Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis
A few days after that, I got the epiphany that this period of my life had come to an end and that it was time to be single again, to be alone. I looked at Jaime one day and thought, “I’m not in love with her anymore.” For no reason. It was nothing she did. It wasn’t the way she talked or the way she walked or the things she said, because she never did anything that I found intolerable. Something just dawned on me. It was as if a fog had lifted. I was like “Jesus Christ, what have I been doing for the last two years? It’s time to make some changes.” But it was all about being sober. I had no intention of getting high.
I had probably done enough damage to myself that I was incapable of being in love with her. And that voice was so clear to me that to have ignored it would have meant faking my feelings from that point forward. I knew that I had to do the most undesirable thing of all. For me, it was much easier to stay in an uncomfortable relationship than to tell somebody, “I’m leaving.” Historically speaking, I was terrible at it. I couldn’t say, “I don’t want to be with you anymore.” I’d rather go hurt myself, which is part of my cycles.
I told Jaime, and she didn’t accept it. She told me that she was planning on getting married to me and having kids, which was the saddest thing she said during all of our discussions. I went back to L.A., and she came out. There was a lot of crying and ranting, and then she packed up her stuff and got back on the red-eye and left.
Because I had caused somebody whom I truly cared about so much pain, it was the perfect emotional setup to go out on another binge. It started on a Friday afternoon. I drove my motorcycle down to Lindy’s for a band business meeting. On my way there, I stopped downtown and filled up my pockets with drugs. Then Flea and Lindy and I had our meeting, and I left Lindy’s house in the bright daylight, drove a few blocks, and started hitting that pipe right there in the street. The minute the drug hit my brain, I started the bike up and went. I ran for two or three days, smoking crack and putting the heroin on top of that, and all at once I was in another desperate predicament.
I figured I’d be in too much trouble if I stayed in L.A., so I got out the Yellow Pages and dialed up Aeromexico. I found the nicest hotel in Cabo San Lucas, a beautiful place where I had worked on songs with Flea a few years earlier. I was so high on heroin that I was a danger to myself, scratching holes in my body, and I certainly couldn’t hide my condition from anyone, so I ordered a car to drive me to the airport. I had saved a handful of balloons that I was going to take with me for some weanage. There’d be no trouble getting on board with them, but I was wary of Mexican customs, so I decided to hide the balloons in the cassette area of my CD/cassette boom box.
When I landed in Mexico, I was still high, and my hair looked like a theremin. The airport had a customs system where you step up to the line, press a button, and get either a red or a green light. If I got a green light, I was home free. Of course, it came up red. I went to the table, and the customs guy was looking at me with great suspicion. He searched my bag and my pockets and then said, “Let me see the stereo.” My heart started racing. The last thing I needed was to get busted bringing heroin into Mexico. He looked inside the battery compartment, which I’d considered as a stash place, and then he had trouble trying to operate it. He was hitting all the cassette buttons, just about to hit eject, when he looked at me and said, “Make it work.” I clicked it right to CD, pushed play, and The Jackson 5 Greatest Hits started blasting. He passed me on.
I had booked a room at the Westin, a modern hotel that had been designed to look like a red-clay Mexican structure. I holed up in the bed, used the last of the heroin, and then cocooned, ordering room service and watching satellite TV and feeling lonely and depressed and remorseful. By the third day of lying in bed, eating, and trying to become human again, I forced myself to go down and jump in the ocean. I had to baptize my spirit. I went to the pool area and tried to swim, but I ran into people who wanted to talk to me, and I wasn’t up for that at all. On that trip, I made friends with a pelican whose wing had been damaged in a fisherman’s net. He had become the mascot of the pool area. I sat there and fed him and talked to him. We were two creatures nursing our wounds. I even wound up writing a song about that pelican.
At some point, I performed the selfish and errant act of calling Jaime, even though I knew in my heart of hearts that our relationship was over. But she was still my best friend and a soothing entity in my life. “I’m down here and I’m lonely and I’m sick and I’m tired and I’m hurt and I’m fucked up and I’m sad. Do you want to come down?” She flew in the next day, and we had a decent couple of days together, staying in bed and eating and talking.
Cabo became my own personal rehab. I’d stay sober for a few weeks, relapse, make a mess of situations, then go back down and check in to the same hotel room, and do the exact same thing, which is one of the better definitions of insanity—doing the exact same thing over and over and expecting the result to be different. If you had to be sick somewhere, Mexico was the place. I did consider myself fortunate to have the luxury of going down there and lying out under those blue skies.
