by Dave Navarro
DAVE: Yes we do.
TORI: No we don’t.
DAVE: We’re arguing right now.
TORI: No we aren’t. I don’t feel like we are right now.
DAVE: Do you want to know why you hurt my feelings?
TORI: Yes, I have no idea.
DAVE: You said that I was wasting all my time on the Internet.
TORI: No I wasn’t. I’m so proud of you for what you’ve done. I was not trying to insult you at all.
DAVE: You basically said there’s no reason for anyone to go to my homepage. I don’t want to get into it. I’m over it.
TORI: I can’t hear you but, yeah.
DAVE: Maybe you’re just not the kind of person who likes to surf the Internet.
TORI: What I was trying to say was … Am I on speaker right now?
[Dave picks the phone up, gets Tori’s permission to debate in front of an audience, and returns the phone to speaker mode.]
DAVE: I’m totally cynical and self-centered. I don’t care about burning children in Africa. I care about how my hair looks.
TORI: That’s true about David: he’s very narcissistic.
DAVE: It definitely comes from an insecurity. But if there is a mythological character I identify with, it wouldn’t be Narcissus. It would be Zeus. That’s an old Woody Allen line. I didn’t steal it. It’s homage.
TORI: I don’t think you’re aware of your capabilities.
DAVE: That’s why I didn’t kill myself. I saw what I was capable of. I’m becoming more aware of that and what I can do.
TORI: I don’t think you thought you were capable of starting your own band in the car that one day. You were still in the Peppers and scared about doing something on your own. You didn’t think anybody would be interested and you didn’t think you had anything to say.
DAVE: It’s kind of true.
TORI: What, baby?
DAVE: It’s kind of true. No one’s listening. All those people who were in my life then aren’t in my life now.
TORI: If you made a phone call to Jimmy Boyle, to Heather [Parry], to Rick [Rubin], to any of those people, they’d all be there again.
DAVE: Those friendships I had were everyday friendships until …
TORI: You may believe that Chad [Smith, the Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer and Dave’s original collaborator on his solo album] deserted you, but I still really believe that you and Chad will come around at some point because you really do love each other.
DAVE: You’ve said that about other people before.
TORI: You’re like a vampire with relationships. You suck all the blood out.
DAVE: That’s what you think, a vampire?
TORI: Well, look at your coffin, baby.
DAVE: I sometimes have a power over people. I don’t know what it is.
TORI: I do. It’s charm. If there’s a bunch of people in the room, you’ll make every one feel like they’re special. It feeds you. It’s total vampire shit. You’re a total taker. You only give to those who give back.
DAVE: I think I’m probably one of the most generous people I know. I have so much faith in people. But at the same time, usually it takes people so much work to be my friend.
TORI: Oh my God, it’s so much work. He’s an amazing guy; there’s nothing like being friends with him. He’s got an amazing heart. But he doesn’t give it away that often.
DAVE: [silence]
TORI: Dave also appears to give away a lot. He’s an open book. But I believe there are certain things he does hold on to. One would think he’s real open and stuff. But there are other places he refuses to go with anybody.
DAVE: Hiding in plain sight.
TORI: He’ll be out there and radical and doing all this stuff but it’s hiding something. I think the real Dave Navarro has yet to be found.
DAVE: I was asked to interview anybody I wanted for [the online magazine] Addicted to Noise. I chose Fiona Apple because of her self-exploitation of her troubles and darkness. The topic I was going to get into with her was how you can use the exposing of your secrets as an incredible mask. The thing is, it’s a diversion. It’s the same thing with the costumes. Everybody’s stunned when they see me all done up in some kind of costume, but they never ask what I’m hiding.
TORI: It’s enough to fool everybody.
DAVE: I’m not creating a person I’m not. I’m just amplifying a part of me.
TORI: He gives you so much of that, there’s nothing else you can think about. You’re drowning. Dave’s putting himself out there so big you can’t see anything else.
