Scar Tissue (60 page)
After Japan we had a week off before going to Australia and New Zealand. Everyone headed off for different holidays. I was going to meet Claire in Bali. I couldn’t wait to see her, especially after being so bummed out in Japan. I’ll never forget how happy I was when I walked through that airport door and she greeted me. She had a big flower in her hair and had put on a few pounds, which I appreciated, because she looked good when her flesh was full and pushing out, rather than being sucked up.
We stayed at a fancy resort built into the side of a cliff overlooking the ocean. Each room was an individual unit with a stone pool. There were rose petals all over the bed and some more in the bathtub. That afternoon Claire and I enjoyed the best lovemaking we’d ever had. Then we snorkeled and drove into the interior, which was the most beautiful part of the island. You picture Bali as this pristine, remote location, but it’s really an overcrowded cluster fuck of traffic with some air pollution thrown in. There had to be a few hundred thousand people jam-packed onto the island, but the interior was solid mountains and jungle. We went on an incredible rafting adventure on a river that cut through the middle of the island.
Then it was time to play Big Day Out, Australia’s answer to Lollapalooza. January is the nicest time by far in Australia, because it’s their summer and the whole country goes on joy time. We started our tour in Auckland, New Zealand, and we were especially excited because Nine Inch Nails were going to be on the bill with us, and we all just loved them. We were also playing with the Foo Fighters, and we would become incredibly close to them down the line.
The only downside to all of this was my shin splints. Even with the week off, the pain would not subside. My shinbones were getting hairline fractures because my muscles and tendons were so swollen, they were pulling off the bone mass. Walking was painful, jumping was even more painful, and I was going to have to go out there and give my best performances ever with these getaway sticks that were in maddening pain. Two days before the show, I saw a doctor.
“Doc, I got shin splints. Could you please give me a muscle relaxant, or something that’s not going to affect me from the neck up, so I can go perform?” I asked.
He suggested Advil, but I told him I’d tried that and it hadn’t worked.
“There’s a new non-narcotic painkiller called Ultram,” he said. “It really works on athletes who have to perform under similar conditions to you. Take one in the afternoon and one right before the show.”
The day before the first show, I took the Ultram, and lo and behold, I started to feel pretty good. Not good enough to know for sure that I felt good, but I could swear I felt good in the subtlest possible way. It couldn’t be the Ultram, because it was non-narcotic, so I decided that I just felt good. I took the other one before the show, and man, I felt no pain in my legs at all.
We played our show, and it was mad fun, fifty thousand Kiwis bouncing in unison. The kids knew every word to every song, even the new ones, and it was an unbelievable rush. John was blazing on his guitar, Chad was an orchestra of cannons blasting off, Flea was a ball of primal aborigine energy, and I felt totally in control of myself as a singer and performer. And there was no pain! I was ready to kiss the earth.
It was all good, and when we got back to the hotel, I had sex with Claire and something unusual happened. We were fucking and fucking, and I just was not coming. That had never been a problem. Later, it crossed my mind that it might have been due to the Ultram, but how could it make me not come? It was supposed to be a glorified Advil, a non-narcotic. It made no sense.
I thought it was amazing that I could be getting pain relief from a non-narcotic pill that was also making me feel pretty nice. There had to be part of me that recognized the voice in my head saying, “Okay, you’re supposed to take your Ultram at three, and it’s noon now, so maybe you should take it a little early.” Halfway through the tour, I had to have my prescription refilled. But the doctor had told me it was not a narcotic, and I wasn’t getting goofy high, just a foundation of artificial well-being, which I was loving.
So we rocked Auckland and went on to the Gold Coast of Australia. We were the inaugural event at the Olympic Stadium in Sydney. Physically, I was in perfect health. My legs weren’t bothering me, I was exercising every day, running and swimming and stretching. Claire and I were having fantastic sex. I was loving the whole experience. But then I started to become aware of the fact that Flea was not experiencing the same euphoric joy of life and touring and music and people and skies. He was not on the same heavenly ambient wavelength.
