Scar Tissue (63 page)

“What? You were sleeping on a couch in a fucking ghetto. I put you through school, and then you left your couch to move into a penthouse.” I wasn’t buying any of it. But Claire seemed confused and scared, so I forgave her and went on with my life. There was no residual “Oh, I miss that girl.” It was like a closed chapter, done, moved on.

Or so I thought. I was so happy to see her at the meeting that at the break, when everyone left the room, I rushed over to where she was sitting, sat down next to her, and started giving her kisses on the cheek. It was an impulsive reaction to seeing her and her smile and her eyes and her smooth white cheeks. We started kissing and cuddling and talking, and five minutes later, I was kissing her on the mouth.

The whole floodgates came rushing open out of nowhere. I had a new girlfriend, my life had changed, this girl was of the past. But here we were, making plans to see each other later that day.

I was so excited. I drove straight to Cammie’s house, because I didn’t want to lie to her or leave her hanging.

“I’m really, really sorry, but something fucking totally unexpected happened to me today, and it has to do with my ex-girlfriend. I think I’m going to be seeing her, so I can’t see you,” I said.

That night I met Claire at a one-year sober birthday celebration for a friend of hers at El Cholo, a Mexican restaurant on Western. I felt like I had fallen in love and was on my first date with this girl. I was on my best behavior, and every glance she threw me made my heart flutter. Something weird had happened: Not only had I fallen back in love with this girl, it was like starting from the beginning. We ran with it, and she moved right into the house. My house had three stories, and I’d moved my stuff into the upstairs area, so I suggested that she move her things into the bottom story, which had a big bedroom and bathroom and huge closets with a dressing area. It was much nicer than the upstairs. Paradise didn’t last long. Down the line, she started complaining, “Why do I have to have the downstairs dressing area? Why can’t I have the upstairs?” It made no sense. Give her the continent and she wanted the hemisphere.

But at first our love was still in full bloom. The band started working on our next album in March 2001. That month I organized a family trip to Hawaii. I took my mom, both of my sisters, their husbands, and my adorable little nephew Jackson to Kauai. I wanted Claire to come, but she had a work commitment. My feelings for her inspired a song, “Body of Water,” which was a tribute to her spirit and her inner energy, which always had me captivated.

In March we got some tragic news. One of my closest friends and mentors, Gloria Scott, was diagnosed with lung cancer. Her friends quickly rallied around her and tried to find her whatever treatments could help her, but there was a huge need for cash, because she had zero. So we played a benefit for her (and also for Huntington’s disease, an affliction that had struck the family of Flea’s longtime ex-girlfriend) and raised the needed cash. Since Gloria had always jokingly referred to Neil Young as her higher power, I put in a call to ask Neil if by any crazy chance he could perform.

“You tell me when, and I’ll be there with Crazy Horse,” he said.

By the night of the show, Gloria’s condition had worsened, but she made it to the concert, and I was thrilled to introduce her to Neil. It was a magical moment to see these two people come together.

We got Gloria a little apartment on the water in Venice Beach, because she was always about the ocean, but she’d lived inland in Venice for thirty years. We hired a nurse and paid for her treatments, but the doctors had caught the cancer too late. I got to the hospital in time to say the painful “I know that you’re dying, so you have to know that I love you.” She didn’t want to die in the hospital, so they brought her back home to the beach, and she faded away.

From “Venice Queen”

And now it’s time for you to go

You taught me most of what I know

Where would I be without you Glo

G-L-O-R-I-A

Is love my friend, my friend, my friend

I see you standing by the sea

The waves you made will always be

A kiss goodbye before you leave

G-L-O-R-I-A

Is love my friend, my friend, my friend

Writing
By the Way,
our next album, was a whole different experience from
Californication
. John was back to himself and brimming with confidence. So we did the same thing we always did. Back to the Swing House, four guys holed up in a room with guitars and drums and mikes, playing every day for hours. We started finding some magic and some music and some riffs and some rhythms and some jams and some grooves, and we recorded it and added to it and subtracted from it and pushed it around and put melodies to it. I started collecting words by the score and listening and getting inspired by what the guys were playing.

