Running With Monsters: A Memoir (4 page)

In an art history class one day, the tweedy professor cleared his throat and said, “Mr. Forrest, may I speak to you?”

I gulped. “Sure.” It didn’t feel right.

“You can’t attend this class. You need to go to the registrar’s office.”

I trudged over and went inside, my typical morning hangover suddenly, screechingly worse. The woman behind the desk sent me back to another office deeper in the building. A stern-looking official had my pathetically, laughably thin folder in front of him. “Mr. Forrest, we don’t have transcripts from you. Nor do we have SAT scores, nor do we have a basic application form, nor do we—”

I cut him off. I tried to work up a front of righteous, middle-class indignation straight from the heart of suburbia. “This is outrageous!” I sputtered. “What kind of incompetent office do you run here?”

He just leaned back in his chair and said, “I’m sorry. You are not a student at this university.”

Well, the jig was up. It was a good scam while it lasted. I turned around and headed back to Los Angeles and re-enrolled at LACC, where I was once again eligible to attend. Once I officially signed up for classes again, those government checks started to arrive in the mail. The purpose of my student days and my only academic goal was really just to be registered somewhere to get money to live and to do drugs and go to clubs. It was a pretty good hustle as far as hustles go.

Now that I was back in town and my financial situation was settled for the moment, I got back to my real business: rock and roll. One of my favorite clubs to visit was the Cathay de Grande. Situated dead center in Hollywood at the corner of Argyle Avenue and Selma Avenue, the club’s main stage was the subterranean home to some of the most exciting music in Los Angeles. It featured the raw punk of local acts like Fear, X, the Circle Jerks, and countless others. The Orange County punk bands like Social Distortion made the Cathay their home away from home. The club was also home to a vibrant local roots-rock scene, with the Blasters and Los Lobos often taking the stage, as well as numerous cow-punk bands, who, really, were playing the kind of straight-up Bakersfield country that had fallen out of favor with rednecks but was finding a new audience with young punk rockers. It was the kind of music that would have fit right in at Zubie’s in Orange County … if the sweaty cowboys could get past the punk rock look of the musicians playing it.

I worked that scene like it was a job. Sure, I partied and had lots of fun, but I constantly inserted myself into peoples’ faces. I met the musicians, the regulars, and all the staff. I made sure to remember everybody’s name. I sincerely liked just about everybody I met at the Cathay and I was genuinely happy to be there. People responded to that. I was a best friend to whoever I might meet. It wasn’t long before I was accepted into the inner circle.

Things were great at the Cathay, but they could have been better according to the owner. There was a problem. The place was divided into two sections, upstairs and downstairs. Downstairs was where the bands played and where the crowd stayed. Upstairs there was a beautiful, ornate bar that was left over from the club’s restaurant days. Very few of the customers used that bar. There was no draw upstairs. All the music and fun happened downstairs. The reluctance of the crowd to go upstairs was costing the place currency. The major moneymaker at any club isn’t the door, it’s the bar. The owner, Michael Brennan, had an idea. “People won’t leave the stage because they want to hear music. What if we have music upstairs?” I was twenty-one years old, loved rock and roll, and lived two blocks away. Michael approached me with his idea. “You’re here every night anyway,” he said. “You come in, play some records, and make a little money too.” His logic was flawless, and the truth is that I would have carried out his plan for free if he had asked. I started coming in five nights a week with a crate of records to spin through the bar’s sound system. I took care and consideration with what I picked to play. I had a vast collection of vinyl I had collected over the years that covered just about every genre of twentieth-century music. I’d play everything from scratchy Delta blues to early rock to psychedelia to the latest underground sounds from Europe. It worked. People started sitting at the bar because now it seemed like something was going on. People would come up, buy a drink, sit and talk and cool out, maybe buy another round or two, and then go back downstairs. I couldn’t believe my luck. I was in the right place at the right time. The gig supplemented my student money. I got $15 a night and, equally important, I got all the booze I could drink on the house. Best of all, I was in the center of the action at one of the coolest clubs in Los Angeles.

