Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis

  I had become totally constipated, and I couldn’t even sit up straight, the pain was so intense. In every city we went, I begged our tour manager, Tony Selinger, to find somebody, an osteopath, a chiropractor, a voodoo practitioner, anyone who could help me. I was bedridden until I had to go onstage. And that was when I remembered the advice that Carolee Brogue, my Fairfax drama teacher, had given me. She was on Broadway playing Peter Pan when she got a nasty stomach virus, but she strapped on a diaper and squirted out diarrhea the whole performance because, no matter what, the show must go on.

  We were in Belgium when Tony showed up with a fat, sweaty, boisterous Belgian fellow who bounded through my door speaking Flemish. He was an osteopath. I was thinking, “Jeez, yet another quack who’s not gonna be able to do anything.” He examined me, had me stand and walk around, and then told me to get on the bed. This big bowling ball of a fellow went to work on me. He lifted my leg and put all his weight on it, and POP!, my whole back snapped into place in one fell swoop. It was like going from being a broken toy to being a brand-new one. It turned out I had dislocated my sacrum.

  I was revitalized, and we began playing well. France was great, then we went to England, where we played Wembley. It was the single best show we played with Dave. Guy O was there, and he had taken it upon himself to become my matchmaker. Sometime during the spring, he had gone on a boat party in L.A. and met a girl who lived in London. He assured me she was just my type. So he beat away all the other guys on the boat and got her number for me. After the Wembley show, he introduced me to this girl named Rachel. He was right: I was immediately attracted to her. I decided to get a hotel room and stick around London, even though everyone else was heading home.

  The next night Rachel and I went out to dinner and walked through the park. All of a sudden, we started making out, and it was all going on. We went back to her apartment, made love, and she was wonderful, everything Guy O promised and then some, a very special girl. We were in our postcoital glow when she said to me, “I have to tell you that this is so weird, because the very last person I had a sexual relationship with was your ex-girlfriend Ione. And by the way, I liked this experience much better.” Out of the three billion girls in the world, I ended up being with one Ione had also been with. The ironic part of all of this was that when I first met Jaime, she was part of the Beastie Boy world through her trust-fund boyfriend. While she was hanging around them, she met Adam and Ione, who were married then. As soon as Adam walked out of the room, Ione went for Jaime with openmouthed kisses. It turned out that Adam and Ione were leading pretty separate lives by then, but I found it interesting that Ione and I had such similar tastes in women. I stayed with Rachel for a few days, but then it was time to go home.

  It was also time to go on another drug binge. It was bound to happen sooner or later, because I wasn’t taking care of myself. I think the fact that I’d spent all this intimate time with a girl I wasn’t going to follow through on triggered this episode. Now I had some time on my hands, and I was home alone in what had become the palace of getting loaded. I did a two-week run, and then I went to Cabo San Lucas to do my routine of sleeping for three days, kicking, eating like a fiend, and swimming. Same hotel, same room, same Northern Exposure on satellite TV.

  When I came back from Cabo, Louie was there for me, picking me up at the airport and hanging around with me. I was over at his house a few days after I’d gotten back when the phone rang. It was my beloved aunt Mickey, one of my favorite aunts, the second oldest of four sisters on my mother’s side. She was hysterical, saying, “Steve died. Steve died,” over and over again. I assumed it was her son, because she had both a son and a grandson named Steve. I asked her which Steve, and she sobbed, “Your mother’s Steve.” Suddenly, the heart and soul of my entire sense of well-being in Michigan was gone. He was the guy who brought my whole family together and gave us this loving homestead, the thoughtful, caring, hardworking, honest soul trooper of the bunch. He raised Julie and Jenny and the dogs and the cats and the horse, and my mom loved him, they were just so good together. I thought, “Oh shit. My fifty-one-year-old stepdad had to go and have a damn heart attack in the garden at two in the afternoon.”

