Scar Tissue (57 page)

“Dude, do me a favor. Be quiet and go sit down right now. I’ll come over in a little bit,” I said. Finally, he left. “What are you doing after work?” I asked this girl.

“Not coming to visit you,” she said.

“How about tomorrow after work?” I countered.

She agreed. The rest of that day, I was very excited. I tuned the rest of the female race out of my consciousness; I was just smitten. That night Guy O wanted to go out to meet girls, but I shrugged. “Nope, can’t do it. I met one,” I said. So the rest of his trip was basically ruined, because now I was monogamous.

The bad news was that I was leaving in two days, so I had only one day to make something happen with this girl. I met her after work, and we walked over to have sushi at a nearby restaurant. I really liked Claire. She had crystal-blue eyes, looked like a magical fairy, was exactly my height, and had a real strong sense of self. Plus, she had mad style and was tough and a little crazy. When I looked in her eyes, I saw an invisible spirit of something that I already loved. This girl could be my girlfriend, I decided.

We had some sushi, and she drank some alcohol, and it didn’t faze me. Then we smoked some cigarettes and walked around SoHo. I tried to subtly suggest that she might spend the night at my hotel room.

“Well, I might, but I’m not going to fuck you or anything like that,” Claire said. That was fine with me, and we started heading back, but we stopped under a streetlight and started kissing. The kiss was definitely working. It wasn’t a horny-lust kiss, it was a real human-connection kiss, and she was a good kisser.

In my room, we talked and talked for hours, getting to know each other. I read her some things from my book of lyrics, including a dense song called “Quixotic Elixir.” We listened to music and had a lot of physical contact—there was nudity and touching—but she hadn’t been kidding when she said she wouldn’t fuck me. In fact, she made it clear that if we continued, she wanted to see an AIDS test from me. All of this was making me feel better, because who wanted to fall in love with a girl who was ready to sleep with anyone who came along? Another positive was that she wasn’t a fan of my band. She was twenty-three years old from upstate New York and had been a straight upstate New York raver bitch on Ecstasy in her youth.

I went home the next morning. I’d moved back to Guy O’s house and was talking to Claire on the phone at least three times a day. Guy started organizing my thirty-sixth-birthday party, and the day before, he asked me if I wanted any girls there. I told him that apart from Sherry and my friend Mary Forsberg, I just wanted my male friends and the guys in the band.

“Are you sure? I can invite a bunch of hot girls,” he prodded.

“The only girl I’m interested in is Claire. I think I’d rather get on a plane and fly to New York for the day than have the party,” I said. “Why did I have to meet a girl who’s a million miles away?”

November 1 rolled around, and we convened at a fancy-pants place down on Beverly. There was a bunch of tables pushed together, and it was a festive atmosphere. I was trying to make the best of a birthday occasion, feeling good because I had been back to being sober for a few months. The dinner was going on, and I was chatting and eating, and then I looked over at Guy, who had a really weird expression on his face. When I turned my head to the right, I saw Claire walking into the restaurant with Guy’s assistant. Unbeknownst to me, Guy had flown her in for the weekend. Claire was all dressed up in a sharp outfit, with her New York fur jacket and her blond hair and her blue eyes and the lipstick and eye makeup and her big bright smile. And Chad, Mr. Class, turned to Guy and whispered, “What did you get him, a hooker?”

The first thing I did was grab her by the hand and take her to a table in the back. I felt that we needed a few minutes alone to make a connection without being scrutinized by everyone at the table. As soon as the dinner was over, I took her back to Guy O’s house, packed a bag, and we got a room at the Chateau Marmont, where I’d live for the next few months while we were recording our album. We spent a really nice night. Claire drank a bottle of red wine and took a bath, and I snapped some pretty pictures of her in the tub, the pale green water contrasting nicely with her pale white skin. But we had no biblical relations. If I’d known Guy was flying her out, I would have had the results of that AIDS test right there on the dresser. She stayed for two days, and we were joined at the hip for the whole time, getting to know each other better.

She left, and I went back to work writing songs. I was absolutely into this girl, and a lot of my writing was beginning to get influenced by that fact. I had a whole new well of feelings to tap into. But the more I’d gotten to know her, the more I realized that she was a troubled girl herself, who was maintaining a calm, cool, and collected front around me.

