Scar Tissue (50 page)

We finished the two-week tour cycle, and everyone went home to the U.S. except me. I went back to New Zealand, checked in to a bed-and-breakfast, and went through the process of closing this deal, which cost me about $1 million U.S. I was waiting for the farmer who had sold me the place to take his money and move to the Gold Coast of Australia, where it’s always sunny. Meanwhile, I was thinking, “Why on earth would these farmers leave the most beautiful piece of paradise for the crowded-ass Gold Coast, which is like Miami Beach, only tackier?” I soon found out. It turned out that I saw that farmhouse on one of the few days of the year when it didn’t rain. Three hundred days out of the year, that country just poured precipitation. It was cloudy, rainy, chilly, blustery, England-on-a-bad-day kind of weather.

Eventually, the farmer moved out, and I signed the papers and set up a bank account in Auckland. I got Greer’s father to be the caretaker, because people in New Zealand were known to move in and occupy vacant country properties. There was this Wild West mentality out there. Greer’s dad was going to check up on the property and make sure no one was squatting or stealing the fixtures.

It was time to go home and get ready for our European dates. Before we went to Europe, we played the first ever Tibetan Freedom Fest in San Francisco. It was a great lineup that included Smashing Pumpkins, the Beastie Boys, Foo Fighters, Beck, Björk, and Rage Against the Machine, but it wasn’t a great show for us. We had problems with the sound, but it was for a good cause, so we didn’t stress much. There was a party afterward, and I ran into Ione and attempted to make amends for being such a shite boyfriend when we lived together. It was the first amends I had ever attempted, and it was ill conceived to approach her in that environment, so she had every right to tell me that I was an asshole and that I should fuck off before she walked away.

When we got to Europe in late June, everyone was optimistic, partially because I had been staying sober for the tours. There was a distinct feeling of brotherhood among us. The only issue surfacing was the fact that Dave wasn’t crazy about playing music for the sake of music, and Flea needed that kind of bond. He missed having someone who’d call him up and say, “Come over to my house and let’s play guitars for a while.” Dave wasn’t that guy. He was like “Why would I come over and play guitar with you? Do we have to write a song for something?” There was a rift developing. But on the other hand, Dave and Chad were becoming quite close.

We started the tour off in Budapest. Everyone raved about Prague, but to me, Budapest was a much more interesting town, more exotic and wild and more recently detached from the Communist hold. In Prague, we performed in a small club. It was packed, and I went to do a flip onstage. I was a little bit out of control and landed on one of the monitors. When I went to stand up, there was no one home. We had to stop the set and wheel me off, because I was in such excruciating pain. The next day I couldn’t move. I saw a few practitioners, but no one seemed able to diagnose what damage I had wrought upon my back. So they strapped me up in a back brace, and I did the next few shows standing in one spot, almost totally immobilized.

I had become totally constipated, and I couldn’t even sit up straight, the pain was so intense. In every city we went, I begged our tour manager, Tony Selinger, to find somebody, an osteopath, a chiropractor, a voodoo practitioner, anyone who could help me. I was bedridden until I had to go onstage. And that was when I remembered the advice that Carolee Brogue, my Fairfax drama teacher, had given me. She was on Broadway playing Peter Pan when she got a nasty stomach virus, but she strapped on a diaper and squirted out diarrhea the whole performance because, no matter what,
the show must go on
.

We were in Belgium when Tony showed up with a fat, sweaty, boisterous Belgian fellow who bounded through my door speaking Flemish. He was an osteopath. I was thinking, “Jeez, yet another quack who’s not gonna be able to do anything.” He examined me, had me stand and walk around, and then told me to get on the bed. This big bowling ball of a fellow went to work on me. He lifted my leg and put all his weight on it, and POP!, my whole back snapped into place in one fell swoop. It was like going from being a broken toy to being a brand-new one. It turned out I had dislocated my sacrum.

I was revitalized, and we began playing well. France was great, then we went to England, where we played Wembley. It was the single best show we played with Dave. Guy O was there, and he had taken it upon himself to become my matchmaker. Sometime during the spring, he had gone on a boat party in L.A. and met a girl who lived in London. He assured me she was just my type. So he beat away all the other guys on the boat and got her number for me. After the Wembley show, he introduced me to this girl named Rachel. He was right: I was immediately attracted to her. I decided to get a hotel room and stick around London, even though everyone else was heading home.

