Scar Tissue (30 page)

They transferred me to the Glass House, the downtown L.A. County jail. It was a hellhole. By now my drugs were wearing off, and I hadn’t slept in days and was feeling raw and empty and nervous. On arrival, they told me I’d have to undergo the old strip-down and bend over, spread my butt cheeks, lift up my nut sack, peel my foreskin back, full-body check, because they didn’t know how long I was going to be in there and they didn’t want me keestering in goods. The only problem was that they had just passed a new law that stipulated if you had track marks on you, you’d have to do a ninety-day mandatory sentence. And I had some track marks. So on my way to the full strip search, I started talking to the cop about to search me. I began to empathize with him, telling him I understood how rough it was being a cop, and he told me about his family, and we related as two humans for a minute. He asked me what I was doing downtown, and I told him that I was trying to get back in college and get my life together, just lying my ass off, trying to make friends with him. As soon as I took off my shirt, he looked amazed.

“Holy Toledo, look at your arms! You know that’s a ninety-day mandatory,” he said. I just laid on the bullshit about how I’d be fired from my job and I couldn’t get back in college and I had to support my mom, who was disabled.

“Put your shirt on and keep your arms covered the whole time you’re in here,” he said.

After I’d spent the next few harrowing hours in a big dormitory room with fifty other inmates, a guard came into the cell and told me I could leave. Waiting for me in the corridor was Lindy.

“You motherfucker, I called you at nine this morning. It’s nine at night! What took you so long to get me out of here?” I screamed.

“Well, Swanster, I got some advice from some of the other guys, and everyone seemed to think maybe it was a good idea if you chilled out in here for a minute and got some idea of where your life was going,” he said. “It really wasn’t my thinking. My thinking was if I was in there, I’d want to get out, but they said, ‘Maybe if we let him sit in there for a little while, it’ll help.’”

“Look, motherfucker, you better give me forty dollars, because that’s not brotherly, leaving me in there like that,” I said.

“Whoa, forty dollars? Swanster, I don’t know if I should do that,” Lindy said.

“That’s the least you could do. If you don’t give me the forty, I’m going to be sick,” I warned. He gave me the money and drove me to a place where I could cop.

While my drug use remained blatant enough to send me to the Glass House, Hillel was battling his own demons in private. Whereas before, we’d be together or there’d be girls involved, a whole party atmosphere, now it was more reclusive and isolated. There was a dark feeling to it. He was going off into a more constant and necessary use of heroin and cocaine, while I was becoming more of a periodic binger. I’d go ballistic for a week, and people always murmured and rumored and gossiped and spoke behind my back about how I’d be the first person they knew who’d die of drugs. Every now and then, even Hillel would come to me and say, “Dude, don’t kill yourself. Look at you, you’re close to death.” Ione was terrified, telling me, “Please don’t die. I can’t handle it.”

That winter the band embarked on our first proper European tour. London was our first stop. Come the night of the show, Hillel was too sick to leave his room. Flea and I went to his room, and it was incredibly sad to see him losing the battle with this darkness. He didn’t have that look in his eye that said, “Yeah, I’m losing, but I’m going to fight this thing through.” Instead, he was wailing, “I can’t do this. I’m dying here.”

We convinced him to come to the club, and we took the stage and went into our trademark sizzling beginning, but Hillel was not part of what was happening. We tried playing another song, and Hillel stopped and mumbled to me, “I can’t do this,” and left the stage. I looked over at Flea and Jack and said, “Do something,” and then I ran backstage, where Hillel was slumped over, crying into his hands.

“Hillel, you can do this. Get your fucking guitar and come back.”

“No, I can’t,” he moaned. “Cancel it. It’s over.”

I ran back onstage, and we proceeded to play an entire set of a very rhythmic bass-and-drums-and-vocal thing. We started breaking out the jokes and the banter and the one-liners, and no one left, no one booed, people just went back to dancing and jumping around, but it was obviously the weirdest show we’d ever played, because there was no guitar. A couple of days after that, Hillel was fine, and he and I were back to joking about keeping an eye out for suspicious-looking characters who might be able to hook us up with a little of the downtown.

