Scar Tissue (25 page)

It was also memorable because, shortly before George came out, I decided to interrupt the set and give a heartfelt, ten-minute-long rambling discourse on the dangers of doing drugs. I certainly hadn’t planned the speech, but something came over me as I was looking down at my black-and-blue arms, and I just started rapping.

“If you haven’t ever put a needle in your arm, don’t ever do it. Let me tell you from experience that you don’t have to do this, that’s where I am right now, and it’s horrible, and I don’t want anyone to ever have to feel like I’m feeling right now. Let me do the suffering for you, because this is something that no one needs to subject themselves to. If you’re doing this, okay, just do it, but don’t ever think that you’re going to be the same once you’ve gone this far.”

I proceeded to explain, in detail, why it was a big mistake to shoot drugs. I kept going, I couldn’t hang up on it. Meanwhile, the band was shooting me looks like “Oh my God, this fucking idiot.” After the show, I was afraid to face the guys. I thought they’d hate my guts for saying that stuff and being a hypocritical moron. In the middle of everyone giving me dirty looks, my friend Pete Weiss, the drummer from Thelonious Monster, came backstage.

“Swan, I’ve heard you say a lot of stuff from the stage, but that was the coolest shit you ever said,” he gushed. “That was riveting, you had every single ear in the place. They knew you were a fucked-up bastard but also that you cared and you were just trying to share some love. Don’t let that band of yours fool you, you did the right thing tonight.”

A month later, when it was time to tour the U.S. for
Freaky Styley,
my speechifying hadn’t changed anything for us. Both Hillel and I were strung out, but for the first time, I noticed that he wasn’t doing so well. He seemed weak, and while I was able to bounce right back from a run, he didn’t seem to have that Israeli fire stoking like he always had in the past. It became evident when we started our usual on-tour wrestling diversion. Hillel and I had teamed up; I was his manager, and he was set to wrestle Flea. Even though Flea was real solid, Hillel was bigger, and he had massive tree-trunk legs, like a tall Pan. We had a two-week buildup to this match, and when they wrestled in a hotel room one night, Flea destroyed him in as long as it takes to grab somebody and hurl him to the ground and pin him mercilessly to his death—ten seconds. I could tell that Hillel had no inner core of strength; he had been robbed by his addiction of the life force that allows you to at least defend yourself. It was a sad moment.

Hillel and I didn’t do heroin on the road, so we would drink bottles of Jägermeister, because that gave us the feeling closest to a heroin high. He’d always tease me that I was a sloppy drunk, because I’d get drunk and take off all my clothes in the motel and walk down the hall and knock on people’s doors, whereas he’d get drunk and act suave.

Leaving to go on tour was an ordeal for me then, mainly because of my volatile relationship with Jennifer. Even though I was staying mainly at Kim’s house, Jennifer was still my girlfriend. Jennifer became convinced that Kim and I were having sex. One day she came by Kim’s house, and Kim and I were sound asleep, naked and cuddling up. I know it would look like a bad scene if you were the girlfriend of the boy in the bed, but we were just having a nice drug high. No romance, just friendship.

Jennifer didn’t quite see it that way. Kim and I woke up to Jennifer shattering the bedroom window. She wouldn’t come in with a good, old-fashioned baseball bat; she made her entrance with an elaborately carved and painted bird-head cane from the Mayan lands. After she broke through the window, she proceeded to try to kill me with the cane.

When it was time to leave on a tour, I’d avoid Jennifer for days before, because I knew some kind of hatchet was going to be thrown at me. One time I was early to the breakout place, which was the EMI parking lot on Sunset. I was with Kim, and we were both completely high on heroin, sitting in the front seat of some car.

I guess in my half-awake drug reverie, I had somehow unbuttoned Kim’s blouse because I wanted to see her milky-white chest. I may even have been sucking on her nipple or holding her tit when, BAM, BAM, BAM, there was the loud sound of something rapping against the window. I looked up and it was Jennifer.

“You motherfucker, you’ve been gone for days, and I knew that this was going on,” she screamed.

“Jennifer, believe me, I may have had her shirt open, but I’ve never had sex with this girl, she’s just my friend,” I protested.