DAVE: If I didn’t want you to know I had a tonsillitis problem, I’d cut my hand off. Even in eighth grade, everyone came to me with their troubles. They came to me to repair things and get advice. Somehow people looked at me to fix shit for them. My eighth grade literature teacher, Ms. Dunn, called me Uncle Dave.
TORI: What do all these stories have in common?
DAVE: Fear.
TORI: You’re afraid of love.
DAVE: I’m afraid of love and afraid of my own capabilities.
TORI: Dave doesn’t want to love anybody who doesn’t love him back.
DAVE: Love is sacrifice.
TORI: If you’re in love you shouldn’t have to sacrifice.
DAVE: I know I have an issue with love. I know my mom is gone, and it contributes to how I feel about it. But I don’t think there’s a man in love who doesn’t think of it as a sacrifice. It’s certainly a sacrifice because you’ve been married fifty years and you’re fighting, but you stay in it. In society today, one of the main physical expressions of love for someone else is to remain with them. But at the same time, as much as women hate to think this, men are more prone to chase after women because we are ultimately here to spread our seed and increase our offspring. Because we have millions and millions of sperm and women’s eggs can only be fertilized one at a time, they aren’t inclined to seek out physical action as much as men are. We’re putting animal urges and animal instincts into a sociological and intellectual world.
TORI: I believe that men have that drive more than women. But I don’t think it’s a sacrifice: it’s a trade.
DAVE: This debate is about words, then? We’re comparing animal instinct and human morality, and they contradict each other. I think love is possible, but I think the general consensus of what society’s views on love is—monogamy—is really close to impossible.
RHIAN: [Note that in transcribing this conversation, I accidentally used the name of Dave’s ex-wife instead of Tori. Dave requested that the error be left uncorrected.] I agree. Society does confine people.
DAVE: Exactly.
TORI: I think we’ve come to some kind of consensus.
DAVE: And I think the consensus is that I’ve won. I think you got thrown off when I said “sacrifice.” I think I’m at a stage in life where my bitterness and emotional state of being are defining what I think of love.
TORI: I think it’s been that way with Dave up to this point.
DAVE: It’s been gradual. Do you know how hard I tried to love and succeed?
TORI: That was a tough thing for both of us. But look at how great it came out. Where you are now there’s a big piece of it there.
DAVE: You didn’t answer the question. I was trying as hard as I could and, given my age and experience, I was really open to it and trying to compromise with you on things that would ultimately in my mind benefit the relationship as a whole. And I think I’m way more bitter about it now.
TORI: I agree. I do agree.
DAVE: And I don’t think our relationship ending is a contributor to that. We were pretty fucking lucky.
TORI: It blows my mind sometimes when I really think about it.
DAVE: This is the only woman I’ve stayed friends with.
TORI: [silence]
DAVE: Navarro, three. Andaházy, zero.
part IV AN IMAGE
Tonight, imagine that the walls of Dave’s house are glass. Upstairs, there are three girls�
�—two of them dancers from the Jane’s Addiction reunion tour, the other a makeup artist. They are drunk, chasing each other around the house, getting naked in the photo booth, and enacting almost every fantasy known to the male species. Downstairs, Dave sits alone in his bathroom, a glass tube in his hands, smoking ice.
part V SPIRITUAL GUIDANCE
The Ouija board has been trying to kill Dave. Or maybe Dave has been trying to get the Ouija board to kill him. I’m not sure.
Tori had come over and Dave decided the best entertainment would be his Ouija board. We gathered around, fingers on the pointer, waiting for a spirit. After a while, Dave invoked one. It said that it was Dave and Tori’s unborn child.
Every time we asked the spirit a question, the pointer shot to the letters D, A, and then V. Morbidly, Dave asked the spirit if he was going to die. The pointer shot to “Yes.” He asked if it would be soon. The pointer shot to “Yes.” He asked if it would be because of drugs. The pointer wandered in the direction of “No.”
