Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis
Unfortunately, Jaime was coming to visit me in a few days. When she arrived at LAX, I was AWOL. She had to go right from the airport to a modeling job, and she kept calling me from the job, saying, “Where are you?” It takes away a lot of the thrill of killing yourself when people are looking for you and you’re disappointing them, because it is a lot of fun when you’re out there killing yourself. You’re escaping from the cops. You’re avoiding getting stabbed to death by dealers. You’re running the risk of overdose. You’re having escapades of delusion. It’s exciting. But when it becomes “Oh shit, someone’s looking for me,” it puts a damper on the insanity party.
I hid out in a motel. This was the beginning of the great motel tour. I didn’t check in to the Peninsula or the Four Seasons, places that I could have easily afforded. No, I opted for the Viking Motel or the Swashbuckler’s Inn, shitty, torn-up, dirty-ass, dope-fiend motels that were for poor families who had no place else to go, or for prostitutes, dealers, pimps, hoodlums, and other scandalous motherfuckers. And a bunch of white drug addicts who were sneaking away from their real lives.
I started checking in to these places up and down Alvarado Street, because they were a few blocks away from where I bought my drugs. Maybe that’s part of the thrill: You can make your score and then drive three blocks, check right in, and you’re smack in the middle of this circle of hell. If you’re in a reputable hotel, chances are that you’ll run into somebody you know.
When Jaime was looking for me, my motel sophistication hadn’t evolved that far yet. I had made it only to the Holiday Inn in Hollywood. That was where she and Dave Navarro tracked me down. Dave had the smarts to call up Bo, our accountant, and ask her where my last credit-card transaction had occurred. She called the company and told Dave that I was at the Holiday Inn.
I was in there trying to sleep off the heroin and escape from myself and this latest mess I’d made when I awoke to a crazy knock on the door. I went to the peephole and looked out and saw Dave and then Jaime lurking in the back of the hallway. It was that bad combination, your loved one and your friend conspiring together.
“Come on, dude, open the door,” Dave said. “I love you and I want to help you get better. This isn’t happening. Let’s go to rehab right now. Throw away your junk and let’s go.”
I wouldn’t open the door. “No, you don’t understand,” I called out. “I feel really bad. I need to sleep. I’ll call you later and we’ll go tonight.”
“Nope. Nope. I got the car outside,” Dave said. “I’ve already called Exodus. They’ve got a bed waiting for you. Open the door.”
I opened the door. At that point, I couldn’t fight or argue anymore. I had fucked up, and the only way I had to appease these people who were unhappy with my behavior was to acquiesce and go back to rehab. So I went.
By April 1995 the world of rehab had evolved into a much different animal than my first stay in 1988. Going to rehab had become commonplace. Among rehabs, Exodus was famous for two reasons. It was the place that Kurt Cobain had left right before he died. Kurt had climbed a four-foot fence to escape when all he had to do was walk out the front door. They can’t keep you in Exodus against your will, but I guess if you don’t want to see anybody on your way out, you bolt.
Exodus was also famed for the renowned doctor of rehabology who ran the place. Guys like him claim to know how drugs affect the body, but to me, all that information amounted to nothing. As long as a dope fiend is high, he’s crazy. The minute he isn’t high and he starts working the program, he’ll start to get better. It’s the simplest plan on earth, but they try to complicate it with psychiatric jargon and detoxology. Just get a junkie off the streets, get him three squares, and get him working on his steps, and he’ll get better. I’ve seen it in thousands of drug addicts I’ve come across who have attempted to get well. It doesn’t matter how wonderful their detox or therapist was.
Exodus was off the beaten path in a larger hospital in Marina del Rey. It wasn’t connected to the prison system, so there were no end-of-the-liners there who chose rehab over prison. It was plusher than a Section 36 facility, but not as much so as Promises, a Malibu rehab that makes the Four Seasons look like the Holiday Inn. But again, the place doesn’t make the difference. You’re either going to do the work and figure out your problems, or you’re not. You don’t need Promises; you can get better at the Salvation Army on skid row. I’ve seen people get well in both, and I’ve seen them not get well in both.