At the beginning of February 1996, we began a three-leg, two-month U.S. tour. We were opening the tour at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, but the day we got to town, the New York area was hit by an incredible blizzard and was under a monstrous blanket of snow. The subways and cabs weren’t running, so Flea and I took a snowy walk from our midtown motel to the Lower East Side to eat at Angelica’s Kitchen, a great vegetarian restaurant. Later that night, I met Guy O at the Spy Bar in SoHo. There were a lot of girls there, but most of them were too New York fabulous and difficult to deal with. Then we saw this girl who was a little tipsy, wearing a bright red dress with some weird ’80s Zebra belt accoutrement. She was in her own world by the piano, doing a heartfelt pantomime to a Björk song. I thought that took a lot of chutzpah, so I went over and introduced myself. Her name was Christina, and she was a model who had grown up in Idaho but was now living in New York. She had natural orange-red hair and crazy-beautiful white skin and huge tits, way too big and pillowy for normal runway modeling.
I invited her to the show the next night, and she asked if she could bring her roommate, who, it turned out, was a huge Oasis fan. This was the moment that Oasis was the hottest band going, having permeated every nook and cranny of America. I had purposefully ignored this phenomenon, but on the ride out to the Coliseum, all Christina’s roommate could talk about was Oasis and this brother or that brother. We plowed through the snow and got to the Coliseum, and I was relieved to see that the place was full and the audience was appreciative.
That night I began seeing Christina, which was a good thing, since it had been a while since I felt that connection with somebody. I wasn’t falling in love, but she was a nice person, and we were definitely sexually compatible. I don’t know if it was her smell or her energy, but we’d be in bed, and I’d feel like an opiated vampire from being with her.
Early on in that tour, I fell off the stage. We were playing these new One Hot Minute songs that hadn’t seen too much stage time, and I was in the midst of my eyes-closed robotic dancing when I tripped over one of my monitors. I went plummeting right off the stage and dropped eight feet, hit my head on the concrete floor, and passed out. I came right to and was grateful to be conscious, but my head was the least of my problems. Before I tripped, my leg had gotten tangled up in my mike cord, so when I fell, the cord acted like a hangman’s noose and ripped my calf muscle right off the bone. I was hanging upside down thinking I could deal with the head injury, but when I pushed myself back up onstage, my leg wouldn’t work. I finished the show on one leg and went to the hospital. I got some stitches in my head, but my leg had become black and blue and green and wildly disfigured-looking. They rigged me up with a Frankenfoot-looking cast complete with a vast array of straps. I had to finish the rest of the tour with this Frankenfoot, which was not fun to perform in.
After the second leg of the tour, we had a two-week break. Prior t
Louie had been a pot dealer in high school, and then he got strung out on heroin. He went through years of back-and-forth struggles to get sober, but he had been clean at this point for a lot of years. Louie was kind and giving and would go out of his way to be there for you, almost to the point where it became a defensive mechanism so he wouldn’t have to deal with what was going on in his own life. But he was a great running partner, and we shared the sobriety and a love for music.
The last thing Louie was, was an outdoorsman. When we got the two-week break, I decided to facilitate a nice experience for Louie and Sherry and take them on a trip to Hawaii, which they couldn’t have afforded then. Sherry was adventuresome and gung-ho, but Louie agreed begrudgingly. We rented a house on the sunny side of Maui. Every day Sherry and I would go out in front of the house, dive into the ocean, and swim a mile out and a mile back. Louie would sit on the beach, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and doing his crossword puzzles, naysaying all of nature’s beauty that was surrounding him.
At one point on that trip, Louie and I were having lunch at a fancy hotel, and a thought popped into my head: “Louis, I hear wedding bells for you in the near future.” He confessed that he was feeling the same thing. A few days later, near the end of our stay, I had taken a nap in the middle of the day, and when I woke up, the house seemed deserted. It was odd not to have Louie and Sherry around, and I started going from room to room, calling out, “Louis? Sherry?”
Finally, I cracked open the door to their bedroom to see if they were napping. I saw Louie in full slow-jam love mode with Sherry, naked man on top of naked woman. I closed the door right up and felt terrible for walking in on them. Nine months to the day later, their son, Cash, was born, which connected me further to the family. Most kids can’t say, “Oh yeah, Uncle Tony was there when I was conceived.”
We finished the U.S. tour with a West Coast leg. Considering that we had taken a four-year record hiatus and that the climate of pop music had changed so drastically, it was nice to see that people were still interested in coming out to see what we do. We were playing arenas, and it wasn’t the every-date-sold-out tour of our career, but we were getting warm receptions to the new material everywhere we went.
In Seattle, I flew Christina out for a few days. The band had an off night, and Oasis was playing in town. Their management called up and invited us to the show, but no one wanted to go except Christina. By that point, Oasis was in disarray. The brothers were constantly fighting, and shows were being canceled right and left. But we went, and before the show started, we were backstage and I met the singer. He introduced himself to me, and I said, “Hello, Ian.” “No, Liam.” We went through a whole “Ian, Liam” Spinal Tap moment. Then we went out to watch the show. It would have been great, except it was obvious they hated each other. They were dead on the stage. The songs and the singing were good, though.