It became evident when she came out in December to visit me. Even though I was still sober, I wasn’t working at getting well. I wasn’t working through the twelve steps or even going to many meetings. I was what they call a “dry drunk”—someone who’s irritable and restless and discontented and, even though technically sober, is suffering from the same crippling character defects of an alcoholic. I was still an obsessive, self-centered, selfish control freak instead of living my life instinctively in the way of love and service. If I had been working on my sobriety, I would have been doing a lot of personal writing, which helps you recognize your behavior and start taking action so you don’t repeat it. I was too busy writing songs and rehearsing and recording to put in that work, which was a cop-out. The only way the program will work is if you put your sobriety first, and then everything else in your life will fall into place.

I was a little rough around the edges, a little bit uncomfortable in my own skin, even though I was getting a lot of band work done. And here came this girl I liked a little bit too much, so I was a little overbearing and insecure about the relationship, instead of just letting it be. I was trying to manipulate it a little too much, and it started to get tense.

The first mistake I made on her visit was to drag her out to this Hollywood schmoozefest called the Fire and Ice Ball. It was a fashion show in a rented space filled with movie stars and fabulousness. Not the best place to take a girl you don’t know that well. It was uncomfortable, it was awkward, it was Hollywood at its silliest, not a great date.

We double-dated with Guy O. The minute we got in the limo, Claire started rummaging through the booze collection and throwing back shots of vodka. “She’s nervous,” I thought. “She doesn’t know these people, and she wants to loosen up.” But I did notice that she wasn’t sipping these drinks. We went into the party, and I was just not relaxed. Guys were flirting with her, and I was getting jealous and not feeling good about anything. So we started to drift apart, and we ended up leaving and going to a smaller party with Madonna and a bunch of actors on the top floor of a tall building on Sunset.

Now Claire started ordering triple Cosmopolitans, downing them one after another. By then she’d stopped talking to me, because she thought I was being an asshole. As she was guzzling these drinks, I thought this was definitely not going to work. I got up and started walking around the party. When I looked back at the table, she was gone. Then I looked across the room and there was Jack Nicholson sitting on a chair with Claire on his knee. They were passing a joint back and forth. That was not a pleasant sight at all.

Meanwhile, chaos had broken out around me, and I was summoned to help this girl who thought she was having a heart attack from doing too much coke. I told her to just go home and sleep it off and she’d be fine. Then I ran into the model who’d been making out with Jaime the night I met her in New York. The girl started rubbing up against me, and I thought, “Okay, this might work. Two can play this game.” We got on the couch, and within minutes, the girl said, “Can I come back to your hotel, or do you want to come to my house?”

“Let’s go to your house,” I said. Even as the words came out of my mouth, my heart was dying a million deaths. I looked over and saw Claire sitting on the floor with a very drunk Joaquin Phoenix. This was going from bad to worse. Seconds later, Joaquin came over to me.

“I’m having a hard time getting a handle on what’s up with this girl,” he said. “I keep asking her if she wants to get out of here, and all she can say is ‘I came here with Anthony.’ Yet you’re clearly on your way to another scenario. I just want to know where things are.”

“She’s a big girl, she can make her own decisions,” I said. “Whatever she wants, welcome to it. I’ve got nothing to do with her anymore.”

It turned into a Mexican standoff. I didn’t want to leave with that other girl, and Claire didn’t really want to leave with someone else. She’d also arrived at the point where she couldn’t walk anymore. So I picked her up and threw her over my shoulder and got her in a car. I was ready to have this big talk with her, but I looked over and she had passed out cold.

I had to carry her into the hotel room. I laid her down on the couch and closed the curtains, and she passed out like a baby. Meanwhile, I had been through an emotional meat slicer. I lay down in my bed, but it was no rest for the tortured mind. I was up all night with visions of Jack Nicholson smoking a doobie with my girlfriend. Arrrrggghh.

