Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis
Then Dave walked in the room. I was always happy to see him. He greeted me, told me it was great to see me, and that he’d be right back to talk. But he was high and messing around with some girl, and they went off to do more drugs and never came back. It was fun to watch the show, even though it did seem weird to see Flea in that band. That night I walked home with Guy O, feeling detached from both Flea and Dave, which was ironic, since I just had detached from them for months on end. I accepted that this is what happens when you don’t talk to anybody—you come back and it’s a new ball game.
I was hoping it would be a new ball game for me. The fact that my circumstances had changed drastically but my behavior hadn’t was beginning to wear on me. I remember one poignant moment when I still had the house in the hills. I was driving down Beechwood at night and getting high in my car. I came to a stop sign, and this car full of twenty-year-old boys pulled up next to me. They looked at me and said, “Hey, Anthony!” I was so torn up, the last thing I wanted to hear then was “Hey, Anthony” from some fans. I was trying to ignore them, but I sneaked a glance at their car. One of them stared at me and said, “Hey, it’s not him,” and they drove off. That couldn’t be him, because Anthony didn’t look like a fucking ghost.
It got worse. Another time on the motel tour, I pulled up to my downtown corner, and some desperado got in the car and told me he knew where to score some dope. He was doing this so he could get a taste for leading me to the prize, but I didn’t care, so we took off. We ended up pulling into the parking lot of one of those cheap hooker motels on Sunset. He went off to find the dealer, and I was waiting in my truck, when this family got out of their car and headed for their room. They must have been a little down on their luck, because they were staying here. I looked over at their car and saw a Chili Peppers bumper sticker on it. Then I looked at the kids, and they both had on Chili Peppers T-shirts. I felt horribly ashamed and embarrassed. I slouched in my seat and pulled the visor down. Here was a family of fans proud to fly their Red Hot colors, and I was at the same motel but trying to score drugs from some insidious dope dealer. Ooofah.
I was really trying to stay sober, so I moved into Guy O’s house at the end of 1997. That Christmas I went home, and Blackie introduced me to a beautiful, brilliant local girl. We spent a nice few weeks together, but by the time I had to leave Grand Rapids, I knew the interlude would end. Sure enough, true to my Impact relapse charts, a few weeks later—and two weeks before we were scheduled to leave for Hawaii to begin writing a new album—I went on another guns-blazing, full-speed-ahead run.
I came up with yet another ridiculous plan. I decided to use drugs like a maniac for days on end and then go to Hawaii a week before the band, so that by the time we started working, I’d have a week of rest and recuperation under my belt. I dragged myself to the airport and flew solo to Hawaii. I checked in to a luxury high-rise hotel in Waikiki, holding the last smidgen of dope that I had, telling myself, “Okay, I’m gonna finish this little amount of stuff and then call it quits, and whammo, I’ll get better right here in Hawaii.” But when the drugs were ingested, I was like “Ooh, not quite ready to come down and face reality.” I went to some strip bars to find dealers.
When you’re wrapped up in that kind of drug intake, you lose all sense of what’s reasonable and what’s not. Later that night, while I was injecting my drugs, I intentionally broke the needle off my only syringe because I thought that if I put any more drugs in my body, I would explode. Ten minutes later, when I was craving more coke, that seemed like an awful idea. In my delusional toxic state, I tried to reaffix the needle. By now it was bent, and it wasn’t suctioning right, but a man needs his drugs in his veins, so I pushed the needle into a vein and hoped for the best. Well, I got the worst. The needle came off the syringe and lodged in the vein. I grabbed it and held it, paranoid that the needle would travel through my veins and pierce a valve in my heart.
I was high, and blood was leaking out of my arm, and now I had to grab the needle through my skin and pull it out from the inside lest it get released into my bloodstream. I managed to get it out, but my next dilemma was that I had no heroin to come down from this coke with. I ended up drinking the entire contents of my minibar. The whiskey, the vodka, the Scotch, the wine, one after another, I downed those little bottles and finally passed out. Always, you wake up to an unpleasant memory and an unpleasant body and your spirit is reduced to a pile of dirty ashes residing somewhere inside of your ass. You’ve gotta face the music, which is a beautiful island outside, but you can’t even bear to look out the window. I kept those curtains drawn and stayed in that bed and ordered room service and hibernated, knowing that each day that clicked off the calendar was bringing me one day closer to when I had to get on a little plane and fly over to Kauai and see my friends, my bandmates, my compadres.
The day of reckoning arrived. I went right down to the wire and got up an hour and a half before the plane was scheduled to depart and showered and shaved. I went out into the world for the first time in a week, and it was all too bright and vivid, but I got on that plane. I got to our rented house, and everyone was there, but our spirits were dampened. Both Dave and I had gone off the deep end for the last few weeks. We were both dry, at least for the moment, so we spent most of our time running and eating tons of good food but unfortunately playing very little. I wasn’t doing that well emotionally. I was dry, but my heart was broken, and I wasn’t feeling like myself. Then we got the call that our old friend Bill Stobaugh, the Hallucinogenius, the man who was my mentor at the graphics houses and who had let me live with him, had died while undergoing a heart operation. Flea flew back for the funeral, but I begged off.
