Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis
It’s never a good idea for two addicts to reminisce about their old days of using drugs. When I’d met Claire, she was drinking, but I’d never seen her on drugs. And she knew me only in sobriety. Somehow the topic of drugs got placed on the table.
“God, I can’t imagine you ever doing those things, it seems so out of character for you,” Claire said. “You’re so not into that self-destructive energy.”
“Believe me, this is what I used to do,” I said, and told her some of the war stories that I’ve recounted here. She told me some of hers, and we started realizing just what birds of a feather we were.
I don’t remember who suggested it first, but someone said, “Can you imagine us getting high together?”
“It would be fun for a minute, and then it would be horrible,” I said.
“Yeah, but it would be really fun for a minute,” Claire said.
“It would be fun for a minute,” I agreed.
“What if we did it?” she said. “What if we did it just this weekend and then went home?”
“That’s crazy, but it sounds interesting,” I said.
“Are you serious?” she asked.
“I’m not really serious, but now that you mention it, I’m a little serious,” I admitted.
“I wasn’t until you said that, and now I’m really serious,” she said.
“Do you want to go get high?” I asked.
“Yeah, let’s do it,” she said.
“You’re sure? Because once we do this, things will never be the same,” I cautioned.
“Oh, we’ll be all right. Let’s go,” she said. And we left that restaurant for our rendezvous with the eight-hundred-pound gorilla.
Chapter 15
A Moment of Clarity
Claire and I left the restaurant and went straight to Haight Street. I didn’t even bother disguising myself; I just tried to stay out of the sight line of all the white kids on the street. We found a black dealer who had the coke but didn’t have the heroin. We figured we’d deal with that problem later. On the way back to the hotel, we stopped in a liquor store, bought some pipes, and picked up a bottle of vodka and a bottle of cranberry juice. Claire insisted that she wanted alcohol. If she was going out, she was going all the way out. The poor kid had no idea what she was in for. All we knew was that we were salivating like Pavlov’s dog at the prospect of getting high.
Probably part of the reason I had become so interested in getting high was that Ultram was actually a heavy-duty synthetic opiate. A few months later, Louie consulted the Physicians Desk Reference and read that under no circumstances should Ultram be administered to ex–heroin addicts, because it induces a craving for opiates. I guess that idiot doctor in New Zealand didn’t read his copy.
Claire and I got to the room and started smoking and smoking and drinking and drinking and, for the first time, saw each other in our getting-high mode, with all the quirky drugisms that go along with that. About five in the morning, we ran out of coke. We were both too annihilated to go back out on the streets, so I came up with a genius idea. I took out the Yellow Pages and called an escort service, knowing that the majority of those girls had drug connections. I’d pay one for her time, which would be spent in the pursuit of drugs. For once, Claire was easygoing about my talking to another woman. The girl went off to Berkeley, and it seemed like it took her forever, but she came back with twenty Valiums, some coke, some crystal methadrine, but no heroin. We did the coke and then took the Valiums and finally crashed.
Because we were in this together, it wasn’t as horrible a wake-up as I’d had in the past. We were both feeling a little shaky, lying in bed, wondering, “What were we thinking? That was a really bad idea.” So we ate and drank something, watched a movie in bed, and tried to forget about it. But then that voice came over us. “Hey, you’ve already fucked up. Ain’t no sense stopping now.” I went out and got some syringes, and we shot the speed. Of course, that wasn’t enough, so Claire scoured the streets and found a one-eyed taxi driver who sold her some smack. How horrible was that to let my girlfriend go out into the streets of San Francisco to find stuff?
By now the hotel wanted us out of our room, but when I told them we needed to stay a few more days, they moved us to a bigger room. I got on the phone and did the escort-service trick again. This girl was dialed into the drug world, and she delivered everything we needed, including a bag of pure powder cocaine. My body was relatively resilient to shooting coke; it remembered stuff like “Oh yeah, this is where the heart goes into the fifth gear.” I started injecting large quantities and doing okay.
Claire did up a smaller injection of coke, but something went drastically wrong. She’d done a million hits of cocaine in her life, but she was not doing well on this one. She lay down and got real pale and clammy, started shaking furiously, and began to have trouble breathing. She was convinced she was dying. That was the scariest moment of my drug-using career, even scarier than when I walked into Hillel’s living room and saw Kim blue-faced and not breathing in his chair. I was so deeply in love with Claire that the idea of anything bad happening to her was terrifying.
Before I called 911, I prayed. “Okay, universe, we have a problem. The girl I’m in love with is possibly dying right here on the couch. I need a real big favor, and that is for her not to die.” She had gone out like a frozen little fish Popsicle on the couch, but while I was on the phone with 911, she started to breathe again and then sat up and said she felt okay. I told 911 it was a false alarm and hung up.
Then the phone rang. It was the hotel operator. “Did you just call 911?” he asked.
“Me? 911? No. Wrong room. Wires must have crossed.”
She was skeptical, but I wouldn’t cop to making that call.
