Scar Tissue (42 page)
I was also lonely without a true love in my life. A lot of my close friendships had unraveled. John was out of the picture. Flea and I had been growing apart. Bob Forrest was deep into the exploration of his own drug abuse. I felt like a man alone.
With nothing compelling me to return home, I decided to go on an adventure to Borneo. Even as a kid, I was always reading about the most remote tropical jungle locations in the world, and of all the places I’d ever read about, from Mongolia to Papua New Guinea to Tuva, Borneo always struck me as the most remote, the least Westernized: a place where you could go back in time and see what life was like before industry and creature comforts.
On our visits to Amsterdam, I had befriended an amazing tattoo artist named Hank Schiffmacher. Hank, also known as Henky Penky, was an icon of his country—an underground philosopher, artist, Hell’s Angels associate, booze hound, drug hound, girl hound, an absolute rapscallion of Dutch proportions. Over the years, Hank had injected much ink into my skin, and in the process, we’d become close. So when Hank suggested that we travel to Borneo to search out primitive tattooing techniques and replicate the crossing of the Borneo rain forest by a nineteenth-century Dutch explorer, I was all for it. I had visions of being Mowgli from
The Jungle Book,
hanging out with orangutans and swinging from vines over rivers and eating berries and meeting naked native girls and being a tough nature fella. It didn’t turn out quite that way.
We put aside a month for the trip. At first I thought it would be Hank and me traveling to the land of the Punandaya tribe, who had practiced cannibalism, according to some reports, as late as the 1960s. But Hank brought a photojournalist who thought getting his pictures was more important than the humanity or the dignity of the foreign culture. Hank also brought a Caspar Milquetoast of a kid who had wandered into his tattoo shop, a bank employee who’d never been outside of Holland.
So we were a motley crew when we met up in Jakarta, Indonesia, to plan out our journey. I didn’t like Jakarta, a third-world megalopolis saturated with trash and pollution and teeming with a fundamentalist energy that didn’t make us the most welcome guys in town. We were a long way from Kansas, but every time we went to a bazaar or a marketplace, in every shantytown, I’d be surrounded by giggling Indonesian girls. They were selling bootleg Red Hot Chili Peppers T-shirts in every stall. It was surreal.
From Jakarta, we took a series of small planes to Pontianak, a town on the west coast of Borneo. That was where we’d start our adventure. We planned to cross central Borneo from Pontianak to Samarinda, the trans-Kalimantan tour. It had taken the Dutch ethnographer Nieuwenhuis fifteen months to make this trip in 1894. We gave ourselves four weeks.
We stayed in Pontianak for a day, stocking up on supplies and cigarettes. Then we got on a ferry barge and made our way up the river toward the center of the island. The river started off huge, like the Mississippi, and then kept getting smaller and smaller as we went deeper into the jungle, until it became these raging rapids-type rivers that were capable of quadrupling in size in about ten minutes during flash floods.
Everyone was in fantastic spirits, viewing this beautiful confluence of two rivers, until we saw miles and miles of decimated jungle. The logging industries had infiltrated this ancient civilization and raped the forest. It was as if an area the size of Rhode Island had been shaved clean off the map. After changing to a smaller boat, we reached the fishing village of Putussibau, the last outpost before we were confronted with true wilderness. Putussibau consisted of two main streets, one transvestite, and a Dutch missionary priest who almost gleefully warned us of the dangers that lay ahead, things like malaria and poisonous snakes. According to him, all the anti-malaria pills we’d been taking were completely useless, and if we ended up catching malaria, we were dead meat. Nice.
The next day we set off in our own boat. We stopped after a few hours to explore an authentic longhouse, which was a jungle version of an apartment complex, except it was a commune where everybody lived together, sharing one common porch. Then we went on and on and on, deeper into the jungle. The farther up we got, the faster the water moved, the fewer the villages, and the more difficult passage became in general. Then the rains came. After changing to smaller and smaller boats, we made it to Tong Jang Lokam, the last village before the terrain became too mountainous and too perilous to travel by boat. It was a serene setting before the maze of the jungle, where there was no river or even a path to follow, just an overlap of mountains, forests, and streams.