When we got back from our unproductive stay in Hawaii, we got another dose of bad news. Our manager, Lindy, decided to quit. His wife had recently died, but he’d met a new lady, and she convinced him that it was time for him to walk away from that dose of anarchy and retire to Ojai. We looked like we were going backward on the conveyor belt, and I don’t think she saw much of a future in us; nor did he. Nor did anybody, really, including the people in the band.
Back in L.A., Dave started working on a solo record with Chad and went right back to getting loaded. I had stayed sober since Hawaii. When I went to a party at Dave’s girlfriend’s house and Dave picked up a beer, I was surprised. He was so nonchalant about it. He and I were both in the same place, where one is too many and a thousand is never enough. We couldn’t use drugs moderately, and that would be proved to him in a short period of time.
We went back to rehearsing. We had downgraded into an abominable little studio in Hollywood, right near Transvestite Alley. Dave was getting high and I wasn’t, so that was adding more tension to an already tense situation. Dave would come into rehearsals wearing oversize sunglasses and over-the-top large floppy Renaissance hats, which we called “coke hats” because you had to be on cocaine to even think of wearing a hat like that. Dave was coming in late, and it was impossible to communicate with him. The minute he was wearing that coke hat, he had his own agenda, and that was to get high.
We tried to play, but we weren’t going anywhere. Flea’s face was sunken with disillusionment, and Chad was like “This guy’s off on his trip. What can you say?” I felt like we had to talk to Dave and get him some help. He used to come and pick me up at hotels to go into rehabs; it was my turn to talk to him about getting well so we could carry on.
We had a little talk. Dave was sitting on an amplifier, and the band discussion escalated into an argument between the two of us, which was bizarre, because all we were saying was “Hey, you’re using drugs while we’re rehearsing, and that’s not working. How about if we talk about you getting sober again?” He didn’t want to hear it, he had a real fuck-you attitude about the whole thing. When he came at me with the fuck-you attitude, I was like “Whoa, fuck me? Fuck you.” Those weren’t the exact words, but that was the energy that started to go around. Chad and Flea backed off, and Dave got up to get in my face, b
With the band once again stagnant, I decided to take a trip to Thailand. I had been diagnosed with hepatitis C a few years earlier, and even though I wasn’t symptomatic, it was a disease that could reappear if I wasn’t vigilant. I brought along my liver-cleansing herbs and swam a lot, prayed, and meditated on the idea of my body getting healthy. It worked. Three weeks later, my hepatitis viral count came back undetectable.
By now it was April. Flea and I decided that it just wasn’t working out—we had to fire Dave. Flea talked to him initially, but Dave was really upset, so I did the follow-up. It went horribly, because he was totally loaded, and even though he knew there was no way this band could work, the verbalization of the reality pissed him off to no end.
“Fuck you guys! How can you do this to me, you motherfuckers!”
“Dude, there’s no band here,” I said. “When was the last time you showed up? You’re making a solo record, you’re off getting loaded. You’re not really into this anyway.” Of course, Chad was staying totally Switzerland, because he was in the middle of making that record with Dave.
Meanwhile, Flea was going through his own health hell, fighting Epstein-Barr as well as girlfriend hell and band hell. He was like a general doing battle on too many fronts. He was really down, and on top of all this, he was trying to do a solo album. It came as no surprise when Flea decided he wanted out.
“I don’t think I can do this anymore,” he told me. I’d known that this was coming. It was so obvious; nothing was happening with the band.
“I know,” I said. “I figured that’s what you were going to say. I totally understand.”
Then Flea dropped the bombshell. “The only way I could imagine carrying on is if we got John back in the band.”
That threw me for a loop. “Why would John ever want to come back and play with us again?” I asked Flea. “He doesn’t care for me and didn’t really care for the experience.”
“I have a funny feeling that he might be standing on the verge of making a comeback, a personal resurgence into the land of the living,” Flea told me.
“That would be a wonderful miracle,” I thought. And the second miracle would be if he’d even think of playing with us again.
“You’ve got to be crazy. John is not going to want to play in this band. It doesn’t sound remotely possible, but if it is, I’m open to it,” I told Flea.
John and I hadn’t had much contact since he left the band, except for the odd and unplanned moments that we’d run into each other. Even then, you’d have thought there would be a lot of anger and resentment and dislike, bordering on hatred, but every time I saw him, there was no display of that.
The first time I saw him was a few years after he left the band. I had heard all these horror stories about John’s descent into a drug hell, and I knew that Johnny Depp and Gibby Haynes, the lead singer of the Butthole Surfers, had even made a film documenting the squalid conditions that John was living in. If you saw that film, you knew that this was the home of a person who had absolutely no interests in life other than shooting drugs and painting.
