Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis

  I’d been struck with a couple of bolts of relapse lightning, and my thinking wasn’t that great. I was carrying around this secret inside of me, and it was poisoning my entire thought process. I was pretending that everything was A-OK, but the integrity of my entire psychic structure was starting to collapse. I had a few more songs to write lyrics for, and when you’re in that state of mind, it seems like a good idea to change your geography. The problem, obviously, was the town I was living in. So I decided to go to New York, which was always an inspiring town for me. Plus, Jaime was there. She had made many a sojourn to L.A. to visit me, so I decided to return the favor.

  My plan was to check in to the Chelsea Hotel and write for a month. The Chelsea was an artists’ compound, full of freaks and old-timers and misfits and drag queens and dope fiends and jilted harlots. It was the land of a thousand character ghosts. For the same price as a four-star hotel room, I was able to get a beautiful penthouse with a full kitchen and an incredible view looking south.

  I moved in, but I wasn’t feeling right inside my own skin. Here I have this wonderful space in which to write, I’ve got great tapes to work with, I’ve got tons of notes and ideas, my girl’s a ten-minute cab ride away, I’ve got the city in my view, but I feel fucked up inside. I set up my workspace, and I went to work and wrote a little bit and ate a little bit, and Jaime came over and we watched movies, but I didn’t feel like myself, which is a horrible feeling. I was edgy and uggghhh, in that limbo of not being on a run and not being sober.

  One night a week after I’d checked in, Jaime must have been off doing her thing, and I was home alone and it was nighttime and this overwhelming notion came over me to go down to Washington Square Park and see what the action was with the drug dealers. I jumped in a cab, went down there, and started talking to some of the local scalawags. I scored a handful of rocks and couldn’t find any dope, so on the way back, I bought a couple of bottles of red wine, thinking that would take the edge off the coke. I smoked the crack, and it wasn’t even getting me high, but one more time I was on this ride. I wasn’t digging it. I started hammering the wine back, and I just wasn’t well. I was like a clock that had exploded—my springs were hanging out, my hands were cockeyed, and my numbers were falling off. Jaime showed up, so I hid the wine and told her some cockamamy line of excuses that I must have eaten something bad. In the end we had an argument, because I was out of my mind. That was the color of my experience during that whole month. I’d get it together for a few days, but it basically disintegrated into an unproductive and sad month, because I wasn’t getting much done. I wasn’t sober, but I wasn’t using in the way that would have given me relief.

  In July the band went into the studio to record the album. Even though I wasn’t finished writing all the lyrics, we decided to start cutting the basic tracks. By then I had put down the getting-high thing and was white-knuckling the dryness of not using, but I was behind in my work and not well prepared emotionally or physically. I did have some lyrics that I believed in, but I hadn’t trained my voice to go in there and be able to do my thing. However, Rick and Chad and Flea and Dave were all ready to fire away.

  It’s funny. No one suspected that I had slipped from my more than five years of sobriety, but if you look closely at the lyrics I was coming up with, there were clues galore. In “Warped,” I wrote, “My tendency for dependency is offending me/It’s upending me/I’m pretending see to be strong and free from my dependency/It’s warping me.” Later in that same song: “Night craving sends me crawling/Beg for mercy, does it show?/A vacancy that’s full of holes/Hold me, please, I’m feeling cold.” Even on an upbeat song like “Aeroplane,” there were lyrics like “Looking in my own eyes/I can’t find the love I want/Somebody’d better slap me before I start to rust, before I start to decompose.” That’s a cry for help. Later: “Sitting in my kitchen/I’m turning into dust again/My melancholy baby, the star of Mazzy must push a voice inside of me/I’m overcoming gravity, it’s easy when you’re sad to be.” Even “Deep Kick,” which was a historical account of our journeys, referenced “this giant gray monster” of drug addiction that had enveloped so many of our friends. At that point, John was getting into his sordid drug trip. Bob Forrest, Pete Weiss, and Dickie Rude were all in never-never land. And River and Hillel were dead.

