Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'N' Roll Memoir (47 page)

We got to the Palace Grounds for the sound check. That’s where the concert was to take place. Once outside the hotel, the scenes were horrifying: mobs of desperate, hungry people milling around with begging bowls asking for coins, people pooping in the street and dogs eating the poop.

“So sorry but sound check delayed,” said the promoter.

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Well, you see, we are just now testing
it
for you.”

“Testing
what
?” He pointed to the stage. So I walked down and looked underneath the stage: sticks! It was just a great mass of sticks, twigs no bigger than your thumb. It was stronger than it sounds because they were lashed together like a geodesic dome. It was never going to break, but it was scary-looking and we had a ton of sound and lights and equipment.

The promoter of the Bangalore concert was even more ruthless than your average scummy promoters in the United States. He confiscated water, booze, and food from everyone and then made them pay ten dollars for a bottle of water and there’s eighty thousand people at the concert—so do the math. The worst part was that he didn’t offer to cut me in! The guy said, “I make beer. I own all alcohol here in Bangalore Province. We take all the bottles away before they come in.” There’s a ton of booze and water bottles piled up in a huge heap. I said, “What do you do with all those bottles?” “Oh, we dump them.” “What about all the destitute people walking the streets outside our hotel like zombies at four in the morning, barefoot, in loin cloths, with no food?” “As Ramakrishna says, ‘When an elephant is in trouble, even a frog can kick him.’ ”

Three hours later, we’re back in our room, Erin turns on the TV, and there’s an Indian announcer in the singsongy voice describing our room as the camera pans around to the bowl of fruit, the bed (without us in it), but the pillows with “Steven” stitched on them, my bathrobe, and the towels (also with “Steven” on them). We sat up, “Whoa! Is this camera in here
now
?” They’d been in the room the day before and filmed everything.

Onstage, Joey’s always tied to his drums, and Tom, Brad, and Joe are all ferociously focused on their fret boards—they can’t be running around like maniacs—so it’s up to me to put on a show. I’m the designated kinetic animal, the leaper, the somersaulter, the jack-in-the-box, the March Hare driven to mad extremes by the manic artillery of Aerosmith’s heavy-ordnance rock. And my poor feet having had to bear the burden of all these acrobatic antics for thirty-six years finally said, “NO MORE! If you don’t treat me good the way you should, you won’t have a leg to stand on.” Okay, I get it! What was wrong with my foot? It sloped to one side, it looked oddly reptilian, like it had turned into an alien pod. I dealt with it the same way I’ve always dealt with pain—I self-medicated. It took me a while to get around to having my feet examined (I should’ve had my head examined, too). When I finally went to see an orthopedic specialist, Dr. Brian McKeon at the Boston Sports and Shoulder Center, he said, “Son, what you got ain’t good!” What he actually said was something like “It’s an enlarged nerve that usually occurs in the third interspace, between the fourth and fifth toes. Problems often develop in this area because part of the lateral plantar nerve combines with part of the medial plantar nerve here.” Okay, stop! I’ve heard enough! It had a nasty-ass name: Morton’s neuroma. It sounded bad and it was.

My feet were crooked and broken from years of wearing tight shoes and high-heeled boots—Beatles boots—and slamming around onstage. That’s why I walk this way. It’s one thing to walk around all day in high heels like women do, but to traumatize your feet onstage for two hours every night for thirty years is quite another. We played
thousands
of shows, my feet and I. After every tour, my feet weren’t just inflamed, they were
in shock
.

