Scar Tissue (46 page)
In November I tried to go back into the studio and do some singing, but I wasn’t in any kind of shape to do it. I did a mediocre job. I was skinny and sucked up, bad color, bad skin, scraggly hair, droopy, dead-looking eyes. The cat wasn’t out of the bag yet, and everyone thought I was run-down from being sick all summer. I was beginning to realize that drug addiction really was a progressive illness and, God forbid, if you should start using again, it would be worse than it was before.
When Jaime came to visit, I’d force myself to go without for a few days, then I’d take her to the airport and head straight downtown. I had a few close calls with the law. One time I was smoking coke in the car and was way too high to drive safely, and I had a bunch of paraphernalia and drugs right under the seat. I must have been driving erratically, because a cop pulled me over. I got the window halfway down, and this young, vicious-looking LAPD cop shone his flashlight on me and said, “Oh, Mr. Kiedis! My bad! I’m sorry, sir, excuse me for the interruption, but I really have to tell you that this is a pretty dangerous area, so you might want to exercise caution around here. You have a good night, now.” That wasn’t quite the reception I was expecting.
Another time I had purchased both of my products and peeled away, cutting through traffic, and a black-and-white pulled me over. I had stashed the coke under an ashtray, but I had the balloons of heroin right in my hand. I didn’t want to get busted, so I quickly swallowed the three balloons, which weren’t digestible, so I wasn’t in any danger. When the cop came over and asked me why I was in that neighborhood, I made up some story about visiting a girl, and that mollified him, so he didn’t search the car. Then I had to backtrack and buy some more heroin.
That was the beginning of what would be a marathon binge. Four days later, I wound up finishing everything, and it was daytime, and I was beat down and delirious. I’d spent all my cash, and the last thing in the world I felt like doing was driving downtown in the daytime heat and interacting with drug dealers. I was on my way into a liquor store to buy some paraphernalia, but I was so full of toxins that I had to casually stroll over and vomit into the gutter. As I vomited, I looked down and spotted those three intact balloons full of heroin. “Yeah! Free drugs. I hit the jackpot!” I thought, and fished out the balloons and saved myself a trip downtown.
Jaime came to visit in December, and by then I had an ugly heroin habit. I’d been smoking both crack and heroin for a couple of months straight. This was in anticipation of our Christmas trips home. We had decided over the phone that we would give our dads big cars. Jaime was on a roll with her modeling, and she wanted to give her pop a pickup truck, and I wanted to give Blackie a Bronco. By then he had moved back to Michigan. Right after we did so well with
Blood Sugar,
I’d visited him, and he was living in a tiny apartment in downtown Grand Rapids. I had an epiphany that I had just made a ton of money touring, so I should buy him a house. We found a nice house on a lake in Rockford, out in the country, and Pops was taken care of.
Jaime and I arranged for the truck to be shipped out to Pennsylvania. Our plan was to drive Blackie’s brand-new, luxurious, spacious Bronco to Michigan. After the two holiday celebrations, Jaime and I would go to the Caribbean together, to a resort on Caneel Bay on the island of St. John. She still didn’t know what the hell was going on with me, but since my clothes were hanging off my emaciated frame, she could see that I was sick. I was like “Oh, we’re going to go away for Christmas, I’ll get healthy, we’ll go to the Caribbean, everything’s going to get better from here on out.” Unbeknownst to her, my foolish notion was that I’d buy a bunch of coke and a bunch of heroin and wean myself as we went across the country. This is never a good idea. But I’d convinced myself that the farther away from L.A. I got, the fewer drugs I’d do. I had to make a number of sojourns downtown, during which I bought out every dealer I encountered.
Jaime still had some last-minute Christmas shopping to do. By now I was taking a hit off the pipe every ten minutes, wherever I was—in a phone booth, a bathroom, behind a tree, wherever. Once I got high, I wasn’t acting all spooked out, because I was so accustomed to it. So we started packing and gathering goods, and she was gleeful about this imminent departure for a cross-country trip, and I was going along with the glee, but really I was Spirograph Brain. I drove her to pick up some slippers at a fancy shoe store on Melrose, and as soon as she left the Bronco, I fired up the old pipester. I was sitting there smoking like a fiendish monkey when, all of a sudden, I heard a sharp rap on the window. It was Jaime. She had caught me red-handed. The whole masquerade that I’d been holding up was over. I was mortified, and she was shocked. She popped me the finger and tried to run off, but I grabbed her and talked her into coming back into the car.