  We laid down the basic tracks, but I was still having trouble with the lyrics. A lot had to do with my state of mind. When you’re at odds with yourself, it’s hard to create. Sometimes the writing process is as easy as opening up the window and letting in the breeze. And sometimes it’s like chiseling away at a block of granite with a pencil.

  On August 1, I should have been celebrating my sixth anniversary of sobriety. To the outside world, I was. My dad hadn’t acknowledged the first five years of my sobriety, but on that would-be sixth anniversary, he sent me a T-shirt that said SIX YEARS CLEAN. I had to accept it, but it was one more thing to feel horrible about.

  The band took a break from recording to play the Woodstock festival. Judging from my love handles in the photos, I’d have to say I stayed sober for at least a month before Woodstock. Woodstock was our first show with Dave, even though he’d been in the band since the previous September. Lindy came to us and said, “Okay, you’re headlining Woodstock. Anything special you want to do?” I sketched out a giant lightbulb on the floor, and Lindy thought I meant a cartoon lightbulb that went off over your head, but I meant lightbulbs that would encompass our whole heads. Dave was looking at us, going, “I’m going to be wearing a giant lightbulb?”

  We got a Hollywood propmaster in the Valley to create the lightbulb costumes, and we hired this Russian Mongolian seamstress to make five identical Jimi Hendrix costumes, because our encore was going to be “Fire.” The fifth costume was for Clara, Flea’s daughter, who at times became an integral part of our show. The lightbulbs were a tough way to initiate Dave into our performing thing, because that wasn’t his style. He was more into being cool and sexy and risqué, a naked muscle guy, and here we had him dressed up in a silver spaceman suit with an enormous lightbulb head. But he didn’t complain at all.

  We didn’t know what to expect for our first show with Dave, but we played for more than two hundred thousand people, and it sounded pretty damn great. The lightbulb costumes turned out to be difficult, because we didn’t rehearse with them and didn’t realize that it was impossible to look laterally out of them and see your fingers on your instrument. But they were a striking, sensational look.

  Now it was time to return home and finish my work and concentrate on my sobriety. Instead, I did the opposite. My house had been tainted, and it was the perfect little isolation castle at the top of the hill. I had a gate down below, so no one could get up to the door. I decided it would be a good bad idea to start getting into the cocaine and heroin zone again. I ended up finding this Mexican billiards place downtown that was a full-service stop. I didn’t have to go up to the corners, I didn’t have to buy stuff right on the street or go to different guys, I could just go in there and grab a beer, and when they finished their pool game, they’d come by with gumball-machine containers filled with rock cocaine and heroin balloons. Occasionally, I’d see somebody I didn’t want to see, some young white males from Hollywood who might recognize me, but I had taken to pulling my hair up under a baseball cap and wearing glasses, and that was a pretty good disguise.

  Then I’d hop onto my motorcycle and drive to a deserted, derelict area of downtown. I’d take out my pipe, pack it full of rock, and smoke it, and it would be like a steam engine exploding in my head. My eyes would fall out of my head, my heart would start racing, and there’d be this ringing in my ears. Then I’d fire up the bike and kick that thing into high gear and take off like a rocket for home.

  I’d come home and close the front gate, lock the front door, and turn off the phone. I had two or three places in the house that I would spend my high time in. One of those was the kitchen, which was where all the implements of destruction were. But I’d
end up on the third floor of the house. I had this weird old ’50s couch, a television, and a boom box on the floor. I’d go up there and drag along my art supplies—drawing pads, glitter, markers, and pencils by the gazillion, inks, and other weird objects that I could cut up and paste around. I’d get into this fixated thing where I’d get high and go to work on these bizarre creations, meticulous and precise drawings of faces and nude women, bizarre bodies and breasts and mouths and eyes, and also scary Japanese demon faces. Days would go by and I’d just sit there, very comfortable, because my whole body was acclimated to these chemicals. I’d also get out random art books and books of nude models and lay them all around the house so I could see the images wherever I went.

