Scar Tissue (34 page)

We didn’t want to leave Vicki out of this, so we raised some money and gave her the job of eating an entire huge metal container of butterballs. She agreed and sat down and ate that whole bucket like it was whipped cream. Then we all watched Kristin. I would have been projectile-vomiting at the smell of that sludge, but Kristin Zenned out, took the liter of goo, drank it, and then ate the bonus bogus food. Then I got out the old watch and sat with her as she began to sweat, cry, and turn fifteen different colors. But she made it to five minutes, and when that time was up, she calmly got up, turned around, and went into the toilet and it all came flying out of her. At the sound of Kristin’s first heave, Vicki lost it and ran to the bathroom, and like two dragsters side by side, they egged each other on. When they returned, the whole meal degenerated into a food fight until a stern matronly cleaning lady came back and chastised us and ordered us to clean up after ourselves, which we did very sheepishly.

The road food was execrable, but a few months into the tour, sex had been added to the menu. That was possible only because I had broken up with Ione in December. I had managed to stay sober by not ingesting drugs, so my body had pretty much healed from all that torturous activity, but my mind still wasn’t healthy enough to work out the problems that come up in a relationship. Neither of us adapted after I got sober. I had been the needy, groveling fuckup, and she had been the caretaker who, for whatever reason, loved me and nursed me back to health. When that changed, instead of us both finding a workable, healthier, more sustainable dynamic, we just didn’t. I didn’t have anybody in my life for whom I was willing to listen to “Dude, you’re sober now, but you’re acting like a fucking asshole. Work through your steps and take an inventory and see who you are and get better.” I was still the jealous, raging, controlling, selfish, bratty kid that I had been, only drug-free.

We became another typical fighting couple, and I knew that our relationship was doomed. There wasn’t anything horrible going on between us, but we weren’t making each other happy, and we weren’t giving ourselves completely to each other. We were fading and fighting, and I think we were both over it, but we were afraid to give each other up, because we were at times tighter than I’d ever been with anybody.

At the end, it was my house, and I said, rather crassly, “Please take your stuff and just get out of here.” She argued, “No, no, I don’t want to leave. I want to be here with you.” That happened over and over again, and on the tenth time, I did the big “Take your stuff and get the hell out of here.” She looked at me and said, “I think I will.” “Well, do it then. Just take your stuff and keep on walking, little lady,” I said. She left the house and never came back.

She moved back in with her mom, and I kept waiting for the pattern to play itself out, when she would come right back a day or so later, but she didn’t. I was desperate and lonely and confused, and I wondered why I had told her to leave when I really wanted her to stay. About three days later, I called her up and said, “Isn’t this where you come back to the house like all those other times?” She said, “No, no, no, in fact, nope. Actually, I’m never coming back again. I finally agree with you. It’s over.”

This was right before Christmas. Before I went home to Michigan, I bought Ione an art deco statuette and delivered it to her house. Her mom answered the door. “I’ve got this gift for Ione,” I said. And she said, “You’re going to have to leave it on the porch.” I thought, “Wow.” So I left her gift, and bummed out on the plane ride, and wrote a sad and lonely heartbreak song about it, which never became a full-fledged song, just something to sing to myself. I used to write song mantras to sing to myself and deal with whatever it was I was going through at the moment.

At my mom’s house, I was alone for the first Christmas in years. I realized it was over with Ione and that she already had somebody else in her life, so I’d better accept that this was all part of the beauty and the flow and it was time to move on to a new chapter of life and love and adventure. Even still, there was a lot of unfinished business from the relationship. It would take years and years and years before I was even able to understand and cop to all of my lying and insanity and emotional terrorism. I’m glad that I was ultimately able to express that to her and try to make amends for it.

When I got back from Michigan, the band played a big show at the Long Beach Arena, which was filmed for a documentary. In the middle of a backstage interview, the interviewer started asking me about Ione, and I told him we’d had a rough breakup. Just then, John peeked into the camera frame and said, “That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. Anthony’s a free man, and you know what that means: It’s time to fuck.” It was John’s way of bringing me out of my doldrums, and it was a tactic that we’d both use on the rest of the
Mother’s Milk
tour. I might still have had reservations about the easy availability of girls on the road, but they remained theoretical reservations. Sex was once again on the menu.