Being there that time was actually a beautiful experience. I made ten of the most atypical friends I’d ever make in my life. There was a weird old lady from some town up north, a Brazilian doctor, and a pillhead from Texas. My first roommate was a gay kid from the heartland of America, Kentucky or Missouri or someplace. He had the classic story, young misunderstood kid grows up in a football town in the Midwest, doesn’t get the whole macho deal that his whole world is revolving around, so he’s alienated, isolated, and ostracized by his family. He moves to Hollywood, finds his gay brethren and the drug and alcohol world, and hits the downward spiral. He was so into Vicodin that he’d crush them up and sprinkle them on his cereal for breakfast.
He left, and my next roommate was a black anesthesiologist from Inglewood who came from a highly respectable family. Made his family proud by becoming a doctor, but then it turned out that he’d been abusing all the best medical drugs he could find for years. So he came in, like the rest of us, for thirty days. You could tell that he was keeping secrets and destroyed that he had let his family down. A couple of months after the rehab, I got a call. He had relapsed and couldn’t bear the agony and the shame of facing his family, so he locked himself in a closet at the hospital where he worked and chose the most unpleasant drugs to overdose on. A few of us from Exodus went to his funeral, and it was really emotional. He had a big family, and one of his brothers was a preacher. There was a holy-roller vibe at the service, and everyone was crying their eyes out, including his rehab buddies, who were all in the back row.
There was an uncommon array of people in there with me, and I became friends with all of them. You recognize the possibility of your own demise in the lives of these other people. You’re doing the same thing they are, but you can’t see it in yourself. However, you start seeing all of these tragedies and potential miracles in other people. It’s a real eye- and heart-opening situation. Here you are in a fucking hospital in Marina del Rey, sleeping in a small bed, sharing your room, and having to go to the cafeteria for your breakfast. You’re forced to think, “Where did I go wrong? I had a plan and was doing really well, but now I’m in here with a bunch of other crazy people, and nurses and doctors and wardens are telling me where to go and what to do, and I’ve gotta report to a group. Wow, I thought I was smarter than this.”
At some point during my stay, I had a group meeting with friends and family, and Flea showed up. During the circle, the drug counselor turned to Flea and said, “Okay, Flea, tell us how it makes you feel deep inside when Anthony’s out there using drugs and you have no idea where he is or if he’s ever going to come back.” I was waiting for Flea to say, “Ah, it pisses me off, that motherfucker. We were supposed to be rehearsing and writing. I was waiting for twelve hours, and that bastard never showed up. I’m ready to do something else altogether.” Instead, Flea started sobbing, which caught me off guard. He said, “I’m afraid he’s going to die on me. I don’t want him to die, but I’ve kept thinking for years that he’s going to die.” I had no idea that was the way he felt.
I began a practice at Exodus that is a major part of my life to this day. During the five and a half years that I’d been sober, I never got into prayer or meditation. I wasn’t clear on what it was to cultivate a conscious contact with a power greater than myself. At Exodus, someone who worked there suggested that I start each morning with a prayer. Now, to anyone in recovery that’s Get Well 101, that’s where you begin your program. I had never thought that it was what I had to do. But one morning I looked in the mirro
I started praying every morning. Once I opened my mind to the concept of a greater power, I never struggled with it. Everywhere I went, I felt and saw the existence of a creative intelligence in this universe, of a loving power larger than myself in nature, in people, everywhere. My prayers and meditations would gain steam and momentum over the years and become an important part of my recovery and daily experience.
