Scar Tissue (29 page)

When we weren’t shooting up in his drug-infested apartment, Mario knew this safety zone beneath a freeway bridge, some weird hideaway that the LAPD never patrolled. He explained to me that no non-Mexican gang members were allowed there, so in order for me to get in, we had to lie and tell them that I was engaged to his sister. We walked up to the big guys guarding the gate, told them Mario was my future brother-in-law, and they let us in. Sheltered beneath that overpass right in the middle of the city, I spent countless days lying on a bunch of dirty mattresses and shooting up with a bunch of killers.

About the only thing that could tear me away from this endless cycle of abuse was to go out on tour. When it was time to start the touring for
Uplift,
a damn limousine came to pick me up for the trip to the airport. I figured if we were going out on tour in a limo, something must be working, and it was. We played some of the greatest shows of our lives on that tour, mainly because Hillel and I weren’t obsessed with getting high. We drank a lot and did coke whenever we could, smoked a lot of pot, and maybe had one shipment of dope sent out. But we crisscrossed the country, charging these small stages for hundreds of willing and beautiful customers. Kids would come out of the woodwork to rock out with this different outfit from Hollywood. We weren’t part of the punk-rock movement, or the post-punk movement, we were a different animal. I had no idea how these kids even knew about us, but they were the best audiences you could ever ask for—so much heart, so much spirit, so much enthusiasm, they’d just show up and give everything they had.

We did a lot of crazy things to while away the time while we were on tour. When we got to Texas, I decided to shave off all my pubic hair. I collected it and put it in a Ziploc bag and gave it to our roadie Nickie Beat as the “merch” for that night. He went out to the concession booth and tacked it up on the wall, next to the T-shirts, and started hawking “Anthony’s pubic hair, only twenty-five dollars.” At the end of the night, he reported that he couldn’t get the money, but he did get panties from three different girls, with the promise that they’d bring their entire families to the next show.

On that tour, we came up with a new touring pastime called Tongue in the Dirt. In the past, a lot of our games and challenges revolved around food. On the
Freaky Styley
tour, we had something called the Truck Stop Vomiting Club. We’d typically eat horrible, greasy, disgusting food, and we knew it was no good for us, so we’d go on to the truck stop and upchuck it by whatever means necessary. Whether it was fingers down the throat, or thinking about something disgusting, your manhood was defined by your ability to make yourself vomit. Flea was always the hair trigger of these events. All he had to do was look at an egg and he was vomiting all over the place.

Then Hillel came up with something called the Grizzlers. Every day, when we’d hit a greasy spoon, to perk up the atmosphere of our experience, we’d turn our order into a rhyme. So we’d be in Utah, and the waitress would be hovering over us, waiting for the order, and we’d say something like “I don’t know any Chinese, but I’ve worked with blacks, so give me scrambled eggs with a side of flapjacks.” Then we’d end it with “Because we’re the Grizzlers.” We’d go around the table, and everyone would have a minute or two to compose a Grizzler verse.

Tongue in the Dirt evolved out of challenges Flea and I gave each other back in high school. I remember one time I was on a city bus with Flea when we were about fifteen, and I was a little under the weather and coughed up a hideous cookie of congealed phlegm into my hand. We were both looking at this fucked-up loogie with awe when I challenged Flea: “If you’ve got any balls at all, you’ll eat this right out of my hand, because you’re the only motherfucker crazy enough to do that.” And he did! Tongue in the Dirt was born without our even knowing it.

In our newest refinement of the challenge, we’d get a few roadies and some of the girls who were traveling or visiting with us and form an irregular circle. If we were throwing a football around, we’d line up forty feet apart. If it was some awkward chunk of metal we’d found on the side of the road, we’d be closer together. The object of the game was to catch the object without dropping it. It was a group decision whether a particular throw was catchable or not. If a throw was not catchable, the person who threw would lose. But if someone fumbled a catchable throw, then he or she would lose. The loser would, as the name of the game implied, have to get down on hands and knees and lay his or her tongue flat down in the dirt and then come up and show the other players.

