Scar Tissue (31 page)

It was enough to get my attention. I drove home, got out of my car in a chemical fog, and Ione came running out into the street, half dressed, her face all puffy and red and splotchy and wet. She was screaming, “Your friend Hillel is dead.” And she lost it. You would have thought he was her best friend. But she felt all of this pain immediately, whereas I refused to accept it. “There must be some mistake.” Deep inside my core, I knew he was gone, but I would not allow myself to accept that then.

The rest is a real blur, because I think I turned off my brain. I know I didn’t stop using the rest of that night. I woke up the next day in a state of shock and denial. Everyone was dealing with this huge upheaval, death and aftermath and funerals and people laying blame, and I knew there was never anyone to blame when people get into drugs. They’re always responsible for their own behavior, and it’s not the dealer, and it’s not the friend, it’s not the bad influence, it’s not the childhood. For some sad and disgusting reason, people associated me with being responsible for Hillel’s demise at age twenty-five because my own addiction had started so much younger. His family tried to say I was the bad influence. It was kind of ironic, because I never blamed anyone for my own drug use. And I had tried to introduce Hillel to the idea of getting well.

Meanwhile, I continued to get loaded. It’s a myth that something like that scares you into going straight. Even when your close friend dies, you maintain a false sense of invincibility. You don’t want to deal with your own wreckage, you just want to keep getting high. I heard from Ione that they were planning the funeral, but I was in no shape to attend. I couldn’t stop using, for one thing. I was at my wits’ end. I couldn’t quit, but I couldn’t keep using; nothing was working, and my friend was dead, and I didn’t want to look at that. Ione’s mom had once mentioned that her friend owned a house in a tiny fishing village in Mexico, and we could use it anytime we wanted. So that’s what we did.

People thought it was in poor taste that I didn’t go to the funeral. Hillel was my guy, my best friend, but I was dying of the same thing that killed him. And it wasn’t about taste. It was about insanity and unmanageability. Ione and I flew to Puerto Vallarta, and from there we took a small outboard motorboat to a place called Yelapa, a small fishing village of about a hundred people. We stayed in a nice house with a bed and a mosquito net, but there was hardly any electricity in the town. I lay there and went through another fucked-up, nasty, cold-turkey heroin kick, while I was light-years away from what was happening in Hollywood. I turned off that station in my mind. Ione was incredibly supportive, and after a few days I started feeling better. I began to exercise, and we went back to having sex and sharing this love. We caught fish in the ocean and cooked on the beach, and I developed a false sense of wellness. After ten days, my hiding had to end, and we went back to L.A.

The minute I got back, I couldn’t get high quick enough. I didn’t know what the fuck else to do. By now I was down to about ten grand to my name, and I was out of game. I went out and bought a bunch of heroin and coke. While Ione was asleep in bed, I was on the floor shooting up and doing some inane art project all night long. But something had gone drastically wrong with my chemistry, because I was putting these drugs in me and wasn’t getting high, I wasn’t disappearing, wasn’t escaping, not feeling euphoric, not blocking out the pain, not blocking out the reality. I kept doing more and more and more, but I was right there. I couldn’t escape myself.

Right around then, Jack Irons called a band meeting. He’d never done anything like that before. We met on Lindy’s modest sailboat, and Jack sat us down and said, “This is not where I want to be. I do not want to be part of something where my fucking friends are dying.” He quit the band. And we understood.

Lindy was probably thinking, “What’s going to happen here? The guitar player’s dead, the drummer’s quitting, the singer’s hanging by a fucking thread. What happens now?” But Flea and I did not plan on stopping playing music together. It wasn’t out of lack of respect; it was out of respect. This was something that Hillel had helped build, and we were going to keep on building it, which was weird, because I was in no great mental shape. But I knew that it was what I wanted to do, and Flea knew that it was what he wanted to do. And Jack knew that it was what he didn’t want to do.

Even though I was a mess, Flea and I hunkered down. We hired D. H. Peligro to play drums and Blackbird McKnight to play guitar. We had known D.H. for years, and at one point Flea, D.H., and I had a joke band called the Three Little Butt Hairs. We had played with Blackbird when Hillel was temporarily fired, so we were comfortable with him. But before we could even think about playing, I had to do something about my drug problem.

