Scar Tissue

  For some reason, it didn’t faze us when Mike and I found ourselves out on the street. The whole concept of sleeping didn’t make much sense to us then. There were all these new clubs opening and a whole post-punk scene developing in Hollywood. There was the Lasa Club and the Zero One after-hours bar and the CASH Club, which stood for Creative Artist Space of Hollywood. We’d end up at these places because we were out all night, every night, going with this invisible flow, following the party.

  Mike was in a little better shape than I was. He wasn’t hitting the drugs as hard, and he still had income from his animal-hospital job. When we left the Formosa house, he ended up crashing at the CASH Club. CASH was run by a woman named Janet Cunningham, who had a legit job as an extras casting director for the film industry. If you were an actor or a painter or a musician, Janet would let you crash at this loft space for free. During the day it would be a hangout spot, and at night there would be performances. At the time Mike moved in, Larry Fishburn lived there, along with a great Guadalupian drummer named Joelle, a French painter named Fabrice, and an authentic punk rocker named Animal Boner. Not only did this guy have some of the first tattoos I’d ever seen other than on old sailors, his were on his kneecaps, and they read METAL KNEECAP FACTORY.

  Because Mike was staying there, I’d wind up crashing there, too, from time to time. That was when we started doing heroin. Fab, in addition to being an artist, began to get a steady source of China White heroin. It was so pure that you could sniff one line and be loaded. Mike started sniffing it, too, but he always remained a lightweight around heroin. The joke was that all you had to do was show him a bindle of H, and he’d start vomiting.

  By now my flattop was growing out, so one night when we were out in the Valley at a party, I asked Hillel to give me a Mohawk. I knew he was good with shapes and dimensions, so we went into the bathroom and he hawked me up. Because my flattop had already been trained to stand up, I didn’t have to use eggs or gel or whatever the other punks used to straighten their Mohawks. Mine just stood up on its own, like the horsehair that stuck out of the top of those old fighting helmets.

  The Mohawk gave me a new persona and new energy. Even though I didn’t have a place to live or a job, it didn’t matter, because I had this new set of armor and a good feeling about myself. I would dress up in a white frock dress with no underwear and black combat boots and go out dancing. One of the great new places that I discovered was Radio Club, L.A.’s first hip-hop club. I’d go there with Mike and Gary Allen, our crazy black, gay fashion-designer friend who was from Arkansas and was the lead singer in a band called Neighbor’s Voices. We’d dance for five hours straight and get completely wasted.

  When it was time to sleep, I wasn’t picky. I’d go with the flow. If I was with Mike, I might crash where he was. Hillel’s was a favorite spot on my couch tour. His family always made me welcome and never made me feel like the loser that I was, even though one time I overstayed my welcome and Hillel came to me and said, “I think if you stay on the couch tonight, my mom’s going to have a little more than she can handle. She’s been through a rough time of her own.” I ended up sleeping in my T-Bird, parked right in front of Hillel’s house. Between the bucket seats and the metal trim, I couldn’t get comfortable, so I got out and crashed on their front lawn. In the morning, the neighbor’s kids came out to play and saw this Mohawked freak in thrift-store clothing passed out on the grass. Eventually, Hillel invited me in for coffee and toast.

  When I wasn’t at Hillel’s, I’d stay with my friend Keith Barry. He lived with his hip dad in a small two-bedroom back house in Hollywood. His pops was a daily weed smoker, so that became another pit stop to get high. Keith had always been an outcast, so he got behind my Mohawk persona. He was also a great musician, and he turned me on to some stellar old jazz. He let me crash on his bedroom floor, and that was fine with me. I’d roll up a towel and put it under my head and be set. But like at Hillel’s place, Keith’s dad began to feel a little put off by my presence, so I wound up sleeping in their tiny backyard. It was barely big enough to contain a couple of lawn chairs, but that was all I needed to curl up in.