She woke up feeling a lot more refreshed than I did. We had a talk and realized that we were both being idiots, that the night had been a mutual display of vulgar immaturity. That week showed me that nothing short of a small atomic blast could have derailed our relationship, because if we could get through that first night of her blacking out and me being a creep, we had proved our ability to weather a storm right off the bat.

The band began recording the album, and the sessions were going well when we took a Christmas break. I went home to Michigan and then back to L.A. On New Year’s Eve 1999, Flea, John and I went to the Playboy mansion for their party. It wasn’t really our scene. It was tacky being in the land of a million fake tits. We weren’t into the Charlie Sheen/Fred Durst thing at that stage of our career. Plus, I was missing Claire. We had planned to be on the phone for the dawning of the New Year, but when I called, something in her voice sounded amiss. She was out on a ferryboat in New York Harbor. Here was this person who’d expressed her true love for me, and I’d done likewise, so there was an obvious heart connection between us, but she wasn’t all there on the phone. It was disquieting.

Claire’s birthday was early in January. Since everything was going well with the recording, I decided to take a weekend trip to New York to surprise her. She was living in Brooklyn with her sister and a guy who had enough piercings in his lips to make a zipper. I took the red-eye to New York and checked in to the Mercer Hotel. I was so excited about this surprise that I had to keep myself from going out to Brooklyn too early. To ensure that she’d be home, I’d told her that I was having an exotic plant delivered to her place that day.

Finally, I hopped in a cab and headed out to Brooklyn. The farther I went, the dingier the neighborhood became. When we got to the address, it turned out that she was living in a basement apartment in a very shady neighborhood. I knocked on the door, all excited, and she answered it and was just torn up and hungover. She was not looking good or feeling good, and certainly not blossoming with joy at my surprise appearance. She let me in, grunted, and got back in bed. I jumped into bed with her. We made love, but it was very uninspired.

Then we got into the shower together. I looked down and saw her arms, and my heart sank. She had crazy-assed black-and-blue track marks. I knew that she drank and I knew that she had been the X raver girl, but I had no idea that she was the coke-smoking, coke-shooting, occasional-heroin-chaser girl. I was devastated, not because I was upset with her, but because I realized that this person I was so in love with was a sick drug addict and that her poor little soul was probably doomed to a miserable life of chasing the drugs and feeling like crap. Claire saw the look in my eyes and was saddened because she’d been found out. She assumed that no guy in his right sober mind was going to hang out with a girl who was shooting coke.

I had to sit with my senses. This clear, beautiful intuition took over. I knew exactly how I felt, and I wasn’t confused or clouded or compromised. I realized that none of my feelings had diminished, but I might have to lose someone I truly loved. I didn’t want to run away from Claire, but I knew drug addiction was strong enough that I had to be willing, if need be, to let go of the person I’d just fallen in love with.

We went for a walk through Brooklyn and stopped to get some coffee. She was twenty-four years old that day, and she looked so unhealthy, with sunken bloodshot eyes and a sickly pallor.

“Does this mean it’s over for us?” she asked me.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I still love you. I don’t know that it’s possible for us to be together, but I’m not walking away from you because of this.”

I think she was touched by that. Then we went into Manhattan, and I gave her some presents. The next night I had to fly back. When I left, I wished her luck and told her that I hoped she’d find a way to deal with her problem. I went back to work in Hollywood. Without telling me, Claire started going to meetings and got clean.

Back in the studio, things were going well, but the one song that was so important to me was less important to everybody else. That was “Californication.” Every time I’d bring it up, everyone would go, “We’ve got twenty-five other songs recorded. We don’t need another one.”

“No, we have to have this,” I urged. “This is the anchor of the whole record. It’s as good a lyric as I’ve written in a long time. It has to be a song.” I was not letting go. I kept telling John that we had to finish it. Meanwhile, the session was winding down, and we had only a few days of basic track recording left. In the last moments of recording, John came running into the studio with his new thirty-thousand-dollar White Falcon hollow-body guitar. He said, “I’ve got it! I’ve got ‘Californication’!” He sat down and plucked this incredibly sparse yet haunting combination of notes. It was so different from any other approach that we’d taken for the song that I didn’t quite hear it. Then he started singing it, and it was at the high end of my range, but it was doable.