Too Old To Rock, Too Young To Die

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.”