  I thanked God that I wasn’t in a motel room somewhere, smoking crack off a tinfoil pipe, when I got the news. I was newly clean with an extra launch in my stride. It turned out that I was the only one in a clear state of mind; everyone else was shattered and stunned and torn up. We had a huge funeral service, and the church was packed to the rafters with half of Grand Rapids to say good-bye to Steve and pay homage to this unique citizen. My family elected me to give the eulogy. It wasn’t hard to write about a guy like him. For a kid like me, who had always been watching after his mother, Steve entering the picture was such a huge relief. It was like “Okay, now I can go be a boy again and not have to worry about my mom getting screwed over by a convict.” It was a remarkable experience to look out at this church filled with hundreds and hundreds of people, all of us riding the same wave of love and gratitude and appreciation for this person.

  Back in L.A., I was sitting at home one day when I got one of those periodic crazy calls from Lindy. He was in his apartment/office in Studio City, smoking his Merits and telling me that Molson Beer was offering us $1 million to fly up to the North Pole and do a show for the winners of a contest. They’d also get to use our name and our music to sell the hell out of their beer in Canada for a few months. This wasn’t the first time we’d gotten an offer from a big corporation. A year after “Under the Bridge,” McDonald’s came up with a whole campaign to sell hamburgers using that song. They were offering $2 mil, but we didn’t want our name to be associated with them.

  The Molson offer was interesting because 1) they wouldn’t use our image, and 2) it was just a radio campaign in Canada. Basically, our music would get heard many times per day. I guess this was a time in our operation when integrity wasn’t as revered as it is now; plus, we all wanted to go to the North Pole. Molson made the whole thing sound appealing. We’d get private aircraft service to and fro, and accommodations. The show was for an audience of a hundred people, and we’d be in, out, and get to go to the end of the earth and see the Aurora Borealis. We weighed the good and the bad and agreed to do it.

  We flew to Montreal and switched to a larger plane to fly north for eight hours. We got to the site, and there was only one place to stay, a run-down boot-camp barracks-type place called the Narwhal, named after the unicorn whale. There was no town, just a handful of native Indians who lived up there full-time. We were there a day before the show, so we did some snowmobiling, and they took us on a small-propeller flight tour of the North Pole. We marveled at the beautiful blue and white barren landscape. We were supposed to perform on the deck of a Russian icebreaker, but even though it was September 1, it was freezing outside, with gusts at fifty knots, so the concert was moved into a warehouse.

  One thing we pride ourselves on is being professionals. When we play, we play all the fucking way. But there was something about the atmosphere that made it impossible to do a normal rock show where you go out there, and boom, you start getting into your shit. We stepped onto that stage, and I looked at the hundred people who had been flown up, and they all had their funny little clothes on and their Molsons in their hands, and the whole thing reminded me of a bad office party. I picked up the mike, and the music started, and it was time for me to sing, but I couldn’t stop laughing. The preposterous nature of show business overwhelmed me, and I could not get it together. Eventually, I focused, but between songs I went back thirteen years and broke out some of our old comedy routines and started taking the piss out of people and having fun with the audience. There was at least as much comedic banter as there was music. I don’t know how long we played, but I was happy when it was over. We flew home that night and saw the Aurora Borealis and the otherworldly colors and cloud formations, and it felt like we were on a mission to Mars.

  When we got back to L.A., I began my own privat
e mission to Mars, a furious round of benders that would consume my next few months. I would go out for a week at a time, and even though the whole idea of using had become repugnant to me and I wanted to stop, I couldn’t, which is the textbook definition of active addiction. All this weird-ass shit would happen to me on my runs. On one of these benders, I ran out of drugs at four-thirty in the morning. At that point in time, I wasn’t dialed in to ATM technology; when I needed money, I’d go to a bank and take out a chunk of money on a credit card, or I’d visit an American Express office, where I could take out as much as ten thousand dollars at a shot. But now I had no money, no stuff, and was in a frenzy to get high.