It was here that we’d hire our guides from the Punans, a nomadic tribe considered the masters of the forest. The local Punans could probably cross the mountains in five days, but there was no telling how long it would take when they were bogged down with four slow white guys. I was uneasy with the guides they were choosing for us, because one was the grandpa of the village, a guy in his seventies, and the others were barely teenagers. I couldn’t figure out if we were getting worthy guides or whichever nomads happened to be in town.
We had a nice day or two of rest in the village, and then we set off on foot. It was a wild landscape, like nothing I’d ever marched through. The density, the heat, the wetness, the noises, all of it evoked a prehistoric feeling, especially when we spotted the giant hornbilled birds flying overhead. This was a different reality. After a day of hiking, we had to come to terms with the fact that there were no paths to follow. It was just wet and mucky terrain.
When nightfall came, we needed to find a dry, level space protected from the inevitable rains. We stumbled upon an old decrepit outpost shack, so instead of building a lean-to out of huge leaves, our guides told us to stay in the shack. It didn’t look inviting—the structure was teeming with insects and covered in spiderwebs, but we lay down in there like sardines, crawled into our sleeping bags, and tried to sleep. I was starting to doze off, half conscious of the spiders dangling over me, when, all of a sudden, my entire skull started to vibrate. It felt like a woodpecker practicing on my skull. I was terrified that I had been bitten by something poisonous and the toxic venom was going to work on my nervous system, so I bolted up and screamed for Hank to help me.
The horrible vibrating noise in my skull was intensifying, and I couldn’t bear one more minute of this agony, so I begged Hank to take out his flashlight and look inside my ear.
“No, I don’t see anything. Everything looks—ARRGGGHH,” he screamed, and dropped the flashlight.
A huge sense of relief came over me, and my head stopped vibrating.
“Oh my God,” Hank said. “Some little animal came scurrying out of your head, man.”
It turned out that a cockroach had somehow squeezed into my ear canal and gotten lodged there. It took the light to get it to depart my head. I was glad to be rid of the roach, but then I started worrying that the monster had laid eggs inside my head and my brain would become dinner for a family of insects. But after a while, that obsession left me, probably because I was too busy dealing with the leeches that had begun to burrow into my body. Because the jungle was so dense, we sought out the rivers, which were anywhere from knee- to waist-deep. While you were in the water, these leeches would swim up and attach themselves to your skin. They’d suck your blood and become enormous, and every day we’d have to burn them off with a lit Marlboro. Then we’d be left with gaping open wounds, which could get infected. If you didn’t pick up leeches in the river, they’d also be in the trees, waiting for you to walk under, so they were coming at us from all angles.
About five days into the trek, we had our first major crisis. Our guides realized that we were totally lost, and they began to have powwows to figure out what to do. No one had any idea which direction to go. Our food was running out, and I got the distinct impression that they were looking at us like “Let’s ditch them or kill them or just eat them.” But I think the grandpa nixed those stirrings, and we all set out to try to find our bearings.
Then the sickness began. I started having severe nausea and diarrhea and vomiting, though I had no choice but to march tens of miles every day, straight up mountains and cliffs, carrying this heavy backpack. I couldn’t sleep; all night long, I’d flame diarrhea and simultaneously vomit. I began to hallucinate from dehydration and lack of food and sleep, but I became fixated on survival and willed my body onward.
We started splitting up, sending out groups to climb to the tops of the mountains and figure out where the mighty Mahakam River began. Once we found that, we would be home free. One day I went off with a guide and climbed to the top of the nearby mountain. The only way back down was a sheer vertical drop, which was, thankfully, covered with vines. I followed him step by step down the cliff, holding on to the vines. We came to a spot where there were no footholds, so now we were dependent on vine power alone to get us down. He scaled this ten-foot traverse clinging to the vines, but when it was my turn, I questioned whether the vines would hold my weight. He assured me it was okay; I was still dubious. The minute I let go of the cliff and put my weight on the vines, the vine ripped loose from the cliff, and I went falling over backward. Now there was nothing to save me from plummeting to a certain death on the ragged rocks hundreds of feet below, except for the fact that on the way down, my foot had gotten tangled up in another series of vines. I was dangling upside down off of this cliff. My guide was safe above me, laughing hysterically. I had to claw myself to an upright position and untangle myself before I could reach a safe spot.