Flea had been going through a lot of personal shit with his girlfriend for this whole
Californication
time. I knew he was down and sick and depressed and anguished about everything, but I also knew the situation was of his own making. We create a horribly painful bouillabaisse to sit in for years on end, until we can’t fucking sit there anymore; but it wasn’t like some evil fate flew into his ass, he created it. He sat there and masterminded his own misery. So he was troubled, but he had to appreciate that the love he was experiencing from both John and me was immense. We were backing him, we weren’t dissing him. It wasn’t like during the
Mother’s Milk
era, when John and I bonded up and left him unattached. And Flea can, at times, be a prima donna, especially earlier in the Dave era, when he was ready to quit the band at the drop of a hat.
Just for the record, anything negative that I ever say about Flea is only because he’s my brother and I love him. The fact is, it’s funny to take the piss out of ourselves. Each one of these guys, Flea, John, Chad, is individually a bridge to God for me, and there’s nothing I would do to change any of these people or the experiences I’ve had with them. Every one of them has given me love and music and the best life I could ever hope to have. But at the same time, I feel compelled to laugh at all of our foibles. I’m not poking fun at the relationship to feel better about myself; it’s just because we really are all such kooks.
Flea was suffering then, both emotionally and physically. He was feeling zapped and sapped and run-down and not centered. When we got to Melbourne, he called a band sit-down. Peter Mensch was there to tell us about our upcoming U.S. tour. And if we thought hitting Europe and the rest of the world was hard, Peter was about to tell us how many dates they were hoping to give us in the U.S.A. I was feeling gung-ho, let’s go. But Flea basically broke down and explained that he wasn’t able to enjoy this experience. You could tell by the look in his eyes that he was at his wits’ end.
That was when he proposed the idea of touring in three-week segments, then taking ten-day breaks between segments. It was a fairly revolutionary idea, and it made it nearly impossible to generate any money, because you have to keep your crew on salary for those ten days. You have to keep your buses and your trucks, and it’s the same amount of expenses, except for hotels, as being on tour, only you’re not making a penny.
We realized that doing this tour was not about making the maximum amount of money; it was about having the maximum amount of fun and enjoyment and staying healthy. We implemented that schedule and, to Flea’s credit, we stick to it religiously to this day.
Flea came up with another important idea. For a long time, we had both been charity-oriented and earlier, while we were on holiday at his house in Australia, he and I had talked about the idea of taking some of our profits and creating some sort of charitable organization. We decided to take 5 percent of our income from touring and give it away. Just give it to the best charities we could find, whether it was cancer research or children’s hospitals or music programs, whatever. That’s a pretty big percentage of income, because half always goes toward the expenses of touring, and then another 20 percent goes to the managers, and 5 percent to a lawyer, and another 5 percent to the accountants.
We went to John and Chad, and they both thought it was a great idea. It turned out to be an incredibly fun and positive change, because now we get the joy of helping all these people. It was shocking to the core how good it felt to be of service. Kids send us pictures of themselves and letters of gratitude and tell us how much it means to them to get some medical care or a playground or musical instruments. It was one of the best decisions we ever made as a team.
But that euphoria faded back to some fairly mundane realities. In Australia, Claire and I starting fighting again. There we were, walking down the great old section of Melbourne, and we got into a tiff. It wasn’t a poisonous fight; we were yelling at each other and she was socking me and I was grabbing her and it was a good, healthy working-it-out kind of thing. But some people walked by and thought it was a spousal-abuse situation. I’m not sure who they thought was taking the worst of the abuse, but they stopped and asked if she needed help.
It was a testament to the potential of our volatility. There was no physical harm, but there was an intensity about us that would have made anyone stop and say, “Is everything all right here?” I remember thinking it was fun and playful, because I secretly liked it when she beat me up. She’s a big strong girl, and heaven forbid she gets her legs in the party, because then you’re going down.