  Whenever I got any money, I’d go on a drug binge. The problem was, I didn’t have a home to do the drugs in. So I’d start off using in somebody’s house, and when they got finished, I’d go off to get more. I began to do a roaming drug-shooting thing where I’d get the drugs, go into underground parking garages, hide out in a corner behind someone’s trunk, set up, and then shoot up. I’d get all crazy high and go walking the streets, and then I’d find an alley or a school yard, or go behind a bush and do some more.

  Sometime that spring, my homeless period came to an end. I ran into Bill Stobaugh, a friend of mine from my old graphics job. He was a white guy, but he had a shock of huge Eraserhead hair jutting up from his head. Bill’s beautiful psychedelic artwork earned him the nickname “The Hallucinogenius.” He was a Renaissance man of sorts, a filmmaker, a guitar player, a collector of beautiful old twelve-string guitars. He had gone on to a few other graphic-design houses, and he was helpful in finding me part-time work that put some coin in my pocket.

  One of these places was called Mid-Ocean. It was owned by a giant six-foot-five overachieving Irishman named Ray. He was capable of doing twenty tasks at once and getting them all done. His petite blond wife ran the financial side of the business. They were doing cutting-edge animation work, including all the animation for Blade Runner.

  Ray and his wife sort of adopted me, and once again I got a job as a runner. But once again I started doing heroin. I’d stay up all night doing smack, and then I’d go to work and have to shuttle some film down to Orange County to get processed. I’d be driving their little red pickup truck, nodding out on the freeway. It’s amazing I didn’t get killed in a car crash.

  While I was at Mid-Ocean, Bill realized that I didn’t have a home, so he asked if I wanted to move in with him. He had this great huge dark basement with many windows that looked up to the sidewalk. It was in a classic old Hollywood apartment building that had mostly Mexican tenants. The space was raw, with no walls, but he offered me one corner if I would help him build security bars on the windows to keep the riffraff out.

  One night shortly after I moved in, I decided to go on one of my infamous coke binges. I had one of those weird walking nights when I walked up and down Hollywood Boulevard, popping into the porno shops, doing weird shit. I came home during the night maybe once, quietly, to get either money or warmer clothes, but I ended up staying out all night.

  The next day I walked into Mid-Ocean, and Bill charged me with a look in his eyes that I’d never seen before. “I’ll kill you, you motherfucker.” He had always been such a mellow, trippy fellow, so I asked him what was wrong. He stopped in his tracks, maybe because he saw something in my eyes that he wasn’t expecting, but he told me that he had gotten robbed the night before and every single one of his precious guitars was gone, and that I was the only person who could have done it.

  “Bill, I know I’m crazy, I know that I’m shooting drugs and doing weird shit and disappearing, and I can see where you would blame me for something like this happening, but you’d better take another route, because I didn’t do it. If you don’t focus on whoever did do it, they’re going to get off scott-free,” I said. He couldn’t get his head around the fact that anyone else could have done it. I was the only one with keys. But I was sure it was an inside job and that the maintenance people in the building had robbed him.

  That was the end of my rooming with Bill. There was no way I was going to live with a guy who thought I’d robbed him. Now I had to find another place to stay. At Mid-Ocean they had set up a little loft space above the primary artwork room that was accessed by a ladder and had a couple of futons. I started crashing there and getting up early enough that nobody knew I wasn’t just the first person to work that morning.

  By now Mike (who had been dubbed “Flea” on a trip he took to Mammoth with Keith Barry and JK) had mo
ved into an apartment in what we called the Wilton Hilton, a great old classic brick building on Wilton and Franklin. The place was filled with artists and musicians, and it was managed by a super-kooky seventy-year-old fireplug of a landlady. Flea was living with Joel and Fabrice, his buddies from CASH. At some point Hillel became a semi-resident, too. So when my tenure with Bill ended, I wound up staying over there a lot. All during this time, What Is This (which was Anthym’s new, more mature name) continued to play live shows and develop a cult following. I was still introducing them, but by now I was writing my own poetry for the intros. One time I even rhymed “metropolis” with “acidophilus.” The more they played, the more Flea became the acknowledged star of the band. Whenever they’d give him a bass solo, that would be the climax of the whole evening.