I also heard about the interviews that John was giving journalists extolling heroin use. He’d even shoot up during interviews. I wasn’t interested in reading that stuff or looking at the film. I didn’t listen to his solo records at the time. I couldn’t celebrate his lifestyle because it seemed like he was killing himself. There were a lot of people who were glorifying that and wanting to participate and wanting to get free drugs. Granted, his art, the songs he was writing, were great, but it didn’t feel right for me to condone this eccentric person’s demise. This guy used to be my best friend, and now his teeth were falling out, so I didn’t look at it like other people might: “Oh, he’s a genius, it’s okay.” I didn’t care if he was a genius or a fucking idiot, he was rotting away, and it wasn’t fun to watch.
I knew he’d been painting for years, inspired by Basquiat and da Vinci, so when I heard that he was going to have a show at the Zero Gallery on Melrose, I decided to pop in the day before the show opened and have a peek at the paintings. I dropped by, and lo and behold, John was there hanging the show himself. We were both a little startled. He was high on coke, and his hair was shorn, and he had big black circles under his eyes and was smoking Gauloises. He was shockingly thin, a skeleton in a vest, this little bone man, but he had a lot of vigor because he had a lot of energy and chemicals in him, so it wasn’t like he was passing out or looking weak.
Instead of being “Fuck you, I hate you, you suck,” we were happy to see each other. His paintings were disturbing but beautiful. It was weird, because I think we wanted to dislike each other more than we were able to.
The next time I saw him, he had deteriorated quite a bit. Everyone was worried about his arms, which were all abscessed because he never did learn how to properly administer an injection; he would just go for the stab-and-poke mode and hope for the best. He wound up checking in to Exodus, my old haunt, in December 1995, more for his physical health than his mental health. The doctors there were seriously concerned that he was going to get gangrene and have to lose a limb unless he’d wash and take care of his arms, which he refused to do.
I called him up and asked whether it was okay if I came to visit him. He was fine with it and asked if I could bring him some cigarettes and a pastrami sandwich with a lot of mustard. So I showed up and he ate the sandwich and I tried to get him to wash his arms. Again, our exchange was kind and loving and caring, so different from what everyone around either of us thought our exchange would be like, based on our past turmoil. I still hadn’t recognized how unhealthy my own dynamic of relating to him had been before he left the band. I never understood just how sensitive he was and how hurtful I was capable of being. I didn’t know that all of the jokes and the jabs and the kidding and the goofing and the sarcasm had really hurt his feelings and had a long-lasting impact on him.
Long after John quit, Flea said to me, “Do you have any idea how much pain you caused John?”
“What are you talking about? He and I were best friends, we spent every waking moment together. We played pool together, we chased women together, we ate Lucky Charms together. We were two peas in a pod.”
“No, you hurt John’s feelings a lot of the time,” Flea said, “because he looked up to you and you were so brutal to him.” That was the first time I was even aware that my love for him had ended up being a difficult experience for him.
When John left the band, I resented him for not being my friend and for abandoning our musical comradeship. But all the time that he was out of the band and going through his anguish, I prayed for him constantly. From going to meetings I’d learned that one of the reasons that alcoholics get loaded is because they harbor resentments. One of the techniques they teach to get rid of a resentment toward somebody is to pray for him or her to get everything that you want for yourself in life—to be loved, to be successful, to be healthy, to be rich, to be wonderful, to be happy, to be alive with the light and the love of the universe. It’s a paradox, but it works. You sit there and pray for the person you can’t stand to get everything on earth that you would want for yourself, and one day you’re like “I don’t feel anything bad toward this person.”
That was part of the reason I prayed for John. The other part was that I didn’t want him to die a sad and miserable death, so I prayed for him almost every day. I would sit there and say, “Whoever’s out there, whoever’s getting this thought from my mind, could you please look after John Frusciante, because he needs it.”
In January 1998, Bob Forest convinced John to check in to Los Encinos, the same old-school treatment facility that housed W. C. Fields, back in the day. John had already kicked heroin by then, but he had been smoking crack and drinking. I went to visit him there, and he seemed committed to being in there, but a little peculiar. Our conversations were sparse and unusua
During one of my visits, we were sitting there having one of these minimalist conversations when John jumped off the bed and went flying into a perfect James Brown split, circa 1968. Then he got up and sat back down. I don’t know what his motivation was, but it seemed like he was feeling his oats and letting it be known that he still had the fire to fly into a James Brown split, if need be.
I was open to the possibility of John coming back to the band, even if it still seemed remote to me. After leaving Los Encinos at the beginning of February, John rented a small apartment in Silver Lake. One day in April, Flea went over there, and they sat together and listened to records. Then Flea popped the question: “What would you think about coming back and playing in the band?”
John started sobbing and said, “Nothing would make me happier in the world.” They both cried and hugged each other for a long time. Then Flea took a trip to Cambodia, which gave John and me time to clear the air and talk about the problems we had in the past. We went to the Farmer’s Market, one of my favorite places in all of L.A., and sat down and had some salmon tacos.
I broke the ice. “Do you have a problem with me at all about anything?”
“No, not really,” he said. “What about you? Are you mad at me for anything?”
“I thought I was, but I don’t feel mad right now. I thought we should probably go over all this stuff, but I don’t feel bothered by any of it anymore,” I confessed.