Somewhere in Europe, a car full of Dutch weirdos showed up. They were there to document our tour. They had a lot of great behind-the-scenes tumult to capture, especially when Jack entered a totally manic phase of his life. He had been an extremist when it came to love, maybe because he was a late bloomer in that arena. Once he latched on to a girl, she meant everything to him. He had been in this tight union with a woman, and while we were in Europe, she left him for a guy we knew. Jack got the horrible news while we were in Berlin. After the show, I scored a bunch of coke and went to a club and wound up making out in a bathroom stall with this beautiful German girl who didn’t speak a word of English. After a while, Flea and Lindy had left, and I was all alone there with this girl, gacked out of my mind. I was willing to go at it right in that stall, but she wanted to take me home, and I wanted to get some coke, so we met a dealer who fronted me a bunch of drugs.

The next morning everyone was boarding the bus to go to the next venue when I pulled up in a big black Mercedes limo, accompanied by the drug dealer, a big, burly guy. He grabbed me, held me like a toddler, and marched me over to Lindy and told him that he was in possession of my passport and wouldn’t give it back until Lindy paid for the blow I’d done the night before. No one was too happy that Lindy had to spend band money to bail me out.

During all of this tumult, poor Jack was out in the middle of the lawn surrounding the hotel, literally banging his head repeatedly on a tree.

“What’s wrong with Jack?” I asked Flea.

“His girlfriend’s left him, and he doesn’t know what to do,” Flea said.

We were still at a level where we were intimately connected to the audience. People would come backstage to meet us after the show, and we’d hang with them and even go back to their houses and check out their record collections. They were loving us and appreciating us and willing to give us the shirts off their backs, though we were still like one of them. It becomes so much different when you pull up in a tour bus, go through a back door of a giant building, go backstage, take the stage, go back off, and get back in the bus. There’s no connection with the street or the local culture. We used to invite the whole audience back to our hotel. That was one of our ongoing jokes. I’d say, “There’s a party in room 206 at the Finkelstein Hotel on Rotterwheel Avenue.” That would be Flea’s room. And he’d grab the mike and go, “No, no, the party’s in 409. 409,” which was my room.

Despite Hillel’s meltdown and poor Jack starting a long and arduous section of his life, that tour did have many, many happy and magical moments. It’s always at the end of a tour that you become this organic vessel. You’re tight and it’s effortless and you become one heart beating together. But then we flew to New York and played a big college show at NYU. I made a deal with Hillel not to get high before the show, because New York was dope town, but I lost sight of him before the show and when I got backstage, he was high on smack. Flea and I were furious.

“Dude, this is not happening. If you want to do this, do it after,” we cajoled him. “Let’s play the show and then go party. But you’re not capable of doing that.” And he wasn’t. Hillel was pulling the exact routine that I had been before I got kicked out of the band. And when we got back to L.A., we fired him. Hillel started to miss rehearsals, and Flea was like “Fuck this. Hillel, you’re out of the band.” We began rehearsing with an ex-Funkadelic guitarist named Blackbird McKnight, whom Cliff had introduced to Flea. Hillel was bummed and sulking but accepting of his fate. We tried it with Blackbird for a few days, but then we decided to give Hillel another chance.

Then we went back to Europe to play a few festivals. We did a huge outdoor show in Finland on the same bill as the Ramones. It was a great show, one big massive orgy of eighty thousand drunken half-naked Finnish people. We rocked this enormous audience, but they weren’t there to see us, they were there to see the Ramones. After our show, we all assembled to watch the Ramones, who weren’t the most engaging fellows if they didn’t know you. They kept to themselves in the backstage area. Before they went on, they went through their entire set in the dressing room with unamplified instruments.

When they went out, we huddled at the side of the stage, and someone came up with the idea of taking off our clothes and running onstage and doing a little dance in homage to the Ramones. Hillel was dead set against it, but Flea and Jack and I stripped down and skanked naked across the stage during “Blitzkrieg Bop.” Later that night, I ran into Johnny Ramone and their manager in the lobby of the hotel.

Johnny bitched me out: “Who the fuck do you think you are to get on our stage during our show without your fucking clothes on? That was not cool.”