When I was going to meetings that spring, I’d met a guy named Chris who was a young and crazy, skirt-chasing, mischief-making, sensible, funny guy. He had introduced me to a guy named Bob Timmons and said, “This guy could be your sponsor.” Timmons was a bearded guy with tattoos who had a pretty hard-core past, but I immediately trusted him. He was quiet and not pushy, and he didn’t seem to want anything from me.

After one of those drug runs when I couldn’t get loaded, I called up Bob Timmons. “I don’t know what to do. My friend is dead. I can’t stop using, and it’s not even getting me high. I’m fucking going crazy.”

“Why don’t you go into rehab?” he suggested.

“That sounds horrible. What is it?”

“For one thing, it’s ten thousand dollars.”

“Ten grand! That’s all I have,” I said.

“I think it would be a good investment,” Bob said. “I think your life is at stake, and maybe one day you’ll be able to make another ten grand if you spend ten grand now. If you don’t, that might be the last ten grand you ever know.”

I didn’t know what else to do, so I agreed. The rehab was a place in Van Nuys called ASAP. I got in the car with Ione to drive out there, and I was so infuriated that I was trying to drive the car into the tarmac. I zigzagged all the way down Van Nuys, into oncoming traffic, and Ione was cowering in the passenger seat. I was mad that I had to check in to rehab, I was mad that I couldn’t get loaded anymore, I was mad that my friend had died. We got there, and I checked in, and they took a Polaroid of me. I was not looking real good. My skin was green and orangey yellow, my eyes were dead, and my hair had a life of its own.

Then I was assigned a room. And a roommate. I was sharing a damn room with some other crazy bastard. He turned out to be this kid from Palm Springs who became my first sober rehab buddy. When you go to rehab, you end up meeting people from dozens of walks of life, all races, different financial realities, different religious backgrounds, but you end up loving all of them and seeing yourself in all of them. There was a female basketball player who couldn’t stop smoking crack, a Brazilian businessman, a doctor, and a black SWAT team cop who busted people to get their drugs.

I settled in, and it wasn’t that bad. I stopped hating and started just being. My whole life, I had been the most defensive person you’d meet, unable to tolerate any criticism. But now I started listening and being. Ione came to visit, and we broke the rules and had conjugal visits in the bathroom, which meant the world to me. I was so in need of some love and affection.

From time to time, Bob Timmons would send different random sober people to visit me. I didn’t know any of them, but I’d sit down to talk to them, and therein lay the magic of recovery. No one will ever really understand your predicament better than another addict. This stranger came and talked with me, and the next thing I knew, the process of recovery was happening whether I liked it or not.

About two weeks into my time there, Bob Timmons came to visit. He’d seen that I had avoided going through the grief of Hillel’s death, so he told me that he was going to take me out on a day pass. We drove to the Jewish section of Forest Lawn Cemetery and wandered around until we found Hillel’s gravesite. There was a humble plaque in the grass, not even a tombstone. The inscription was something simple like “Hillel Slovak. Devoted son, brother, friend, musician.”

I was sitting there with Bob, saying, “Yep, okay, there he is. I guess we did that. Can we get out of here now?”

“No, I don’t think we should leave quite yet,” Bob said. “I’m going to take a walk. Why don’t you do me a favor and talk to Hillel and tell him how you feel about him dying? And why don’t you also make him a promise right now that you’re not going to put another needle in your arm and that you’re not going to drink and use?”

“Talk to what? It’s a plot of grass with a rock on it,” I said.

“Just act as if Hillel is here listening and have that conversation,” he said, and walked away.

I was sitting there feeling really awkward about talking to no one. But then I said, “Yo, Slim,” which was the way I’d always greet Hillel. And it was like this wall came down in a second. I started weeping like I’d never wept before. From that point on, I was a waterfall of blabbering and blubbering and crying and coughing. I had this talk with Hillel and told him how much I loved him and how much I missed him. And then I made him the promise. “I’m clean. I’m in this rehab. I promise you I’m not going to put a needle in my arm again. I’m going to stay clean.” I cried all the way out of that cemetery.