Days later, we came upon the Mahakam, this fat mountainous river with deep, blue, fast, treacherous water. We were still a few hundred miles from the ocean, but now it was a doable trip by boat, which we could hire at the first village, about twenty miles downriver. We were celebrating on that bank, kissing the ground, when we spied some locals in a boat. They had a whole deer, and our guides cajoled them into giving us a leg of the deer and a turtle. I had been a vegetarian for years, but I had no compunction about tearing into that poorly cooked venison. Before the natives departed, our guides ordered a boat to come get us the next day.
Then the dreaded rains came. We were in a canyon, and there was no shoreline, just sheer rocks, and the river rose and spilled over our campsite. We were forced up this steep slope that had some vegetation and a few trees, and we had to spend the night standing up against the mountain, resting our feet on some tree stumps below. The next day the boat showed up, we made a deal for passage to the ocean, and said good-bye to our guides, who turned around and scurried back over the mountains to their village. That night we stopped at a village and managed to rent a room, but my fever returned with a vengeance. Again I was up all night spewing out of both ends, feeling weaker than I ever had in my entire life. My condition wasn’t helped when we got the news that a few days earlier, a team of Australians doing the same trek had died in a flash flood.
The next day I was so sick and so desperate to get back to civilization that I went to the local communications base, got on the shortwave, and ordered a helicopter to come get us. Hank and I were choppered to Balik, where I found a doctor who prescribed some antibiotics, which seemed to take the edge off my illness without curing it. Then I hugged Hank good-bye. Our bond had been strengthened by our conquest over death by making it through that damn jungle.
On the way back to L.A., I stopped in New Zealand, but I still wasn’t feeling normal. A few days later, when I got on the flight to L.A., I sat down and nearly passed out. Buckets of sweat started pouring out of me, my fever escalated, and I started hallucinating again. When we landed, I could barely get off the plane. After spending a day on my couch, I checked in to the UCLA medical center, where they were baffled by my condition. They gave me some painkillers, which I was willing to take even though I was sober. I went back home, but now I was going into feverish, painkiller sweat baths. I checked in to Cedars-Sinai, where, after days and days of testing, they determined that I had a rare tropical disease called dengue fever. At least now I knew what I had, and the treatment course was the same potent antibiotics. I recovered, although we did have to cancel our New Year’s Eve show in San Francisco.
I was fine when we flew down to Brazil to perform some big shows in January. It was a four-night festival, and we were alternating nights with Nirvana, each band doing shows in Rio and São Paolo. We all flew down together in a big 747, and it was a real festive situation, but nothing could have prepared me for the reception we got in Brazil. Even though Nina Hagen had told me that after the rest of the world had forgotten her, she could go to Brazil and get a welcome like she was one of the Beatles, I still couldn’t believe the fervor of the Brazilian fans. We needed members of the armed services to help us leave the hotel. The fans had an exuberance that bordered on being dangerous.
The day before we were scheduled to play Rio, we got a police escort and were ferried deep into a favela—a slum neighborhood that even the police were afraid to enter—to see an authentic Mardi Gras Samba troupe practice. We were so knocked out by this South American Mother Earth soul music and pageantry that we invited the whole troupe to come onstage and jam with us the next night. And they did. At least twice as many members poured onstage as were at rehearsal, all decked out in their best costumes.
Chad didn’t know what to do, so he started to beat on his drums, and they started playing along, shaking their percussive sticks and dancing and singing. Flea found his groove and got in there, and Arik started playing something funky that worked. I had a hard time finding a place in that arrangement until two Samba girls came over and started dancing with me, and then we all danced and percussed and had a rad psychedelic jam.
Nirvana was headlining the next night, and we were all excited about their show. Meanwhile, Courtney Love was making an unbelievable spectacle of herself every chance she possibly could. I had never seen anyone so designed for attention and spotlight and drama. She was out of control. Whenever a photographer aimed his camera at a group of people, Courtney flew into the frame, grabbing everyone like she was their best friend.
