Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis

  I started to lose some of my interest in Jaime, thinking she was too young and too wrapped up in the nonsense of her micro-community. But something in me wasn’t going to give up all the way, and at a certain point I could see that she needed to go home and be in bed. So I put her in a cab, and she asked me to go home with her, so I went and we slept together that night but nothing happened because she was too full of booze to start our romance off. The next night we had an out-of-control, over-the-top sexual encounter. She rocked me in a way I hadn’t thought was possible by a person of her age—seventeen. There was some very adult behavior taking place, and I remember going, “Wow! What fucking porno has this girl been watching?”

  I went back to L.A., and we were on the phone every night. The first night we were talking, she said, “I have a small problem. I’m seeing this guy, and I have to let him know that it’s over between us.” Turned out he was a trust-fund baby whose dad was a Wall Street gazillionaire. She said the other problem was that her parents had gotten wind of our relationship, and they weren’t having any of it.

  Her dad started leaving threatening messages on my answering machine, especially after her jilted boyfriend told him that I had AIDS. But Jaime was undaunted, and we started plotting and scheming to get her out to L.A. for a visit. I called her dad and convinced him that 1) I didn’t have AIDS, and 2) I wasn’t an ogre. I also sweet-talked her mom, and they let her come out for a visit.

  I don’t remember too much about her first trip, other than going to pick her up and watching her walk out of her hotel room, wearing some go-go boots. I thought, “Whoa, this is definitely where I want to be.” We had a lot of fun and were at ease with each other right away. That Christmas we made the obligatory trip to Michigan, and she bonded with my mom right away. To this day, they speak to each other every day. Then we flew to Pennsylvania, and I met her parents. I was nervous, but it was actually pretty mellow. I got along with her mom right away; she was sweet and loving, the classic mom. I didn’t have any real problems with Dad. It turned out that he was the true music lover in the household. He had these stacks and stacks of doo-wop stuff and R&B 45s, and he would start playing them, and Jaime and he would sing along and do dances in the kitchen.

  In January 1994, I was five and a half years sober, with no intention or desire to ever take drugs again. Then I went to a Beverly Hills dentist to have a wisdom tooth removed. I had been to see many doctors and many dentists during that five and a half years, and I had this canned speech that I gave them: “I’m allergic to narcotics. Whatever you have to do to me, you’ll have to do with local anesthetics or some non-narcotic substance.”

  The dentist thought he could do the operation with a local, so I got in the chair and got jacked up on Novocain. He started to extract the tooth, but in the middle of the process, he told me it was so badly impacted that he’d have to cut it out of my mouth. In order to do that, he’d have to put me under. I’d already been in the chair for an hour, so I agreed. So he stuck an IV in my arm and shot me up with liquid Valium. That stuff ran up my arm, up my throat, and into my head, and a golden cloud of euphoria came over me. It was the first time I’d felt that loaded in five and a half years. It felt so good, and I was so under the influence, that I was no longer me, I was now the stoned, under-the-influence guy.

  The dentist got the tooth out, and I was feeling warm and cozy and fine, floating on this cloud, and also becoming aware of this new voice in my head that said, “We’ve got to keep this up, right away. We’re not letting this feeling go away.” And I was like “Don’t worry. We’re on the same team here, brother.” As soon the dentist was finished, he asked me if I was in pain, and I told him I was hurting so bad, I needed some Percodan. He looked confused, but I insisted that all that previous allergic talk was nonsense, and I needed those Percodans right away.

  I ate a handful of the twenty-five pills before I even left the building, and shortly after I got home, there were only two left in the bottle. Now I had a proper opium buzz going. Right at that moment, I decided it would be a good idea to drive to downtown L.A. and buy some heroin and cocaine. I didn’t think twice about it, I didn’t think about my sobriety or where I’d come from, I was strictly in the moment of being high and wanting to get higher, no consciousness of any consequences, nothing, zilch. So I drove to my old spot, Bonnie Brae and Sixth, and I found out that those packages of nice cocaine had been supplanted by the crack-cocaine trade. All I could get was rocks. But the good old-fashioned Black Tar heroin was exactly the same, and I knew what to do with that. I went into a drugstore to get some needles and pulled my usual diabetic scam, but I forgot that now I was recognizable. The pharmacist looked at me and said, “Oh, Mr. Kiedis, I didn’t know you were a diabetic.” I said, “Yup. Diabetic. That’s me.” On the way back home, I stopped at a pipe shop on Sunset Boulevard and bought this big goofy pipe for freebasing. They recognized me there, too, but I pretended it was a gag gift for a party.