The next night Rachel and I went out to dinner and walked through the park. All of a sudden, we started making out, and it was all going on. We went back to her apartment, made love, and she was wonderful, everything Guy O promised and then some, a very special girl. We were in our postcoital glow when she said to me, “I have to tell you that this is so weird, because the very last person I had a sexual relationship with was your ex-girlfriend Ione. And by the way, I liked this experience much better.” Out of the three billion girls in the world, I ended up being with one Ione had also been with. The ironic part of all of this was that when I first met Jaime, she was part of the Beastie Boy world through her trust-fund boyfriend. While she was hanging around them, she met Adam and Ione, who were married then. As soon as Adam walked out of the room, Ione went for Jaime with openmouthed kisses. It turned out that Adam and Ione were leading pretty separate lives by then, but I found it interesting that Ione and I had such similar tastes in women. I stayed with Rachel for a few days, but then it was time to go home.

It was also time to go on another drug binge. It was bound to happen sooner or later, because I wasn’t taking care of myself. I think the fact that I’d spent all this intimate time with a girl I wasn’t going to follow through on triggered this episode. Now I had some time on my hands, and I was home alone in what had become the palace of getting loaded. I did a two-week run, and then I went to Cabo San Lucas to do my routine of sleeping for three days, kicking, eating like a fiend, and swimming. Same hotel, same room, same
Northern Exposure
on satellite TV.

When I came back from Cabo, Louie was there for me, picking me up at the airport and hanging around with me. I was over at his house a few days after I’d gotten back when the phone rang. It was my beloved aunt Mickey, one of my favorite aunts, the second oldest of four sisters on my mother’s side. She was hysterical, saying, “Steve died. Steve died,” over and over again. I assumed it was her son, because she had both a son and a grandson named Steve. I asked her which Steve, and she sobbed, “Your mother’s Steve.” Suddenly, the heart and soul of my entire sense of well-being in Michigan was gone. He was the guy who brought my whole family together and gave us this loving homestead, the thoughtful, caring, hardworking, honest soul trooper of the bunch. He raised Julie and Jenny and the dogs and the cats and the horse, and my mom loved him, they were just so good together. I thought, “Oh shit. My fifty-one-year-old stepdad had to go and have a damn heart attack in the garden at two in the afternoon.”

I thanked God that I wasn’t in a motel room somewhere, smoking crack off a tinfoil pipe, when I got the news. I was newly clean with an extra launch in my stride. It turned out that I was the only one in a clear state of mind; everyone else was shattered and stunned and torn up. We had a huge funeral service, and the church was packed to the rafters with half of Grand Rapids to say good-bye to Steve and pay homage to this unique citizen. My family elected me to give the eulogy. It wasn’t hard to write about a guy like him. For a kid like me, who had always been watching after his mother, Steve entering the picture was such a huge relief. It was like “Okay, now I can go be a boy again and not have to worry about my mom getting screwed over by a convict.” It was a remarkable experience to look out at this church filled with hundreds and hundreds of people, all of us riding the same wave of love and gratitude and appreciation for this person.

Back in L.A., I was sitting at home one day when I got one of those periodic crazy calls from Lindy. He was in his apartment/office in Studio City, smoking his Merits and telling me that Molson Beer was offering us $1 million to fly up to the North Pole and do a show for the winners of a contest. They’d also get to use our name and our music to sell the hell out of their beer in Canada for a few months. This wasn’t the first time we’d gotten an offer from a big corporation. A year after “Under the Bridge,” McDonald’s came up with a whole campaign to sell hamburgers using that song. They were offering $2 mil, but we didn’t want our name to be associated with them.

The Molson offer was interesting because 1) they wouldn’t use our image, and 2) it was just a radio campaign in Canada. Basically, our music would get heard many times per day. I guess this was a time in our operation when integrity wasn’t as revered as it is now; plus, we all wanted to go to the North Pole. Molson made the whole thing sound appealing. We’d get private aircraft service to and fro, and accommodations. The show was for an audience of a hundred people, and we’d be in, out, and get to go to the end of the earth and see the Aurora Borealis. We weighed the good and the bad and agreed to do it.

