Scar Tissue (52 page)
I flew to Michigan and did the country-house Mom hang, trying to get it together one more time. This was a new bottom for me. I’d been institutionalized in a mental ward, escaped, gotten caught, had an intervention, escaped the interventionees, freaked out, bought a car thinking I’d go cross-country, pumped a bunch of drugs into my system and didn’t even get high, and now I was back on my mother’s couch, shivering through another withdrawal.
I felt so bad that my mom had to deal with one more emotional firestorm. Less than two months earlier, she had buried her soul mate, and now she had this weak little scarecrow to contend with. But moms are resilient, and she looked at the bright side: I was alive and prepared to go to battle for myself one more time. There was something to be grateful for when we went over to Steve’s grandfather’s house for a huge Thanksgiving dinner. I helped myself to some turkey, which was the first meat I’d eaten in a long time. Hey, if I can shoot dope and smoke crack and gobble pills, I can eat a damn plate of turkey and not worry about it.
Flea
calls 1997 the Year of Nothing because the Red Hot Chili Peppers played only one concert that year, a festival in July, and even that show got derailed two thirds of the way through by a typhoon. But for me, 1997 was a year jammed full of adventure and misadventure, strides forward and many steps backward, another year in my topsy-turvy, Jekyll-and-Hyde existence.
The year began on a positive enough note. I was in New Zealand, setting up my new house. I remember being in Auckland on New Year’s Eve and seeing amateur party people on the streets doing cocaine and champagne. It looked so appalling to me. I was glad I wasn’t in that place. The truth of the matter was that there probably wasn’t enough cocaine in a small country like that to keep me satisfied for any length of time.
I didn’t have any band obligations at this point.
One Hot Minute
hadn’t sold well, especially compared to
Blood Sugar,
so we had cut back on the touring cycle. Since I already was in New Zealand, I had planned to take a month off and explore India. I went to Puttaparthi for a week, then to New Delhi. But the highlight of my whole trip was a spontaneous trek I made to Dharamsala to see the Dalai Lama.
I took a train to Rishikesh and then hired a driver to drive through the Himalayas. Dharamsala seemed to be in a different world, carved out of the mountains, with dirt roads and wooden sidewalks, like an old western town. I got a room and then walked into town. I ate at a delicious vegetarian restaurant and then browsed some shops and bought some tonkas. The town was filled with all these bald monks wearing saffron-colored robes.
The next morning I got up and walked over to the Dalai Lama’s temple. I found the office and approached one of the monks who worked there.
“Could you please inform the Dalai Lama that Anthony Kiedis is here? I know he must be busy, but I’d like to say hi to him,” I said.
All of the people in the office started laughing hysterically. “Sir, do you realize what you just said?” one of them replied. “Half of Planet Earth is in line to say hello to Dalai Lama. How do you think you can just come in here and see him? His schedule is booked for the next three years.”
He went on and on, telling me all the pressing issues the Dalai Lama had to deal with and how he was the busiest man on the planet.
“Okay, I understand. Just leave him a note that Anthony Kiedis says hello. I just wanted to make some contact,” I said.
They promised to tell him and then started laughing again. I walked away a little disheartened, thinking, “Oh well. I came a long way to meet the Wizard of Oz, but I guess I won’t. Such is life.” It was a five-minute walk to my hotel, and when I got back, the lady at the front desk seemed excited.
“Oh, Mr. Kiedis. Come here right away. You have a message from the office of the Dalai Lama. This is amazing. They insist that you be there tomorrow morning at eight
A.M.
”
I got up bright and early the next morning and made it over to the office.
“This is how things will go,” they lectured me. “First of all, you go through the metal detector. Then you must leave your backpack behind. We have to have these security measures because we are constantly getting death threats from the Chinese. Then you will stand in the corner of the courtyard, where Dalai Lama will be walking down the path with his security en route to his class. Maybe as he is walking, he might wave to you, you never know. Don’t expect him to, but maybe he will.”
I dutifully went through the metal detector and handed over my backpack and my camera. I took my assigned spot in the corner, and lo and behold, here came the Dalai Lama over the crest, with his security posse surrounding him. He looked up and saw me, and his eyes lit up, and a big smile crossed his face. He veered off his path and came straight to me. I was shocked, hoping for a wink, and here he was jogging right over.