In February of ’07 I was a busy boy. We’d gone to London to perform at the Hard Rock Cafe, where I put on one of John Lennon’s jackets. We were there to promote our upcoming world tour and to rip the Hard Rock another asshole with our badass selves. It was the first gig Tom played after having recovered from throat cancer. The show was fucking great and I was on fire from hanging out with the Bert and Ernie of England, our photographers, Ross Halfin and
Classic Rock
magazine’s Peter Makowski, who I later had dinner with—along with Jimmy Page. Not only do I have to perform, I have do BBC One and BBC Two interviews: “Now, tell me, Steven, how are you and those drug addictions doing? Are you and Joe still the Toxic Twins?” Where have they been? Fuck, they missed my whole sobriety thing.
What!
Twelve years of me clean, sober, drug free, and reasonable (well, okay, maybe that’s going a bit too far) and you
missed
it, you fucks? On to the inevitable Mick look-alike questions and the more recent taunt, “By the way, how
old
are you?” I just went, “You sensationalistic motherfuckers. I don’t mean that in a bad way.” They just laughed; they loved it. I was, after all, a visiting dignitary and it was all really sweet.

At the Brit awards I was asked to copresent the Best International Group award to the Killers, along with Sophie Ellis Bextor. Amy Winehouse, my sister in the art of self-destruction and abuse, showed up to greet me. The guys from the Red Hot Chili Peppers came to my dressing room and I felt bad because most of them were clean and I was still crusin’. “How’re you doin’?” I asked Anthony Kiedis, and he goes, “Well, I’m still ridin’ the sobriety train.” And shamefully, I blurted out, “Yeah, me too!” but I was snorting Zanzibars at the time like there was no tomorrow. I did an absolutely manic interview with the Brit classic rock magazine
MOJO
. I raved on about God, gorillas, talking dogs, and sex in trees.

The thing about my feet was that I knew they were going to require surgery and that it was going to be fucking painful as hell, because I knew the band would force me to rush my recovery in order to get back out on tour in a timely manner. My doctor works on all the Celtics’ and Bruins’ knees and shoulders and feet, and he put me in Larry Byrd’s room. I was in the hospital for a week-plus while I had the foot operations. What they had to do was to cut some bone and take two knuckles out of my feet (they’re in a similar position to the knuckles in your hand). If you bend your thumb above the nail, that’s one knuckle, the next knuckle back is where the thumb attaches to the hand, and that was the joint in my foot that had to be sawed in half because it was bent. They also took out a ganglion of nerves. The nerves that are in your feet are small as a dime, but mine were the size of a quarter, big and bulbous and traumatized to the point where they had to be taken out. Morton’s neuroma is the nerve center in the feet. That’s where they took the nerves out, so now there’s just phantom pain there, like a guy who gets his arm cut off and still feels his fingers.
Whatha?
So there’s phantom pain
plus
my brain is sending electricity down to the feet thinking that Nerve Central’s still there. What Dr. McKeon did was to take the Grand Central Station of nerves in my feet out.

Even four months later I was still walking on those incisions; it’s something that I need to do because it makes nerves spark and come back to life and return life to my foot again. The doc said that in a year it should be just plain all right. I’ve got a couple of places that are creaking and hurting still and I don’t know why. Love may be hard on the knees, but it’s also hard on the vocal cords and the feet—and my ankle muscles aren’t back, either. I’ll be in pain for the rest of my life. Hey, what else is new?

When I got out of the hospital I kept my feet elevated and got a little roller device to do my orthopedic exercises on. I also got a scooter on four wheels that I’d kneel on and scoot around the house. I put a horn on it so I could blast everyone as I zoomed around the house. But because it’s my feet and because of who I am, you can only imagine, after a month and a half, I climbed up the stairs on my
knees
to go take a tub. After sixty days of climbing up the stairs on my knees I moved my bed from downstairs into my living room in Marshfield.

Then I tried to find a live-in nurse to give me my drugs so I wouldn’t have to touch them myself because of my past history. I called up the Nurses Society at the hospital near me in Marshfield and left a number. A woman called back, very excited about doing it. I hung up and went, “Oh, god, I
know
that name. Who is it?” Susan, who was working for me at the time, said, “That’s the fuckin’ stalker girl!
Ach!
That’s that stalker bitch down the street, who drives by and we duck all the time!” And I went, “
Wha-a-a-at?”

I could hear her in the echoing recesses of my addled brain saying in her crazy scary lady voice: “Steven, love, I followed you back from Sunapee, I’m going to make you well . . . I will never abandon you.”