“I’m sorry. We did it because we love you. We didn’t mean to interfere with your aesthetic,” I apologized. Johnny stormed away, but Joey Ramone, who’d been lingering in the shadows, came up and whispered to me, “Personally, I thought it was kind of cool,” and then walked away.

Our next stop was Norway, and on the way to Oslo, we had to take a long train ride. Hillel and I wound up sharing a berth. I always had a deep connection with Hillel. He had that capacity to allow people to go past the barriers of their comfort zone with how much they wanted to reveal to people. I set up those cutoff barriers all the time with my close friends, always reserving 25 percent in a mystery zone. But with Hillel, you were comfortable showing that hidden 25 percent. I bonded with him closer than I ever did to any other male. Maybe part of it was that we shared the sickness of drug addiction. You can’t understand the experience of addiction unless you’re an addict, too. Hillel and I had that in common, but he also had a capacity for forgiveness that was beyond most mortals’. No matter what you did or what your flaws or failures or weaknesses were, he would never hold them against you. Unlike Flea, who had a real scrapping-brother-type relationship with me, Hillel wasn’t competitive. He was paternal in a way. He wasn’t a braggart, he wasn’t a macho guy. He prided himself on being a man, but not in a macho way.

Hillel and I sat in that train berth, looking out at the scenery whizzing by, and talked about everything. A lot of what we talked about was drugs and heroin, and where we were with our addiction, and what we wanted to do about it. We were still pretty clueless as to the nature of the disease. I had a little more experience with meetings than Hillel. That spring Kim Jones had gotten clean, and I started to go to meetings with her. I had seen these transformations, people who had lost their will to live, coming back from their zombie states and radiating a new life force from their eyes. I took Hillel to a meeting once, but he hated to admit that he had a problem, he hated to admit that somebody could help him, and he was generally shy of crowds. After that I could never get him to a meeting again.

On the train, we agreed that the band was going really well, and we vowed to make a concerted effort to stop the drugging. In the next breath, we joked about Oslo being the heroin capital of Scandinavia. That was an ongoing thing with us. Whatever town we were in, it would become the heroin capital of the world.

I could see that neither of us was committing to anything positive. It was more like “Let me get high first, and then we’ll see.” I think we were sitting in the midst of a dark spirit, and we had to take the power away from that darkness and carry on as friends and bandmates. We both realized that we were at a point in our life when it was do or die.

We played Oslo and then flew back to L.A. We landed at the airport, gave one another a hug, and it was “Great tour, great being with you.” “Call me in a few.” “I’ll be good. You going to be good?” “Yeah, I’ll be good, too.” We said good-bye. And then both Hillel and I made a beeline for our individual dealers. You probably could have set a stopwatch to see who copped first. I went home, checked in with Ione, and was off and running on a terrible, painful speedballing binge.

I was downtown and realized that all this time had melted off the clock, way more than I had planned. So I decided to come home and at least be with Ione, because unlike Jennifer, she would rather I use with her than away from her. She was like a little Mother Teresa. I’d come back from these long, terrible binges, and instead of her wanting to kill me or make me feel worse, she’d say, “You have to eat. Come and lie down on the couch. You’re not going anywhere. Give me your keys.” She would cook me a healthy meal, and I’d cry and apologize. I’m not saying it was a healthy relationship, but it was different. God bless her for having that kind of unconditional love and compassion toward her junkie-ass, selfish bastard boyfriend.

I was on my way home and stopped a few blocks from the house to call her from a pay phone. I couldn’t just go there and face her, I had to apologize first on the phone. Actually, I didn’t even know if I was going to come home, because I was still on a run. When she answered, I said, “Ione, I’m so fucking sorry that this is what I’m doing.” She was wailing and sobbing. I was thinking, “This is weird. This is a bigger reaction than I’ve ever gotten from calling.” She was screaming, “Come home right now. Something terrible has happened.” I don’t think she told me the details, but Hillel’s name came up, at which point part of me knew that he might be dead. But I went quickly into a rock-hard state of denial: “She’s confused. Maybe he just OD’ed and she thought that must mean he’s dead.”