Heidi Fox,a.k.a. Heidi Fox-Blade,a.k.a. cheating whore was unlike any other woman I'd ever dated. She was the new kind of Playboy model. Well-read, smart, wanting to be something more down the road. Wanting to change the world. Think Miss America but without the swimsuit. Women like her who aren't scared to show some skin to boost their popularity and get to the very top are now called influencers.

But in 2007, that concept didn't exist. Heidi Fox was just a centerfold who caught my attention during one of the Playboy Mansion parties Dante and I attended. I had to ask her out. She laughed at all my jokes, admired my bike, and gave one hell of a blowjob. I was smitten. It was a bad, dirty romance with tabloids publicizing our every step. Another train wreck in the making, which I failed to see at the time because the band had just gotten picked up by KBC Universal.

We thought we'd hit the jackpot. In reality, we'd sold our souls to the devil. We just didn't know it yet. It was a lot like a forced submission. A BDSM dungeon with the suits running the show. The label screwed us any way they wanted, and we simply took it because we had no choice. The contracts had been signed. The firstborns had been given away.

Heidi and I got married four months after our first date while the boys and I were in the middle of working on our third album. The suits wanted us to level up, wanted us to put out a radio-friendly record,a.k.a. write generic shit.

I was at a crossroads. It went like this: Do I stick to my guns or do I sell out? I wanted to write music that crept its way into people's hearts and claimed its rightful stake there. I wanted to write music that would make people cry, that would make people want to rip their hair out. Music that would bring their darkest desires to the surface. Like Manson and Reznor did.

I wanted to be honest.

The label wanted a new version of Backstreet Boys but with instruments.

The night I walked in on the scene that I still can't erase from my mind—my best friend balls deep in my wife's pussy—I knew what I was going to give to the label. A big fat "fuck you." I planned on quitting the band. It was pathetic because, technically, it was due to a woman. But I didn't consider any of that when I rushed out cursing and tripping over my own feet as blind, seething anger clouded my vision.

I got on my bike and I rode until sunrise, until the rage filling me from head to toe turned into a cluster of words that would later become the lyrics of "Ambivalent,"the biggest hit we'd ever write. The heart-stopping, chart-topping, award-winning monster that would forever seal the name of our band in its rightful spot in the history of rock music.

Then I filed for divorce.

"Why don't you date a doctor or a lawyer instead?" my mother said to me after I told her about my cheating wife and Dante.

I laughed at her. Rock stars didn't date doctors and lawyers. Being seen with a woman whose face or body hadn't graced a magazine cover or spread would have been preposterous and very unbecoming of me. I had a reputation to live up to. I was Frankie-fucking-Blade. The Golden Boy of Hard Rock. The sex symbol.

That's why I continued seeing women who were like me—professional pleasers of the masses. I simply didn't fall in love anymore. Love was overrated anyway. People who loved you were the ones who would most likely stab you in the back. Take my birth mother, my best friend, my wife. Correction—my ex-wife.

In a way, it was the beginning of the end. There's a point in every band's career when the relationships within it crack, and with each passing year, that crack grows bigger, until it all falls apart because there's nothing left to hold on to. Because there's only bitterness, hate, and indifference. And greed.

We were steadily headed in that direction. Sometimes I could taste the defeat on the tip of my tongue.I could feel it crawling under my skin and wrapping around my soul. And I feared the day the emptiness would outshine the music.

I feared it so much that I lost control. I lost control of my life. All it took was a split second. One minute you're riding against the wind, blood pounding, pulse drumming. The next, you're a pile of flesh, blood, and bone, rolling across the highway. Then BAM! You're out. You're nothing more than history.