Scar Tissue

  I walked up to them and saw that one of these huge chicks was sitting on the outside of the booth. She appeared to have Bob pinned in. I was thinking she looked like a wide receiver for the Cleveland Browns, but when I looked closer and saw that besides all the lipstick and eyelashes and wigs and fluorescent clothing, there were some serious muscles on this chick, I realized she probably was a wide receiver for the Cleveland Browns. Then I saw that she was all over Bob, with her hand on his dick, sexing him up. I started screaming, “Get off my friend! Get off my friend!” and I was ready to dive into this fray, but then I realized that he had a smile on his face and he was enjoying himself. They’d been sitting there for hours, buying him drinks. We never got the syringes that night.

  But we did in Chicago. We played to a packed house, and I went onstage wearing the executioner’s hood that I had worn for our “True Men” video. Then I pulled off the mask and dove into the audience while I was still singing. The band was in a great groove, and this hot little club girl, cute as can be, grabbed me, dropped to her knees, yanked off my stretchy fabric pants, and started giving me a blow job right on the spot. I appreciated the gesture, but I didn’t have the time or the inclination to have sex right then, I wanted to rock the place out.

  We finished the show, and somehow Bob had managed to come up with a goodly amount of coke. We were staying at a run-down inner-city Travelodge with barbed wire all around it, but we didn’t care, because we had the coke and some syringes and a bunch of beers. We went into our room and started slamulating huge amounts of club-bought cocaine. Poor Bobby instantly went into this cocaine psychosis and started going on about how we had to stop because there were police helicopters landing outside. He was glued to the window, convinced he was seeing helicopters. I can’t remember if there were any helicopters or not, but if there were, they certainly didn’t care about a couple of guys at the Travelodge shooting coke.

  Bob was so paranoid that he was ready to run into the parking lot and throw himself at the mercy of the police. I tried to calm him down. He’d collect himself and then he’d go off again: “They’re coming. They’re coming again.” He cowered for hours until that coke disappeared, which it always does. Then we found ourselves wide awake at five in the morning with our brains screaming for more dopamine. We found some booze and tried to drink ourselves into that early-morning torture chamber of half sleep when Satan’s birds are singing outside the window. It was not fun. Some of the most depressing sensations known to humankind come in that morning netherworld when you run out of coke and you’re in some seedy hotel and the sun is coming up and you’ve got to go somewhere. A few times on that tour, I’d do the all-night-drug thing and then get in the van, sleep on the floor under the seats all the way to the show, and have to wake up and feel like a wax statue with a core of Styrofoam and somehow find the power to play.

  By the time we got to New York, about a month into the tour, Bob had had enough. We were staying at the Iroquois Hotel in Times Square, which was one step up from a welfare hotel. Flea and I and Bob shared a room, and I went out onto the fire escape to practice the songs, because this was New York and I really wanted to get it right. I was going to unveil a new look for New York: a woman’s swimming cap, really big sunglasses, my usual paisley smoking jacket, and, for this show at the Pyramid Club, an inflatable airline vest that I’d stolen on the flight to Detroit. At the opportune moment, I’d pull the CO2 cartridges and inflate.

  That night we had the most fantastic audience—a mixture of drag queens and hipsters and dope fiends, Goth people and punk rockers. We rocked out and accomplished our mission and then went on to the afterparties. The next day we assembled in front of our hotel with the van. We were off to play Maxwell’s in Hoboken, New Jersey. Bob had been up all night, and he’d really come to the end of his rope. He was pulling a Rumpelstiltskin on the sidewalk, banging his feet into the pavement, screaming and yelling, “I won’t be treated like this.”

  “Treated like what? You’re getting three squares a day and a place to stay and you’re getting paid. You got Ben to do all your work for you, so all you have to do is drink, and you never show up anyway. How are we treating you?” we asked.

  “This is a mockery. Don’t you know who I am? I can’t do this if Ben is going to be here. I quit. I quit this fucking tour,” he said.