As the game developed, the more dirt you took in, the greater your honor. The losers began eating bugs off the grilles of cars or licking the entire circumference of a trash can, anything that would entertain their brethren with an audacious display of absurd bravado. It was a terrific game, because you could play it with a hockey puck or a football, and it was all about psyching out your opponents and making the unexpected throw and putting a spin on it. It was a great way to spend time with friends and destress. Tongue in the Dirt maintained its presence in the camp for a very long time.

It was during the
Uplift
tour that I had the first inklings that we were becoming a tiny bit famous. Girls would show up backstage and offer themselves to us. Suddenly, I became disinterested. Even under the influence, I couldn’t be persuaded to sleep with these girls, because they would come up to me and go, “You’re Anthony Kiedis. I want to fuck you. Let’s go.” I’d be like “Hmm. No. I’m going somewhere, and I think your friends are waiting for you.” It was like when Groucho said he’d never join a club that would have him as a member. That was me. I wanted something that I couldn’t have. I’d rather have a challenge or even failure than something that was too freely given. Most of the time.

The longer we were on that tour, the more our popularity increased. In the South, we had been booked into theaters instead of clubs. By the time we hit Denver, Lindy was ecstatic, because we had to move our show to a huge theater thanks to the ticket demand. That night, after the show, Hillel and I were sitting backstage, congratulating each other on our newfound success, when a girl came storming backstage.

“Anthony, I have to show you something,” she screamed. “I’m so in love with you. Look what I did!” She pulled down her pants, and there was my name tattooed right over the old pubic mound. There was a guy standing a few paces behind her. “This is my boyfriend, but he doesn’t care. I’m all yours if you want me,” she said.

“Yeah, thumbs up, dude. Take her, she loves you,” this guy said.

I didn’t take him up on his offer, but Hillel and I looked at each other and realized that maybe all that touring for the last three albums had finally amounted to something. We still weren’t getting radio airplay, but we were definitely infiltrating the psyche of American youth.

Touring was usually not a lucrative endeavor for us. After
Freaky Styley,
we each got three grand. But following this tour, Lindy announced that after expenses and including T-shirt sales, we were getting twenty-two thousand.

“To split?” I asked.

“No, we each get twenty-two thousand,” Lindy said.

That was a quantum leap in finances for us, so my first order of business was to get a nice place to live for my angel girlfriend and me. But every time I’d go look at a place, they’d hand me a long application. I thought I could just fork over some dough and the house would be mine, but every landlord was asking for me to list my last five residences, along with my last five places of employment. Okay: The last place I lived was with my girlfriend’s mother, before that was my manager’s couch, before that a squat in Pasadena, before that I was homeless, before that it was another girlfriend’s mother, before that it was Flea’s sister’s bed, before that a house that didn’t have a door. My references weren’t looking too good. They’d ask for bank-account numbers and credit cards, but I didn’t even own a checkbook then. All I had was twenty-two thousand dollars in cash.

Eventually, I went to see a two-bedroom house on Orange Drive. It was a ’30s triplex, very art deco, with wood floors and an old tiled bathroom. It was paradise. And it was a thousand dollars a month. After I inspected the place, the Russian landlord handed me an application, but I gave it right back to him.

“I can’t fill this out. It doesn’t work for me,” I told him.

“Then you can’t have the house.” He shrugged. “Get out of here.”

I pulled out a shoe box with five thousand dollars in cash. “This is the first five months’ rent. If you don’t like me after five months, then kick me the hell out,” I offered.

He looked at the five grand. “The house is yours,” he said.

So I had our dream house, and I still had a lot of money. I decided to celebrate my new acquisition with the yin/yang of drug use—a nice pile of heroin and cocaine. Once again, I started speedballing like a maniac. There was no furniture in the house, and I didn’t even know how to get the electricity turned on in my name, so I went out and bought five watermelons and dozens of candles. I cut the watermelons in half the long way, and set them all over the floor of the house and shoved candles into their cores. So now the entire house was a sea of halved watermelons and candlelight. I inaugurated the bathroom by shooting up a ton of coke and dope.

