Scar Tissue (19 page)
The party finally came to an end, and I passed out in a gnarly state of discomfort. After sleeping for a few hours, I heard loud banging on my door. It was Greg, and he wanted his money. I was thinking that if I didn’t answer the door, he’d go away, I could outpatience him. Wrong. He kept coming back periodically, hitting the door harder each time. Eventually, I heard the cracking of wood. I peeked up from the bed and saw a big ax coming right through my beautiful thick wooden door. Hmm. Did not look good. I figured I could stay right there in bed and he’d rage in and chop me up with that ax because I had no money or guitar to hock, or I could charge him and try to turn the whole thing around and stand a chance of surviving.
I flew to the door, threw it open, and screamed, “You bastard! Look what you’re doing to my door!”
The air seemed to deflate from this enraged coke fiend. He looked at the door and then at me and said, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I am going to fix that door right now.”
I decided to parlay my advantage. “What were you thinking?” I said. “Now you owe me money for this.”
Greg looked confused. “No, you owe me money.”
“Owe you money? Look at what you did to my door, my friend. I think we should just call it even.”
“I don’t know . . . I owe my guy all that money . . .”
“Look, keep the skis. Get out of here, you destroyed my door.”
Greg turned around and walked off like a puppy dog with an ax in his hand. There was a big sliver that had been chopped out of my door, and you could see right into my place, so I got some cardboard and taped it up. Then I went back to sleep.
That wasn’t an atypical day at the Outpost, I’m sad to say. A lot of my days revolved around hanging out with Bob, doing drugs at night, waking up the next day with no money, and scraping together ninety-nine cents to go downstairs and get a slice of pizza.
Flea was no longer a participant in our insanity. While we were still living at La Leyenda, he had read about this D.C. band called Minor Threat, who were promulgating an anti-drug philosophy in a song called “Straight Edge.” Flea was so demoralized and depressed from all these drugs we had been doing that he tore their lyrics out of the magazine and shaved his head and tried to embrace this not-getting-high philosophy. It didn’t stick, but it did stop him from going further down. He leveled off and did a lot less drugs, whereas Bob and I were out of control. One time while I was at the Outpost, I had been shooting coke and speed, and I ran out of everything. There comes a point when you want to keep shooting something, even if you’re high, just to get a new rush. Someone had given me a hit of acid and I had a bottle of vodka, so I took the acid, put it in a spoon, poured some vodka in the spoon, dissolved that blotter acid as best I could, and shot the LSD mixed with vodka. It was the first time I ever peaked on acid in one second. And instead of tasting heroin or cocaine or speed in the back of my mouth, I was tasting vodka.
Somewhere along the line, I ran into some China White heroin again. I can remember spending all my money on coke and lying in bed, not being able to sleep. I’d call Jennifer in the Valley and ask her to come and take care of me, which meant bringing by some money so I could get some heroin to come down. It would usually be about four in the morning, and Hollywood Boulevard was dead quiet, and I was an empty soul lying on the mattress, waiting to hear the sound of her MG. I was such a dope fiend that I could hear that distinctive sound of her car when she got off the freeway, ten minutes before she’d show up. And she’d give me twenty or forty or sixty dollars, whatever she had. She didn’t have a drug problem at this point, so she would be there to rescue me. That was our pattern, me listening for the car to come up, and this sensation of absolute relief when I knew she was parking downstairs.
By now my drug-shooting escapades were starting to impinge on the band. I’d miss a rehearsal, then I’d go AWOL for a while, and I was starting to alienate myself from Flea. We had the record deal and we had work to do, and I would be lying on the floor of my Outpost space, rolled up in some blankets after a wretched night of abuse, trying to get some sleep. One day I was in that situation and there was a knock on the door. It was Flea. He came into the room, which was a squalid mess, and he looked at me. “Anthony, get up.”
I sat up.
“I can’t do this with you anymore. You’re too fucked up. I gotta quit the band.”