All this time, I tried to make it work with Claire. She had started her own clothing line. She was productive and creative, but we weren’t clicking as a two-person singular entity. We even went to a couples counselor, a practical, smart, unbiased woman who gave us some tools to work with, but nothing ever amounted from it; the changes that needed to happen didn’t happen.

Sometime that summer, we half broke up. Claire moved into the downstairs bedroom, in theory, until she found her own place. I wasn’t going to kick her out again. But of course, that led to late-night visits between floors. The forbidden fruit of liaisons in the downstairs bedroom on top of piles of her clothing did wonders for our sex life for a while. But eventually, we split up, and I rented a small bungalow for her in Beverly Hills. I let her keep the car until the lease expired, and she returned it to me without any door handles or stereo or carpeting. It was symbolic of our relationship. I tried to do her a favor, and she returned it destroyed and told me that the insurance would cover it.

Even after she left the house, our relationship continued off and on. Instead of relapsing with drugs, I’d relapse with Claire. We went back to Saint Bart’s after Christmas in 2001 and rented a house on the beach. One day she wanted to learn how to surf, so we paddled out about a quarter of a mile until we got into the break, but the waves were big as houses, too big to learn on. We found ourselves in the crunch zone, where the waves were coming over us, so we held our breath and waited till the set went by. In the upheaval, the leash on Claire’s surfboard had snapped, so I swam over and gave her my board. We finally made it back to shore. But in the confusion of the storm-swelled waves, we made the mistake of coming back in over a coral reef instead of going through the channel. The good news was that we were alive, but the bad news was that we had to walk over this coral reef, and the coral had barnacles and sea urchins. Even little waves were enough to push you around, so we were getting poked and sea urchined, the spines of which break off, are impossible to remove, and cause you much discomfort.

Claire started yelling hysterically at me, as if I wanted her to get urchined. I spent the next two days calling doctors and rushing to pharmacies to get her some relief, but she was crazed. She was so mean to me the whole trip that, once again, I realized she wasn’t the girl for me.

While we were still in Saint Bart’s, I reached a breaking point. “ Claire, you’ve got to go home,” I told her. “I won’t sit here and be yelled at. I’ve done my best to make it a pleasant journey for you and to share my life with you, but you’re impossible to be with.” I sent her the hell home, and we broke up again. Sometime the next year, I relapsed. I’d keep getting back with her because I missed her friendship, but I always got the same result, never any progress. Four years into the relationship, she was as smolderingly distraught over the littlest things in life. She’d lie there steaming in bed over a fight the size of a ladybug. I would apologize and say, “Let’s forget about it, my bad. I love you, I care about you, I want you to be happy, let’s enjoy this love and this life.” But she wouldn’t let go, she wouldn’t choose to be happy.

Even all my troubles with Claire couldn’t derail my sobriety. My Wednesday breakfast meeting was grounding, and everyone got into the idea of being of service. We were picking people up and taking them to meetings and bringing new guys into that particular circle so they could see sobriety wasn’t about giving up the party, it was just creating a new, saner party. Having a moment of clarity was one thing; I’d had moments like that before. It had to be followed with a dedicated push of daily exercise. It’s a trite axiom, but practice
does
make perfect. If you want to be a strong swimmer or an accomplished musician, you have to practice. It’s the same with sobriety, though the stakes are higher. If you don’t practice your program every day, you’re putting yourself in a position where you could fly out of the orbit one more time.