Early on in my stay at rehab, we had a group meeting, run by a counselor who was this big semi-biker-looking dude. He’d been clean for five years. He got thirty patients into the room, everyone who was part of the class that month. Everybody was listening intently, because we were all giving it our best shot. He said, “I’ve got some pretty unfortunate news for you people right now. Statistically speaking, only one person in this room is going to stay clean for any length of time after you get out of here. That’s just usually what it boils down to.” I looked around that room and saw the basketball player, and the cop, and the businessman, and the doctor, and the criminal, and all these people, and I was like “They can all go home right now, because I’m taking that slot. So you guys can save your money and your time, because I’m the one who’s going to be sober from now on.”

No fifty-day celebrations, no wiggle room, I just vowed to give everything up. There wasn’t any single moment of bedazzling revelation, it was more of an educational process. The more I learned about the nature of addiction, the more I was willing to look at my own behavior and history. And the more I was able to help the people I was in there with, the more it all made sense. A lot of this process came through witnessing the sickness of these people I was in rehab with, for me to see these people and care about them, and to know how slim their chances were of ever changing the demonic possession they had been living with. I realized this was not the jail I wanted to live my life in.

When I made the decision that no matter what happened in my life, I was not drinking or using, this gorilla that had been beating me down for years evaporated. By the time I walked out of rehab, I didn’t even want to get high. I turned off that voice in my head, which was wonderful, except it was almost too wonderful. I wasn’t compelled by that pain anymore to keep working toward getting better and putting myself in a position where I could help someone else get better. I was so relieved of the pain of wanting to get high that I was able to coast and skate a little bit. I still went to meetings, and I showed up on panels and went to hospitals and talked to other alcoholics, but I didn’t dive into this incredible opportunity of instigating a true psychic change. I went halfway and then started backing off.

When I checked into ASAP, I wanted to die. Thirty days later, it was “Let’s rock. Let’s go write songs. Let’s go be a band.” And we did. Flea was excited and supportive when I got out of rehab. We went right into rehearsals with D.H. and Blackbird. D.H. seemed to fit right in—he was fun-loving and absolutely lived to play music. Blackbird had a harder time fitting in. He was a uniquely talented guitar player, but he’d never been in a band where everyone rocked together. He was used to George Clinton giving him some tape and then going into a studio by himself and working for days on his parts.

We had been friends with D.H. for years, but Blackbird was harder to get close to. He was a little older and a little kookier. The more we played together, the more obvious it became that it was not clickety-click-clicking. Our idea of working on new material was always the jam, and it wasn’t happening.

Around that time, D.H. introduced Flea to a young guitar phenom named John Frusciante. John was a Chili Peppers fanatic who had been going to our concerts since he was sixteen. In fact, I had met John before Flea did. Around the time
Uplift
came out, we were playing a big show at Perkins Palace in Pasadena. I was still struggling with my addiction, and I had to do a little bit of smack before the show, to get right. I drove to the gig and parked a few blocks away and walked through a park adjacent to the venue to find a place to shoot up. Just then, two fresh-faced kids walked up to me and gushed, “Oh my God. Anthony. We just want to say hi. We’re huge fans of the band.”

I chatted with them for a while, and then I walked across the park and sat down on the first staircase I could find and cooked up some dope. Then I looked up and saw that I was shooting up on the steps of the Pasadena police department.

After John had impressed Flea so much, I started hanging out with him. At the same time, Bob Forrest was all over John to play guitar in his group, Thelonious Monster. John told me he was going over to Bob’s garage to audition, so I drove him there. In my mind, he was auditioning for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. One song into his performance, I knew this was our guy.

Now it was my turn to do the firing. Blackbird lived in South Central L.A., so I decided to do it on the phone. “Blackbird, this is Anthony. I’ve got bad news. I’m really sorry, but it’s not working out, and we can’t be in a band with you. We’re going to go in a different direction. Thank you very much for everything.”