I picked up Ione and brought her back to our dream house. She looked a little skeptical, especially because there were mad streaks of blood down both of my arms, and my eyeballs were spinning around in my head.

“I’m with you, we’re in this together, it’s going to be okay, but my mom is not having this,” she said. “In fact, she’s on her way down here right now.”

“Baby, don’t you worry about a thing. I’ll handle the mom. This is my forte,” I said. “They always told me I should have been a lawyer. Watch me work.”

Enid pulled up in front of the house, and I marched out into the street, my shirt covered in blood, with crazy eyes and matted hair. She got out of her car and stood under the streetlight with her arms crossed, just beside herself.

“Enid, it’s going to be okay,” I reassured her. “I love your daughter with all of my heart. I would die for your girl. She’s my baby, and I’ll take care of her as good as you did.”

She looked at the blood and then at me. “But you have a problem. You’re not well.”

“Enid, trust me. This is a passing phase,” I said.

Enid was peeking past me into the house and staring at the watermelons and candles, probably convinced this was some sort of Satanic ritual sacrifice of the virgin. But somehow, in the midst of this debauched debacle, I was able to come to some state of clarity and convince Enid that things were going to be okay. I sent her home and kept her daughter, and we started our life together in that house.

The band’s suspicions that we were moving to another level of popularity were confirmed when KROC asked us to play a daytime promotional show at the Palamino in the Valley, a classic old-school, beer-drinking, barroom-brawling cowboy venue where people like Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles had played on their way up. The day of the show, we drove to the gig and were within a half a mile of the venue when we got caught in a massive traffic jam. It was like the Rose Bowl Parade. Traffic was stopped, and there were cops on horseback, and we were indignant because we had to get to our show. Then we realized that all the traffic was from people converging on the Palomino for
our
show. Between the power of KROC and the celebrated sons of the moment returning from their tour, we had stopped traffic.

I must have gone on a pretty serious dope bender around this time, because in pictures of me from that show, I was frighteningly thin. Mario had reentered my life, and I was back to borrowing Ione’s car and going on runs with him. One day, in the midst of an outing, we were running out of money, so he suggested that we go deeper into the jungle of downtown, where the drugs were stronger and less expensive. We piled into Ione’s Toyota and drove down to skid row, where 90 percent of the people on the street looked like extras from
The Night of the Living Dead
. Even though it was broad daylight, Mario and I looked like an unlikely duo to be rolling through those streets. I had taken all of my drugs and syringes and spoons and put them up under the driver’s-side visor of the car. Mario was in the passenger seat, scanning the streets like a computer for the right guy. I was driving cautiously, but all of a sudden, I saw a cop car in the rearview mirror. I alerted Mario, and he told me to make a left, so I dutifully put on the signal, got in the proper lane, and made the turn. The cops kept following us.

“Pull over by this alley,” Mario said. As soon as I got near the curb, he opened the door and bizalted right out of the car. Now the cops were coming out of their car toward me.

“Who’s your friend there?” the first cop said.

I tried to stay calm. “Uh, that’s Flaco. Just a guy I know.”

“Well, do you know your friend Flaco there is an escaped convict and on the most-wanted list?” the other cop said.

Next thing I knew, I was under arrest for being in the company of an escaped felon. Luckily, they didn’t search the car, but they did put me in the back of their patrol car, and we started canvassing the neighborhood for “Flaco.” Sure enough, they drove down some alleyway, and there he was. He looked at me like I had ratted him out, but when he got in the car with me, I made it clear that I hadn’t said nothing to nobody. They took us to jail and separated us. They interrogated me, but I told them nothing, so they returned me to this glass-enclosed cell that was about as big as a large couch and stuffed with other prisoners. I was sitting there bemoaning my fate when I got a visit from the FBI.

“FBI? I don’t even know this guy. I was just giving him a ride and—”

“Don’t talk so much,” the fed cut me off. “We’re here to take pictures of your teeth.”

Apparently, I fit the description of the Ponytail Bandit, a white kid who had successfully knocked off dozens of Southern California banks. Finally, a forensic dentist arrived and stuck his damn fingers in my mouth and turned to the agent and said, “This is not the guy.”