  Meanwhile, I’d make the occasional contact with either Lindy or Flea. They’d ask me when they could book the studio so I could do my vocals. My excuse for not working was that I had a weird stomach ailment, something that had to do with my experience in Borneo, so I’d constantly see this stomach doctor and buy more and more time. I was even taking walnut-shell medicine that was supposed to rid my body of its “parasites.” It was such an obvious line of crap, but it worked. Nobody questioned why I wasn’t coming to the studio.

  I kept going deeper and deeper into this world of repetition. Jaime would come to visit, and it wasn’t pretty, because I wasn’t well and she didn’t know what the situation was. The sad thing is, people don’t want to believe that the person they’re in love with is out of his mind, drinking and using, so if you give them even half an excuse, they’re going to want to believe it. A girl with no prior exposure to the disease had to be blissfully unaware of the nefarious tricks of the dope fiend. That’s how I was able to get high all late summer and autumn and pretend like it wasn’t happening. I was saying, “I’m sick.” I was deteriorating physically and emotionally. Jaime was tolerant, and it did speak well of her character, because she was not the type to abandon ship during a crisis. She didn’t consider backing off or bowing out, she was just there, which I can’t say about everybody. I don’t know if I could say it even about myself.

  I began to drop some pretty tantalizing clues. I drove to the studio one day, and Flea came by the car and saw a discarded Cheetos bag on the floor. That would be a huge tip-off, because if I was clean, I would never even think about eating junk food. But Flea wasn’t sure it wasn’t left over from Jaime, so he never put two and two together. Another time Jaime was at my house, and we ordered some food delivered. I collared the delivery boy on the front steps and offered to give him a hundred-dollar tip if he would give me all the cash he had on him; I’d put the tip and extra cash on my credit card. Jaime was eavesdropping on this whole negotiation from the landing at the top of the stairs. There I was, in total conniving-whisper mode, trying to do this dirty deal with the delivery guy, who by the way did come through for me. Jaime said, “What was that all about?,” and I had to be the abominable lying machine.

  In the middle of October, we played two dates with the Rolling Stones. It was an awkward time, because my father was in town to visit, and he was staying at my house. I came home after the first show and made some lame excuse to drive down the hill and came back with a small amount of narcotics. And I wasn’t Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin. I couldn’t go trash myself and turn it into a soul stew onstage. I would trash myself and be half a man with half the joy in my step.

  But opening for the Rolling Stones is a shite job anyway. I can’t recommend it to anybody. You get the offer and you think, “Historically speaking, they’re the second most important rock band in the history of music, after the Beatles. So we should have a brush with history.” But the fact is, the Rolling Stones’ audience today is lawyers and doctors and CPAs and contractors and real estate development people. This is a conservative, wealthy group. No one’s rocking out. The ticket prices and merchandise costs are astronomical. It’s more like “Let’s go to the Rolling Stones mall and watch them play on the big screen.”

  The whole experience is horrible. First you get there, and they won’t let you do a sound check. Then they give you an eightieth of the stage. They set apart this tiny area and say, “This is for you. You don’t get the lights, and you’re not allowed to use our sound system. And oh, by the way, you see that wooden floor? That’s Mick’s imported antique wood flooring from the Brazilian jungle, and that’s what he dances on. If you so much as look at it, you won’t get paid.” You’re basically like a little TV set on the stage, playing your show as eighty-five thousand wealthy, bored-out-of-their-minds fans are slowly finding their seats. They’re all wearing their Rolling Stones letter jackets and leafing through their catalogs, deciding which Rolling Stones T-shirt and which pair of Rolling Stones slacks they’re going to get. We were the music to be played for ushering, seating, snack-getting, and clothes-buying. It was a nightmare.

  In November I tried to go back into the studio and do some singing, but I wasn’t in any kind of shape to do it. I did a mediocre job. I was skinny and sucked up, bad color, bad skin, scraggly hair, droopy, dead-looking eyes. The cat wasn’t out of the bag yet, and everyone thought I was run-down from being sick all summer. I was beginning to realize that drug addiction really was a progressive illness and, God forbid, if you should start using again, it would be worse than it was before.