  At that time, Fear was the most famous punk-rock band in L.A. They had gotten national attention when John Belushi took them under his wing and featured them on Saturday Night Live. So when their bass player left the group, it was natural that they’d try to get Flea to replace him. One day Flea came to me and dropped the bombshell that he had been asked to audition for Fear. This was a dicey situation, because Flea and Hillel were my two best friends in the world. But we talked, and it turned out if Flea had to choose between the two different styles of music, he would end up in the Fear camp. So I advised him to go and audition.

  He came back from the audition with the job, but now he had to face Hillel, the guy who had taught him how to play bass in the first place. Flea got so nervous before their meeting that he threw up. And Hillel did not take the news well. “I have no words for you,” he said, and left the room. What Is This replaced Flea with a series of mediocre bass players; meanwhile, Flea vaulted into punk-rock mini-stardom. After several months of noncommunication, Hillel had to forgive Flea. Something in him knew that even though he’d been wronged, it was Flea’s destiny, and he had to swallow his ego a bit and allow Flea to flower. It was hard, because none of us had any father figures to consult with on these heavy issues. Eventually, they became friends again and resumed jamming.

  I was still working at Mid-Ocean, driving that pickup truck all throughout the summer of 1982. An amazing song kept blasting out of the radio that I had on the center console. It was called “The Message,” and it was by a rap group from New York called Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. I went out and bought the cassette and played it over and over and over. A few weeks later, they came out to L.A. and played at a place called the Country Club, and they were incredible. Their theatrics were inspired, and each had his individual persona, and their rapping was fantastic. Grandmaster Flash was the man behind the turntable; the sounds and the rhythms and the funkiness and the coolness that this guy emanated from the stage were really impressive.

  But more than anything else, “The Message” started to get me thinking. These guys were all writing rhymes, something that Hillel and I had been in love with for a long time. He and I would break into the top floor of the Continental Hyatt House on Sunset, which was a private club, and we’d have it to ourselves and look out at this spectacular view of the city, and we’d smoke a joint and invent these crazy characters and spontaneously erupt into these rhyming sessions. It was the first time I had ever attempted rapping.

  So when “The Message” became the hottest song that summer, it started dawning on me that you don’t have to be Al Green or have an incredible Freddie Mercury voice to have a place in the world of music. Rhyming and developing a character were another way to do it.

  Chapter 5

  Deep Kicking

  In some ways, I owe my career to my friend Gary Allen. In February 1983, Gary and Neighbor’s Voices were scheduled to play the Rhythm Lounge at the Grandea Room on Melrose. A few days before the gig, he suggested that Flea, Hillel, and I open for his band and do one number, with me fronting this band.

  Although Hillel and Flea were initially skeptical, since I wasn’t a singer, Gary had recognized my potential as a performer, mainly from my maniacal cavorting on the dance floor at various clubs around town. We decided to put together something, and it instantly became clear to me, thanks to Grandmaster Flash, that I didn’t have to sing a song, I could go out there and rap a poem. All of us had latched on to the energy of Defunkt and the raw edginess of the Gang of Four and, of course, the cosmic freedom implicit in Jimi Hendrix’s guitar playing, so we would channel all those influences. But mainly, we wanted to do something based in funk, because What Is This had absolutely nothing to do with the funk.

  We didn’t have a space to rehearse, and we weren’t taking this gig that seriously, so we decided all we really needed to do was get together in Flea’s living room at the Wilton Hilton and have an a cappella rehearsal. Flea and Hillel had such exquisite telepathy going on that they could just look at each other and know what to play. So Flea came up with his bass line, and Hillel invented a funky guitar riff, and Jack Irons, the drummer in What Is This, laid down a beat. Then I went off to write some lyrics.

