by Dave Navarro
With love, you can take all the precautions you want to protect yourself, but no armor is thick enough to keep it out. Once Dave let her in his house, they left the terrestrial plane and entered their own bubble world. But they built a vacuum so tight that, after a while, the bubble began to collapse under the pressure. During a New York trip, she broke up with Dave after he took ecstasy with a model friend of hers at a Halloween party. They began dating again a few weeks later (the first breakup in a relationship is never a fatal bullet—only a warning shot), but this time it was a fragile, tempestuous alliance that lasted until Adria flew to Las Vegas during the Jane’s Addiction reunion tour and broke up with Dave again, accelerating his downward spiral.
“Adria called me, and asked if I wanted to get together, which I’d been dying to do because I missed her so bad,” Dave said about her reappearance in his life. “I’ve always loved her and probably always will. And I knew that the only thing that kept us apart was pride. She didn’t call me, I didn’t call her. So I wasn’t with the woman I love for almost a year because I was being proud and she was being proud. And it breaks my heart to think that.”
So Adria is back, and Dave’s house is beginning to change. There are fewer people over, as reflected in the decrease in photo strips. Often, he will spend the night in his living room, working on the computer until dawn while Adria sleeps downstairs. Although the drugs remain (“Adria has me smoking pot again,” Dave says one night, “and frankly I’m afraid it will lead to harder things”), the circus is dying down.
Only when Adria is away do the clowns start to stream in again, running around in painted faces and high-heeled shoes. The prostitutes invite themselves over, again just to hang out, with no sex or money involved. And this is not kept from Adria: the photo strips now serve the additional purpose of enabling her to monitor the goings-on at the house when she is not there.
The changes in Dave’s life are mirrored physically in his living space. As he grows more stable, so too does his house. He buys a new refrigerator, gets his kitchen redone in a 2001 space-age style, installs recessed lighting in his living room, buys a washer and dryer, hooks up digital satellite television, and gets a new car—a Mercedes-Benz 500SL convertible. As in everything else Dave does, he goes overboard, pouring money into his home.
“That’s pretty conscious,” he explains. “Part of letting myself go is letting my house go. As I get it together, the house gets more put together and there are less people in the book. The girlfriend is in place. The only thing to go now is the drug use. I really think I learned a lot this time about myself, and what the things in life that truly bring me joy are. And what the illusions that bring me joy are.”
He pauses and paces across the carpet. The tone of the documentation is beginning to change as well. The story is no longer about the party house, the new Factory. It is now about a relationship. Adria is a very mystical person: she believes in voodoo and magic and special powers, not unlike his stalker from June. (“If you’re attractive, you can talk to my dead mom all day,” Dave jokes when the comparison is made.) Suddenly Dave is documenting coincidences in their lives that have to do with ladybugs, and trying to figure out whether a colorfully wrapped totem found under his couch is a voodoo spell of bewitchment that Adria has cast on him.
“I’m learning that human contact has brought me more joy than I’d like to admit,” Dave continues. “I never wanted to be dependent on others because I’ve been hurt so much. I was an only child. I didn’t want to have to be around other human beings to feel whole. But this entire experience has taught me that there is a happy medium within reach. My plan is not only to clean my house and my life up, but to search for that medium, that middle ground. I’d love to live less insanely.”
It is a strange statement considering that just a month ago, Dave said, “If you threw a woman into this equation right now, I’d be a mad fucking mess.” When asked to describe Adria then, he compared her to the movie Snow White—not to the protagonist but to the evil queen asking, “Mirror, mirror on the wall/Who’s the fairest of them all?”
Although Dave was married before, it was not as serious a relationship. It was to a woman, Rhian, whom he had met at the rock club the Whisky-A-Go-Go. After two intense weeks together, a combination of escapism and obsession led them to Las Vegas to get married by an Elvis Presley impersonator. The marriage was annulled after a month.