  “Great, okay, we’ve got to go, so we’ll see you back in L.A.”

  “No, I mean it, I’m not coming with you anymore,” he insisted.

  We were pretty relieved when he quit. As much as we cared about him and enjoyed the anarchy of his company, by the time we got to New York, it had lost its amusement. So we drove away and left him there. He was screaming and yelling and hissing the whole time we drove away. We went on to finish our tour, and he stayed in New York and went to work for a needle-dealing ring to support himself until he managed to get back to L.A.

  When you’re doing a lot of alcohol or cocaine, your thinking becomes skewed and you’re willing to do a lot of things you normally wouldn’t. I don’t know if sleeping with a different girl more than half the time on tour while the love of my life was back in L.A. was due to drug-impaired judgment, though. At that point in my life, I had no morals. Even though I never stopped loving Jennifer, and I’d think about her every day and call her whenever I could afford it, I had no problem cheating on her. It became a momentum thing. If you don’t actively seek out women, you lose that momentum, and even if you change your mind and decide you want to get laid, it becomes tough. But when it’s happening every night, you’re in that zone, and it becomes effortless, especially when you’re the center of attention. That’s what I wanted at that point in my life.

  It would change a few years later. The instant that energy shifted and there was no effort required to have sex with girls because I was in a known band was the instant I stopped wanting to have sex with them. When we were punk rockers no one had heard of, I wanted to grab people’s attention and show them who I was. It was all fun, and it made sense and I didn’t feel weird about it. Of course, I was telling Jennifer that I was faithful, so I was not only cheating but also lying. But I was an out-of-control, selfish egomaniac, out to get mine morning, noon, and night.

  Sometimes it was tricky to get yours, especially when we were at least two to a room. You’d have to be creative. Sometimes you could use the bathroom backstage or a room at an aftershow party. When I was rooming with Lindy, which I did on occasion, it was no problem. One night I ran into this girl from Nebraska. It was ironic, because Nebraska is the corn state, and she had pubic hair that resembled the precise texture of corn silk. You meet a lot of different pubic hair along the way—the nappy, the long, the short, the shaved, whatever. This girl had black corn silk growing out of her pubic mound. And she was a sweetheart, mild-mannered, not a hussy, not a whore, not a trampy backstage girl of any kind. I brought her back to our room, and Lindy was unflappable. He just lay there in his bed, put on his earplugs and eye mask, and zoned out.

  Sometimes I combined my passion for drugs and girls. We had just played in South Carolina, and I was a little drunk, so I went straight into a coke hunt. The bartender at the club found me half a gram, and I did it all too soon. So I was horny beyond control when this fat girl approached me. She was probably about five-three, with an unusual chunky shape. She had a fairly large girth, and her tits were like enormous missiles that projected out from her elbows to the end of her hands. She was kind of pretty, though not the type of girl I’d ever hit on before. But she had our album, and she told me I was her favorite poet of all time, and she gave me this letter that, among other things, suggested my dick was a dolphin and her pussy was the ocean and I had to go for a swim in that ocean. She also wrote that she worshiped the ground I walked on and that she was my servant and she’d do anything for me.

  “Can you get me some coke?” I started.

  Sure she could. We just had to drive to her uncle’s trailer in the next county. We drove out there, and there were
guns and beer bottles and cigarettes and poker, a real southern drug-dealing trailer-park community. She got the coke, and we went back to her little apartment and did it all. As soon as we finished that coke, all of the clothes came off right away, and I had some of the best road sex imaginable with the most unlikely candidate. Because she wasn’t typically hot, there was no pressure, whatever happened happened, and we went for it all night with her big, beautiful, pillowy breasts and her crazy extra-wide body shape. The whole time we were fucking, she was telling me this was her dream come true, but not in a way that made it unpleasant. Later, I found that she had put twenty hits of acid in that letter to me, so I was able to barter it in the next town for some coke.