One night, I was in the DJ booth playing “Defunkt” by Defunkt when this shirtless, hyper, rubber-faced kid barged his way in like some sort kind of punk rock commando, took the needle off the record, and flipped it over to put on “Strangling Me with Your Love.”

“That’s a better song!” he yelled at me before he ran out on the dance floor and started slamming around with the rest of the moshers. I was dumbstruck. It displayed a total lack of respect, although I had to admit, it was a pretty ballsy move on the kid’s part.

“Who the fuck was that? Security! This kid just came in and flipped my record!” I yelled. The guards went looking for him, but he was a slippery little bastard. They couldn’t catch him. And he kept doing it all night. I was impressed by his persistence—and his taste in music. Finally, I managed to get him to sit still long enough to tell him, “Look, man, you can’t just come into my DJ booth and flip my records.”

He looked at me like I was insane and laughed. “I’m Flea. I play bass for Fear!” he boasted. “I can do anything I want!”

Another regular was Lori Paterson, who eventually became my first wife. She helped book talent for Club Lingerie. She must have seen something in me and we started a fairly dysfunctional relationship right away. She was a little older than me and had absolutely no trouble matching me shot for shot and line for line when it came time to drink or get high. And it seemed like it was always the right time to indulge, although neither I nor anyone around me saw what we were doing as excessive or over the line. It was just something to do to keep the party in constant motion. I moved in with her and one day, fueled by booze and speed, we drove to Victorville in the high desert across the San Bernardino county line and tied the knot. She had faith in her man’s talents and kept after her boss, a flamboyant Scotsman named Brendan Mullen, to let me DJ at the Lingerie. Whatever she said convinced him. I also grabbed a gig where I spun records at Eddie Nash’s Seven Seas club. My schedule was full and I worked every night. From Lori’s apartment in Beachwood Canyon, my nightly routine took shape. I’d wake up late. Drink, do drugs, and crate up the records I planned to use that night. I didn’t have a car. I didn’t need one. My days in Orange County had been spent on the deck of a skateboard, and I had a fine fishtail ride. Powered by gravity, I’d start at the top of the canyon, my crate of records cradled in my arms, and free-fall, high out of my mind, down to Gower to the Cathay de Grande. Sometimes, I’d slide onto Franklin, or I’d just highball it all the way down Beachwood to the Lingerie. You can build some frightening momentum on your way down that hill. If I was scheduled to work the Seven Seas, I’d hook onto Hollywood Boulevard. The stone paving that makes up the Walk of Fame is a fast surface and I could haul ass as I dodged pedestrians and balanced my records.

Now there was movement. My life had direction. I no longer felt the need to continue my charade with college. My real education had begun.

D
rugs were everywhere in the eighties, and everybody I knew used them and loved them. Some were more devoted to the substances than others, but I didn’t know anyone who ever passed up a drug when it appeared. “Hey, you want one of these pills?” someone would say as they pulled out a plastic sandwich baggie stuffed full of multicolored capsules.

“Uh, what are those?”

“I don’t know exactly. The red and yellow ones will slow you up and the brown and orange ones are some kind of speed.”

“Well, pass ’em over, man. Pass ’em over! Got a beer to wash these down with?”

There was a dividing line, though, and that was the needle. You’ll find, sometimes, that the most enthusiastic sniffer of medicinal powders will have a moment of horror and disgust when a party partner pulls out a rig.

“Hey, man, what the fuck is that?”

“It’s the best way to do it, dude.”

“Maybe you’d better take that action somewhere else. It’s not cool.”

But the thing is, it was cool. At least that’s how I saw it. When I encountered a junkie, I didn’t see some sad-sack, toothless loser with pallid skin and the inability to get through four hours without a fix. I saw a member of the Fraternal Order of Cool. The world heroin addicts occupied was closed off to me, and I was fascinated by it. There was a dividing line between drugs. Some users of cocaine and speed can get downright schoolmarmish when heroin enters the picture.

