Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis
It happened at Hillel’s one night. He had moved into an infamous Hollywood haunt called the Milagro Castle, right off Gower. Marilyn Monroe had once lived there, but now it was populated with drug dealers and punk rockers. One night after we scored some China White, Kim and Hillel and I went to his place to do the drugs. Hillel had his bindle, and Kim had our bindle, and for some reason Hillel offered to share his with Kim, so I could have a whole bindle to myself. I was in such a frenzy over doing my stuff that it didn’t dawn on me that Hillel would actually split his bag fifty-fifty with Kim.
The high was amazing, and I remember Hillel and I going into the kitchen and sharing some Lucky Charms, dancing and talking and generally exuberant about how potent the drugs were. Then I realized that we hadn’t heard a peep out of Kim for a while. It dawned on me that she’d taken much more than she ever had before.
I rushed into the living room and saw Kim sitting upright in the chair, basically dead. She was cold and white, and her lips were blue, and she wasn’t breathing. Suddenly, I remembered all the techniques for reviving someone from a heroin overdose that Blackie had taught me when I was thirteen years old. I picked her up, dragged her into the shower, turned the cold water on her, and began giving her major mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I was frantically slapping her face and screaming, “Kim, don’t fucking die on me. I don’t want to have to call your mother and tell her that her daughter’s gone. I don’t want to have breakfast alone tomorrow.”
She started going in and out of consciousness. I was shaking her like a rag doll, screaming, “Stay awake!” Hillel had called 911, and when the paramedics showed up, I jumped out the window and ran away because I had outstanding warrants out for my arrest for moving violations. Hillel went to the hospital with her, and they got her up and running. About twelve hours later, I called her room in the hospital.
“Come and get me. Those motherfuckers ruined my high,” she said. “I’m sick. We need to go cop.” Amazingly enough, it never occurred to me that there might have been a problem there.
From time to time, I’d make halfhearted attempts to get clean. One of them was at the urging of Flea, who suggested that I might want to get off the stuff for a while and reconnect with what we were doing as bandmates. He was living in this cute apartment on Carmen Street, and he proposed that I come and kick on his futon. I showed up with a couple of bottles of NyQuil and said, “Flea, this is going to be ugly. I’m not going to be able to sleep, and I’m going to be in serious pain. Are you sure you want me in your house?”
He was willing, so we listened to music and I kicked. After a while, Flea said I should get an apartment in the building, so I did. Of course, Jennifer promptly moved in with me. Unfortunately, a new dope dealer named Dominique, who had usurped all the other French dealers, lived only about a block away.
Then it was time to go out on another tour leg. The night before, Jennifer and I were having one of those marathon sex/heroin sessions. We’d have sex for a couple of hours, and then we’d fight for an hour about me leaving the next day, and she’d be screaming as loudly during the sex as she was when she was yelling at me for going on tour. It was hard to distinguish when we were fighting and when we were having sex. So a neighbor who hated me called the cops on what he thought was a domestic-violence thing.
I was in the house, surrounded by tons of syringes and spoons and heroin, when the cops came to the door.
“We got a domestic-violence call here,” the one cop announced.
“What are you talking about, domestic violence? It’s me and my girlfriend, and that’s that,” I said.
“Can we come in and take a look around?” the cop asked.
I was saying no when Jennifer came to the door. She was obviously not abused, but she was hotheaded and still screaming at me. One cop was trying to poke his head in the door and shine his flashlight on Jennifer. In the meantime, the other cop had run a check on me and found the outstanding warrants, so they arrested me on the spot and dragged me out in handcuffs, half naked. All the neighbors were watching, convinced I was getting arrested for beating up a girl. Jennifer and I were screaming at each other as they took me away. It was just a bad episode of COPS. Thankfully, Lindy bailed me out, and we left on tour the next day, but during that period of my life, you had to plan on something like that happening before a tour.
Or when we got back from a tour. We were returning from a Freaky Styley tour leg when I ran into Bob Forest, who was waiting for us at the EMI parking lot. Bob was the classic shit-stirrer of the city. If he could stir the pot, if he could drop a hint, if he could make drama and conflict, he would. He loved it because, God knows, he was falling apart at the seams, and I’m sure it took some of the attention away from him.
Bob knew about my indiscretions on the road, but I was surprised when he came up to me and said, “Okay, you’re out there doing all that crazy stuff. Don’t you ever worry about Jennifer?” That was the last thing I would have worried about. In my mind, she would never do anything to betray me, even though I was cheating on her right, left, and center.
He smirked. “I’ve got some bad news for you, buddy.”
My heart started pounding in my chest.
“My friend, the unusual hour is upon us when I’m going to share with you information you might not be too keen on,” he continued. “Maybe a certain someone wasn’t so loyal to you while you were away, either.”
“You’re crazy,” I stammered. “Jennifer would rather cut her own wrists than take interest in another man. She loves me with every cell in her body. She’s physiologically and emotionally incapable of giving herself to another man.”
“No, it’s possible. Because I have proof.”
