be back together. Tommy, Nikki and Vince will keep that larger-than-life beast going, and I'll keep the music part going. I'm not a young man anymore, but I'm not old enough to retire now."