Credit: Dangerous Minds / Reddit

It’s one of the great lines in doofus cinema for a very good reason.

A 37-year-old Steve Buscemi decked out like a grunge rocker barely out of his teens (“how do you do, fellow kids” indeed) sneers at an old fogey who got the question “who’d win in a wrestling match, Lemmy or God” wrong. Then, he spits out the immortal line “trick question, dickhead, Lemmy is God.”

Buscemi’s character, Rex, was a lot more on the money than anyone would give him credit for. Not because the man born Ian Fraser Kilmister (yes, Kilmister was his real last name) was touched with any actual divinity, Lord no. Anything Lemmy was touched by did not come from upstairs, and I say that with all the love in the world for the bass-slaying walking wart. Instead, much like The Creator, Lemmy is more a figure of myth and legend than a man.

That’s not some snarky statement of Richard Dawkins-esque atheism either. I think most people who genuinely believe in God would be the first to tell you that each of us, believer or not, projects our own meaning onto God. He is whatever we need him to be, and really, so is Lemmy. The library’s worth of stories that surround the Motörhead frontman could all be cobblers, and they could all be real, we just don’t know, principally because we can’t really trust the word of the man himself.

Basically, the only thing we can know about the man for sure is that his intake of drink and drugs makes Keith Richards look like Henry Rollins, so much so that one of the stories that clung to him most was that he wasn’t allowed to give blood because his plasma was too toxic. He was even told by doctors to keep drinking booze because the shock to his system going cold turkey would give him would kill him within days. Then you get an altogether more disturbing genre of story from him.

That of his prodigious sexual capacity.

That’s right. Lemmy fucked.

“A baby’s arm holding a satsuma” was the quite frankly nauseating description Lemmy had for a certain part of his anatomy I’ll leave you to work out. That part of his anatomy saw more action in one lifetime than most continents get in the same time period, and one of the best examples of this comes from a story that we almost certainly know is complete nonsense.

Yet, knowing the reputation of the man at the centre of it all, there might just be a kernel of truth to it.

The story goes that Lemmy played a gig with Motörhead one night, finished the set, and promptly passed clean out the moment they got backstage. Absolutely no one could rouse him (for a change), which was an issue because they still hadn’t played the encore. A couple of thousand Motörhead fans waiting for ‘Ace of Spades’, you can imagine the stakes. Eventually, he came around, played the encore and explained to a journalist afterwards that the reason he was so… *Ahem* drained that particular night was because he claimed to have gotten not one, not two, but three blowjobs earlier in the afternoon. Nice life if you can get it.

Now… I guess it’s possible. Let’s be real here, though, if Lemmy Kilmister ever passed out for reasons other than chasing a truckload of Jack Daniels with a similarly titanic amount of cocaine, I’ll try to defend his collection of Nazi memorabilia. Which is the sadness at the heart of the story, isn’t it? Anyone who dug a little deeper than the legend of Lemmy found a bracing reality. Lemmy wasn’t a god, or a devil, or anything more than a human being.

One who spent the last two decades of his life as a confused, old burnout sat at the end of the bar at the Rainbow Bar and Grill, slamming whiskey and playing a poker video game until he soiled himself and had to be helped home.

I prefer the legend, myself. I think he would too.