I threatened to crack his skull open on the pavement if he didn’t tell me all he knew. Finally, he spilled the beans. Jennifer had slept with Chris Fish, the keyboard player of Fishbone, one of our brother L.A. groups, while I was out on tour. But it still didn’t compute to me. I could have seen if she’d slept with Angelo Moore, who was the good-looking lead singer. What girl didn’t want to fuck Angelo? But Chris Fish—a guy with bad dreadlocks and worse fashion sense?
I was mortified. It hadn’t mattered that I’d slept with a hundred girls on the road in the last year. This killed me. The reality of my friend and my girlfriend doing this while I was away was incomprehensible demoralization to the tenth degree. I felt paralyzed. I probably gave myself cancer at that moment. But what could I do?
For some reason, I went to my father’s house and formulated a plan. First I picked up the phone and called Chris. “Chris, did you fuck my girlfriend?”
There was a giant pause, and then a slow and stunned voice said, “Oh man, Bob spilled the beans.”
I took a deep breath.
“You’re not going to come after me, are you?”
“I’m not going to come after you, but you are not my friend, and stay the fuck away from me,” I warned. End of conversation. He wasn’t my problem. Jennifer was.
I called her. “Jennifer, I know what happened.”
“Nothing happened,” she protested.
“Nope, I know exactly what happened. I’ve spoken to Chris, and we are finished.”
She started protesting, claiming Chris was lying, but I was adamant. “We’re finished. Don’t ever come around me, I hate your guts. Good-bye forever.”
I hung up, and I meant it. It was time to move on. This sense of excitement came over me, and I called up Flea, and he and I and Pete Weiss went out driving. I stood on the top of the car as it was rolling down the streets of Hollywood, screaming, “I’m a free man. I’m a free man.”
We had toured on and off till the spring of ’86, and now it was time to start thinking about our next album. One of the producers we were considering was Keith Levene, who had been in Public Image Ltd. I knew Keith and thought he was a great guy, but I also knew he was a heroin addict, so we were in for a convoluted experience. But that sounded great to me, since I was a mess. The more co
EMI had given us a budget of five grand for the demo, and that seemed pretty high to me. There was no way a demo should cost that much. When I brought it up with Hillel and Keith, I found out that they’d earmarked two thousand dollars for drugs to make the tape. I don’t think Flea agreed to it, and I know Cliff had no idea; he was just caught up in the maelstrom of insanity.
I was late for the session, and as I pulled up at the studio, I wondered if they had been serious about putting aside funds to get high. The first thing I saw when I walked in that room was a mountain of cocaine and a small molehill of heroin. Hillel was fucking gizacked. They told me that the first fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of drugs had already been consumed, so I started scooping and grabbing and snatching and saturating and got so loaded I was in no shape to be part of a creative process.
Poor Cliff was off in the corner of the studio, tinkering with what was then a brand-new device, a drum machine. You would hit the pads to create a preprogrammed drum sound, and you could record your own sounds so you could play the drums with whatever sound you wanted. Cliff’s favorite was a baby crying. It was a low-tech device, but Cliff was fiddling with it as obsessively as we were with the drugs, laughing in a strange, nervous fashion. He looked at me and said, “I could play with this thing for ten years. This is like a whole band within itself.” I remember thinking, “That’s what he wants to do. He’s sick of this circus, and he’s looking at this machine and seeing his future.”
It was obvious that Cliff’s heart was no longer in the band. He didn’t quit, but we sensed that he didn’t want to continue, so Flea visited him and gave him the bad news. He took it pretty hard and had bitter feelings for a couple of years. But then Jack Irons, our original drummer, decided to come back to the band, which was as much of a shocker to me as when Hillel came back. Something must have happened with What Is This to shake Jack’s loyalty, because he was not the kind of person to leave something for a better career opportunity. Whatever; he missed us and he loved us and he wanted to play music with us. So he came back and we began to write music again as the original foursome.
Then someone else came back into my life. About a month had gone by since I split with Jennifer. I was still shooting a lot of heroin and cocaine, not learning anything. I wasn’t growing as a person. I wasn’t setting goals or working on my character defects. I was just a fucked-up drug addict.
One night about three in the morning, there was a knock at my door on Carmen Street. It was Jennifer. She was working as a go-go dancer at a club, and it was obvious that she had come right from work, because she was dressed up in a thousand different colors, with feathers and boots and chains and crazy makeup that must have taken her a few hours to apply.
“Please just let me in. I miss you. I miss you,” she begged.
“No chance,” I said. “Just go. Don’t get me in trouble, don’t start yelling. I don’t need cops at my house.”
I closed the door and went back to sleep. When I woke up, I saw Jennifer curled up on the welcome mat outside my door, sound asleep. This went on for the next few weeks: Every night she’d come up and either knock or curl up and go to sleep on my doorstep. I even started going out my kitchen window and climbing down a huge lemon tree that was right outside (and which came in handy when I scored some Persian heroin, which was oil-based and had to be cooked up in lemon juice).
One night I succumbed. I can’t remember if I gave in to her love or if I was so bad off that I needed twenty bucks or if she came offering drugs or whatever sad, sick, and bizarre circumstance it was, but I let her in and we picked up where we left off. High as kites together, back into the mix of a totally dysfunctional but passionate relationship. So passionate that it would be documented on a video that became a cult classic in the underground club scene of L.A.