Once again, it was freely available. In Houston, we were coming off the stage on the way to the bus when I ran into another Marilyn Monroe look-alike. Unlike her New Orleans counterpart, this little Marilyn never broke character. She became my Houston girlfriend, and every time we’d play there, I’d wind up going back to her apartment and having sex, and she’d be in her own private Marilyn movie.

Not all of my road affairs were consummated. We were playing a college show in Kentucky, and I was backstage getting ready to go on when Robbie, our roadie, made a surprise visit to the dressing room.

“Swan, I thought you might like this girl. From what I can tell, this is what you’re into,” he said. I looked up and saw an absolute princess of a college student, with white skin and black hair. A princess who’d been handcuffed, her hands behind her back, with gaffer’s tape.

“Thank you, Robbie, now go away,” I said, and proceeded to provide this delightful young girl with explicit directions to my nearby motel for an aftershow rendezvous.

“Oh, no, I was just having fun. I just wanted to say hi,” she said in her adorable thick Kentucky accent. “I’m out there with my girlfriend, and I have a boyfriend at home.”

“Let’s at least hang out. I’m not saying anything has to happen,” I countered.

“I don’t know if that’s possible,” she said. “I’d like to be friends with you, but I don’t know if he would like that, and I’m loyal to him.”

I was looking at her thinking that I would die if I didn’t have this girl. There was no way I could continue to tour if I didn’t get to know her. She told me she lived with her mom and dad, and somehow I finagled her address out of her.

It was time to go onstage, and we played the show, and as soon as I got backstage, I searched out Robbie. “Where’s the girl?” I implored him.

“Brother, I’ve been looking for her for the past half hour. She’s disappeared,” he said.

There was no way I was going to let that girl disappear into the Kentucky night. I grabbed a pen and some paper and sat down and wrote her a poetic letter, and then I got some college kid to drive me to her house. It was around midnight, and I found the house and went around the back and started calling her name, but there was no answer. I left the note, along with contact numbers for the next hotels we’d be at, in her mailbox.

A few days later, we were in Chicago, where I met a girl who looked like a ’70s starlet with her kinky chestnut-colored full head of hair. She was very free and easy and sweet and obviously sexually enthusiastic, so I took her back to the hotel. I was rooming with John, and I could tell just by kissing and touching this girl that she was one of those hypersensitive live wires who become super-intensified when you touch them anywhere. I told John that I needed to be alone with this girl, and he said that Chad happened to have an extra bed in his room and he was out drinking. John also happened to have an extra key, so I grabbed it and shifted over to Chad’s room.

We lay down on the extra bed and took off our shirts and were kissing and touching, and she was unusually responsive. It was all getting ready to go on when I heard what sounded like Clydesdales stomping down the hallway. Before I could react, the door flew open and it was Chad, except it didn’t look like Chad, something had come over him. He had some little heavy-metal tramp in tow, and he saw me and screamed, “What are you doing in here, you motherfucker? I’ll fucking tear your head off!”

“Whoa, Chad, come on, hey, whoa,” I said, but Chad was out of control. He charged me and I jumped over a bed and he followed, knocking over lamps, banging into walls, taking huge swings at me. I told the girl to grab her shirt, but Chad was still diving for me and I was still eluding him.

“What is your problem? Chill out,” I said.

“Who let you in my room? I’ll kill you,” he slurred, and kept taking full haymaker swings at me with hate and vengeance in his eyes, as if I had done something horrible to him, but if you knew the history of our behavior on the road, there was always that give and take with rooms if you ended up with a girl. Finally, the girl and I made a break for the door. It turned out that Chad had drunk a whole bottle of tequila and was in a blackout rage. To this day he has only vague recollections of seeing me in his room.

The girl was very understanding of the whole matter. “Your drummer drank a little too much, I guess,” she said. “Let’s go somewhere else to be together.” We were staying in a lightly traveled, quiet old brick hotel with lots of hallway space, so we curled up next to a radiator in a stairwell and had relations right there. What I didn’t know about this girl was that she was not only hypersensitive but also a world-class screamer. At first I thought she was kidding, because I touched her pussy and she started bellowing at the top of her lungs. Every single person in that hotel could hear her clearly, but at that point, there was no stopping.