Dave picks up his guitar, puts Jimi Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced” on his stereo, and starts playing along, weaving in and out of Hendrix’s solos. He often does this to practice. When he fumbles over a riff, he pauses and says he has just thought of the most egotistical thing a guitarist could ever do: release a record in which he or she plays along with Hendrix in order to “fix” everything that’s wrong with the original recordings.
“I remember riding a skateboard in a skate park and hearing ‘Purple Haze,’” Dave recalls. “And that moment, I knew that playing guitar was what I was going to do.
“Since then, almost every dream I’ve ever had has been handed to me, even my new dreams,” he continues. “In retrospect I’ve gone further than I ever intended to—as an artist, as an icon, as a personality, and financially. So what am I so sad about all the time?”
Half an hour later, the answer comes to him: “Because what I was looking for the whole time was human compassion, a relationship.”
part III CRYSTAL KOALAS, PET ROCKS, AND THE TENNIS MOM THEORY
The following was transcribed from a tape left running during Navarro’s first session with a therapist since the commencement of this project. The date was October 3 at four P.M.
YOU MAY BE AFRAID OF ABANDONMENT, AND THAT MAY BE REFLECTED IN YOUR CHOICE OF PARTNERS.
That’s true. I essentially always pick out the same type of woman, which is somebody who is pretty codependent and pretty suffocating. If you put a hundred women in a room and said, “Pick the one of your choice—you have that power today,” I would somehow pick the one who is the most unstable.
They say that you look for the woman who is your mother, and you try to make her correct the wrongs your mother did. And I’m certainly looking for a mother figure. That’s probably why I have this Rene Russo fascination, probably why I was interested in Pamela Des Barres, probably why I always go for totally put-together rich older women. I have a phrase called “the tennis mom.” I’m totally into tennis moms, like a friend’s rad blond mother who plays tennis because she really has nothing else to do. And she’s had every surgery known to man, and she’s rich, and her husband doesn’t hang around because he’s off fucking some younger blond. My dream was to be a paid boy toy for one of these women. But at the same time, the true love of my life, who I’m starting to date again now, is eight years younger than me. And she is just as unstable as me: I have mother issues, she has father issues.
WHAT KIND OF RELATIONSHIP DID YOUR PARENTS HAVE?
My parents had a rough divorce. I can’t judge them for that but at the same time it was hard to see both of my parents go through so many boyfriends and girlfriends. My dad is so suave: tall, dark, and handsome, like a James Bond type. He could just pull women. He had this saying, “twenty-four and out the door,” meaning that when his girlfriend turned twenty-four, that was it. And he kind of stuck to it. I couldn’t believe it. Imagine walking around the house with these women around all the time. So maybe that’s where the older-woman thing comes from. I don’t know what it is, but I always feel inferior when I’m with them. But at the same time, I enjoy feeling that way. I’m so in love the woman can do anything she wants to me.
But then check with me six months down the line and I’m a different person. I’ll get furious at the smallest thing. I remember coming home one time and my girlfriend was on the computer. I wanted to sign on to America Online, and she was sitting there downloading pictures of fairies. I told her, “There’s nothing bothering me” when she asked what was wrong. But inside I wanted to die. I broke up with
her soon after that.
I also get insanely jealous. Not at first, but after a few months I’ll get paranoid that she’s into other guys. I will start imagining shit, and getting pictures in my head which are really bad to get, and then it just becomes a sickness. And in her head she’s already dealt with the fact that she thinks that I’ve been with ten zillion girls on the road. They deal with that shit right away when they’re deciding if they want to be with you. I have a theory about jealousy: nine times out of ten we’re wrong, and if it’s the tenth time and we’re right, there’s nothing we can do. So it’s useless to say or do anything about it.
TELL ME ABOUT THE FIRST TIME YOU FELT BETRAYED OR MISLED BY A GIRLFRIEND. I SUSPECT IT WAS AT A VERY EARLY AGE.