“Want to try some of this?”

“What is it?”

“Heroin.”

“Get the fuck out. Now.”

Heroin, like needles, was cool. Or so I thought in those days. I sensed that dope might be the key that could unlock all the doors that the secrets of art, poetry, and music hid behind. Charlie Parker had blown mad, furious harmonies under its sway. Keith Richards, the ultimate rock-and-roll outlaw, churned out thick, massive riffs with its influence. William Burroughs took its directives and conjured up dark, nightmarish worlds that I wanted to explore. The whole of the night-framed hip world grooved to its beat and pulse and created fucking art. Smack was their muse. My heroes had known its allure, felt its embrace, and I wanted what they had.

Despite my fascination and desire to explore the dark world of the poppy juice, I learned quickly that heroin wasn’t an easy score. The pill poppers, speed freaks, and drunks I knew just didn’t have access to junk. It wasn’t something they used and they didn’t have connections to that world. The junkies I knew all possessed some strange moralistic code that prevented them from introducing a novice to the habit.

“Hey, man, let me try some of that,” I’d say as casually as I could.

“You ever done this shit before?”

“No. But I’ve done everything else.”

“Sorry, kid. I’m not going to bust your cherry.”

“But I can pay. I have cash.”

“No.”

It was frustrating and a major hassle, but if you look hard enough for anything, and if you’re persistent enough, you’ll find it. So there I sat in an apartment deep inside the Hollywood wasteland. It was a hot night and the avenues and boulevards were crawling and thick with hustlers and twilight life forms. The room was dark and cool, a refuge from the dusty streets. I was twenty thousand leagues beneath a neon sea. Across from me, sitting like Buddha at a low table littered with bent and blackened spoons, misshapen candles spitting out what little life was left in them, needles, glittering squares of tinfoil, bright scraps of rubber that had once been balloons, ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts, and half-empty glasses sat a guy named Top Jimmy. He was one of the coolest dudes I knew, an underground legend. I had met him at the Cathay de Grande where his band, the Rhythm Pigs, played every Monday night. A snaggletoothed, porcine throwback to an earlier era’s great, hard-living white bluesmen, his given name was James Paul Koncek, but he derived his blues handle from a counterman’s gig he had once held at a gritty little Mexican takeout joint called Top Taco over on La Brea across the street from A&M Records, where he handed out free tacos and burritos on the sly to struggling musicians and local down-and-outers.

Now here I was in Jimmy’s pad about to take my first taste of heroin. I had conned him and convinced him I was a regular user of the stuff. Not strung out, but well versed in the mysteries of the medicine. I was excited and maybe a little scared, without a clue about what to expect.
This is it,
I thought.
This is your first step into something deep, Bob
. I watched him perform the arcane voodoo ritual of shooting up. I was fascinated as he carefully measured out a dose into a bent spoon like some nineteenth-century backwoods apothecary, added some water, and then cooked it over the flame of one of those sputtering candles on the table. When he determined it was ready, he sucked up the solution into a syringe through a wadded-up piece of wet cotton. I watched him tie off his left arm with a cord, find a ripe and juicy vein, and slide the needle in. He pushed down the plunger. Silence.

Jimmy let the rush wash over him, then focused. “You sure you’ve done this before?” he asked suspiciously.

“Fuck yeah, man,” I lied a little too eagerly.

“You got a point?” was his next question.

My naïveté showed. I was lost. A point? A point about what?

Before I could answer, Jimmy said, “Here,” and took my arm, tied me off, and gave me a shot from his own rig.

This was something. A window opened. A wave flooded in and I felt like I was sinking deeper into the underwater world of Jimmy’s pad. Street noises filtered in from a million miles away. I tamped down a slight flurry of panic and briefly felt nauseous, but that passed as I rode the wave and quickly found my sea legs.

