Scar Tissue (21 page)

I stayed in the hospital for a week, taking Percodans every day and filling the script up faster than I could down them, loving this new supply of heroin. The doctor finally saw through my game and cut me off cold. After a few days, the swelling went down, and they repaired the broken bones. I had a broken skull, a broken eye socket, and a shattered orbital floor, which is the wafer-thin bone that supports your eyeball. The plastic surgeon had to work from a photo that my mom supplied, but with a little titanium and a little Teflon, he got me back to a reasonable facsimile of myself.

I called Lindy and apologized and told him I didn’t think I’d be able to make it to the CMJ show. But Flea asked if I could show up. By then I had been fitted with a face cast that looked kind of cool, so we decided that I’d play with it on. Jennifer had made me a purple atomic-age angular cowboy hat, so I got on a plane with my face cast and my purple cowboy hat and my leather jacket with the cups, and the band did our best job at playing this huge showcase. I remember being nervous and terrified and stricken and energized, and it was the first time I realized that, okay, I had to find a way to take this adrenaline and this fear and these butterflies and turn them into a performance. It was a feeling that stuck with me for life, because if I don’t have some of those feelings before a show, the juice is not flowing.

After the show, Flea and I crashed the MTV media room. George Clinton, Madonna, Lou Reed, and James Brown were on a panel, but Flea and I took over in the interview area. That was the beginning of our two-headed-monster routine; unlike some bands, we didn’t have a singular spokesperson. We were the Loudmouth Two from the beginning, sitting in the same chair and sharing the same mike. It’s something that, unfortunately, dissipated over the years, because we used to be so at ease with supporting each other and setting each other up, and starting and/or finishing each other’s sentences in the best possible way. The weird sense of competition that’s always been present between us didn’t interfere with our singular purpose at that time. We were just happy to have a spotlight and happy to share it. I guess symbiosis is something that fades in time for no good reason. It’s sad. We’d go out to the Zero Club early on and introduce ourselves to people as In and Out, and go into an Abbott and Costello routine: “I’m Out? I thought I was In.” “Oh, I’m back In again?” We used to sleep side by side in railway stations. Now you couldn’t get us to share the same house.

We felt we were the greatest, most successful band in the world. We didn’t ever look at bands who sold lots of records and played in arenas as being more successful. EMI was disappointed in our sales, and when they told us that our record hadn’t sold, I responded, “Okay. And the problem is what?” I wasn’t one of these kids who grew up dreaming of gold records. To me, my life was what was in front of me, and that was going on this tour of America in a blue Chevy van. Everywhere we showed up, there were people, and they cared, and we rocked them out, and we gave it everything.

Nothing can describe how unprepared I was for any of this. Lindy said, “We’re going on tour,” and we said, “Okay. Where do we go?” This was when we got hooked up with Trip Brown, our first music agent. I didn’t even know what a music agent was, but it turned out that besides a manager, you had to have yet another industry dude/weasel—not that our guys were weasels, but generally speaking, these guys are a weasely ilk. So Trip booked us on this tour that was sixty dates in sixty-four days, covering all of America. It never even crossed our minds to say, “Hey, that’s a lot of shows, and there are no days off.”

Before we left, the band invested in a beautiful blue Chevy van with white stripes. Lindy got it from a church group, and it was a big, heavy V8 that hauled ass. The few times that Lindy would let me drive it, I’d be able to get it airborne. Bob Forest wound up driving the van to our first gig, which was in Detroit. Bob was a talented songwriter and performer, but he offered to be our roadie, so we hired him. Having Bob drive your van across country is not as simple as it sounds. This was a guy who couldn’t manage five dollars, he’d accidentally spend whatever money you gave him on the most useless things possible, none of which had to do with gas or oil or accommodations. So by the time he got to Detroit, he was a drunken wreck. And he was bitter and angry. “How come you guys got to fly and I had to drive?” “Because we hired you to drive the equipment. That’s your job,” we told him. And we had to live with it constantly, that “I’m happy to be out here, but fuck you guys, I should be performing.”

Our first show was at a gorgeous old venue called St. Andrews Hall. Back in those days, we would sound-check before almost every show if it was at all logistically feasible. So we started, and Jack was being as anal as a man could be. He fastidiously pointed out every conceivable problem. “This cord is only eight feet long, and it has to be twelve feet, because I have to stand here to get the correct mix off my monitors, and I have to find my Fingerease, because the travel has made the guitar strings dry.” We were ready to go buck wild and destroy the place, and he was standing there fretting.

