Scar Tissue (28 page)
From “Fight Like a Brave”
If you’re sick-a-sick ’n’ tired of being sick and tired
If you’re sick of all the bullshit and you’re sick of all the lies
It’s better late than never to set-a-set it straight
You know the lie is dead so give yourself a break
Get it through your head, get it off your chest
Get it out your arm because it’s time to start fresh
You want to stop dying, the life you could be livin’
I’m here to tell a story but I’m also here to listen
No, I’m not your preacher and I’m not your physician
I’m just trying to reach you, I’m a rebel with a mission
Fight like a brave—don’t be a slave
No one can tell you you’ve got to be afraid
When I got back to L.A., within two months I was shooting heroin and cocaine again. My sobriety hadn’t stuck for a long time, but now I knew there was a way out of the madness if I wanted it and if I was willing to do the work to get it. I had been given the tools; I just didn’t want to use them yet.
The Organic Anti–Beat Box Band
Rejoining
the band wasn’t the only thing that I talked to Flea about when he called me in Michigan. While I was away, Flea had a part in a science-fiction movie called
Stranded,
and he’d met a beautiful young actress named Ione Skye who he was certain was my type. We made plans for an introduction when I came home.
When I got back to L.A., I moved in with Lindy, who was nice enough to let me stay in the spare room of his two-bedroom apartment in Studio City. Of course, that meant he had to fend off all the calls from Jennifer. I had no desire to talk to her, especially after I met Ione. From the moment I laid eyes on Ione, I knew that goddess was going to be my girlfriend. It was a few days before her sixteenth birthday, and she looked like she’d come out of a fairy-tale book. Whereas Jennifer was this exquisitely manicured, modern, self-created sculpture of a punk-rock superstar, Ione was more of an au naturel, soft, soulful forest nymph. She had long, flowing curly brunette hair, a beautiful large flirtatious rack, and an overbite. I was always a sucker for an overbite.
Ione came from an alternative-lifestyle Hollywood family. Her dad was the folksinger Donovan, but he wasn’t really in the picture. Her mother, Enid, was a beautiful hippie with blond ringlet hair. Ione had a brother named after her dad. They all lived in this great old Craftsman house on North Wilton, which was suffused with a warm, rustic, loving family vibe. Ione dressed like a hippie child and had an ethereal sixth sense about her, an extra gift. She was also way too sexually curious about everything. It was an energy that she didn’t verbalize, but it worked for me at that age. She was probably the most beautiful, smart, sexy, caring, and nurturing young girl in all of Hollywood, and our attraction was mutual, thank God. A few days after we met, she was introducing me at her birthday party as her boyfriend. It was mind-blowing, how quickly I fell completely and deeply in love.
Now I was ready to go back to work. I sat down with our producer, Michael Beinhorn, and we went over the status of the songs. We were supposed to go into the studio and cut basic tracks in ten days, so I planned to write throughout the recording process. It wasn’t an overwhelming amount of work; back then you needed only twelve songs for a record. We worked on “Fight Like a Brave,” and Beinhorn put a football-rally chanting chorus on it. “Me and My Friends,” a song that I’d written while driving home from San Francisco with my old friend Joe Walters, came together nicely. “Funky Crime” was basically a lyrical description of a conversation that we’d had with George Clinton, in which he maintained that music itself was color-blind but the media and the radio stations segregate it based on their perceptions of the artists. “Backwoods” was a song about the roots of rock and roll, and “Skinny Sweaty Man” was my ode to Hillel. I wrote another song, “No Chump Love Sucker,” that was also in Hillel’s honor. He had just been left high and dry and shattered by a girlfriend who dumped him for a guy who had more money and more drugs. So it was a revenge song against that type of evil, materialistic woman.
“Behind the Sun” was a definite branching out for us. Hillel had this unusual, melodic riff, and Beinhorn felt it was a song that could be a hit. He worked a lot with me on the melody, knowing that it wasn’t my forte to get wrapped up in a pretty song. I guess my reputation at that time was for songs like “Party on Your Pussy,” which EMI refused to put on the record until we changed the title to “Special Secret Song Inside.” But it wasn’t entirely accurate to think that all of our songs were raunchy. “Love Trilogy” became one of our all-time favorite songs. The music started off like a reggae thing, then it went into hard-core funk and ended up in speed metal. For years, whenever someone would question our lyrics, Flea would say, “Read ‘Love Trilogy’ and you’ll know what real lyrics are all about.” It’s about loving the things that aren’t necessarily perfect or always lovable.
From “Love Trilogy”
My love is death to apartheid rule
My love is deepest death, the ocean blues
My love is the Zulu groove
My love is coop-a-loop move
My love is lightning’s blues
My love is the pussy juice
My love can’t be refused
After fifty days of being sober, I thought, “That’s a nice number. I think I should honor that number.” I decided it was a good time to do drugs. My plan was to get high for a day or two and then go back to work. What I found was that once I started, I couldn’t stop, and it really made a mess of the beginning of the recording process. The songs were amazing; Hillel was on fire; we were all in love with recording in the basement of Capitol Studios, another incredibly historical monument of Hollywood recording; Beinhorn was working his ass off; and I went and got high and couldn’t stop. Finally, I decided to do a bunch of heroin, get some sleep, and face yet another mess I’d made.
I went downtown and found an El Salvadoran who hooked me up, and I was in that opiate haze one more time. But all I could think about was the fact that I was supposed to be in the studio. I started hearing Jackie Irons’s beat in my head for a song we were working on called “The Organic Anti–Beat Box Band.” I sat in a downtown park, surrounded by an odd mixture of park people, and wrote the lyrics. I felt excruciating pain and guilt and shame behind not being there for the beginning of the record, but I thought if I showed up with something good to offer, the heat would diminish. And it did. I crashed at Lindy’s, then got up and apologized and pulled it together for the rest of the session.