I hung up and went back to getting high. Because of her near-death experience, Claire put a moratorium on getting high and went to the bedroom, trying to collect herself. I was in the living room with a table full of cocaine and pills and heroin and syringes and pipes when, kabang, kabang, kabang, someone came to the door.
I threw a blanket over the entire table and opened the door. It was the San Francisco police department. Not an ambulance, not the rescue squad—the cops.
“Sir, we received a call from 911 that someone was overdosing in this room. The law mandates that we have to inspect the premises in that situation,” the cop said. They were being pretty decent to not knock me down and barge into the room.
“I have no idea what that call was about,” I said. “It’s just me and my girlfriend, and we’re both fine.”
They could tell that I was lying. And stoned.
“Well, we need to see the girl,” the cop said.
I called Claire into the room, and she looked good enough to satisfy them, so they left and she went back to bed and I started getting high again. Then again, bam, bam, bam, it was the door. Again I covered up the stuff. This time it was the damn sheriff’s department.
“We got a report that a call was made to 911 concerning a possible drug overdose,” the sheriff said.
“No, no, the police were just here. We handled this already,” I said.
The sheriff recognized me and almost apologized for disturbing us, and left. But I was frazzled. Claire wasn’t well, the cops kept coming, the hotel obviously was aware that two dope fiends were going for it on their top floor. The whole scenario was going from bad to worse.
In the morning we ate some food at a diner and then flew back to L.A. Both of us looked like wrecks. But I wasn’t finished. On the plane ride down, I decided to drive downtown, buy a lot of drugs, and have Claire drop me off at a motel and then go home. She dropped me off at a sleazy motel on Alvarado.
“Be careful, don’t hurt yourself. I’ll be home when you’re done,” she said.
“I’m terribly sorry, Claire, but I gotta do what I gotta do,” I said.
She left, and I started firing up and getting very, very out there. And bang, bang, bang. Again knocking at the door. It was already ner
“A.K., it’s me. Let me in.”
It was Claire.
“I’ve changed my mind. I want to get high,” she said.
She had gone a few blocks in the car and then decided to indulge, so she parked in this horribly scary neighborhood and, in her high heels and platinum-blond hair and vintage long jacket, walked all the way back to the motel.
That run went on for a few days. Eventually, we went home and brought the drugs into the house with us. Now our love nest had been soiled with the negative energy of crack and heroin. But we couldn’t stop this demonic behavior. The only fun part of the whole experience was when we stopped smoking the coke and did heroin and lay in bed together, smoking cigarettes and watching movies till six in the morning.
Of course, we had these sweet heroin-induced conversations about how much we loved each other. I remember telling Claire on one such occasion that I not only wanted to be with her for the rest of our natural lives, I also wanted to make sure that after we were both dead, our spirits stayed together. That kind of craziness.
Most of the time, we’d watch a movie and she’d fall asleep in the middle of it, so I’d end up watching it by myself. One night Less Than Zero came on, a movie that the Chili Peppers were in for a snippet, playing “Fight Like a Brave.” I’d never seen it before, and I was blown away by Robert Downey Jr.’s amazing performance, which absolutely mirrored his life. And spoke to my life, which had pathetically reverted back to the ’80s. I’d gone back to less than zero. Was that what was waiting for me, dying in a convertible on the way to the desert?
I hatched a new plan. Claire and I would go to Hawaii and kick there. Who could do what we were doing here on the beautiful island of Oahu? We checked in to a hotel overlooking Waikiki Beach and ate some delicious ribs at the dusk barbecue. (I was back to eating meat.) But then we decided to keep the run rolling. There wasn’t a street-dealing scene for heroin in Hawaii, so I dragged my lovely sweetheart to the strip bars of Waikiki to score. For backup, we ran a prescription scam and had Claire feign tooth pain to get a codeine supply.
We had no problem copping at the strip clubs. All the strippers wanted to party and whoop it up with us, and the dealers were ecstatic to be dealing to me. “Dude, I’ve been listening to your music since I was in high school.” Our routine was to go out to the clubs, buy the drugs, go back to the hotel, and do them until we couldn’t do any more. Then we’d wake up and say, “Let’s stop. Let’s go swimming in the ocean and eat some good food and get our health back.” By eleven that night, we’d be itching for more drugs. I was the sicker of the instigators. Claire would always beg to stop and go back to being clean.
After ten days of this cycle, we went back to L.A. The minute we were back, we got high at our place again. Claire’s heart was into being clean, but I had a harder time surrendering. The sad thing is that all this using together had definitely affected our relationship. There had been an untroubled purity to our love that was tainted and never recovered from the bouts of using.
The only thing that stopped me from continuing the run was that I had to be on a plane on March 23, 2000, to start the first leg of our U.S. Californication tour. I had Louie hustle me up a bunch of detox medication—sleeping pills, muscle relaxants, the works. I was so weak, I don’t know how I managed to play that first show in Minneapolis. I didn’t really rise to the occasion, but I didn’t collapse, either. This tour was the first time that we were using two tour buses for the band. John and Flea shared one, and Chad and I were in the other. We hit the highway, and in a few days I was feeling much better.