I went through this psychedelic Rolodex of what page works for this problem. I had no choice but to tell her what had happened and how I’d ended up here and what I was prepared to do about it, as long as I didn’t have to stop getting high at that moment. We drove to Waddle’s Park, and I put it all on her, the whole sordid story. I told her that I loved her from the bottom of my heart, and I’d do anything for her, and this was a serious fucking problem that I’d been through before, and there was no easy solution. I told her my plan to drive across the country and wean myself off the cocaine and heroin, so by the time I got to Michigan, I’d be clean. It was a temporary solution to an enormous and life-threatening problem, like putting a Band-Aid onto a severed jugular.
She was not having it. “Fuck you, fuck you, you motherfucker. Where’s my plane ticket? I’m going home. You’re an asshole, you’re a liar, you’re a scumbag.”
“Yeah, I’m all that stuff, but I still think you should stay. I’ve got my stuff, and by the time we get to Michigan, I’ll be done-zo,” I said.
Jaime told me that she’d had suspicions all along and that she had been telling my mom and Flea that maybe I was doing drugs again. Of all the dreadful, self-deprecating, self-loathing, isolated, fucked-up feelings that you get as a drug user, one of the worst is having your girlfriend conspire with your best friends and your family on your behalf. It’s the ultimate in humiliation, knowing that your best friend and your girlfriend are talking about you behind your back because you’re using. Then your family’s in on it, and you feel pathetic. You know they feel bad for you and want to help you, and it’s just like agghhh, stay away, don’t even bother. I don’t need your help, I don’t want your help. Don’t even talk to each other, please!
Finally, she agreed to take the trip with me. I don’t think she realized how disconcerting it would be for her to be in a car with me getting loaded every ten minutes until the stuff ran out. We left California and got to the desert, and I was having to make all these stops, not sure if I should be getting high in front of her or if I should hide it. I was getting more comfortable with the idea of her watching me get loaded, but it was still not my favorite thing in the world, because the physical act of ingesting the drugs is so ghoulish.
We kept driving and driving, and at one point I was too high to drive, so she took the wheel. We were listening to
Nirvana Unplugged
and Mazzy Star, and she was crying her eyes out. Then it was nighttime and we were in the mountains of Arizona. The road was slick and icy and dangerous, and out of nowhere, what looked like a gigantic super-elk, bigger than the whole car, leaped across the road. Jaime swerved to avoid it and we were fine, but I looked at the road sign and realized that the town was where my grandmother had driven off the road to her death. I took it as an omen, as if the spirit of that elk was saying to me, “Wake up, motherfucker, because you’re dying.”
That wasn’t the first time I had experienced interactions with spirits while I was doing drugs. One time during this era of relapsing, I came back to my house in the middle of the night, pockets full of drugs, ready to be the mad scientist. I was fiddling through my pockets to get my keys out when I heard this crazy scream. I figured it was somebody I knew who was on the balcony screaming at me like a crazy witch. But I didn’t see anybody. I stepped back from the house and said, “Hello? Anybody there?” Again I heard that horrifying scream. I looked up on the gable above my bedroom and saw a giant hawk sitting there, staring right down at me, screaming his lungs out in this tortured human voice.
I thought that this guy did not want me to do what I was doing. And if I didn’t stop it, I would probably die. This would happen periodically, once a month or so: There’d be a bird, sometimes an owl, screaming at me at the top of its lungs when I came home on these furious misadventures of drug use. When you’re using drugs, you’re driven by this mystical black energy, a force inside you that just won’t quit. And the weaker you get, the more you feed into that energy, and the more it fucks with you. When your spirit becomes dark and your lifestyle becomes dark, your existence is susceptible to infiltration by dark spirits. I’ve seen it so many times with addicts. You can see that they’re controlled by dark energy, the way they look, their appearance, their voice, their behavior, it’s not them.
