Scar Tissue (51 page)

When I started going missing in action and becoming more desperate and isolated, I stopped answering my phone. Every now and then I’d check my mail, and there’d be a postcard of a Native American warrior. On the back, Gloria would write, “Don’t ever give up your fight. You are a warrior and you will beat this thing that you’re up against. I have faith in you. I never forget you, don’t forget your own self.” I’d read that in my kitchen and think, “There’s a person out there who actually believes I can win this battle.”

Around that time, I had a dream in which I was driving at about four-thirty in the morning, that darkest hour of the night before the sun even thinks about coming up. It was pitch black and raining, and I was going through the intersection of Melrose and San Vincente. The streets were dead, and I was driving fast and furious, screeching around corners, obviously going somewhere in a heated passion. I must have been going to cop drugs, because I was driving like my life depended on it. It was eerie and spooky and dark and rainy, and I was all alone in the car, driving and driving, and then out of nowhere, a hand came out and, whoosh, grabbed on to the steering wheel and started fighting me for control of the car. I looked over to see who the person in the seat next to me was, but he was all slouched down with a hat covering his face, so I couldn’t make out the demonic person. We kept driving, and I became terrified of what I was about to see. Then we drove under a streetlight, and the light illuminated the face of the intruder. And it was me. I had this horribly scary grin pasted on my face, and I was holding the wheel, saying, “I got ya. I got ya. I got ya.”

Near the end of October, I checked in to Exodus again, this time resigned to being in there. That day I got a phone call from Bob Forrest.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

“I feel like a gangster in one of those old cops-and-robbers movies. I’m gonna have to shoot my way out of this place,” I joked. I was teasing him, being a character, acting out a scene, trying to make light of the heavy and fucked-up place that I was occupying.

Bob said, “Oh, really? That sounds crazy. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Yeah, I’m gonna stay here and see what happens.”

I stayed that night. The next day I woke up and got the call. And the call was to go out and get high again. So I gathered up my stuff and said good-bye to Nurse Kathy, who was the only sane person in that whole place. Everybody else was doing the rehab shuffle.

I walked into the corridor, and the woman who ran that wing of the hospital stepped into the hallway and confronted me. “Where do you think you’re going?” she said.

“You know what, I’m just not ready to go through rehab right now, so I’m leaving,” I said.

“You can’t leave,” she said with finality. “We’re not going to let you leave.”

“Let me see you try and stop me,” I said. I took a few steps toward the exit, and she rushed up to me.

“No, really, we’re locking the doors. We’re going to have to put you in your room again,” she threatened.

“Lock the doors? I’ll fucking put my bed through the window and leave when I want to. You’ve got nothing to say about it, lady.” What was she talking about? This wasn’t a lockdown facility. I was there voluntarily, and I could leave whenever I felt like it. Or so I thought.

“I do have something to say about it this time,” she said.

I was getting pissed off. I had a serious calling here. I had to go get some money, get a cab, and have it wait while I talked to Flaco on the corner. Then I had to find a motel room. I had a very important agenda. But all that went out the window when she pushed a button. Suddenly, there were some very large USC-football-linemen-sized fellows coming at me from every angle. They grabbed me like a little rag doll and started carrying me down the hallway.

“Hey, what’s going on here? Let me go, buddy. I have things to do,” I was ranting, but they ignored me and carried me past some electronically locked prison-style doors into a separate unit known as the mental ward. This was it. The lockdown. The no-escaping-you’re-in-jail-now-insane-asylum-loony-bin ward.

I demanded an explanation: “What the fuck is going on?”

“You are now on a lockdown. You’ll be here for the next seventy-two hours while we observe you,” one of the behemoths said.

He may as well have said seventy-two years. Seventy-two hours was not acceptable to me. If he had said ten minutes, I could have worked with that. But I had pressing business outside.

“Oh no. No, no, no. Get my lawyer on the phone. I demand to talk to my lawyer,” I screamed.

“Dude, shut up. Someone’s gonna be in here to fill out a form, and you’ll get a room and you can chill,” my tormentor said.