“You said you were coming home three days ago, and you’re leaving for three weeks, and by the way, I’m pregnant,” she screamed.

Meanwhile, the dispute had escalated to the sidewalk, and Jennifer was trying to kill me or at least scratch my eyeballs out.

“Jennifer, you see, this is why I don’t come home for three days before I leave, because I don’t want to get hit and you’re too hard to deal with and I know you’re not pregnant, because you just had your period and I haven’t had sex with you since you had your period, so don’t try to tell me you’re fucking pregnant.” I tried to reason with her, but she was a bull. Not that I can blame her.

There was no stopping her, and Kim was getting caught in the crossfire, so I ducked inside the EMI building. Jennifer followed me in and proceeded to pull my hair and scratch at my face. I was still high out of my mind and trying not to lose an eyeball or a tuft of hair, so I started running through the halls.

Jennifer chased me. For some reason, I had a bag of cookies, so I started throwing the cookies at her, to keep her far enough away that she couldn’t connect with any of her punches. She grabbed some blunt instrument, so I put my foot out to keep her from hitting me with it, and she went further nuts, if that was possible.

“Don’t you try to kick me in my stomach just because I’m pregnant. I know you want to get rid of the baby,” she screamed.

Thankfully, Lindy came to my rescue. “Jennifer, we’re only going away for a couple of weeks. I know how much this boy loves you. You’re all he ever talks about.” Somehow we made it out on tour in one piece.

Despite our touring, EMI never got behind the album, and they wouldn’t give us any money for a video. That didn’t stop us. Lindy had one of the first home-video cameras, and he shot footage on our tours and took that footage and cut it into a BBC documentary that had filmed us lip-synching “Jungle Man” at the Club Lingerie in Hollywood. He attached two VCRs in some back room at EMI, did an edit, and we had a video for a hundred dollars. Later, our good friend Dick Rude shot a video for “Catholic School Girls Rule” that featured a shot of me singing from the cross, among other blasphemous things, so that video got played only in clubs.

When we weren’t touring, I was pretty much staying high. It was like Groundhog Day every single day, exactly the same. Kim and I would wake up and have to look out of her window to see which direction the freeway traffic was going to determine whether it was dusk or dawn. Then we’d hustle up some money, get the drugs, shoot up, and go for a walk around Echo Park Lake, holding hands, in a complete haze. If I was supposed to show up to rehearsal, I would probably miss it. If I did show up, I’d be too stoned to do anything, so I’d nod out in the corner of the room or pass out on the loading dock.

Every day Kim and I would get high, and right in the middle of the euphoria, we’d vow that tomorrow we were going to get off that stuff. The next day we’d start the whole process over again. By now a lot of our friends were strung out on dope, and often the only time we’d see each other was when we were in our cars waiting to cop. We were each scoring from the same French guy, so we’d page him, and he’d call back and say, “Meet at Beverly and Sweetzer in ten minutes.” We’d drive down there, and on one corner we’d see Hillel and Maggie in their car and on another corner we’d see Bob Forest and his girlfriend. The dealer would go from car to car, and Kim and I would always get served last, because we were the most likely either to not have the right amount of money or to owe money; but we were patient and willing to take whatever we could get. Then we’d go back, and I’d be in charge of splitting the bag and loading the syringes. Because I knew I had a much greater tolerance to heroin than Kim, unbeknownst to her, I would always take 75 percent of the bag and give her the rest. Ironically, that practice almost killed her.

It happened at Hillel’s one night. He had moved into an infamous Hollywood haunt called the Milagro Castle, right off Gower. Marilyn Monroe had once lived there, but now it was populated with drug dealers and punk rockers. One night after we scored some China White, Kim and Hillel and I went to his place to do the drugs. Hillel had his bindle, and Kim had our bindle, and for some reason Hillel offered to share his with Kim, so I could have a whole bindle to myself. I was in such a frenzy over doing my stuff that it didn’t dawn on me that Hillel would actually split his bag fifty-fifty with Kim.

The high was amazing, and I remember Hillel and I going into the kitchen and sharing some Lucky Charms, dancing and talking and generally exuberant about how potent the drugs were. Then I realized that we hadn’t heard a peep out of Kim for a while. It dawned on me that she’d taken much more than she ever had before.