It happened one night at the Roxy. Some people had organized a benefit for Sea Shepherd, a hard-core version of Greenpeace, and the Chili Peppers were asked to play. The theme of the night was that every band would cover a Jimi Hendrix song. There was a great bill that included Mike Watt, our friend Tree, and Fishbone, so we were psyched to play.
When I showed up at the gig, Fishbone was about to go on. Earlier there had been some discussion of Jennifer singing backup with Fishbone, but I kiboshed it. “You are not going to go onstage with that guy.” Fishbone took the stage, and I made my way to the balcony. When I looked down, there was Jennifer onstage. That was not good. Now I had to make her pay for disrespecting me like that in front of my friends. At the same time, I kept my focus, because what really mattered to me was that I sing “Foxy Lady” well. Right before we were scheduled to go onstage, this young hippie girl walked backstage. She had brown hair, was really pretty, and had these huge tits poking through her tank top that couldn’t help but be in everybody’s face.
A lightbulb went off in my head. I went over and whispered in her ear: “We’re going to do ‘Foxy Lady,’ and when we get to the end of the song, when we’re freaking out onstage, I want you to come out and dance with me naked.” Two can play the same game. The hippie goddess agreed. We went out and killed “Foxy Lady.” It was like our band could have levitated. The drums were happening. Flea was digging in. Hillel was orbiting. I was giving it everything I had.
I almost forgot there was supposed to be a surprise guest. We came to the end of the song, and this slinky young hippie walked onstage. She hadn’t gotten completely naked, but she was topless, and her big tits were just to-ing and fro-ing across the stage. She came up to me and started to do her hippie shimmy next to me. Norwood, the bass player from Fishbone, came out to join us, and we sandwiched this semi-naked girl.
Suddenly, a figure flew onstage as if shot out of a cannon. It was Jennifer. She grabbed Norwood, who’s a big man, and tosseºd him aside like a rag doll. Then she grabbed the girl and literally threw her off the stage. Meanwhile, the band kept going. I realized that I was about to become the recipient of some serious pain. By then I had wound up on the floor on my back, singing the outro. And there was Jennifer, coming at me with fists and feet, punching and connecting and going for my crotch with her boots. I was trying to block the punches, all the while not missing a note. She kicked my ass till I finished the song and somehow escaped and ran off into the night.
Between my dysfunctional girlfriend and my dysfunctional platonic friend and my dysfunctional self, my life continued on a downward spiral. We had settled on a producer for our third album, Michael Beinhorn. He was a very intelligent fellow from New York who was into all of the same music that we were and had produced a hit by Herbie Hancock called “Rockit.” But I was stuck in my Groundhog year, waking up every morning to the same gray reality of copping to feel right. I went on another horrible heroin run with Kim and stopped being productive. I was withering away, mentally, spiritually, physically, creatively—everything was fading out. Sometimes doing heroin was nice and dreamy and euphoric and carefree, almost romantic-feeling. In reality, I was dying and couldn’t quite see that from being so deep in my own forest.
The few times I showed up at rehearsal, I wasn’t bringing anything to the table. I didn’t have the same drive or desire to come up with ideas and lyrics. They were still in me, but the process was thwarted, numbed out. We’d written some music for the third album, maybe four or five songs, but we needed a lot more. The whole band was suffering from Hillel and me being on drugs, but I was the much more obvious candidate to put the onus on, because I was literally asleep at rehearsal.
One day I showed up to rehearsal, and Jack and Hillel and Flea, who probably loved me more than any three guys on earth, said, “Anthony, we’re kicking you out of the band. We want to play music and you obviously don’t, so you have to go. We’re going to get a different singer and go on, so you’re out of here.”
I had a brief moment of clarity when I saw that they had every right in the world to fire me. It was an obvious move, like cutting off
Much to their amazement, I shrugged and said, “You guys are right. I apologize for not contributing what I should have been contributing this whole time. It’s a crying shame, but I understand completely, and I wish you guys the best of luck.”
And I left.
Once I didn’t have anywhere to report to, it went from worse to worse than worse. Kim and I went for it. We were getting more desperate, and we owed too much money to the drug dealers around Hollywood, so we started walking from her house, which was not far from downtown Los Angeles, to known drug neighborhoods, mainly Sixth and Union. We went down and started introducing ourselves to these different street characters. I met a pretty talented hustler right off the bat. He was this scurvy street urchin, an out-of-control white-trash drug addict who was moving deftly in the downtown Latino drug world. He became our liaison to all the other connections. He still lived with his parents in this little wooden house. The kid was covered with track marks and abscesses and disease from head to toe, but he was a master of the downtown corners. Kim and I were always such petty punkass low-budget buyers that he would always do us right. We trusted this guy. We’d buy bindles of cocaine and bindles of heroin and walk a couple of blocks into these residential neighborhoods and shoot up right there on the street. We still had an air of invincibility and invisibility, so we thought we couldn’t be touched.