After Big Day Out, Claire and I went back to L.A. and settled into our new digs together. We had been back for a week when I was invited to the NBA All-Star game, which was in San Francisco that year. The NBA was offering to provide us with a hotel, a car, tickets to the game, the works. Figuring we could spend a nice romantic weekend, we flew up. The hotel they put us in was not that nice a place, but it was free and in an interesting neighborhood. Unfortunately, the game wasn’t exciting, so afterward we drove back to the city and found a restaurant. We were getting along fine, sitting at an upstairs table, holding hands, and enjoying each other’s company. And then we made a huge mistake.
It’s never a good idea for two addicts to reminisce about their old days of using drugs. When I’d met Claire, she was drinking, but I’d never seen her on drugs. And she knew me only in sobriety. Somehow the topic of drugs got placed on the table.
“God, I can’t imagine you ever doing those things, it seems so out of character for you,” Claire said. “You’re so not into that self-destructive energy.”
“Believe me, this is what I used to do,” I said, and told her some of the war stories that I’ve recounted here. She told me some of hers, and we started realizing just what birds of a feather we were.
I don’t remember who suggested it first, but someone said, “Can you imagine us getting high together?”
“It would be fun for a minute, and then it would be horrible,” I said.
“Yeah, but it would be really fun for a minute,” Claire said.
“It would be fun for a minute,” I agreed.
“What if we did it?” she said. “What if we did it just this weekend and then went home?”
“That’s crazy, but it sounds interesting,” I said.
“Are you serious?” she asked.
“I’m not really serious, but now that you mention it, I’m a little serious,” I admitted.
“I wasn’t until you said that, and now I’m really serious,” she said.
“Do you want to go get high?” I asked.
“Yeah, let’s do it,” she said.
“You’re sure? Because once we do this, things will never be the same,” I cautioned.
“Oh, we’ll be all right. Let’s go,” she said. And we left that restaurant for our rendezvous with the eight-hundred-pound gorilla.
Claire
and I left the restaurant and went straight to Haight Street. I didn’t even bother disguising myself; I just tried to stay out of the sight line of all the white kids on the street. We found a black dealer who had the coke but didn’t have the heroin. We figured we’d deal with that problem later. On the way back to the hotel, we stopped in a liquor store, bought some pipes, and picked up a bottle of vodka and a bottle of cranberry juice. Claire insisted that she wanted alcohol. If she was going out, she was going all the way out. The poor kid had no idea what she was in for. All we knew was that we were salivating like Pavlov’s dog at the prospect of getting high.
Probably part of the reason I had become so interested in getting high was that Ultram was actually a heavy-duty synthetic opiate. A few months later, Louie consulted the
Physicians Desk Reference
and read that under no circumstances should Ultram be administered to ex–heroin addicts, because it induces a craving for opiates. I guess that idiot doctor in New Zealand didn’t read his copy.
Claire and I got to the room and started smoking and smoking and drinking and drinking and, for the first time, saw each other in our getting-high mode, with all the quirky drugisms that go along with that. About five in the morning, we ran out of coke. We were both too annihilated to go back out on the streets, so I came up with a genius idea. I took out the Yellow Pages and called an escort service, knowing that the majority of those girls had drug connections. I’d pay one for her time, which would be spent in the pursuit of drugs. For once, Claire was easygoing about my talking to another woman. The girl went off to Berkeley, and it seemed like it took her forever, but she came back with twenty Valiums, some coke, some crystal methadrine, but no heroin. We did the coke and then took the Valiums and finally crashed.
Because we were in this together, it wasn’t as horrible a wake-up as I’d had in the past. We were both feeling a little shaky, lying in bed, wondering, “What were we thinking? That was a really bad idea.” So we ate and drank something, watched a movie in bed, and tried to forget about it. But then that voice came over us. “Hey, you’ve already fucked up. Ain’t no sense stopping now.” I went out and got some syringes, and we shot the speed. Of course, that wasn’t enough, so Claire scoured the streets and found a one-eyed taxi driver who sold her some smack. How horrible was that to let my girlfriend go out into the streets of San Francisco to find stuff?