All of a sudden, a switch flipped in Dave’s mind. He became obsessed, fixated, tormented. He kept asking it the same type of question over and over—“When will I die?” “Are you trying to say that I’m going to die this week?”—and the confused pointer kept shooting all over the board, contradicting itself and confounding Dave. He was sure he was receiving a warning, although Tori thought he was badgering the poor thing, trying to force a fatal prediction. Eventually, we had to stop. All of us—Dave, Tori, me, the unborn child named Dav—were getting too freaked out.
The next day, we decided to call on the ultimate spiritual authority, the arbiter of all matters celestial and terrestrial: Angelyne.
But Angelyne was on her way to the farmer’s market, so Dave consulted the next best source—her manager and oracle, Scott Hennig:
SCOTT: Angelyne is in her car right now and she doesn’t have the phone on. She’s too busy waving at fans and putting on lipstick to be using the phone.
DAVE: Do you use a Ouija board at all?
SCOTT: I have a really old one I got at a garage sale. It was one of the first ones they came out with. It’s the same design, but bigger than the wood ones. I’ve still got the box it came in. It’s from the early fifties. Why? What were you doing with yours?
DAVE: Oh, the other night me and my friends were using one, and I got negative responses from it. I’ve come to understand that they kind of play with you.
SCOTT: Yeah, plus generally speaking it works on a lower level, which the negative forces have easier access to. A lot of them can’t get past a certain spiritual plateau, so they’ll use the Ouija board as a doorway to just screw around, like you said.
DAVE: I would imagine that there are spirits who are living in harmony and a spiritual state of bliss, and they don’t really want to come down and plant shit …
SCOTT: I don’t know. They still have weird vibes about this place. I know a lot of people that have had contact with spirits like James Dean or Marilyn, and everybody’s got weird stories. But some entities—depending on the specifics of their death—still get the willies thinking about Planet Earth, even though they’re off in spiritual form somewhere else.
DAVE: Yeah, this one was telling me I was gonna die this month. I know they are prone to scaring you and playing with you, but I can’t help being a little freaked out that I’m going to die.
SCOTT: I’ve had a few close calls myself: I’ve almost been shot, I’ve been in car wrecks. But I come out of them without even getting my hair messed up. The fact that you met Angelyne counteracts all that.
DAVE: The bad spirits just go running for the hills when they see her?
SCOTT: She’s got a lot of power and energy with what she represents and the visual image. So many people come to Hollywood trying to make it and regardless of whether they fail or succeed, they see those billboards and her image and think, “Here’s someone who made it.” It’s inspirational to a lot of people.
DAVE: That’s true, but …
SCOTT: What you ought to do is talk with Angelyne about your Ouija board experience. Get together with her and do a burning too. Just hanging out with her is like a “Get Out of Jail Free” card for anything.
part I THE RHETORIC OF DAVE
Never argue with Dave. You cannot win. He will take your premise and magnify it, mangle it, stomp on it, and set it ablaze until it’s so hot and distorted that you don’t even want to touch it. Then he’ll thrust it back in your face and, mouth burning, you’ll beg him to take it away. You’ll grovel and apologize. Anything. Just as long as he allows you a retraction.
The easiest way to start an argument with Dave is to insult him. Dave likes to be criticized. If he’s done something wrong, he’ll be the first to admit it. However, if he’s insulted wrongly or blamed for something he hasn’t done, he will not take it quietly. He will go to any length to make you realize that you are wrong.
Combine this with the fact that Dave is extremely sensitive and perceptive—he can pick up on your slightest variance in mood in a second—and the window of what is criticism opens a lot wider. He has a radar for the stuff: even if an insult isn’t about him directly, he will explore it as something that could be said about him behind his back. And when he doesn’t feel he’s being treated like an equal—even if he is actually being treated like an equal—he will flip out.
So just you dare to let drop a vaguely insulting or condescending phrase, word, or gesture and, before you even realize what you’ve said, he’ll have picked it up and for the next minute, hour, week, or year you two will be rubbing it red and raw.