  By the time we got to New Orleans, the tour was winding down, but the excitement level was ramped up. We were playing at one of the old World’s Fair buildings, and we had luxurious backstage accommodations, including showers and couches and wall-to-wall carpeting. We had finished the set when a lovely young woman wandered into our dressing room. She had bleached-blond hair and fire-engine-red lips and giant eyelashes that made her look like a reincarnated southern version of Marilyn Monroe. As I was prone to do at that time, I made my move before anyone else could even talk to her. I grabbed her hand and pulled her into the bathroom and asked her if she could keep me company while I took a shower.

  Once I got into the shower, she went into an impeccable rendition of Marilyn singing “Happy Birthday” to JFK. I got out of that shower ready to go. She immediately threw off her clothes and we made love on the floor. I had known the girl for five minutes, but I was certain of my affection for her. We spent the night together, and I found out more about her, including the fact that she went to Catholic school. (She would be the inspiration for a later song, “Catholic School Girls Rule.”)

  The next day we drove to Baton Rouge, and of course, she came with us. After we got offstage, she came up to me and said, “I have something to tell you. My father’s the chief of police and the entire state of Louisiana is looking for me because I’ve gone missing. Oh, and besides that, I’m only fourteen.” I wasn’t incredibly scared, because in my somewhat deluded mind, I knew that if she told the chief of police she was in love with me, he wasn’t going to have me taken out to a field and shot, but I did want to get her the hell back home right away. So we had sex one more time, and she gave me an interesting compliment that I never forgot. She said, “When you make love to me, it’s like you’re a professional.” I told her that she should give herself a little time and she’d realize that it was because she didn’t have much to compare it to. And I put her on a bus and sent her back to New Orleans.

  Things had come to a head with Jack Sherman the previous night in New Orleans. We had been through hell and high water with him all across the country, and he had nearly thrown in the towel a few times. By now, we were actually playing well, and the shows had been getting better and better. The between-song comedic banter was a huge part of our act. It was our natural flow of things to take time out for chatty breaks with the audience. Those interludes would send Sherman off. In New Orleans, Flea broke a string during the first song, so I started riffing. Jack was giving me dirty looks or telling me to get on with the show, or some kind of negativity, to which I responded by pouring some jugs of ice water on him while he was taking a solo. It wasn’t a hateful act, it was more theatrical, this-is-what-you’re-going-to-get-if-you-fuck-with-the-singer type of thing.

  Jack looked at me in shock and grabbed his mike. “I want you all to know that this is a historic show, because this is the last night that I will be playing with the Chili Peppers.”

  Then I went up to my mike. “I want you all to know that this is a show of historical proportions, because this is the last night that we’ll have to play with this asshole.”

  It was high theater. We had the audience in the palm of our hand. They were going, “Is this part of the show? Is this for real?” And everybody was silent. Jack and I stared at each other. And he stepped up to the mike and said, “I think you owe me an apology, dude.”

  Another pause, and then I went up to the microphone. “I think you owe me an apology, dude.”

  By then Flea had changed his string, and he came over and we continued playing and it all blew over. But it was one of the most spectacular blowups, because it was bringing out this inner turmoil and making show business out of it.

  Jack was the ultimate straight man, since he really was a straight man. He wasn’t even faking it. That was what people liked about us. When we got feedback from the shows, it was “The music is really interesting. We had a great time dancing. But you guys are the funniest thing we’ve ever seen.”

  God bless Jack, he did keep the band afloat for a year, and if he hadn’t, the years to follow probably wouldn’t have. As awkward and combative and ornery as our relationship was with him, it was an important time. Even on that out-of-control tour, every single time we’d come offstage, I’d feel like I was levitating. It was the greatest high ever. It didn’t matter if it was freezing outside and our backstage was an outdoor patio. We’d all be back there in the cold, sweating, going, “Can you believe this? They loved it. Let’s go out there and make up a new song and give them an encore.”