I’d never felt so fucking great in all my life. This stuff was something I definitely needed to explore more deeply. I became part of a little clique of intravenous drug users. It was a small circle. Don Bolles from the Germs; Top Jimmy, of course; and a dealer named Earache. I lived at the La Leyenda Apartments, which rose like a dirty, skewed Spanish Art Deco iceberg from the concrete sea of Whitley Avenue. My habit began to grow from that first taste, although I ignored all the warning signs. Lori left me after one too many fuckups. I didn’t really care. My interests were becoming narrowed down to three things: dope, drink, and music.

One day, as I made my daily neighborhood rounds, I ran into Flea—the kid who had flipped my records while I DJ’ed—and his friend Anthony Kiedis. I knew Flea as the bass player from Fear, and I loved that band. I didn’t really know Anthony except from seeing him around at the clubs. “What’s going on, man?” I asked.

“We’re starting a new band,” said Flea.

“It’s a whole new thing,” said Anthony. “Punk and rap all mixed up together. Totally unique and new.” They called themselves the Red Hot Chili Peppers and they said they had a gig that night at a place called the Kit-Kat Club.

“You should come see the show, Bob,” said Flea.

I was always up for new music, so I went and was knocked out by what I heard. I’d had no idea how good they were. It was mind-boggling. They were right. What they had developed was completely different, a hybrid sound. It was energetic and crazy, and they had charisma. I could see they were onto something.

After the show, I caught up with them. “That was awesome! Where are you guys going now?”

“We need to find a place to stay,” said Anthony.

“Yeah, we’ve been couch surfing,” said Flea.

“I got you covered,” I told them. “My wife left. I have room. Come stay at my place.”

They moved in that night, although I don’t know if you could technically call it a move since they arrived with not much more than the clothes on their backs. They had been living as close to homeless as it’s possible to be without actually living in an alley. I was a little concerned about how they might react to my drug use and drinking, but I saw right away that they were full-on coke-shooting, up-all-night maniacs. This was a living arrangement that could work, I thought.

They had wildly different personalities. Flea was much more like me in those days. We were both a couple of dedicated music geeks. Anthony was too, but he was definitely his own man. He tended to be thoughtful and deep. Here was a kid who had some confidence, I thought. He saw himself as equal to anybody and everybody alive or dead. That kind of self-esteem is rare. Especially for a twenty-year-old kid. Flea and I didn’t possess that kind of self-confidence. I still don’t. I tried to understand it. What I think is that both Flea and I had somewhat traumatic childhoods. Anthony didn’t come to California until he was about thirteen. Up until then, he lived with his mom and stepdad in a very traditional, normal home. By the time he got out here and started living with his nontraditional, iconoclastic biological father, he had already developed his personality. It was set. It wasn’t going to change.

Anthony, as long as I’ve known him, has never felt the need to explain himself. He’s never cared what anybody thought of him. He knew who he was and if you didn’t like it, too bad. It didn’t affect him. It works both ways for him. If you cross him, you’re dead to him. I’ve had arguments with him, but he’s never felt I’ve betrayed him, so we’ve managed to stay cool with each other. But, I swear, I have never met anyone who had a better understanding of who he was than that guy. He’s self-contained and doesn’t need anyone but himself.

Flea and I were different and bonded over our shared musical heroes. All three of us would constantly spin records in our apartment, but Flea and I would take it to an obsessive level. Not long after they had moved in, Flea and I discovered we both loved bass player Jaco Pastorius.

“Wait! I got a bunch of his albums,” I said. I dove for one of my crates and started to pull out some of Pastorius’s solo stuff as well as his work with Weather Report. Flea started to paw through my records and came up with Ian Hunter’s
All American Alien Boy
album.

“Did you know he played on this?” he asked.

It wasn’t long before the floor was littered with record albums and old music magazines I had managed to dig out. We were having a ball listening to the music as we quizzed each other with Jaco Pastorius trivia. It was then that I noticed Anthony had come into the room. He looked at us like we were idiots. His arms were folded and a smirk was on his face. Okay, this deserved an explanation.