I woke up, because that wasn’t what I was expecting him to say. I thought he’d say, “Dude, you’re a mess, we gotta talk about you not getting quite so high anymore,” but when he said he had to quit the band, all of my cells reverberated and I bolted up. That was the first taste of the fact that I could be destroying the dream we had created of this amazing funk band that was all about dancing and energy and sex. I wanted to be in that band with Flea more than anything. But how could I communicate that to him? Then it popped into my mind.
“Flea, you can’t quit,” I pleaded. “I’m going to be the James Brown of the eighties.”
How could he argue with that?
After
we signed our record deal, Flea and I made the EMI offices our home away from home. A few people there were friendly to us, but we got the distinct feeling that if there was a totem pole of bands on their label, we weren’t on it, let alone at the bottom of it. We even had trouble getting past the security guards at the front door. Every time we’d go there, we’d walk past a giant Rolls-Royce parked by the entrance. We’d ask whose car that was, and they’d say, “Oh, that’s Jim Mazza’s. He runs the company.” But whenever we asked to meet him, we were told that we didn’t need to, he wasn’t involved in the day-to-day decision-making of any band. I can guarantee you that he did not know there was a band on his label called Red Hot Chili Peppers.
One day Flea and I went there in the afternoon, and Jamie Cohen, who had signed us, was out. We demanded to see a higher-up, and his secretary came out. “He’s not available. He’s in a very important board meeting with the entire staff of EMI International. They’ve all flown in for this meeting,” she said.
Flea and I ducked around the corner and conferred and decided to drastically increase our visibility at EMI. So we went into the little bathroom, took off our clothes, went straight for the door, ran in, jumped up on the table, and ran up and down, hooting and hollering. Then we looked down and realized that it wasn’t just men at that meeting. It was the entire multicultural EMI team from around the world, and they all had their briefcases and papers and graphs and charts and pointers and pencils, and we had trashed everyone’s stuff. When this sank in, we jumped off the table, ran out of the room, and struggled to put on our underwear while being chased by the security guards, who had been notified of our intrusion.
We took off like two pieces of mercury and outran the guards through the parking lot and up Hollywood Boulevard until we got to Waddle’s Park. Then we sat down and lit up a big, fat joint of green Hawaiian weed to celebrate the act of letting EMI know who we were. Halfway through the joint, I started getting a little paranoid.
“That was a good idea, wasn’t it?” I asked Flea. “But what if they kick us off the label? They looked pretty upset. Come to think of it, they were screaming at us. Oh, God, what if we don’t have a deal anymore?” When we came down off the pot high, we called Lindy to find out if we’d been dropped yet.
But it all blew over, and we got ready to make our first album. Jamie and Lindy wanted to know who we wanted to produce the album, and Flea and I both, without hesitation, recommended Andy Gill, the guitar player from Gang of Four. Their first album,
Entertainment,
was what had inspired me to get into dancing back when I was living with Donde. The music was so angular and hard and edgy, the epitome of that English art school funk, and Gill’s lyrics were great and sociopolitical, but in a way that didn’t seem like they were taking themselves too seriously.
Lindy got in touch with Gill’s manager, and he agreed to produce us, which we thought was a great victory. When we met with him and he made disparaging comments about his earlier work, we should have seen the writing on the wall. But we started doing preproduction on the album at the SIR Studios, which were on Santa Monica, right near Vine, just a few blocks from my new house with Jennifer. I had a little money from the record deal, and Jennifer sold her MG, and we scraped together enough to rent a small house on Lexington Avenue, in a pretty gnarly area of Hollywood that was home to all varieties of prostitutes, from transsexuals to young boys.
Andy Gill started to go about this business of preproduction with Cliff and Jack and Flea and me, but it made no sense to me. I didn’t really know what the hell a producer even did. It was a weird, uncomfortable situation for me, and the pressure started affecting me. I went on horrible drug binges, disappearing for days on end. It usually involved shooting coke, because I had gotten a few good coke connections. Bob Forest had turned me on to a guy who was a band member in a prominent L.A. rock group. He lived in a huge high-rise in Hollywood. I was such a scammer and a weasel that he ultimately refused to even let me up to his apartment. Whenever I showed up, he’d drop a can that was attached to a string from his balcony, and I’d have to put my money in, and only then would he throw the coke down. But my most reliable source of coke was the valet parking operation at a nearby shopping plaza. Someone told me that when you pulled up to park your car, all you had to say was “I need a ticket” or “I need a half a ticket,” and that was code for buying cocaine. I’d go there morning, noon, and night and score lots of tickets.