After about a week, Claire came out for a visit, which was good, because we probably needed each other to rebound onto getting sober again. But she seemed changed. Even though the drugs had been a consensual situation, she was extra pissed off at everything. One night we took a cab to a meeting on the outskirts of the town where we were staying, but when we tried to go back later, there was a thunderstorm and no cabs were available. Claire was furious, whining about the weather and the car service. She wound up storming off into the pouring rain by herself. It was as if she thought the weather was out to get her. Or it was my fault. She was hard to get along with, but she was obviously in pain and tortured by the setback.
By April 1, thanks to constant sweating and exercise, I was feeling like a million bucks again. On this tour we were really punching the clock and going to work, driving down the highway and not even knowing where we were. We rolled through Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas that spring. I was still rooming with Chad, so our tour bus wasn’t particularly festive, but it was a great place for relaxing and reading and talking to Claire on the phone.
At that stage of my life, I was monogamous. I found out that being monogamous on the road was similar to being sober on the road. When you’re sober, you’re impervious to the drugs and the dealers and the people getting high and the parties. It’s almost like there’s a field of protection around you, and that scene doesn’t even enter your radar. The same can be said of women. I was never tempted. When I look at it objectively, in hindsight, there were a lot of girls around, but I was detached from their sirenisms. I remember sitting on the crew bus with tons of girls who were clearly there to have fun. You can tell by the way they’re dressed and the way their tits are hanging out and the way they’re sitting next to you. They’d say, “Come on, you’re in town. Let’s go romp around,” but I’d reply, “Okay, good night, everybody. Nice to see you. I’m off to call my girlfriend.”
At the end of June, the band got an offer we couldn’t refuse: to play for Paul Allen, the cocreator of Microsoft, at the opening of his Rock and Roll museum in Seattle. Allen had gotten Frank Gehry to design this incredible new building. To me, it looked as if Gehry had taken a hundred-foot-tall beer can and crushed it into the shape of a woman and then made a building out of it. It was sexy, flowing metal curves, more like a giant sculpture than a building.
We didn’t play well that day, due to some technical snafus, so to save the experience, we broke out the socks for our encore. It was nostalgic to strip down with John. We hadn’t done the socks with him since the Mother’s Milk era. Afterward, there was a party in the museum. Chad was the first person to try one of the interactive exhibits, and it turned out that it was broken. But Chad was a little drunk at the time, and to this day, the curator of the museum is convinced that the Red Hot Chili Peppers got drunk and trashed his place, which, of course, we didn’t.
We did another one-off, this time a charity concert for children, at the behest of Pearl Jam in Seattle late in June. I had a short break before the next leg of our tour, and I lost my mind and went out on a weeklong drug tear. There was no major event that precipitated it, other than I had time on my hands, but I hadn’t started any real getting-well process for myself. I’d kept going out and coming back without addressing the issue of recovery. On June 27, it was time to report back for leg four of our tour, so there I was again, skinny and weak.
I got through the next three legs of the tour without slipping. We finished the U.S. tour, and my work was done, so it was time to start digging my grave again. The only commitment I had was to a VH1 awards show in November, so I started using until a few days before the show and then stopped, did a two-day detox using Ultram—the stuff that took me out in the first place—and Mickey Moused my way through the VH1 show.
Claire was understanding of my struggles, but thank God, she wasn’t about to go down that road herself, which was a testament to her spiritual awakening and her commitment to sanity. It was a real blessing that she didn’t follow me, because oftentimes, people go out together and one comes back and the other doesn’t. Or both of them never do.
At the beginning of December, Claire had to go back to New York on business, which was a recipe for disaster. No work, no girlfriend, no commitments: I went hog wild. Dece
Once again the troops were mobilized. Louie and Bob Forest started scouring all my haunts. The ironic part was that Bob lived half a block from the Paradise, so on one of their reconnaissance missions, they drove past the motel and bingo! They spotted my motorcycle. It’s funny how the mind of a dope fiend works. Later, Bob told me that when he saw my bike parked there, he was instantly jealous, because he had passed that motel a million times, thinking, “If only I could check in there and do speedballs for a couple of days.” He’d been clean for years, he had a beautiful girl who loved him. He wasn’t lying or stealing or being a miserable scourge, he was a productive, contributing, loving, giving member of society, but when he drove by, it was “If I could only check in there. That purple light looks so inviting.”
When Louie knocked on my door, I knew I was busted again. I asked him for half an hour, and he said he’d wait in the parking lot, so I finished up the heroin and stepped out to face the music. I was taken aback to see John out there, sitting in his black Mercedes. He was so loving and concerned.
“We’re going back to Louie’s house to talk,” he said. I got on my bike, and we caravaned over to Louie and Sherry’s place. I had done my running by then and was ready to be intervened upon. I was so high that I wasn’t that bummed out. I wanted to apologize to Claire, but she wasn’t having any of it. It was one of the rare occasions when I deserved the trouble she was giving me.