He cupped my hand in his hands and looked me in the eye. “Anthony. Welcome to India. What inspired you to come all the way over here?”
“I just wanted to see the country,” I said.
“Isn’t India an amazing place? Tell me about your journey. What have you been doing while you’ve been here?”
I gave him a rundown of my itinerary.
“Isn’t it all amazing, the smells and the colors everywhere you go? Where’s your camera? We have to get a picture of you and me.”
“They took everything when I came in,” I said.
“Go get his camera, for goodness’ sake,” he yelled to one of his aides. “What are you thinking? He needs the camera.”
The aide came back with my shitty little disposable camera.
The Dalai Lama smiled. “Let’s take a picture.” The whole time we were talking, he hadn’t let go of my hand. It was subtle, and I hadn’t noticed it for a while, but he was definitely sending me some of his juice.
The aide snapped off a shot.
“Okay, now get a long one, a full-body one,” he instructed.
We talked a little longer, and then he produced a signed copy of his latest book for me. He gave me the book, a few old Tibetan coins, and a white silk scarf, which he blessed.
“Thank you so much for the visit,” I said. “If there’s anything I can ever do to help your cause, let me know.”
“There is something you can do. If Adam Yauch [of the Beastie Boys] ever calls you to play another festival for us, please make yourself available.”
“If Adam calls, we’ll rock the spot,” I promised.
“You know I’d love to stay and chat, but all these Tibetan elders are waiting,” he said. “I have to go teach an advanced course. Of course, you’re invited to come. You won’t understand a word anyone is saying, but I think just sitting there would be an enjoyable experience for you. I’ll tell them to get you a seat right up in front so you can see what’s going on in there.” And then he was gone.
“This is so weird,” one of the aides said. “I can’t believe he invited you, of all people, to the advanced Tantric. You have to study for fifty years to get in there.”
I made my way to the outdoor class, and they sat me down right in the front. The class was filled with these crazy-ass old monks wearing big Roman-looking headgear. They were all meditating and making noises. The Dalai Lama was sitting on an elevated platform, and an aide beside him was doing most of the talking and reading. They started passing around a silver goblet filled with rancid yak milk. All of the elder monks took a good hearty sip of the brew, so I thought, “Yeah baby, give me some of that rancid yak milk.” A monk passed me the goblet, and I took a sip, but I was not prepared. I thought I could handle some weird-tasting shit, but this was not it. So that was why it took fifty years to be prepared for the course. I left at the first break, thoroughly impressed by the perseverance of the monks.
Before leaving for New Zealand and India, I had suggested to Louis that he and Sherry move in with me, because Sherry was expecting a child. I thought it would be nice to invite the energy and warmth and life of a family into my relatively unlived-in house. So I came home to them and baby Cash living under my roof. Cash was an amazing kid, and we had a nice family environment, making popcorn and watching movies together.
But it wasn’t long before I started running again. When I started getting high, my friends didn’t understand it. They all thought, “Oh, now he’s met the Dalai Lama, he’ll never get loaded again.” That had nothing to do with drugs. I didn’t have to go all the way to India for spiritual enlightenment. The blue-collar spirituality of everyday life was right in front of me, it was in every nook and cranny if I wanted to seek it, but I had chosen to ignore it.
I started doing the downtown motel circuit, staying out for six- or seven-day runs. The only inconvenience was now I had a whole family at home, waiting nervously for me to come back. On one of those trips, I sneaked home at five in the morning, trying not to wake Cash up. I wanted to slip into my bedroom and go to sleep for a couple of days and deal with the consequences of worried people as far into the future as possible, when I saw that Sherry had set up a little shrine for me. She had taken one of the pictures of the Dalai Lama and me and framed it in a sweet little tacky frame and set up a bowl of popcorn next to it. That almost broke my heart.
Another time I sneaked in late at night and opened the door to my room. A little guy sat up in the bed and said, “Oh God, please, oh, oh!” It was Louis’s dad, sleeping in my bed in my absence. I had come back because I needed some more cash to continue my run. As I got some money and started to leave, Sherry was beside herself.