I got through the thirty-day stay without even thinking about leaving. I accepted that I was there to do the work and get back on track. For the first few days, they give you a whole plethora of meds to detox on. You get chloral hydrate, which would put an elephant to sleep. They give you Darvocets and Colonodine patches to lower your blood pressure. When you see a guy shuffling down the hallway in his robe and slippers, that’s the dude who’s still on detox. The first few days off medication are rough: Your skin is crawling, and you’re coming to grips with not being on anything. But then you pull out of it and start to feel better. They feed you all day long and you get to exercise and you go to meetings. They keep you pretty busy.
While I was there, Jaime came to visit. Bob Timmons brought Chris Farley in to see me, and it felt good to have his support. Kim Jones brought her two beautiful sons to see me. I was allowed a boom box, and I kept playing the first Elastica tape over and over again. I graduated from my thirty-day program and went back out and rejoined the world of the living. Thank God I was in that world when Jaime’s dad left it. He died in June, and I was able to go out to Pennsylvania and be with Jaime and her family through this difficult period.
That summer the band put the finishing touches on the record and began to shoot the videos. We were getting tons of reels, but nothing was touching us, so we went back to Gavin Bowden, Flea’s brother-in-law. He came up with an idea for “Warped,” which would take place in a giant wooden cylinder. It was a two-day shoot and was our most expensive video to date. I still think it had elements of greatness.
The element that drew the most attention in that video was a scene in which Dave kissed me. Flea and Dave and I were supposed to come out from behind a wall and do a mysterious silhouetted shadow-dance thing. We shot the same scene about ten times in a row, and Gavin felt that we hadn’t gotten it, so we went back to our places to try again. Dave turned to me and said, “This time when we walk out, I’m going to turn around and give you a kiss to spice it up.” I said, “Okay, good idea,” thinking that he would give me a friendly smooch. We walked out from behind that corner, and he went to give me what I thought would be a peck on the lips, which is already crazy enough for a rock video, but all of a sudden, Dave started giving me a wet, partially openmouthed, full-blown kiss. I wasn’t upset or bothered, just surprised.
That was one of a thousand shots we did, and we moved on. Weeks later, we got the edited video, and there was the kiss, prominently featured. Minutes later, I got a call from Eric Greenspan, our lawyer.
“Warner Brothers saw the video, and they want to get rid of the kiss right away,” he said.
“Why?”
“They don’t think it’s marketable,” he said. “And I think you might want to get rid of the kiss, too. I think you’re in danger of alienating a large segment of your fan base.”
When I saw the kiss, I was thinking I could take it or leave it, but the minute the corporate suits started saying “No kiss” was the minute I started saying “Nope, the kiss stays.” We had a band discussion and voted to keep the kiss. We did have a huge backlash from the college-frat-boy segment of our audience. We got letters denouncing us as “fags,” and rumors started spreading, and we started to second-guess our decision. But then we figured, “Fuck it. Maybe it was time to thin out the yokels anyway.” If they couldn’t accept what we were doing, we didn’t need them anymore.
We got in trouble with Warner’s again when we used Gavin for our “Aeroplane” video. He came up with a super treatment: an expansive ode to Busby Berkeley, featuring a huge chorus line of half-naked, hot-costumed Mexican cholitas, tough gangster girls with heavy makeup and sweeping hair. We wanted lots of semi-nudity and sexy dancing and chewing of gum and blowing of bubbles. We shot the video in an old pool with trapeze artists and underwater ballet teams on a vintage MGM set that was about to be demolished. But a lady from Warner’s was supervising the shoot, and it turned out that she was a PC feminist.
Gavin did the edit, and the video looked sumptuous. He captured the hot Mexican girls in close-ups and from wonderful angles, but this woman from Warner’s got her knickers all in a knot about showing naked women in our video. Mind you, this would be tame today next to a Jay-Z video, but it was pretty strong for the time, so we were forced to end up somewhere in between our take and her aesthetic. We wound up not using the shots that were truly shocking and beautiful and eye-catching and disturbing all at the same time.