Whoops!
So this nurse is
another
stalker woman off her meds who’s now
moved
to Boston,
moved
near
me. I got a restraining order, but all she did was to move
farther
down the block and become a nurse, a fuckin’ nurse, Oh,
nuuuuuuurse!
They’re very sweet, nurses, and overweight—like in the movie
Misery
. Maybe women who satiate themselves with food have a need to take care of everyone else but themselves! I told Susan, “Ah! Get rid of that number!!!”

So, now I was forced to bring my own drugs home. And needless to say, I was back in my element. I wasn’t taking the pills, I was grinding them up and snorting them. Eyes pinned, mind numbed. I wasn’t the only one buying drugs from the dealer on the street. Everybody was doing OxyContin, Joe more than me. Oh, sure, we had our reasons, um, excuses. Joe’s knees and my fucked-up foot. Ya gotta take something for that severe pain. Unfortunately, those were the only things that worked for us.

For the first month I needed serious painkillers—for the second month, I should have started weaning down, and the third month, been damn near off the drugs completely. But these are my feet and I’m
walking
on the surgery so by the end of three months, I was hooked but good. I still couldn’t walk and the pain was
excruciating
. One day one of our road crew came down to visit me, and knowing what he did on the road, I asked him if he had any you-know-what. I was already taking it so why not do a little more. And I would have, had a dear friend not bought it all off him an hour before. Within a month I was one of his regulars. I’m glad he did it, but after I came out of Las Encinas a lot of my friends began saying, “That motherfucker! He’s fired!” Well, I didn’t think he should be around me and I didn’t want him working for the band, but I never had any bad feelings about him. Shit, I was in a lot of pain and he was trying to make me feel good!

I couldn’t get enough narcotics to dull the pain in my feet. I had whole jars full of Xanax. Not the cute little pills your mother gives you, but these monster things—pills so big they got named Zanzibars. They’re slammin’, they’re great—I got them from Mexico—I didn’t know about the online stuff back then. Xanax, Librium, Valium, etc., commonly known as benzos from their basic chemical compound, benzodiazepine. Now, in rehab, if you came in really strung out on benzos, some counselors would take you off to one side and whisper in your ear, “Go out and get yourself hooked on heroin, instead, because the benzos take a year to kick and are so much harder to come down from. And heroin only takes two months to get off.” Go figure.

But the painkillers and tranquilizers weren’t the only problem. One day a friend of mine came over and he said, “You wanna do a few lines?” I said, “What? You have blow on you now?” I mean, those were the words. I leaped at it. I said, “You have it on you now?” He goes, “Yeah, I got it.” “Well, could I have some of it?” God, and I was shaking like a leaf. I hadn’t done blow in fifteen years.

This drug binge went on for a month . . . or two . . . or three. Then, at the end of March, John Henry, who owns the Red Sox, called me at the house and asked if I would sing for the opening game. And it was “Let me see. Okay, yes.” So on April 4, 2007, I went to Fenway Park and sang the national anthem. I’m in the midst of singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and I’m high as a kite. The words are melting like candle wax against the blue sky.

B
ut at a certain point I said, “This shit’s gotta stop!” So I went to L.A. and got even more fucked-up. The ostensible reason for going out there was that during the third month after my operation, Guitar Hero was doing a version of their video game with Aerosmith. I had to get out there and do stuff, on pain meds
and
in a cast for my foot. Early in the fourth month I’m out of the cast—walking around pretty good wearing a sneaker with the toe cut off. I have some pretty impressive insulated socks and a toe condom I wear onstage.

I was so into Guitar Hero. I love cartoons, comic books. When I was a kid up in New Hampshire at Trow Rico, my comic books were
Archie
and
Scrooge McDuck—
and it was pretty cool stuff
.
It was sweetly demented, but who knew? Whoever wrote that shit? Scrooge McDuck diving in his pool of dimes and nickels, coming up with his lucky dime.