  What I did have was a beautiful white Stratocaster guitar signed by all of the Rolling Stones. Tommy Mottola had given it to me when he was trying to sign the Chili Peppers to Sony/Epic. I figured I could go downtown and get a least a couple hundred dollars’ worth of dope for that guitar. So I went down to those dimly lit back alleys where the men sell their wares, but there was only one guy working the street at that late hour.

  “What can I get for this?” I asked him, proffering the guitar.

  He shrugged. “Nothing.”

  “No, no, you don’t understand,” I pressed on. “This guitar is signed by the Rolling Stones.”

  “Dinero, señor, dinero,” he kept repeating. He was fresh up over the border, and he obviously couldn’t speak English and didn’t give a rat’s ass about the Rolling Stones.

  “But this is valuable,” I protested.

  He finally offered me the tiniest amount of heroin I’d ever seen.

  “No, more,” I begged, but he indicated it was that or nothing. I was so desperate that I bartered the signed guitar for some drugs that would get me high for about ten minutes.

  All during these runs, I had the support of Bob Timmons, who was constantly trying to get me to check in to Exodus again. I was also getting much love from a newer friend of mine, this wonderful white-haired hippie Communist from Venice Beach named Gloria Scott. I first encountered Gloria when she was speaking at a meeting in Hollywood during my first round of sobriety in the late ’80s. She said she’d been a real-deal drugstore-cowboy junkie her whole life, knocking off pharmacies and running scams, but she also talked about the ’60s and Allen Ginsberg.

  By then she’d been sober for about ten years. I was thinking, “This lady is the coolest person I’ve ever seen. She’s nasty and not trying to be all saccharine, saying stuff like ‘Fuck you if you don’t like what I’m saying, motherfucker, because I’ve been there.’” She said her higher power was Neil Young. Then she said, “I’ve lived in a one-room bungalow down in Venice since 1967. I was dealing to Jim Morrison before you were crapping in your pants. The only things I have up in my house are a poster of Che Guevara, a poster of Neil Young, and a poster of a bunch of Red Hot Chili Peppers with the socks on their dicks.” I went up to her after the meeting and told her that I was honored to be on her wall along with Neil. We became fast friends, like Harold and Maude without the romance.

  When I started going missing in action and becoming more desperate and isolated, I stopped answering my phone. Every now and then I’d check my mail, and there’d be a postcard of a Native American warrior. On the back, Gloria would write, “Don’t ever give up your fight. You are a warrior and you will beat this thing that you’re up against. I have faith in you. I never forget you, don’t forget your own self.” I’d read that in my kitchen and think, “There’s a person out there who actually believes I can win this battle.”

  Around that time, I had a dream in which I was driving at about four-thirty in the morning, that darkest hour of the night before the sun even thinks about coming up. It was pitch black and raining, and I was going through the intersection of Melrose and San Vincente. The streets were dead, and I was driving fast and furious, screeching around corners, obviously going somewhere in a heated passion. I must have been going to cop drugs, because I was driving like my life depended on it. It was eerie and spooky and dark and rainy, and I was all alone in the car, driving and driving, and then out of nowhere, a hand came out and, whoosh, grabbed on to the steering wheel and started fighting me for control of the car. I looked over to see who the person in the seat next to me was, but he was all slouched down with a hat covering his face, so I couldn’t make out the demonic person. We kept driving, and I became terrified of what I was about to see. Then we drove under a streetlight, and the light illuminated the face of the intruder. And it was me. I had this horribly scary grin pasted on my face, and I was holding the wheel, saying, “I got ya. I got ya. I got ya.”

  Near the end of October, I checked in to Exodus again, this time resigned to being in there. That day I got a phone call from Bob Forrest.

  “How are you doing?” he asked.

  “I feel like a gangster in one of those old cops-and-robbers movies. I’m gonna have to shoot my way out of this place,” I joked. I was teasing him, being a character, acting out a scene, trying to make light of the heavy and fucked-up place that I was occupying.

  Bob said, “Oh, really? That sounds crazy. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m gonna stay here and see what happens.”