  We came back from that tour with maybe five hundred dollars apiece, so Jennifer and I had to give up the Lexington house. Jennifer went to live with her mom, but my primary purpose in life became the pursuit of getting loaded. More and more, shooting speedballs became my thing. The whole point of speedballs is that you’re going in two directions at the same time, which is a pretty divine feeling. Instead of getting this pure white-light cocaine rush, you’re also getting this soft heroin rush, so it’s not just a super-ringy and crystal-like feeling, it’s also a little of the dark opium-den feeling. You’re getting the best of both worlds; your serotonin and your dopamine are releasing at the same time.

  When we came back from the tour, we realized that we had to let Jack Sherman go, which was sad. As much as we weren’t on the same page with the guy, we knew it was a heavy thing for someone to go through. But we also knew it was time to get back to something that was rawer, that was coming from a common ground.

  So the three of us went to Jack’s apartment in Santa Monica, where he was living with his new wife. Flea and I were outside arguing, “Okay, who’s going to say it? I think you should do the talking.” “Why should I do the talking? I did it the last time.” I think in the end, Flea took on the job of delivering the message. But first we had to walk down a long driveway to Jack’s house. And as we started marching with full intention, we started laughing hysterically out of sheer nervous excitement, and the thrill of the unknown and the dawning of a new era for us. The more we realized we had to be serious and cut it off clean and move on, the more we couldn’t stop laughing.

  We got to the door trying to suppress the laughter, but we couldn’t. We walked in and told him, “It’s over. We’re firing you. You’re not in the band anymore.” He was stunned and angry. We turned around and left.

  At some point after we fired Jack, Flea came to me and said, “What would you think if Hillel wanted to come back to the band?” I said, “What?” because I knew he wouldn’t suggest that unless he’d had some contact with Hillel. I told him, “What would I think? I’d give my firstborn son to get him back in the band. No questions. Let’s go.”

  Chapter 7

  Groundhog Year

  When Hillel rejoined the band in 1985, it was a monumental feeling, like we were back on track. We finally had a guitarist who knew which songs worked for us and which songs I was capable of singing. Plus, Hillel was our brother. And, like a brother, he was worried about the amount of drugs I was doing. I was in and out of rehearsals, sometimes showing up late, sometimes not showing up. By then I had shown up at Jennifer’s mom’s two-bedroom apartment on Cahuenga, right at the Hollywood Freeway. God bless her mom, she accepted me, but I was a mess. I was the horrible, leeching boyfriend who had no money, lived
under her roof, ate the Corn Pops out of the kitchen, and never replaced anything because I was strapped.

  I would disappear for days on end behind my coke runs, then come back like a beaten puppy and try to quietly sneak in the house to get some rest. But Jennifer wasn’t having it. She answered the door once holding a giant pair of leather clipping shears that she used for her clothing designing. I knew when she was bluffing and when she was out for blood and bone damage, and that particular time she would have gladly stuck those through my skull if I had gotten close enough.

  “Where were you? Who were you sleeping with?” she screamed at me.

  “Are you kidding me? I didn’t sleep with anybody. I was trying to get high. You know how I am,” I pleaded. Eventually, I sweet-talked my way back into the house.

  The more Jennifer got into heroin, the easier it became for me to get into the house, because she needed a coconspirator to cop with, and I needed her money. She didn’t mind me doing the dope, because when I’d do that, I was calm and we could actually be together and melt in each other’s arms and nod out watching old black-and-white movies at four in the morning, enmeshed in the blissful, deadly euphoria of the opium. But she absolutely hated it when I was shooting the cocaine. Then I’d turn into a freak and disappear. Of course, I never wanted to shoot just heroin. So when we were shooting heroin in her room, I’d sneak out to do a hit of coke. But she was the total eagle eye. “No, you’re not. Give me the coke. Give me the syringe. You’re not shooting coke!”