That summer I made the first of two open-sea kayaking trips to Alaska with Flea and our ex-drummer Cliff Martinez and our friend Marty Goldberg. We spent about a week kayaking into the deepest fjords of southern Alaska. It was an amazing trip, especially since both Cliff and Marty were gourmet chefs who were able to whip up three-star meals in the middle of the wilderness.
In September, One Hot Minute was released. We were proud of it, even if it wasn’t as good a record as we could have made if we’d kept the band together after Blood Sugar. But for a brand-new band, it was a pretty good effort, along the lines of, say, Mother’s Milk, the first album we made with John and Chad.
Before we began our touring, I was set to do some interviews to promote the album. Right about then, I started getting loaded again. I was holed up in my house on an absolute tear one day in September, and the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. I finally answered it, and it was Louie. “Dude, MTV is outside your house. They’re ready to shoot.” I remembered that I was supposed to do an MTV shoot at my house with the VJ Kennedy. I dragged myself downstairs. I looked sick and lifeless, and I had to answer all these questions on camera in my living room from the bubbly, sweet Kennedy. “It’s been a while since you had a record, blah, blah, blah . . .” What a disaster.
Now it was time to tour. Even though I’d been on a run beforehand, I never considered using on the road. I knew that would destroy everything overnight. We started in Europe. It was the first time we’d played before audiences since Woodstock, so we were like a car engine in need of a tune-up. I felt some responsibility for not allowing us to be as good as we could have been. I wasn’t as focused on my musicianship as I should have been. We weren’t bad, and there were some excellent moments, but overall I was feeling lackluster, and as a musician, I was experiencing a slightly broken reed.
The most memorable thing about that European tour was meeting Sherry Rogers, who would go on to become the wife of our road manager, Louis Mathieu, and the mother of his children. We met her in Amsterdam, where she was working for our old pal Hank Schiffenmacher. Whenever we passed through Amsterdam, we made a beeline to get some more tattoos from Henky Penky, and this trip we encountered a hot, lovely, full-of-spunk young lady named Sherry. She’d routinely dress up in a rubber maid’s outfit, and the thought of having her come onstage in that getup was appealing. Our next gig was in Belgium, and she came along and blew everyone’s mind when she took off all her clothes in front of everyone in the dressing room and donned the rubber costume. During the show, we had her come onstage periodically to wipe the sweat off our brows, serve us beverages, and light Dave’s cigarettes.
Our U.S. tour, which was supposed to start in mid-November, got postponed—through no fault of mine for once—until the beginning of February. So I went straight from Barcelona, our last gig in Europe, to New York to be with Jaime. Jaime had left her dingy high-rise in Chinatown and moved into a charming, cozy, deluxe apartment overlooking the statue of La Guardia just south of Wash
I went back to the store a couple of times to arrange the shipping and delivery, and one time I was there alone, standing near the elevator, when this elegantly dressed woman in her twenties walked in. She was beautiful and stylish, and I had a one-minute conversation with her while she was waiting for the elevator. This voice went off in my head: “You could marry this lady. Your wife is about to get in that elevator and disappear forever, so you might want to act on it right now.” Just at that moment, the elevator came, and she got in and was whisked from my life forever. That was the first time while I’d been with Jaime that I had been open to that kind of idea. I couldn’t tell if I was giving power to the fantasy or if there was a look in her eye or something in the way she carried herself, but it was a distinct foreshadowing of trouble.
Come Christmas, we made the usual trips. That year I gave my mom her first deluxe auto, a brand-new customized Ford Explorer that a western Michigan car dealer had specially painted and modified and tricked out for his wife before she divorced him. Blackie did all the research and development on that present. Then Jaime and I spent a few days in Pennsylvania to say hello to everybody, but with the recent loss of Jaime’s dad, it obviously wasn’t a very joyful time.
We returned to New York in time for New Year’s. I was so fed up with the commercialism of New Year’s Eve and the compulsion on everyone’s part to have the best night of their lives that I decided we would go to sleep before midnight. We cuddled together on the couch and watched a movie, and about eleven-thirty we turned off the lights and went to sleep.