  I stayed that night. The next day I woke up and got the call. And the call was to go out and get high again. So I gathered up my stuff and said good-bye to Nurse Kathy, who was the only sane person in that whole place. Everybody else was doing the rehab shuffle.

  I walked into the corridor, and the woman who ran that wing of the hospital stepped into the hallway and confronted me. “Where do you think you’re going?” she said.

  “You know what, I’m just not ready to go through rehab right now, so I’m leaving,” I said.

  “You can’t leave,” she said with finality. “We’re not going to let you leave.”

  “Let me see you try and stop me,” I said. I took a few steps toward the exit, and she rushed up to me.

  “No, really, we’re locking the doors. We’re going to have to put you in your room again,” she threatened.

  “Lock the doors? I’ll fucking put my bed through the window and leave when I want to. You’ve got nothing to say about it, lady.” What was she talking about? This wasn’t a lockdown facility. I was there voluntarily, and I could leave whenever I felt like it. Or so I thought.

  “I do have something to say about it this time,” she said.

  I was getting pissed off. I had a serious calling here. I had to go get some money, get a cab, and have it wait while I talked to Flaco on the corner. Then I had to find a motel room. I had a very important agenda. But all that went out the window when she pushed a button. Suddenly, there were some very large USC-football-linemen-sized fellows coming at me from every angle. They grabbed me like a little rag doll and started carrying me down the hallway.

  “Hey, what’s going on here? Let me go, buddy. I have things to do,” I was ranting, but they ignored me and carried me past some electronically locked prison-style doors into a separate unit known as the mental ward. This was it. The lockdown. The no-escaping-you’re-in-jail-now-insane-asylum-loony-bin ward.

  I demanded an explanation: “What the fuck is going on?”

  “You are now on a lockdown. You’ll be here for the next seventy-two hours while we observe you,” one of the behemoths said.

  He may as well have said seventy-two years. Seventy-two hours was not acceptable to me. If he had said ten minutes, I could have worked with that. But I had pressing business outside.

  “Oh no. No, no, no. Get my lawyer on the phone. I demand to talk to my lawyer,” I screamed.

  “Dude, shut up. Someone’s gonna be in here to fill out a form, and you’ll get a room and you can chill,” my tormentor said.

  I scanned the corridor. There was no getting out of here. The place was sealed tight as a drum. But as I stood there in the hallway, I saw a pack of loony birds being let into the facility from a smoking patio with sliding bulletproof glass doors. I looked out into the
courtyard and saw an approximately eighteen-foot-high brick wall with nothing around it. There was no way I could get over that wall unless I had some rappelling equipment. Then I saw a basketball hoop about eight feet from the wall.

  And I saw my opening. The goons had left me to wait for the admitting nurse, but just then a doctor walked by. He had the pens in the pocket and the stethoscope, and he was reading a chart. He also had a huge ring of keys dangling from his belt loop.

  “Excuse me, Doctor. I was just outside, and I left my cigarettes. Could you let me out to the patio area to get them?”

  “I’m not authorized to unlock the door. That’s the policy here,” he mumbled.

  “I know. But if you open that door, I’ll go out there for a minute in that secured compound and have a quick smoke.” I was using every mind-control technique I could on this guy, and they worked. He unlocked the door, and I thanked him. The minute he turned around, I shimmied up to the top of that basketball hoop, stood on the backboard above it, leaned my body as far forward as I could, and jumped, just catching my fingers on the edge of the wall. Another inch and I would have done a face-plant into the wall and cracked my skull. I pulled myself up to the top of the wall and jumped down. I was free.

  I started boogying down the sidewalk and got about two blocks before I stopped to figure out my next move. There was no one coming after me, so I figured they were happy to get rid of me because I was causing such a stink. Then I looked up and realized that I was right in front of a branch of my bank. What a stroke of luck. I could get some cash and begin my excellent adventure.

  I never spotted the hospital employee who was in the bank depositing a check. But she was watching me as I marched over to the desk of the branch manager.