  When Jaime came to visit, I’d force myself to go without for a few days, then I’d take her to the airport and head straight downtown. I had a few close calls with the law. One time I was smoking coke in the car and was way too high to drive safely, and I had a bunch of paraphernalia and drugs right under the seat. I must have been driving erratically, because a cop pulled me over. I got the window halfway down, and this young, vicious-looking LAPD cop shone his flashlight on me and said, “Oh, Mr. Kiedis! My bad! I’m sorry, sir, excuse me for the interruption, but I really have to tell you that this is a pretty dangerous area, so you might want to exercise caution around here. You have a good night, now.” That wasn’t quite the reception I was expecting.

  Another time I had purchased both of my products and peeled away, cutting through traffic, and a black-and-white pulled me over. I had stashed the coke under an ashtray, but I had the balloons of heroin right in my hand. I didn’t want to get busted, so I quickly swallowed the three balloons, which weren’t digestible, so I wasn’t in any danger. When the cop came over and asked me why I was in that neighborhood, I made up some story about visiting a girl, and that mollified him, so he didn’t search the car. Then I had to backtrack and buy some more heroin.

  That was the beginning of what would be a marathon binge. Four days later, I wound up finishing everything, and it was daytime, and I was beat down and delirious. I’d spent all my cash, and the last thing in the world I felt like doing was driving downtown in the daytime heat and interacting with drug dealers. I was on my way into a liquor store to buy some paraphernalia, but I was so full of toxins that I had to casually stroll over and vomit into the gutter. As I vomited, I looked down and spotted those three intact balloons full of heroin. “Yeah! Free drugs. I hit the jackpot!” I thought, and fished out the balloons and saved myself a trip downtown.

  Jaime came to visit in December, and by then I had an ugly heroin habit. I’d been smoking both crack and heroin for a couple of months straight. This was in anticipation of our Christmas trips home. We had decided over the phone that we would give our dads big cars. Jaime was on a roll with her modeling, and she wanted to give her pop a pickup truck, and I wanted to give Blackie a Bronco. By then he had moved back to Michigan. Right after we did so well with Blood Sugar, I’d visited him, and he was living in a tiny apartment in downtown Grand Rapids. I had an epiphany that I had just made a ton of money touring, so I should buy him a house. We found a nice house on a lake in Rockford, out in the country, and Pops was taken care of.

  Jaime and I arranged for the truck to be shipped out to Pennsylvania. Our plan was to drive Blackie’s brand-new, luxurious, spacious Bronco to Michigan. After the two holiday celebrations, Ja
ime and I would go to the Caribbean together, to a resort on Caneel Bay on the island of St. John. She still didn’t know what the hell was going on with me, but since my clothes were hanging off my emaciated frame, she could see that I was sick. I was like “Oh, we’re going to go away for Christmas, I’ll get healthy, we’ll go to the Caribbean, everything’s going to get better from here on out.” Unbeknownst to her, my foolish notion was that I’d buy a bunch of coke and a bunch of heroin and wean myself as we went across the country. This is never a good idea. But I’d convinced myself that the farther away from L.A. I got, the fewer drugs I’d do. I had to make a number of sojourns downtown, during which I bought out every dealer I encountered.

  Jaime still had some last-minute Christmas shopping to do. By now I was taking a hit off the pipe every ten minutes, wherever I was—in a phone booth, a bathroom, behind a tree, wherever. Once I got high, I wasn’t acting all spooked out, because I was so accustomed to it. So we started packing and gathering goods, and she was gleeful about this imminent departure for a cross-country trip, and I was going along with the glee, but really I was Spirograph Brain. I drove her to pick up some slippers at a fancy shoe store on Melrose, and as soon as she left the Bronco, I fired up the old pipester. I was sitting there smoking like a fiendish monkey when, all of a sudden, I heard a sharp rap on the window. It was Jaime. She had caught me red-handed. The whole masquerade that I’d been holding up was over. I was mortified, and she was shocked. She popped me the finger and tried to run off, but I grabbed her and talked her into coming back into the car.