The Dirt, excerpt 3

(In honor of National Drugged and Drunk Driving Month, Rock Club will be running random excerpts of the Motley Crue autobiography The Dirt. Read more on our community-oriented campaign here.)

In this excerpt, Mick Mars recalls his bucolic childhood:

Back in my day, baling rope wasn't made out of wire. It was real rope, about a quarter-inch wide if you laid it out flat. It was closer to twine, really, and we used it to bale the hay. I guess we also used it to hang my older brother.

My younger brother, Tim, and I made a one-and-a-half-foot loop in the baling rope and held it together with a slipknot. I threw the loop over the branch of an oak tree and tied the other end of the rope around the trunk. Tim found a five-gallon drum in my grandmother's shed, and placed it under the hanging noose. Then we made our older brother, Frank, stand on the drum, slipped the noose around his neck, and made sure it was good and tight. I kicked the drum out from under him, and we watched him hang.

We were the Indians: He was the cowboy. He screamed and struggled as he dangled in the air, and he kept grabbing at the noose with his hands, trying to loosen it. When we grew bored of running around him whooping and hollering, Tim and I headed inside.

"Where's Frank?" Aunt Thelma asked. Aunt Thelma, who couldn't have been more than five feet tall, was my grandmother's most loyal daughter and lived with her until finally marrying at the age of fifty-five.

"Out there." Tim pointed to the side yard.

"Oh my word," Aunt Thelma gasped, and she ran out to the tree, lifted Frank up, and pulled the noose off his neck.

(Mick Mars, pp 173-174)