I scanned the corridor. There was no getting out of here. The place was sealed tight as a drum. But as I stood there in the hallway, I saw a pack of loony birds being let into the facility from a smoking patio with sliding bulletproof glass doors. I looked out into the courtyard and saw an approximately eighteen-foot-high brick wall with nothing around it. There was no way I could get over that wall unless I had some rappelling equipment. Then I saw a basketball hoop about eight feet from the wall.

And I saw my opening. The goons had left me to wait for the admitting nurse, but just then a doctor walked by. He had the pens in the pocket and the stethoscope, and he was reading a chart. He also had a huge ring of keys dangling from his belt loop.

“Excuse me, Doctor. I was just outside, and I left my cigarettes. Could you let me out to the patio area to get them?”

“I’m not authorized to unlock the door. That’s the policy here,” he mumbled.

“I know. But if you open that door, I’ll go out there for a minute in that secured compound and have a quick smoke.” I was using every mind-control technique I could on this guy, and they worked. He unlocked the door, and I thanked him. The minute he turned around, I shimmied up to the top of that basketball hoop, stood on the backboard above it, leaned my body as far forward as I could, and jumped, just catching my fingers on the edge of the wall. Another inch and I would have done a face-plant into the wall and cracked my skull. I pulled myself up to the top of the wall and jumped down. I was free.

I started boogying down the sidewalk and got about two blocks before I stopped to figure out my next move. There was no one coming after me, so I figured they were happy to get rid of me because I was causing such a stink. Then I looked up and realized that I was right in front of a branch of my bank. What a stroke of luck. I could get some cash and begin my excellent adventure.

I never spotted the hospital employee who was in the bank depositing a check. But she was watching me as I marched over to the desk of the branch manager.

He looked up. “Anthony Kiedis! What a pleasure. How can we help you?”

“I happened to be in the neighborhood, and I need to withdraw some money. And perhaps you could call me a cab?”

“I’d be happy to,” he said. “Come sit down.”

He called a cab, and I told him I needed to withdraw a couple of thousand dollars, and it was all good. I was sitting there in the middle of the bank thinking, “Hallelujah, I’m gonna be high as a kite in about forty-five minutes,” when all of a sudden, my radar sensors started beeping. I looked up and saw that the same big motherfuckers who had accosted me in the hallway of the hospital were advancing on me from every direction in the bank. Then I looked out the big glass windows and saw uniformed policemen surrounding the building, along with nurses, orderlies, and a friend of mine named Harold who worked as a rehab specialist in the hospital.

I vowed that these guys would have to chase me. Once I get into the open street, ain’t none of these fuckers gonna catch me, including the cops. I will jump on the back of a bus. I will commandeer a car. I will get on a boat. I will disappear into the bushes. They aren’t going to get me. So I jumped out of the chair and went running through the bank, hurtling over anything in my way. I got through a door that led into the office building housing the bank, but as soon as I entered the hall, a whole other contingent of security guards started running toward me.

“Whoop, can’t go that way.” I turned to run the other way, and there were more guys advancing on me from that direction. I had nowhere to go, so I just thought “Fuck it” and went head-to-head with these guys. I managed to knock down a few of the building guards and even made my way out into the street, but I was overpowered when one of those huge hospital guards tackled me and got me in such a strong body hold that I thought my liver was going to squeeze out of my ankle bone. I was a weakened little bitch at that point.

“Easy, pal, easy,” I said. “Why do you fuckers care? Just let me go.”

“No way. Once you escape from lockdown, we’re responsible for anything you do,” he told me. He also told me about the hospital employee who’d seen me in the bank and thought it was odd that I was sitting down with the branch manager when I should have been on the ward. When I turned up AWOL, it was the same as escaping a jail, and there was an all-points bulletin out for me, with every cop in the neighborhood searching.