  I went home, and I didn’t have a lighter, so I tried to light the crack with matches, which was a horrible idea, because the match doesn’t stay lit long enough to get the rock going. This went on for a couple of days, and then I made another trip downtown and found some powdered cocaine. I did the heroin and got completely anesthetized and passed out in my bed, the bed that I’d always been sober in up until that point.

  Now my house was full of that dark energy, especially the bathroom, which was trashed. When I woke up, my first thought was “Please God, tell me that this was a nightmare.” I figured there was a 2 percent chance that it hadn’t happened. I was holding on to that, saying, “Come on, two percent, tell me that was a dream, tell me none of that happened.” I got up and I was shaky and I peeked into the bathroom and it hit me. How did that happen? That was not in my script. Now the guy who was going to live and die sober had fucked up the track record. I didn’t know what to do; I was dumbfounded.

  Now that the beast within had awoken, it wasn’t done. Part of me wanted to go with it, but part of me was so ashamed about having done that to myself that I cleaned up the mess and pretended it hadn’t happened. But I felt empty and hollow, like I was made out of Styrofoam. All my strength was gone, and my brain felt empty. Looking back, it would have been an opportunity to go straight to somebody and say, “This is what happened. Let me start Day One right now.” I should have gotten rid of the secret and gotten some help, but I couldn’t do that.

  I certainly didn’t tell anyone in the band. We were still feeling our way, rehearsing and trying to write new material. One of the ways we bonded was by each buying a new Harley-Davidson. We even started a mock motorcycle gang that we called “The Sensitives.”

  Now that we were coming off a huge hit and we had a supportive record company that was prepared to spend money, we decided that a change of scenery might help in the creative process. Chad and I took a reconnaissance mission to Hawaii and found a beautiful farm on the south side of the Big Island. It was on acres and acres of land and complete with white horses in a corral. The main house had a nice kitchen and a big living room to rehearse in. There were two or three guest houses scattered across the property, along with a pool and a tennis court, all of this overlooking the magnificent Pacific Ocean and about a three-minute ride to some of the best snorkeling in all of Hawaii. We rented it for a month and shipped our motorcycles out. Extravagant stuff for guys who’d been living in small apartment buildings a couple of years previous.

  The problem was the spot was so beautiful, it was difficult to start playing music, because we just wanted to swim in the ocean and have luxurious lunches and find some cliffs to jump off of. Finally, we started jamming. It was a slower, different flow than we’d ever had before. Good sounds were being created, but there wasn’t any effortless telepathic transmission happening, where we were all instantly in one river going in one direction. I think I must have been lost in my own mental space, because I didn’t go in there with an unquestioning sense of confidence. I wasn’t sure what
to make of the new sound that we were creating; I didn’t know exactly how I fit into it. But I was willing to keep putting one foot in front of the other and keep on with my weird, bizarre style of writing, which seemed interesting to me, even though I wasn’t getting much feedback from anybody else.

  Some very nice things did get planted during those rehearsals, things that would later turn into songs. Flea wanted to reassert himself as a force in the creation of our sound and the direction of our songs, which was fine, because he’d always been an essential contributor, but I think he felt like it was now his turn to dominate in that respect, and it was different. I could tell that Dave was perplexed by our methods; he was looking around, going, “Is this how it’s supposed to unfold? Anthony goes over there and writes in a corner all day while we jam? Are we getting anywhere?” Chad and I were like “Yeah, that’s how we do it.”