I rushed into the living room and saw Kim sitting upright in the chair, basically dead. She was cold and white, and her lips were blue, and she wasn’t breathing. Suddenly, I remembered all the techniques for reviving someone from a heroin overdose that Blackie had taught me when I was thirteen years old. I picked her up, dragged her into the shower, turned the cold water on her, and began giving her major mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I was frantically slapping her face and screaming, “Kim, don’t fucking die on me. I don’t want to have to call your mother and tell her that her daughter’s gone. I don’t want to have breakfast alone tomorrow.”

She started going in and out of consciousness. I was shaking her like a rag doll, screaming, “Stay awake!” Hillel had called 911, and when the paramedics showed up, I jumped out the window and ran away because I had outstanding warrants out for my arrest for moving violations. Hillel went to the hospital with her, and they got her up and running. About twelve hours later, I called her room in the hospital.

“Come and get me. Those motherfuckers ruined my high,” she said. “I’m sick. We need to go cop.” Amazingly enough, it never occurred to me that there might have been a problem there.

From time to time, I’d make halfhearted attempts to get clean. One of them was at the urging of Flea, who suggested that I might want to get off the stuff for a while and reconnect with what we were doing as bandmates. He was living in this cute apartment on Carmen Street, and he proposed that I come and kick on his futon. I showed up with a couple of bottles of NyQuil and said, “Flea, this is going to be ugly. I’m not going to be able to sleep, and I’m going to be in serious pain. Are you sure you want me in your house?”

He was willing, so we listened to music and I kicked. After a while, Flea said I should get an apartment in the building, so I did. Of course, Jennifer promptly moved in with me. Unfortunately, a new dope dealer named Dominique, who had usurped all the other French dealers, lived only about a block away.

Then it was time to go out on another tour leg. The night before, Jennifer and I were having one of those marathon sex/heroin sessions. We’d have sex for a couple of hours, and then we’d fight for an hour about me leaving the next day, and she’d be screaming as loudly during the sex as she was when she was yelling at me for going on tour. It was hard to distinguish when we were fighting and when we were having sex. So a neighbor who hated me called the cops on what he thought was a domestic-violence thing.

I was in the house, surrounded by tons of syringes and spoons and heroin, when the cops came to the door.

“We got a domestic-violence call here,” the one cop announced.

“What are you talking about, domestic violence? It’s me and my girlfriend, and that’s that,” I said.

“Can we come in and take a look around?” the cop asked.

I was saying no when Jennifer came to the door. She was obviously not abused, but she was hotheaded and still screaming at me. One cop was trying to poke his head in the door and shine his flashlight on Jennifer. In the meantime, the other cop had run a check on me and found the outstanding warrants, so they arrested me on the spot and dragged me out in handcuffs, half naked. All the neighbors were watching, convinced I was getting arrested for beating up a girl. Jennifer and I were screaming at each other as they took me away. It was just a bad episode of
COPS.
Thankfully, Lindy bailed me out, and we left on tour the next day, but during that period of my life, you had to plan on something like that happening before a tour.

Or when we got back from a tour. We were returning from a
Freaky Styley
tour leg when I ran into Bob Forest, who was waiting for us at the EMI parking lot. Bob was the classic shit-stirrer of the city. If he could stir the pot, if he could drop a hint, if he could make drama and conflict, he would. He loved it because, God knows, he was falling apart at the seams, and I’m sure it took some of the attention away from him.

Bob knew about my indiscretions on the road, but I was surprised when he came up to me and said, “Okay, you’re out there doing all that crazy stuff. Don’t you ever worry about Jennifer?” That was the last thing I would have worried about. In my mind, she would never do anything to betray me, even though I was cheating on her right, left, and center.

He smirked. “I’ve got some bad news for you, buddy.”

My heart started pounding in my chest.

“My friend, the unusual hour is upon us when I’m going to share with you information you might not be too keen on,” he continued. “Maybe a certain someone wasn’t so loyal to you while you were away, either.”

“You’re crazy,” I stammered. “Jennifer would rather cut her own wrists than take interest in another man. She loves me with every cell in her body. She’s physiologically and emotionally incapable of giving herself to another man.”