“What?” I asked as I threw up my hands.

“Why do you guys do that?” he sneered.

“Do what?” asked Flea.

“This fucking idolatry, man. It’s kind of sick, you know?”

“Wait,” I said. “You mean to tell me that you’ve never admired or idolized anyone in your entire life?”

Anthony didn’t even take time to think about his answer. “No. Never.” He gave a derisive snort and went out to buy cigarettes. But Anthony wasn’t immune to the appeal of rock idols. While we all enjoyed the degenerate, trashy, punk rock splendor of life at La Leyenda, he became obsessed with the song “Las Vegas” from Gram Parsons’s
Grievous Angel
LP.

Every time I hit your crystal city

I know you’re gonna make a wreck out of me.

With doper’s logic, Anthony and I had become convinced that underneath the amphetamine whomp of guitars and the brittle vocal harmonies of the track, Gram was speaking to us directly, advising and watching over us as we took turns shooting up speed in our squalid little pad behind the flimsy door that read 305.

Flea, on the other hand, wasn’t nearly as big a fan of the early country-rock sounds as Anthony and I were, preferring instead the punk rock drive of Minor Threat and their song “Straight Edge.”

But I’ve got better things to do

Than sit around and fuck my head

Flea’s obsession with that song and its message should have clued Anthony and I in to what would follow. One afternoon, Flea just spilled it. “I’m moving out,” he said.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“Back home with my mom. It’s too much here. The drugs and everything. It’s all you guys do,” he said as he looked around at the squalor, the empty bottles, the mess. His mind was made up, and there was no need for discussion. He walked out and left Anthony and me there to stare at each other in stunned silence. We decided to get high. It was weird. Flea still hung out with us, and he and Anthony were still focused on the Chili Peppers, but Flea was clean and sober.

Their band was already generating excitement on the club scene, and I spent so much time with them, it was hard for me to not think of myself as part of the group. In the meantime, though, I made sure that I held on to my DJ jobs. Those were perfect gigs for someone like me. In the shape I was in, about the one thing I could do with any sort of skill was play records. Still, I started to form the idea that I could manage the Chili Peppers. In my mind, I was the fifth member of the band. I thought I was more a part of the band than was the drummer, Jack Irons. In retrospect, it may not have been the greatest or most accurate assessment of the situation. Worse, my sights weren’t set that high with regard to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. “You guys can be as big as the Cramps … or maybe even X!” went one of my managerial pep talks.

Anthony had bigger plans. For six months, he and I booked the band’s gigs. I’d go to the shows, hang out backstage, and feel like I was part of something. I was connected to the music in a way that my DJ jobs didn’t fulfill. I would constantly feed them ideas about music and introduce them to records by Bob Dylan and Hank Williams. Anthony may have had an innate understanding of show business and image—he was a handsome guy who knew how to be cool—but I knew about songs and songwriting, something neither he nor Flea had mastered yet.

One night, at one of their gigs, I noticed a twitchy, fast-talking guy who instantly reminded me of Paul Shaffer’s Artie Fufkin character from
This Is Spinal Tap
. He nosed around the band. I thought,
Who the hell is this guy?
I made a few inquiries and learned his name was Lindy Getz and he had credentials. Solid credentials. Getz had discovered Bachman-Turner Overdrive, the Ohio Players, and countless other big-league bands. Now he had his sights set on Anthony. “I want to manage you boys,” he said. My first thought was,
This dude’s a fuckin’ tool. Why would Anthony even talk to a guy like that?
I may have had some connections to get the band booked in the smaller clubs of L.A., but it was painfully obvious that, compared to someone like Lindy Getz, I lacked even the most basic skills and know-how for managing an act that was, by the week, becoming increasingly popular. I hung around and drank too much and did whatever drugs I could get my hands on. Getz was in as the band’s new manager and I was out.