  In retrospect, there was pressure because we were following up such a massive hit album. I don’t think it was conscious pressure, where we talked about it, “Okay, it’s time to do better than we did last . . .” It was more low-grade, subconscious pressure, a sense that we were under a microscope, that there was a built-in number of people who were looking at what we were doing. We had removed ourselves from mainland America, which gave a further bizarre flavor to everything.

  While we were there, I would write lyrics for hours every day, but sometimes there were periods when new music would accumulate and I wouldn’t have ideas for all of it. To get a change of atmosphere, I’d get on my motorcycle, drive to a corner of the island, find a bed-and-breakfast, and hole up with my tapes and write lyrics. I remember coming back once and Chad saying out of nowhere, “What’s the matter, are you having writer’s block?” I had to educate him that there was no such thing as writer’s block, that writers write when they write, and when they don’t, they don’t. But he was convinced that I had it, and he actually gave an interview to Rolling Stone in which he told the guy that the sessions were going well except I had writer’s block. That was a bone of contention for a while, coming from him, of all people.

  Back at the ranch, we’d work in the morning, then we’d go snorkeling and have lunch. We’d work for a few more hours and usually spend our nights playing poker and Screw Your Neighbor. It was fun to sit outside, drinking beverages, after a long day of playing and writing, and just joke and shoot the shit and play cards. When we got ambitious, we’d take a day off and explore some of the places I’d found on my outings. We went scuba diving and volcano hiking, everywhere, on our four choppers.

  All this time in Hawaii, I’d talk on the phone to Jaime for hours every night. After a month of work, our lease ran out on the house, and everyone went home for a week. But I stayed in Hawaii, and Jaime came out to visit. I picked her up and brought her back to the house, where we spent a very nice first night together. We had an arrangement: I was to do no ejaculating of any kind in her absence, no masturbation, no wet dreams, no other girls; I had to save every last ounce of my chi. Jaime was quite a sexual young girl, and she needed repeat performances, so she didn’t want me having a shortage of juice. After that, we rented a tree house in the magnificent Waipio Valley, which was an enormous Garden of Eden. Then we spent a few days in Maui before it was time to reconvene the band and work again.

  When we came back, we rented an old tropical mansion on the north side of the Big Island, which was a vastly different environment. It was a large bed-and-breakfast, and we rented the entire place for a month. By then we had about half of the album written. We worked but played, too, taking two scuba-diving trips, including one where we saw an amazing school of melon head whales pass right by us.

  One day we were working and got a call from Lindy, who informed us that Kurt Cobain had killed himself. The news sucked the air out of the entire house. I didn’t feel like I felt when Hillel died; it was more like “Jesus Christ, the world just suffered a great loss.” Kurt’s death was unexpected, because even if I see somebody who’s on a mission to hurt himself, I always hold out hope that he can recover. Some of the worst junkies I’ve ever known in my life have gotten sober.

  It was an emotional blow, and we all felt it. I don’t know why everyone on earth felt so close to that guy; he was beloved and endearing and inoffensive in some weird way. For all of his screaming and all of his darkness, he was just lovable. So his death hit us hard, and it changed our whole experience out there. It did wake up a thing inside of me that wanted to express my love for him, in a particular way, without having it be an obvious “ode to.” That day, I retreated to a back house on the property and started writing the lyrics to “Tearjerker.”

  Tearjerker

  My mouth fell open hoping that the truth would not be true, refuse the news

  I’m feeling sick now, what the fuck am I supposed to do, just lose and lose

  First time I saw you, you were sitting backstage in a dress, a perfect mess

  You never knew this but I wanted badly for you to requite my love

  Left on the floor leaving your body

  When highs are the lows and lows are the way

  So hard to stay, guess now you know

  I love you so

  I liked your whiskers and I liked the dimple in your chin, your pale blue eyes

  You painted pictures ’cause the one who hurts can give so much, you gave me such

  We finished the rough outlines for probably ten songs in Hawaii. Now it was time to go back and finish the lyrics and begin work with Rick Rubin in the studio. Then I got derailed again. Someone had given me a coffee-table book about drug use in the New York projects. The book was rife with incredible tales of drug street life and resplendent with amazing photos depicting that world. I was sitting at home alone one night, and that book was on the coffee table looking at me. So I picked it up and started reading it, and a lightbulb went off in my head, and the little horns came out. I checked my pockets to see how much money I had, and I checked my schedule to see if I was free for the next few days. I realized it had been a few months since my last slip, and I could get away with this. My intention was always to go out just for the night and sleep it off, and then I’d go back to being a normal guy.