The good news is that being in recovery is a blast for me. I love going to meetings, I love hearing people speak. Some of the speakers are boring old twats with nothing to say, but some of them are truly angels. At one meeting I saw this big heavyset Mexican transsexual, in full woman’s garb, tell her life story. She was up there cracking jokes and singing and talking and sharing the message of being of service, and she positively glowed. When she left, I knew that I’d seen an angel. I’ve seen the same thing with cowboys from Montana and preachers from down south, all types of people who used to be the walking dead and now are carrying this message of light and love and recovery. Meetings are a gas. It’s like a combination of a free seminar and a lecture and a social. Sometimes there are even hot girls. And people are funny and creative and festive. As the book says, “We are not a glum lot.”

All those years when I was going in and out, I’d lie to myself and say, “You’re just relapsing, you’re not going back to use for good. This is a temporary condition.” It always went on longer than I planned, and I was able to come back, but now I knew that I had come back for a purpose—it wasn’t because I outwitted drug addiction. It was because something, somewhere, wanted me alive so I could be a part of creating something beautiful and helping somebody else.

I’d made the decision to stop doing drugs many times before, but I never followed up with the daily maintenance, the cultivation of a path to a spiritual awakening. I think that anyone who comes in and works all of the steps and goes to meetings and is of constant love and service is guaranteed to stay sober. But anyone who comes in like I did in the past and picks and chooses and thinks, “I’ll do it some days, I won’t do it others. I’ll work some steps, but I won’t work the others. I’ll take the call sometimes, but sometimes I’m too busy,” is doomed to failure. You can’t buy seven tenths of the way into the program and expect to get seven tenths back; you get nothing back unless you give yourself completely.

Another thing that I think is genius about the program is that they realize you can’t preach sobriety or try to make converts out of alcoholics. What’s crucial is that you take care of yourself and in doing so become a program of attraction, rather than promotion. The minute you say “Hey,
this
is what you should be doing” to an alcoholic or a drug addict, nothing will come of it. If you just do your thing, then someone will see it and think, “That guy used to throw up on his trousers, but he looks like he’s enjoying himself now.” There’s no alcoholic in the world who wants to be told what to do. Alcoholics are sometimes described as egomaniacs with inferiority complexes. Or, to be cruder, a piece of shit that the universe revolves around.

Which is okay, because there’s a way to deal with that. You’re feeling like shit? Go get out of yourself and do something for someone else, voilà, you don’t feel like shit anymore. You’re confused and you’re driving yourself crazy? Go call a guy who’s got three days sober and has no clue what to do. The minute you get out of your self-centered mind-set, you’re instantly freed of your own pain. The trick to staying sober is to constantly be of service to another alcoholic. It’s like perpetual motion. All these people freely gave you what was given to them, and now you get to give it to someone else. It’s a constant source of energy, like recharging a battery, only there’s no pollution or toxic runoff.

The reason the program is so successful is because alcoholics help other alcoholics. I’ve never met a Normie (our lingo for a person who doesn’t have a problem with drugs or alcohol) who could even conceive of what it’s like to be an alcoholic. Normies are always going, “There’s this new pill you can take and you won’t want to shoot heroin anymore.” That shows a fundamental misunderstanding of alcoholism and drug addiction. These aren’t just physical allergies, they’re obsessions of the mind and maladies of the spirit. It’s a threefold disease. And if it’s partly a spiritual malady, then there’s a spiritual cure.

When I say spiritual, I’m not talking about chanting or reading Eastern philosophy. I’m talking about setting up the chairs at a meeting, picking up another alcoholic and driving him across town to a meeting. That’s a spiritual lifestyle, being willing to admit that you don’t know everything and that you were wrong about some things. It’s about making a list of all the people you’ve harmed, either emotionally or physically or financially, and going back and making amends. That’s a spiritual lifestyle. It’s not a fluffy ethereal concept.

My friend Bob Forrest is a spiritual person. He doesn’t go to church and he doesn’t talk about God and he doesn’t go do charity events on weekends, but he’ll sit and talk for hours to a guy in jail who can’t stop smoking crack. That’s curing Bob of his spiritual malady, because he’s willing to do something that’s not really for him, it’s for this other guy. He’s not doing it with the expectation of getting anything out of it, but as a by-product, he is.