We went to sound-check “True Men,” and even though there was no audience, I let everything go on the first note, just to get started. I must have done some dance move that unplugged Jack, or kicked his guitar or kicked him or knocked his pedal over. And it wasn’t intentional, but he quit. He walked offstage and said, “I can’t be in a band where that’s the sound-checking procedure. I need my plane ticket home.” Lindy smoothed it out, and he played that night.

Jack would accuse me of deliberately trying to pull his cord out of his pedal. But you can’t steer the dance, you’re spinning like a top. I never exhibited any physical belligerence against him. To Flea and me, part and parcel of the stage experience was getting hurt. In fact, if you got hurt, it was the sign of a meaningful performance. If you came off the stage bleeding from the head or the body, you’d done your job, you went out there and you gave it everything. The stage was the stage, and that wasn’t the place for boundaries. At one point, Jack even put tape down on the stage and told me that his space was off-limits. Why would you want to cut yourself off from your bandmate, spiritually or physically?

Right at the beginning of the tour, I knew that our relationship with Jack wasn’t meant to be. We were crammed in the blue van, going from town to town, making no money at all. Flea was breaking his bass strings every night, and bass strings are real expensive. So he said, “I’d like to bring something up for band discussion. I’m having to replace my bass strings every other show, and that’s pretty much my per diem, and I think it should be a band expense.” Jack chimed in, “That’s not a band expense. You chose that instrument. I am not chipping in for bass strings.” Flea almost lunged at him in the van.

We had a lot of strange things happen that tour. We played Grand Rapids, and my dad’s old friend Alan Bashara was the promoter. He booked us into a place called the Thunder Chicken, out in the suburbs. It was a big hick shack that usually booked country music or REO Speedwagon cover bands. Even though all my family and relatives were there, that didn’t stop us from doing our usual show. That night Flea had a few beers before we went on, and he didn’t handle his liquor too well, so he pulled his dick out onstage. It wasn’t even that obnoxious of a dick pull, more like an exclamation point at the end of a song. But parents covered their kids’ eyes, and people stormed out.

We left town, and the next day the local paper ran an article with a huge headline:
IF I HAD A SON LIKE THAT, I’D SHOOT HIM
. All of the local Christian Reform residents of Grand Rapids were talking about how horrible we were, that we were the devil’s seed. My mom did not take that lying down. She responded with the lion heart of a mother and wrote a letter to the editor saying, “You do not know my son. This is one of the greatest men on earth. His capacity for compassion and helping his fellow man is beyond anything that you’ll ever do with your life. I insist that you take back every negative thing that you said about my boy.”

A couple of weeks into the tour, it was clear that Bob wasn’t the most responsible roadie in the world. So Lindy hired this guy named Ben, and now we had another body crammed into that blue van. Both Ben and Bob were getting something like twenty dollars per diem for food, so Bob cut a deal with Ben. He would give Ben half of his per diem if Ben did all the roadie work. Bob spent the rest of his money on beer.

And drugs. Every night that we could, we’d get high on something. I didn’t have a heroin habit, but I did have a constant craving for cocaine, especially after I drank. After a while on the road, I’d developed dope-fiend radar. We’d play some hole-in-the-wall club, and I’d zero in on the one person I knew had to be a dealer or at least know a dealer. People who are into drugs can sniff them out in the desert if they have to. And they’ll find the codeine cough syrup or the person who’s got some prescription that most resembles the drug of choice. It’s weird, I was such a survivor and so wanted to be a part of life while I was trying to snuff out the life that was inside of me. I had this duality of trying to kill myself with drugs, then eating really good food and exercising and going swimming and trying to be a part of life. I was always going back and forth on some level.

Sometimes we had the drugs but didn’t have the rigs to shoot them. We were staying in a sketchy downtown area in Cleveland one night, and I didn’t feel like leaving the motel to find some syringes, so I sent Bob. An hour went by. Two hours. No sign from Bob. I went out into that bitter-cold night and asked a stranger on the street where someone would go to find drugs in Cleveland. He directed me to an all-night coffee shop about three blocks away. Off in the distance, I saw the neon, which was a beacon of hope. I went in and scanned the room, and sure enough, at one of the back booths, there was Bob in his torn-up suit and dreadlocked hair, sitting with two crazy-looking big black chicks.

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.”