  The drive downtown is an experience unto itself. You’re controlled by this dark energy that’s about to take you to a place where you know you don’t belong at this stage in your life. You get on the 101 Freeway and it’s night and it’s cool outside. It’s a pretty drive, and your heart is racing, your blood is flowing through your veins, and it’s kind of dangerous, because the people dealing are cutthroat, and there are cops everywhere. It’s not your neck of the woods anymore, now you’re coming from a nice house in the hills, driving a convertible Camaro.

  So you get off at Alvarado and make the right. Now your senses go into this hyper-alert radar situation. Your mission is to buy these drugs, and you don’t want anything interfering with that, it’s like being in a battle where your life is going to depend on seeing everything around you, the guy on the corner, the undercover cops, the black-and-whites. You don’t want to commit any obvious traffic infractions, so you signal and make your left onto Third Street, cognizant the whole time of any cars behind you. Then you go two blocks and you’re passing Mexican families and a couple of motels and a corner store and there’s a grocery store on the left, which was the scene of many incidents in your life with Jennifer when you used to shoot up in the car and start throwing up out the window. All these memories are flooding back at you, and the minute you make the right onto Bonnie Brae, half a block up on the left, you see groupings of dealers. They’re incredibly aggressive, and they watch every car that comes around that corner to see if it’s a car there to buy stuff. You either pull straight up on Bonnie Brae or you make a left onto the next side street, and they come swamping down upon you. They’re in your passenger window, they’re in your back window, and you have to choose which madman you’re going to buy from.

  The dealers are used to people buying twenty dollar
s’ worth, or forty or maybe sixty, but you pull out a wad of hundreds and tell them you want five hundred dollars’ worth. They can’t even keep five hundred dollars’ worth of crack in their mouths, which is where they store it, just like the balloons of heroin, under their tongues, so they start hustling and pooling their resources and come to you with a handful of saliva-covered crack. You make the deal and then you ask these guys, “Who’s got the Chiva?,” and they point. Chiva is the dope. Then you go to another block and buy three, four, or five balloons, the whole while trying to make it happen quick, because the cops could be there any second. By now you know where to get pipes, and you’re buying the little Brillo pads to use as screens in the pipe, all the techniques that you picked up from the street dealers. Then you go home and get high.

  As soon as you hit the pipe, boom, there’s that familiar instantaneous release of serotonin in the brain, a feeling that’s almost too good. You instantly start short-circuiting in your brain, because to get all that serotonin at once is so crazy and so intense that you’re liable to stand up and take off your clothes and go walking into the neighbor’s house because you feel that good. And on one occasion I almost did do that. I came back to my beautiful, sweet, blessing-from-God home, up against this park, and I walked into the kitchen and took that first hit—and it’s always about the first hit; the other hits are all in vain, trying to recapture that first one—and I stuffed as much rock as I could in the pipe and as much smoke as I could in my lungs, and I held it for as long as possible and then I released the smoke, and all that manic, psychotic energy came swirling around me again and I instantly became a different person. I was no longer in control of this person. I threw off my shirt, and it made perfect sense to go next door to my neighbor’s house with half of my clothes off and see what was going on. I knocked on the door, and she came out, and I said something like “Did I leave my keys in there?” And she said, “No, I don’t think so, but let’s have a look.” I was ready to take off the rest of my clothes and see how things went, because I wasn’t in control of my faculties. She was kind and sweet, and fortunately, I didn’t make too much of a scene. Three minutes later, that feeling evaporated, and I realized I was over there half naked, looking for keys that didn’t exist, so I mumbled an apology and went back home and hit the pipe again. Absolute madness.