Heroin began entering the picture more, too. Jennifer hated me when I’d shoot cocaine, because I would disappear and act weird and not be the most warm and reachable person. She wasn’t afraid to get in my face and scream and throw punches at me. But one night we had been at the Power Tools Club downtown, and I ran into Fab, who had recently moved into a huge loft that was a block away from the club. We went over to his house and he sold me a little itty-bitty miniature micro-bindle of the strongest China White heroin that you’d ever want to find, so strong that you didn’t even have to inject it.
We snorted some, and it was like sinking into heaven. Jennifer loved it, and we went home and had sex for twelve straight hours, the beginning of the never-ending heroin sex merry-go-round that she and I would partake in. But that initial high is the feeling that you’re doomed to be chasing for the rest of your life, because the next time you do it, it’s good but not quite like that. Even still, China White was so cheap, and seemed so harmless. It wasn’t like I was on the streets doing weird shit or sticking needles in my arm and ending up with a hundred bruises and blood dripping all over the place. It seemed so much more elegant to hang out at this loft with the paintings and the French people and sniff a little stuff and feel euphoric, and it lasted and lasted, and when you woke up in the morning, you still had some money in your pocket. China White was such a deceiving organism. At first it showed you the heaven, it didn’t show you the hell.
Jennifer and I started doing more heroin, but I would still go on these maniacal coke binges. When I could, I’d steal Jennifer’s new car, an old taxicab that she called the Circus Peanut because it was the color of those marshmallow candies. When I couldn’t, I’d be forced to walk to my new dealer, a writer who lived a few miles from me. He dealt both heroin and coke, which was pretty convenient for me. But I’d never get good deals, since he was using himself. Of course, I was my typical pain-in-the-ass client self, always waking him up or generally harassing him until he’d let me in.
One day I was shooting coke at his place, but I got all crazy and he kicked me out. I had been fastidious about using sterile rigs and sterile cotton when I first started shooting up, but by now I didn’t care much. If I had to, I’d use a syringe that I found in the street. Instead of sterilized cotton, I’d use a section of my sock or, more commonly, the filter tip of a cigarette. At first I’d use only sterilized spring water to dissolve the stuff in, but now I’d just pull the back off a toilet or look for a lawn sprinkler or even a puddle.
This crazy behavior began to encroach on my professional life. I started missing rehearsals and writing sessions. Then I even began to miss some live shows, including a big punk-rock show at the Olympic Auditorium downtown, where we were playing with our friends the Circle Jerks and Suicidal Tendencies.
I had started a binge a couple of days before, and when the day of the show came, I just could not stop using. I kept telling myself, “Okay, this is the last gram of stuff I’m going to do, and then I’m going to make it to the show.” Letting the band down like that was the most gut-wrenching feeling I ever had. But Keith Morris, my friend from the Circle Jerks, filled in for me. He just sang the same line, “What you see is what you get,” over and over again for every song. It wasn’t the only time I’d miss a gig because I was on a run. We played Long Beach early on, and I was a no-show, so kids from the audience were invited up to sing the lyrics. Another time Lindy’s brother sang.
We decided to record the album at El Dorado Studios, which is right on Hollywood and Vine. El Dorado was a classic old Hollywood studio with nice vintage equipment. For our engineer, we hired Dave Jerden, a soft-spoken, experienced, and competent man behind the board. Andy Gill was much different than we had expected. He was approachable, but he was also very English, semi-aloof, clearly intelligent, but with no edge. We were these aggressive, volatile individuals, and then there was this soft, smarty-pants English guy. Even though we all liked him and he was interested in us, he wasn’t becoming the fifth finger on our hand. He certainly didn’t embrace our musical aesthetic or ideology. It was almost like it was beneath him. He had been there, done that, and that was fine, but let’s move on, go somewhere else. And we were like “Somewhere else? This is who we are!” So there was a little tension.