I remember when Hillel died and I was just getting clean, I had a dream lying in my bed next to Ione. It was one of those horribly vivid half-awake, half-asleep dreams. All of this terrifying energy came flying into my bedroom along the top of my ceiling. There were demons and goblins and ghouls and creatures, a full-assortment platter of scary motherfuckers. I could tell that they were coming to fuck with me, to say, “Okay, we did our job on your friend, now we’ve come for you.” At first I was like “I’m not having it, you guys, you came to the wrong house.” As I was putting up this psychic fight, the granddaddy of all dark forces, this vast dark angel, came flying in and encompassed the entire ceiling of my room. But I wasn’t open to them. “No, no, no. Be gone. Bye-bye.” That was the beginning of my getting clean.
I noted the message from the elk, and we drove on and found a motel. I kept getting high in the room, and Jaime was beside herself. A lot of her pain and suffering were coming to the surface. She took a bath and locked herself in the bathroom and stayed in there for three hours. I was getting loaded and doing an art project with reflective letters I’d bought at some truck stop, and periodically knocking on the door, saying, “Jaime, are you all right?” After a while, I started to worry. When she finally opened the door, I saw that she had taken a razor blade and carved an “A” into her arm. That whole episode was scary, and even though I was loaded, I was starting to come to grips with the fact that I had created a lot of pain and suffering around me, not just within me.
The next day we got up and drove into Flagstaff. Neither of us had really slept. I kept getting high. Jaime was sad and pissed off and confused and tortured by all of this, so I went into a Native American arts-and-crafts jewelry store and bought a couple of matching rings. In my mind, it was a promise-to-get-better-and-be-together ring. I think she may have taken it as an engagement ring, but I was desperate and lost and grasping for straws. Deep down inside, I loved this girl a lot, and I wanted nothing other than to be with her, but I couldn’t stop using.
We got back in the car and drove to the end of New Mexico and checked in to a motel. I was down to my last balloon of heroin, and we’d been gone only two days. The coke had long since run out, but I was more concerned about having enough heroin to get through the next few days. Still, I announced, “This is it. This is the last time I’m going to be getting high.” She was so sick of the whole drama. I got every last grain of that stuff into my body and didn’t even get high. I tried to sleep that night, and the next day I awoke to the fucking hell that is heroin withdrawal. I was shaking and feverish, and we still had a long way to go. Jaime became the one and only driver, a tiny, beautiful blond princess behind the wheel of this huge truck. I pushed the seat back, got on the floor, crawled inside a sleeping bag, drank a whole bottle of NyQuil, and went into a raging dope kick, sweating and shaking and fainting, just out of it. And Jaime kept driving. She drove for hours and hours and hours while I was in this fever inside of this sleeping bag. She drove straight through to Michigan. Once again, I was home for the holidays with a raging heroin habit.
It
was hard to hide my drug problem when I got to my mom’s house. For one, I looked like a walking skeleton. Besides, Jaime had already voiced her suspicions about my drug use to my mom, who then had talked to my dad.
“Anthony was having stomach problems when I was out there for the Stones shows in October,” Blackie told my mom. “He had to go out in the middle of the night and get Pepto-Bismol.”
“Hello! What are you talking about?” Peggy said. “He’s using.”
Blackie always seemed to be in denial about my drug use. It was probably too painful for him to deal with, so he carried on as if everything was okay.
Now the cat was out of the bag. I settled into the comfort of being home. I knew I had to start going to meetings and eating lots and lots of food. I was okay with the idea of not getting high, but again I didn’t recognize how serious my problem was. The measures I was taking to deal with it were light in the loafers. It’s a good start to go to a meeting and get the truth on the table, but it’s another thing to think that’s going to work. You have to go back in full force and work the twelve steps and do the whole nine yards, you can’t just show up and be a spectator and expect to receive recovery through osmosis. I was dabbling.
But we had a lovely Christmas. I tricked out my mom’s house with a hot tub. My sister Julie had started dating a guy named Steve Simmons, and we were all so happy that she’d met a guy who dug her and treated her well that we spoiled them with lavish gifts. Especially when you’re coming off a long drug run and you’ve been distant from your family, you feel obligated to make up for it with deluxe material goods.