We flew to Montreal and switched to a larger plane to fly north for eight hours. We got to the site, and there was only one place to stay, a run-down boot-camp barracks-type place called the Narwhal, named after the unicorn whale. There was no town, just a handful of native Indians who lived up there full-time. We were there a day before the show, so we did some snowmobiling, and they took us on a small-propeller flight tour of the North Pole. We marveled at the beautiful blue and white barren landscape. We were supposed to perform on the deck of a Russian icebreaker, but even though it was September 1, it was freezing outside, with gusts at fifty knots, so the concert was moved into a warehouse.

One thing we pride ourselves on is being professionals. When we play, we play all the fucking way. But there was something about the atmosphere that made it impossible to do a normal rock show where you go out there, and boom, you start getting into your shit. We stepped onto that stage, and I looked at the hundred people who had been flown up, and they all had their funny little clothes on and their Molsons in their hands, and the whole thing reminded me of a bad office party. I picked up the mike, and the music started, and it was time for me to sing, but I couldn’t stop laughing. The preposterous nature of show business overwhelmed me, and I could not get it together. Eventually, I focused, but between songs I went back thirteen years and broke out some of our old comedy routines and started taking the piss out of people and having fun with the audience. There was at least as much comedic banter as there was music. I don’t know how long we played, but I was happy when it was over. We flew home that night and saw the Aurora Borealis and the otherworldly colors and cloud formations, and it felt like we were on a mission to Mars.

When we got back to L.A., I began my own private mission to Mars, a furious round of benders that would consume my next few months. I would go out for a week at a time, and even though the whole idea of using had become repugnant to me and I wanted to stop, I couldn’t, which is the textbook definition of active addiction. All this weird-ass shit would happen to me on my runs. On one of these benders, I ran out of drugs at four-thirty in the morning. At that point in time, I wasn’t dialed in to ATM technology; when I needed money, I’d go to a bank and take out a chunk of money on a credit card, or I’d visit an American Express office, where I could take out as much as ten thousand dollars at a shot. But now I had no money, no stuff, and was in a frenzy to get high.

What I did have was a beautiful white Stratocaster guitar signed by all of the Rolling Stones. Tommy Mottola had given it to me when he was trying to sign the Chili Peppers to Sony/Epic. I figured I could go downtown and get a least a couple hundred dollars’ worth of dope for that guitar. So I went down to those dimly lit back alleys where the men sell their wares, but there was only one guy working the street at that late hour.

“What can I get for this?” I asked him, proffering the guitar.

He shrugged. “Nothing.”

“No, no, you don’t understand,” I pressed on. “This guitar is signed by the Rolling Stones.”

“Dinero, señor, dinero,” he kept repeating. He was fresh up over the border, and he obviously couldn’t speak English and didn’t give a rat’s ass about the Rolling Stones.

“But this is valuable,” I protested.

He finally offered me the tiniest amount of heroin I’d ever seen.

“No, more,” I begged, but he indicated it was that or nothing. I was so desperate that I bartered the signed guitar for some drugs that would get me high for about ten minutes.

All during these runs, I had the support of Bob Timmons, who was constantly trying to get me to check in to Exodus again. I was also getting much love from a newer friend of mine, this wonderful white-haired hippie Communist from Venice Beach named Gloria Scott. I first encountered Gloria when she was speaking at a meeting in Hollywood during my first round of sobriety in the late ’80s. She said she’d been a real-deal drugstore-cowboy junkie her whole life, knocking off pharmacies and running scams, but she also talked about the ’60s and Allen Ginsberg.

By then she’d been sober for about ten years. I was thinking, “This lady is the coolest person I’ve ever seen. She’s nasty and not trying to be all saccharine, saying stuff like ‘Fuck you if you don’t like what I’m saying, motherfucker, because I’ve been there.’” She said her higher power was Neil Young. Then she said, “I’ve lived in a one-room bungalow down in Venice since 1967. I was dealing to Jim Morrison before you were crapping in your pants. The only things I have up in my house are a poster of Che Guevara, a poster of Neil Young, and a poster of a bunch of Red Hot Chili Peppers with the socks on their dicks.” I went up to her after the meeting and told her that I was honored to be on her wall along with Neil. We became fast friends, like Harold and Maude without the romance.