Part of the reason I relapsed was because I didn’t have a support system. I didn’t know anybody who was sober. I had ventured out to a couple of meetings on my own, but I had a lifetime of the mind-set “I can take care of whatever is wrong all by myself, and I don’t need any of you yokels to guide me, because I don’t, at this moment in time, want what you have.” I went back into a self-imposed abstinence, which equaled what they call a “dry drunk.” It’s an accident waiting to happen. You’re not putting the stuff into you that makes you bonkers, but you’re not dealing with any of the shit that’s been in there your whole life and makes you want to get high in the first place.
We had a great time making the record. It was inspiring to see Jack Irons back in the mix. He added such an important and different element to our chemistry. Hillel, Flea, and I were all pretty self-obsessed maniacs. Jack was the one wholesome fellow. He turned out to be messed up but in a different way. He was a nice element, really hardworking and joyful and supportive.
When it came time to record the vocals, I used Hillel as my bandmate/vocal producer. Every time I did a vocal, we both felt like I was going to a new place and that these were the best vocal expressions I’d ever put down on tape. Hillel was ecstatic, running in between takes, going, “I’m telling you, this is the most beautiful thing we’ve ever done. I can’t wait to release this record.”
Of course, on the last day, when the last note was done and in the can and our jobs were finished, Hillel and I found a French dealer and got loaded on some China White, reveling in our accomplishment. That opened up the floodgates. While I was still staying at Lindy’s house, I orchestrated an absolutely gory scenario of speedballing. I didn’t have a lot of money and I didn’t have an automobile, so I’d wake up in the middle of the night, grab some spoons from the kitchen, and clean out Lindy’s bucket of change. Then I’d take a fishing pole out of his closet, crack his bedroom door open, and fish his car keys off his dresser, feeling miserable that I was such a freak that I could be doing this to the poor bastard who was trying to help me out.
Once you’ve seen a solution to the disease that’s tearing you apart, relapsing is never fun. You know there’s an alternative to the way you’re living and that you’re going against something you’ve been given for free by the universe, this key to the kingdom. Drug addiction is a progressive disease, so every time you go out, it gets a little uglier than it was before; it’s not like you go back to the early days of using, when there was less of a price to pay. It isn’t fun anymore, but it’s still desperately exciting. Once you put that first drug or drink in your body, you don’t have to worry about the girlfriend or the career or the family or the bills. All those mundane aspects of life disappear. Now you have one job, and that’s to keep chucking the coal in the engine, because you don’t want this train to stop. If it stops, then you’re going to have to feel all that other shit.
That chase is always exciting. There are cops and bad guys and freaks and hookers. You’re diving into a big insidious video game, but again, you’re being tricked into thinking that you’re doing something cool, since the price is always bigger than the payoff. You immediately give up your love and your light and your beauty, and you become a dark black hole in the universe, sucking up bad energy and not walking around putting a smile on someone’s face or helping someone out or teaching someone something that’s going to help his or her life. You’re not creating the ripple of love; you’re creating the vacuum of shit. I want to describe both sides of how I felt, but it’s important to know that in the end all the romantic glorification of dope fiendery amounts to nothing but a hole of shit. It has to appear enticing, because that’s why God or the universe, creative intelligence or whatever you want to call it, put that energy here. It’s a learning tool, and you can either kill yourself with it or you can turn yourself into a free person with it. I don’t think drug addiction is inherently useless, but it’s a rough row to hoe.
In my deluded mind, I thought that if I chipped away at a little bit of dope every now and again, I wouldn’t go on these insane speedball binges and my life wouldn’t spiral out of control. I moved into Ione’s house, and a couple of times a week, I’d go out and buy forty dollars’ worth of China White, smoke it, get high all night long, and then go to sleep and feel all right. About a month into living with Ione, she convinced me that I shouldn’t go off and do that, so the compromise was I’d get the dope and bring it back and smoke it in bed with her. We used to have these all-night sessions when I’d smoke the dope and then we’d cuddle up in bed and read books like
Interview with the Vampire
and
Catcher in the Rye
to each other, all night long, until the sun came up.
Despite the occasional heroin smoking, I was keeping it relatively together while I was at Ione’s house. We had lots of glorious days together. I’d wake up next to her in bed and think, “Jesus Christ, she is such an angel, and I’m so in love with her.” Then we’d lie in bed and sing along to Bob Marley’s record
Kaya
every morning, holding each other tight. We’d drive around in her little Toyota and have lunch and smoke pot together and make love all over the city. I was still carrying around that “one foot on a banana peel, one foot in the grave” energy, but I was trying to be respectful of this new place in my life. On one of those days, we had just smoked some pot, and I was thanking my lucky stars that this was where my life was at that moment, when the Stevie Wonder song “I Believe (When I Fall in Love It Will Be Forever)” came on the radio. We pulled over and cranked up the radio and started weeping profusely because we were so in love and this song was describing our feelings.
A week later, I’d disappear into the downtown maze of ghetto dope hell. I’d borrow her car in the middle of the night and always mean to get it right back, but sometimes I’d be gone for days. That was when I started partnering up with this Mexican mafia drug dealer named Mario. I knew Mario from my downtown runs with Kim Jones. Mario always gave me a great deal, charging me the least amount of money for the most amount of drugs. I could have stayed in Hollywood, it was full of hookers who would deliver heroin to your house. But I didn’t want to have a lot of dealers in my life and I’d convinced myself that if I went downtown it would only be for that one time, I wasn’t really going back to that forlorn life.