“That’s it. Enough, motherfucker. You’re gonna go into a rehab. This is crazy,” she said.
I agreed to get on my motorcycle and go into Impact, an end-of-the-line rehab in Pasadena. The image of Pasadena is a safe, calm, residential paradise where the little old lady of Beach Boys fame comes from; but North Pasadena, where Impact was located, was a straight hard-core projects ghetto. Impact was known as the Last House on the Block. After you’d been to every rehab and every jail, that was where you ended up. It was the ultimate no-nonsense, get-sober-or-die place.
There I was at thirty-four, sharing a room with three other guys. I was determined to make it through the entire twenty-eight-day stay this time and begin to work through my demons. The problem was, despite all the work I did there, I never wanted to be sober the whole time I was there. I was inching my way forward and white-knuckling not getting high, but my desire to get loaded was still very much a part of my consciousness. Every day I’d spend at least a couple of hours thinking about going out and getting some money and getting high and doing it all over again.
It was worse when I went to outside meetings. Since Impact was run on a merit system, the more merits you got, the more perks you’d accumulate. One of the perks was going to meetings outside the facility. Whenever we’d pile into those short buses and drive to a meeting, I’d stare out the window at the seediest bars in the seediest neighborhoods and fantasize about going in there and drinking with other barflies. Anything to get me out and rolling again.
Once I got settled in, the daily routine wasn’t so bad. You’d wake up, do your prayer and meditation, make your bed, and shower. Everyone in my bungalow was considerate and cleaned up so we wouldn’t get negative write-ups and extra homework. My roommates fascinated me. I felt horrible for the white-trash kid from Florida: I could see that he was struggling and that his chances for recovery weren’t so good, especially with a wife who shared the same obsession. A lot of the other people there were facing their third strike and looking at serious jail time if they didn’t straighten out.
After tidying your room, you’d go down to the cafeteria, which was a fun place to hang out. The food was all fat, starch, and sugar, the worst imaginable, but it was intended to put some weight back on your frame. Everyone piled on the food. There was an enormous selection of desserts at every meal, including breakfast. I wasn’t eating meat in there, but I was hitting the sweets big-time.
My typical day at Impact was different from most others’. For some reason, they didn’t treat me like a normal person. Everyone got work assignments like mowing the lawn and mopping the floor, but I was assigned to an advanced relapse-prevention class, which was intense and time-consuming. During the course of this class, we all got a day or two to draw a big calendar of the last eight years of our lives on an enormous chalkboard. Then we entered the major events and dates when our relapses occurred and what preceded and followed them. I was in this class with twenty other chronic relapsers, and they started pointing out the obvious—that each time I ended a relationship with a woman, it precipitated a relapse. I realized I had an issue, that there was something in the dynamic of hurting somebody’s feelings that always sent me out the door. That really manifested after I broke up with Jaime and started going out with a number of different girls for short amounts of time. It was go out with a girl for a month, break up, relapse.
I stayed at Impact my prescribed length of time and did all of the work in the relapse class, including filling out pages and pages of questionnaires, which was a psychologically productive thing to do. When you start putting pen to paper, you see a side of your personal truth that doesn’t otherwise reveal itself in conversation or thought. I also liked these psychological exercises because there was a young hot shrink who had recently come to Impact. I spent a lot of time in her office. We’d break out the Rorschach tests and go out and sit in the shade of this compound, and I’d look at the inkblots and make some sexual innuendos, and we’d both flirt. There was no point in doing serious psychotherapy, since I was getting out in less than four weeks, so it was just nice to spend some time together.
I left Impact and got back on board with my recovery. I was feeling pretty optimistic and healthy and happy about my life and the band. Lindy had booked a summer tour for us, so my intention was to start getting in shape for the road. One Sunday morning that spring, I was on my motorcycle, going to my favorite meeting, which was in a rec room in a park at Third and Gardner. I was moving at a good clip, as I was prone to do, but I’d never had any real mishaps on my bike. I’d studied the road conditions and exercised caution at intersections and assumed that cars would pull out at inopportune moments from driveways or parking spots. I was always alert and prepared to deal with those scenarios.