They handcuffed me and threw me into a cop car and drove me back to the hospital, where I found out that I had been put into seventy-two-hour lockdown because Bob Forrest had been concerned about our conversation. He had called Lindy, and they got it in their heads that I was suicidal, so they tried to get me committed. The hospital could have ignored them, but they probably thought the last thing they needed was another Kurt Cobain situation on their hands. The whole thing was ludicrous. I never once verbalized anything about killing myself. I never once said I had a gun. All I said, in a Jimmy Cagney gangster voice, was “Ah, if I had a heater, I’d shoot my way out of this place right now.” Lunatic Bob Forrest, the then–King of Exaggerations, Rumors, and Lies, had started the whole ball rolling.

And here I was in lockdown. When I got back in, I went straight for the phone and called Eric Greenspan. “I want a fucking lawyer to come down here and get me out. I am not suicidal. Get me out of this hospital.”

Eric promised to help, but he said it might take a little while. In the meantime, I was assigned a room and a twenty-four-hour watchdog at my door. I was already checking out the ceiling ventilation shafts, trying to find a way out, because now my life was getting weirder and uglier by the second. The next day a nurse came in and told me I would be discharged as soon as the admitting doctor signed my papers. After a few hours, she came back in the room. I was already counting how many balloons of heroin I would cop when she said, “Before you go, there are some people here to see you.”

“Uh, that doesn’t sound possible. I’m supposed to be discharged—”

In through the door walked Bob Timmons, followed by a few of my friends and my poor mother, who had flown in from Michigan. I was not at all happy that someone had called my mother and she had to fly out to deal with this mess. I had been ambushed with a full-fledged intervention. We all sat down, and they started to give me the intervention, and I was the sheer disease guy. Everything that came out of my mouth was a lie or a manipulation. Everything I said had an angle so I could position myself to psychologically dominate this scene and get free to go get loaded.

“Hey, everything’s okay. I’m ready to get better, I just don’t want to be in rehab. I’ve been through this. And of course I’m gonna go and get involved in my recovery and yada yada.” I conned them into thinking that I was gonna get out of there and go to work on being a sober guy. I had no intention of it whatsoever, but I told them everything they wanted to hear just to get out of that hospital.

We left the hospital, and most of us went to break bread over my new beginning, which I knew was neither new nor a beginning. Everyone started eating, but I was nibbling and picking and pushing my food around.

“Okay, I’m going to leave now and go home and get my recovery notebooks, and then I’m going to meet up with Mom and fly home with her tomorrow and go back to the basics and work on my recovery.”

“Really, you’re going by yourself? Why don’t I come with you?” my friend Chris said. I insisted on going alone.

I scrammed, got my motorcycle, got some money, picked up some drugs, and checked in to the Bonaventure Hotel, a big, modern, fancy hotel in downtown Los Angeles. It had been close to a week since I’d been loaded, so I was chomping at the bit. Right off the bat, I got crazy high, and a bad-idea lightbulb went off above my head. I got back on the bike and drove to the Chevy dealer by USC to buy a new car. My twisted logic was that even though I had just ditched my intervention posse, I was going to buy a car and then drive around with no destination in mind and get better.

I got to the dealership just as they were closing. “Wait, wait. I need to buy a car. Give me the best big black Chevy you have.”

They were all looking skeptically at this crazy-high guy who came off the street, but then I whipped out my Amex card, they checked it out, and they had a major attitude adjustment. They brought me a nice Chevy Tahoe and were more than happy to follow me back to the Bonaventure and deliver it.

The next morning I decided it was time to hit the road, so I left my motorcycle in the hotel parking lot, jumped into this brand-new Chevy SUV, and started heading east. I was thinking of driving to Colorado or the Dakotas, but I got only as far as East L.A. I just wasn’t feeling right. So I checked in to a motel, got high, got high, got high, and realized that doing some long-distance driving might not be such a good idea.

I drove back to Beverly Hills and checked in to a hotel on Robertson and did all my drugs. I was at the point where I wasn’t even getting high. I was just wide awake, raw, empty, lonely, tired, angry, confused, and terrified of having to deal with the latest mess I’d made. I decided that maybe I should go back to Michigan with my mom. I called her hotel, but she had left town that morning, furious that I had lied to her. I got in my new Tahoe and drove to the airport. I found a pay phone and called Lindy to apologize. When I was in Exodus, frantically trying to get out of the locked ward, I had called Lindy and trashed him.