It was when I was thirteen and with my first girlfriend, whose name was Jillian. She was older than me, and was the most incredibly rad chick that anybody had ever seen in my age range. She was very developed and mature. She could look like a woman if she wanted, but she had this harelip. I never noticed it, though, because I was too busy looking at her breasts. I was so excited that I had a real girlfriend and we were going to have sex that the harelip didn’t exist for me.
When we finally did have sex, I came right away. Then she asked me to leave. She was really upset or ashamed, I think. We never talked about it. And of course I was bummed, but I was also so excited. I walked home just thinking, “I fucked a girl! I fucked a girl!” I basically fell in love for the first time. We were on and off for a long time, and I was the envy of all my friends because she was the prettiest girl any of us had ever seen, maturity-wise.
But I was so blind. A friend of mine named Ian used to ask, “Dude, what would you do if Jillian hooked up with another guy?” And I’d laugh and say that it would never happen. I even wrote a song about her, using words that began with each letter in her name to make the sentences in the chorus. It was really sappy. We used to take acid for weeks at a time and go to the park, tripping all day. Finally, Ian and Stephen Perkins (who I went on to play in Jane’s Addiction with) told me that she had slept with a friend of mine who we went to school with. I was so destroyed. I had never felt that kind of pain before.
It was the same year that my mom died, a year when I was losing all the females in my life. And it just annihilated me. While we were going out, I had collected everything: movie tickets, pictures of us, rocks we found, so much stuff that my room was almost a shrine to her. So instead of yelling at her or freaking out, I put everything in my room in a big bag and took it over to her mom’s house. I knocked on the door and asked if she’d come out. We sat on the grass and I went through each thing, one by one, and showed it to her and said things like, “What a great time that was … Remember this? … Oh God, what about these bears? … Remember when we were on acid and found this rock?”
I spent two hours going through everything. We broke into a nursery school once and stole these tiny chairs, and we used to pretend that they were going to be for our kids. I even brought those over. And basically I just left everything on the lawn, spread out around her, and said, “Good-bye.” I turned around to walk to my car, and when I looked back at her, she was sitting in the grass, a sea full of shit around her, crying her eyes out. And I just left. It was one of the first times I felt like vindictiveness and rage and revenge could work. That no matter what anyone says, you can win. And I did it by reinforcing that I was a great guy who loved her.
THAT’S A DANGEROUS WAY OF THINKING.
I know. I realized the day I left Jillian crying that I’d never trust anybody again. And then I began to act like the most untrustworthy guy in the world. I fucked the girlfriend of a close friend. And when I was on Lollapalooza, my girlfriend and I were hanging out in our room with Siouxsie Sioux, her husband, and Richie [Richard Patrick] from Filter. I had started this thing where I’d make out with all the guys on the tour. Me and Richie were making out, and finally it turned into the guys making out with the girls. And then it came down to pretty much just me kissing Siouxsie, who’s another older woman I’ve always had a crush on. And she looked at me and said, “I don’t want to kiss you.” I said, “Why not?” And she goes, “I just don’t want to.”
I told her that maybe she was afraid to kiss me, and she said, “Maybe.” Then, literally the next thing I remember is lifting my head up and realizing that we were going at it next to my girlfriend, who left and slammed the door shut. I chose an unhealthy, dishonest relationship over a more healthy one. That developed into a strange affair, because I was doing a lot of drugs at the time. I would wake up naked in hotel lobbies.
I HOPE YOU’VE BEEN MAKING AN EFFORT TO HAVE HEALTHIER RELATIONSHIPS NOW.
Now I have my guard up more. There was a girl over at my house last month that I was thinking of sleeping with. But at one point, she was crawling across my floor when suddenly she went, “Oh my God, there’s a fucking bug. Kill it!” And she just completely snapped and fist-punched this bug with all her might. A completely different person came out, just rage and fury. That was fucking frightening. I was like, “Dave, whatever you do, don’t touch this girl!”
MAYBE THAT’S WHY YOU SEE PROSTITUTES, BECAUSE YOU DON’T NEED TO HAVE YOUR GUARD UP LIKE THAT. THERE IS NO WAY THEY CAN HURT YOU, NO WAY TO GET EMOTIONALLY INVOLVED.