This went on for some time, and when I got back to my room, John was wide awake. “Jesus Christ, do you realize that every single person in this hotel listened to everything that just happened?” I was touting the virtues of a girl who couldn’t control herself on any level when John cut me off.

“If there’s ever a time when you’re feeling like it would be permissible for all parties involved, I have to experience that,” John said.

“Hold your horses there,” I said. “We’ll see. One never knows.”

She wound up coming with me to the next few cities. We parted company in Milwaukee, her hometown.

The next stop on the tour was Cincinnati. Against every odd in the universe, both the Screaming Girl and the Kentucky Girl of My Dreams showed up at the show. At that moment, I had to make a decision, and it’s not something I’m terribly proud of, but I called John over and said, “John, can you please take the screaming sensation, because I have to pursue Kentucky.” I had no choice. I couldn’t imagine having a better sexual partner than the screamer, but as great as the sex was, I had to have Kentucky.

The poor screaming sensation saw what was happening and looked at me like “You motherfucker,” but at the same time, she conveyed that she was willing to accept the affection of John, and they went off. We played the show, and then I begged the Kentucky girl to come back to my room to be with me. Luckily, I had my own big room, and we sat there and talked for a couple of hours. I just wanted to be around her and smell her and look at her and touch her hand. She told me she was about to go to graduate school in Massachusetts, and I was making all these mental notes, because I was ready to follow this girl anywhere. Slowly but surely, I got closer to her, and she let me hold her and kiss her. Finally, she allowed us to get into the bed together, but she drew a line in the sand at intercourse.

“Listen, I’ll be happy to lie there naked with you, believe me, this is wonderful, I’m just happy to be with you,” I gushed. I was thinking that she wanted to cuddle naked, and I felt the hand of God brushing me one more time. We lay there in that bed, in that high-ceilinged old room, and we kissed and touched, and her purring, revving, undulating spiritual motor started humming, and she allowed me to engage her in a very long and wonderful exchange of oral sex. I was stone-cold sober and lying on my back and she was giving me head and there was so much love being exchanged, and she was pouring so much of her heart into that physical expression, that I started to leave my body and was able to look down and see myself lying on a bed with this girl, with her flowing chestnut locks and her beautiful white skin, making love to me. I just watched for a while and then came back down and everything went on and I had the realization that that was the single most beautiful sexual moment of my life to date.

She disappeared after that, and the next time out, when we hit the Massachusetts area, I looked in the phone book and called every school, to no avail. Every time we came anywhere near Boston, I’d be out on the pavement—“Do you know a girl named blah, blah, blah. She looks . . .” Nothing. I called up Kentucky and found people with her last name. “Did you have a daughter who blah, blah, blah . . .” Years later, I found someone who remembered her and told me she had mentioned me once. I never could get with her again, and she meant everything to me. I’m sure she’s married with ten kids by now, but you never know. Maybe she’ll read this book.

If you are reading this, my Kentucky dream, please skip the next story. Later in the tour, we were playing a gig at a restaurant/ disco club in Baltimore. It was a couple of hours before the show, and I was hanging out in my room with John in another old crazy weird classic hotel, when the phone rang. It was Flea, who was rooming with Chad.

“Guys! Guys! You gotta get up to my room right away,” he said. “There’s some craziness going on up here with some girls. Gotta go. Bye.” John and I went running up the stairs and bounded into Chad and Flea’s room and were struck by one of the most bizarre sights I’d ever seen.

Chad Smith was sitting on a couch, fully clothed and calm and relaxed. In one hand he had a cooking spatula, and in the other he had a big wooden spoon. There were three girls in the room, two of whom were topless and ample of bosom, dancing on top of a table. One girl actually had one of Chad’s shoes tucked under her breast, and the massive weight of her mammary was holding it in place. The other topless girl had a pile of coins that she was balancing on top of her grandiose globes. Chad was sitting there like some weird impresario, alternately spanking the girls with the spatula and tossing coins on top of their chests.