  I got lucky. I decided to write something I knew about—my very colorful friends and our wild nightlife scene. I called the song “Out in L.A.,” and there were references to Flea and Tree (Keith Barry’s nickname) and Slim, who was Hillel. In the great tradition of rap, I wrote a verse about my sexual prowess, and I called myself “Antoine the Swan,” for no other reason than it rhymed. For years and years, people would come up to me and ask, “What’s the real thing behind the swan? You got a curve in your dick?” In a way, it was an ironic reference, because my dancing style was so ungraceful and unswanlike. I would attempt the physical maneuvers of a prima ballerina, and I’d wind up crashing or knocking over a table or pulling the curtains down.

  It was a pretty ambitious first song. I wrote in places for a bass solo, a guitar solo, and an a cappella vocal breakdown. After we rehearsed it to the point where we felt like we had it, I came up with a name for us. We weren’t looking for a permanent band name, because this was just going to be a one-off, so I called us Tony Flow and the Miraculous Masters of Mayhem—that was how we wanted to play, majestic and chaotic.

  We showed up to the Rhythm Lounge, and there were about thirty people in the club, all there to see Neighbor’s Voices. I was wearing a paisley corduroy three-quarter-length robe and a fluorescent orange hunting cap. Oddly enough, I was totally sober. I had no idea how performing was going to make me feel; all I knew was that as we got up onstage, there was this weird sense of a force field traveling among us. I had seen Flea and Hillel and Jack play a million times, but I’d never seen so much intensity in their faces or purpose in their body language. Flea looked like a cylinder of glowing energy. Unbeknownst to me, he’d been snorting heroin before the show.

  The stage was microscopic. I could have reached out in either direction and touched Hillel or Flea. We didn’t even get a proper introduction, but people started to take notice as we were plugging in. All the anticipation of the moment hit me, and I instinctively knew that the miracle of manipulating energy and tapping into an infinite source of power and harnessing it in a small space with your friends was what I had been put on this earth to do.

  And then Jack Irons, bless his heart, cocked his neck back and hit his sticks together and counted off “One, two, three, four.” When the music started, I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I had so much juice flowing through me that I did a flip in that tight space and nailed it. And we all just erupted. We had no idea what we were about until that moment, but right into the song, we realized that we were about exploding and killing it with everything we had. As we performed, everybody who was in that room who hadn’t been paying attention zombied all the way up to the stage. When we finished, the audience was completely stunned and speechless, frozen in their tracks.

  Solomon, the French guy who was promoting that show, rushed out of his DJ booth and, with typically passionate French body language, touched me and said, “Can you please come back and play next week at my club? Maybe you could have two songs
by then?” Although we hadn’t planned on playing again, I said, “Of course, we’ll be here next week, and we’ll have another song for you.” We were so high off of that show that the idea of playing the next week seemed totally natural.

  We got together during the week and wrote a song called “Get Up and Jump.” Flea had been working for a long time on a bass part that was syncopated and intertwined and complicated, combining picking and slapping in a strange and beautifully funky way. I had to write lyrics, so I came up with some more that were character-based. I took the theme of jumping and wrote verses about different cartoony versions of jumping—jumping rope, Mexican jumping beans. But the most memorable line in that song was about Rona Frumpkin, a girl Hillel had a crush on.

  One of Hillel’s more outstanding characteristics was his big red nut sack, which he was very proud of and which he would put on display with hardly any urging. We used to joke about Hillel’s package, because when he would put his dick and nut sack together, he’d form a pumpkin shape in his trousers, which would become a lot more pronounced when he was around Rona. So I wrote a verse that included “Hillel be jumping on that little baby Frumpkin/Say what, you got a pumpkin in your pants?”

  We decided we were going to get theatrical for show number two, so we choreographed a funny dance to the popular song “Pac Jam.” The night of the show, the club was packed to the rafters, so we began our performance by marching in the front door and pushing our way through the crowd with “Pac Jam” blasting out of a boom box. When we got to the stage, we started in on this retarded robotic dance. Jack couldn’t get the synchronized moves together, so we abandoned the dance halfway through and went right into “Out in L.A.” and then “Get Up and Jump.”