That’s exactly it. There are no complications, no baggage. It is just sex, which is a lot more honest to me than leading somebody on emotionally just because you want to have sex with them. When I was on tour once in Australia, I met this hooker and ended up seeing her for two nights. I guess she took a liking to me the first night, because on the second night I came out of the bathroom and on the table was a little crystal koala that wasn’t there before. I asked her what it was, and she got all quiet. It was a little gift she had bought for me. She liked me. And I told her, “Wait a minute, you’re not supposed to be human. You’re not supposed to have feelings. This isn’t about feelings.” And I couldn’t have sex with her after that. It just destroyed it. So I had her leave.
But on the way home from Australia, I started thinking about her. She was really cute, and looked kind of like Anne Archer. And I thought that maybe at the agency she worked for there were stacks and stacks of crystal koalas for the hookers to give to their clients on the second date, as a technique of making the guys think that they’re special. Maybe she didn’t give a shit about me.
part IV THE MYSTERY OF MR. YOUNG
It was a dark and stormy night. Dave had just woken up and walked upstairs for a Dr Pepper when he noticed an unfamiliar object on his kitchen counter. It was black, with a belt clip and a narrow, rectangular screen. It was a Motorola pager.
Rain streaked down the kitchen window and a bolt of lightning flashed in the hills beyond. Two seconds later, thunder pealed through the air, followed by a steady beeping. It was the Motorola pager.
The area code flickered with the numbers 3-1-2. Moments later it beeped again, this time with another area code: 404. All night and all morning it beeped. And all night and all morning it spit out different area codes. Since no one had called to report a missing pager, Dave, our amateur sleuth, decided to take an empirical approach to determining who it belonged to. He began to cautiously, tentatively, return the calls. Each time, a different woman answered. And each time, when Dave asked if they had just paged someone, they denied it, as innocent as children caught with fudge on their faces. They swore up and down that they had no idea what he was talking about. It didn’t matter that he had their number on the Motorola pager.
Finally, Dave decided to go undercover, to pretend as if he were the owner of the pager. It beeped moments later with a 212 area code. “Mr. Young?” a woman’s voice asked when Dave returned the page. “I’m up here on One-hundredth Street. My daughter works for you.” She talked for a while, allowing Dave to ascertain that Mr. Young was a pimp who conducted his business on a Motorola pager.
He spent the next few days trying to piece together Mr. Young’s life and career. But there was one myster
y his formidable deductive powers could never solve: What exactly was Mr. Young doing at his house? Had Dave become so oblivious to everyone except Adria that he hadn’t even noticed the presence of the nation’s greatest pimp, standing right there in his kitchen, conducting illicit business with his Motorola pager?
part V INVADED AT HOME
It is directly after Anthony Michael Hall confesses, “I’ve never bagged a babe” in Sixteen Candles that Dave and Adria hear loud noises coming from directly outside the house. The time is three A.M. Paranoid, Navarro creeps to the door and looks out the peephole. Hoping to find Mr. Young returning for his pager with a fur overcoat and a haggard prostitute on each arm, Navarro sees instead two men with orange vests bent over the street in front of his house, working with tools to pry a manhole cover loose.
“Can I help you guys?” Dave asks, shirtless, opening the door. “It’s three in the morning and you’re in front of my house.”
“Oh,” one of them responds. “We’re from the Department of Water and Power. We got an emergency call from that house next door. Their gauges are broken, and we’re here to fix them.”
Dave walks back inside and calls his neighbors to confirm the story. It seems a little late for a house call. His neighbors tell him that they haven’t phoned anyone.
Dave’s heart freezes as he hangs up. He is sure that these men are trying to rob him or worse. He grabs his double-barreled shotgun and pushes the door open, letting the weapon dangle casually but menacingly at his side.
“Listen, man,” he tells the so-called workmen. “I just called next door. And you know what? They didn’t call you guys.”