Dave is very good with words.
Note: When I read the above paragraphs to Dave, I was scared of insulting him so I changed a few words. From my tone of voice, he picked up on the fact that I had omitted something. Instead of flipping out, though, he suggested adding the phrase “even if he is actually being treated like an equal.”
part II THE GREAT CHILI PEPPERS DEBATE: “BRINGING IT ON YOURSELF”*
A NOTE TO THE READER: As I read this almost two years later, I am struggling with who I am now and who I was when I had this conversation. Today, I have no animosity toward any of the people mentioned here. I am friends with them all. I realize now that my outlook was the very thing that contributed to my downward spiral. Looking back, it’s clear how easy it was to point the finger at everybody except myself. I just don’t feel like this anymore, or even act like this. I present it in hopes that others will learn from it, because I certainly have.
—Dave
June 1, 2000
ADAM SCHNEIDER [recently fired and later rehired Jane’s Addiction manager]: How much are you going to get into the stuff with the Red Hot Chili Peppers in your book?
DAVE: Oh, we’ll get into it.
ADAM: Will you characterize yourself as being asked to leave the band, or will you kind of say that you brought that on yourself?
DAVE: Why did I bring it on myself?
ADAM: By going on MTV and saying, “Well, I don’t even know if I’m in the Peppers. I can do stuff on my own.”
DAVE: I didn’t say that. I just said, “No matter what band I’m in, whether I’m in the Chili Peppers, Jane’s Addiction, or neither—and I stress neither—I’ll be doing something creative.” And besides, I wasn’t given a reason by those guys other than, “The guys are uncomfortable with some of your life choices.”
ADAM: So you’re saying that you would have stayed in the Peppers had that not happened?
DAVE: No. I’m saying I didn’t bring it on myself. You really think I brought that on?
ADAM: Well, from the outside looking in, to a degree I do think that. I think that’s what you wanted to do; I think you wanted to do your own thing. You wanted out of those bands.
DAVE: What I wanted and the way it happened are different things. I wanted out, but how did I bring it on?
ADAM: By wanting out.
DAVE: But I was not verbal to anyb
ody—in fact, I hadn’t seen any of them in months except for Flea.
ADAM: Look, I’m not going to argue with you. But do you wanna hear what I have to say about it?
DAVE: I’m curious as to why …
ADAM: On the Jane’s tour, the fact that you got back into doing drugs and stuff like that broke down a relationship with Flea [who replaced bassist Eric Avery on the Jane’s tour] to a point.
DAVE: Getting back into drugs before I went on the Jane’s tour didn’t break down any relationships. Maybe it strengthened them. All I did was see everybody and hang out with them more.
ADAM: What about the fact that you got into drugs when Kiedis was coming out of them?
DAVE: I do not see that at all. I did not spend a day of my life fucked up in the Peppers.
ADAM: Well, then, maybe now is the time that is the most controversial for you.
DAVE: That’s true, but I’m still asking how I brought it on. I didn’t bring it on any more than anyone else in the band brought it on.
ADAM: That’s true.
DAVE: I didn’t make a choice. And I don’t feel like I alienated any relationship with Perry or Stephen [Perkins, Jane’s Addiction’s drummer] as a result of that MTV show, and that was essentially saying the same thing to them as I said to the Chili Peppers.
ADAM: You yourself said to me so many times that you just weren’t into the Peppers …
DAVE: But that’s not bringing it on, because other people in the band said that at various times too.
ADAM: Well, I just think that when people have a certain belief or a certain kind of attitude that it can permeate their life in a way that has an effect. Like if you say on MTV, “I’m not in the band—”
DAVE: I didn’t say that. Let’s watch it, I did not say that.
ADAM: Okay, I could be wrong, but the theory is that your heart was not in the Peppers.
DAVE: Granted. That’s not a theory; that’s a fact. But I still don’t see how I brought on leaving the band.
ADAM: What if I was to ask you how you’d have liked things to have played out with the Peppers?