Halfway through the show, Christina had a couple of arena beers and got horny and decided she wanted to give me a blow job. So we wandered backstage. Most of the doors were locked, but I found one that was open. It was below the stage and opened into the electrical control room for the whole arena. There were all these levers and switches and buttons. So we got on the floor, took off our clothes, and started having sex. It was a nice atmosphere; we could hear the muffled sounds of the band playing above us. But somewhere along the way, we got too frisky and banged into a lever, and all of a sudden, the lights went out. I jumped up and rushed over to the board, convinced that we had cut the sound and lights to the entire arena. I frantically pushed a lever, and the lights came back on. I realized that we had cut off the power only in that room, but we were one lever away from bringing the concert to a grinding halt from having sex beneath the stage.
Christina was a lot of fun to be with, and our physical relationship was wonderful, but I wasn’t falling in love with her to the point of her being my girlfriend. A few months later, right before we went back to Europe to tour, I told her I couldn’t see her anymore. She was pretty upset, but Guy O was beside himself. “I can’t believe you’re walking away from this girl. She’s the first girl you’ve been with in a long time who’s totally considerate. She brings you flowers. She loves you. She’s beautiful. She’s sexy. She’s smart.” But when you’re not feeling it, you’re not feeling it. When I broke up with her, she said, “Ah, that really sucks. I was hoping that this relationship was gonna go somewhere, but I understand. At least we had a lot of great sex.” I was like “That’s the spirit!”
After the West Coast leg, we had a few weeks off before we set out to tour Australia and New Zealand again. We started off in New Zealand, and being back there made me realize that this was where I was going to make my home away from home. Somehow I hooked up with an ex–rugby player who had been a member of the all-black New Zealand rugby team in the ’60s but now was an older, brutish, conniving, absolute shyster of a real estate agent. On a break from our shows, he took me out to look at this 169-acre farmhouse overlooking Kai Para Bay, which is an hour and fifteen minutes northwest of Auckland. We went out on the most gorgeous, sunny day. I fell in love with the place, even though Kai Para Harbor is an incredibly rough body of water where great white sharks go to breed. It’s a furiously tidal, raging harbor.
My whole thrust of finding a home away from home was to buy a place near a clear, temperate, inviting body of water, one that I could swim in and play underwater. I have no idea why I chose this place, because none of that was there. But the view of the harbor was incredible, a kaleidoscopic, psychedelic patina of colors. And this agent had me all hyped up about an auction for the property, which was going to take place, coincidentally, while I was on tour in Australia. “This is your one and only chance to get this property. It’s gonna go quick, there are a lot of people interested. I’ll have you on the phone and I’ll do the bidding for you. Blah blah blah blah.”
I was on the phone from Australia, and he was at the auction. “It’s at a million dollars. Going up. Going up. Someone here wants it for one point seven.” I was like “Okay. Go two.” The next thing you know, I’d bought this place for way more than it was worth. When I got back, people started telling me that they weren’t even sure there was anyone else bidding. All these Kiwi businessmen were in bed with one another.
We finished the two-week tour cycle, and everyone went home to the U.S. except me. I went back to New Zealand, checked in to a bed-and-breakfast, and went through the process of closing this deal, which cost me about $1 million U.S. I was waiting for the farmer who had sold me the place to take his money and move to the Gold Coast of Australia, where it’s always sunny. Meanwhile, I was thinking, “Why on earth would these farmers leave the most beautiful piece of paradise for the crowded-ass Gold Coast, which is like Miami Beach, only tackier?” I soon found out. It turned out that I saw that farmhouse on one of the few days of the year when it didn’t rain. Three hundred days out of the year, that country just poured precipitation. It was cloudy, rainy, chilly, blustery, England-on-a-bad-day kind of weather.
Eventually, the farmer moved out, and I signed the papers and set up a bank account in Auckland. I got Greer’s father to be the caretaker, because people in New Zealand were known to move in and occupy vacant country properties. There was this Wild West mentality out there. Greer’s dad was going to check up on the property and make sure no one was squatting or stealing the fixtures.
It was time to go home and get ready for our European dates. Before we went
When we got to Europe in late June, everyone was optimistic, partially because I had been staying sober for the tours. There was a distinct feeling of brotherhood among us. The only issue surfacing was the fact that Dave wasn’t crazy about playing music for the sake of music, and Flea needed that kind of bond. He missed having someone who’d call him up and say, “Come over to my house and let’s play guitars for a while.” Dave wasn’t that guy. He was like “Why would I come over and play guitar with you? Do we have to write a song for something?” There was a rift developing. But on the other hand, Dave and Chad were becoming quite close.
We started the tour off in Budapest. Everyone raved about Prague, but to me, Budapest was a much more interesting town, more exotic and wild and more recently detached from the Communist hold. In Prague, we performed in a small club. It was packed, and I went to do a flip onstage. I was a little bit out of control and landed on one of the monitors. When I went to stand up, there was no one home. We had to stop the set and wheel me off, because I was in such excruciating pain. The next day I couldn’t move. I saw a few practitioners, but no one seemed able to diagnose what damage I had wrought upon my back. So they strapped me up in a back brace, and I did the next few shows standing in one spot, almost totally immobilized.