by Dave Navarro
“Oh, shit,” one of the men yells.
“Goddamn,” cries the other. “He’s got a shotgun. Let’s get the fuck out of here!”
Dave watches them race up the street, then returns to Sixteen Candles and Adria. But it is impossible to focus on the movie; every time they hear a sound, they panic, worried that the prowlers have returned with firepower. Stoking each other’s fears with each passing minute, they soon decide to get out of the house. They hop into Dave’s convertible and, top down, drive down the hill to Sunset Boulevard, where they see a Department of Water and Power truck surrounded by six squad cars with whirling blue lights.
Panic flashes in Adria’s eyes: “Oh, no. They were for real. And they called the cops.”
“And you know they’re going to come over to my house,” Dave realizes.
Now, one might think that the first thing on Dave’s mind would be to clean up his needles and coke dust. But no. This is a man who makes his cleaning lady and her daughter get inside his photo booth every month, who tapes conversations with his therapist, who buys fake VCRs and clocks with hidden cameras. So the first thing Navarro does on returning is set up two covert video cameras in the house to document his impending arrest. Then he cleans up the rooms, stashes the shotgun in his downstairs closet, and sits on his porch, smoking a cigarette and waiting for the police with Adria.
“Oh, no, they’re coming,” Adria gasps.
“I know,” Dave says coolly, almost detached, as if the documentation has made the event no longer real.
The cars wind up the hill in the wrong direction, then double back to a street directly above Dave’s house, where they stop and stake him out with binoculars and infrared goggles. The rest of the night is captured on tape:
There is a knock at the door. When Dave responds, he hears: “Police department! Put your hands up! Come on out!”
Adria runs downstairs to hide, worried not just because she might be arrested but because Dave is so calm about it all.
“Is there anybody else in the house?” one of the officers asks, handcuffing Dave’s arms behind his back.
“My fiancée is in the house,” Dave says, embellishing their relationship to seem like a more responsible adult. “And there is a shotgun in the house.”
“Where is it?”
Dave tells him, and two officers march downstairs to retrieve the weapon. And that’s when Dave realizes that maybe he is being a little overconfident. Of course, the gun probably won’t get him into trouble: he has a license and he never pointed it at the workmen. If the police check their files, they’ll see that he’s reported several incidents of stalking and vandalism from his house, not to mention a burglary (while he was in the North Pole with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, thieves carried out his entire safe, which contained eight handguns, among other valuables). He is worried because, while downstairs, the officers could snoop around and discover enough needles, heroin, and cocaine to really put him away. And even Dave can’t charm his way out of that.
His fears come true when one officer returns with Dave’s shotgun and handgun, which is kept in a drawer full of needles, bent spoons, and an orange plastic pillbox full of drugs. To make matters worse, Adria hears the other officer in the bathroom, rattling a wooden container in which she had hidden more paraphernalia.
Neither officer, however, says a word about drugs. And they don’t ask to see a permit or sales receipt for the guns. Instead, the police ask the workers from the Department of Water and Power whether they want to press charges. They respond that since Dave didn’t point the gun at them there is no need to press charges. Besides, they admit sheepishly, they were working at the wrong address. The people who called them actually live farther up the street. The police relax and uncuff Navarro.
“So you must be some kind of musician?” a thin, stoop-shouldered officer blurts out.
Dave nods his head, and with that gesture, the night begins to take a turn for the bizarre. The officers stay and hang out in the house, as if it were any other night at Dave’s.
Dave gives them a tour, the same one he recently gave Kurt Loder when MTV News stopped by to do a piece on the photo booth project. The difference is that Loder understood what he was being shown in artistic terms; the cops can only think financially.
“Look at that. How much did that cost?” they ask as they pass each of Dave’s three computers.
“How much did this house cost?” a balding, heavyset officer asks.
“I don’t know, roughly five hundred,” Navarro replies. “It could have been more. I don’t remember exactly.”
“Wow,” the cop replies. “I just bought a house. But it’s nothing like your house. My house is nothing near as nice as this. No, I mean, I wish it looked like this. But it’s just …”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s very nice,” Dave says, suddenly the host of a very odd tea party. “My place didn’t look like this when I bought it. You have to put into it what you can.”
So much of the conversation centers around money that it begins to seem suspicious, as if maybe the cops aren’t making small talk at all but actually casing the house for their own purposes. They also seem shocked that Dave knew they were coming. “You guys don’t really think that I couldn’t see you over there spying on me?” Dave asks them.
“Hey, what band are you in?” asks the officer with the not-nice house.
“Well, I’m doing a solo project, but I used to be in Jane’s Addiction.” The officers look at him blankly. “I was also in the Red Hot Chili Peppers.”
“Aren’t those guys gay?” the officer asks.
“Yeah, yeah they are,” Dave confirms. “That’s one of the reasons why I had to leave the band. I have no problem with sexual orientation, you see. Everyone should have their own choice. But when over and over again I’m being pressured into sexual situations, I have to take a step back. I don’t care who you are or how famous you are.”
The officers are stunned. “Really?” “Is that what it was like?” “I thought so!”
“No. Of course it wasn’t like that. In fact, for the most part I was the guy who brought that reputation on the band. The truth is that in a video I kissed the singer in tribute to my band beforehand, where we had done that. It was pure shock value, because the Red Hot Chili Peppers have always stood for macho guy power bullshit and I thought that the best thing I could do for the band would be something that completely contradicted that reputation.”
Again, the cops stare blankly at him, as if he is speaking another language. “You know what,” Dave translates, “look at my fiancée. Do you think I’d rather have sex with a guy than her?”
The cops nod and smile, and everything returns to normal. Dave is one of the guys again.
The questions continue fast and furious: “So what’s it like playing for all those people?” “Who did this paint job and how much did it cost?” “Your kitchen is great. Who can I call to get that done in my house?” “Hey Skip, look at this. He’s got a coffin in his house. How much do you think that sells for?”
And then they see the photo booth. Dave explains the project in an attempt to lure them into the booth. He pulls out a book containing photo strips from July, but accidentally opens it to a page with a picture of him shooting up.
“Ah, you don’t want to see that,” he mumbles, flipping to another page, which contains a photo of a drug dealer and two prostitutes. “You may recognize some of these people,” he says, half-joking.
The officers pile into the booth one by one, each snapping a strip of photos. But instead of signing release forms and handing the strips over, they keep them for their families. “We’re with our sergeant,” the thin officer explains as they file out of the house, “otherwise we’d leave some photos behind.”
“See you soon,” the officer with the inferior house waves as the cops speed away, on their way to urgent police business at a nearby diner where the owner lets them eat for free.
part VI THE MARCH OF THE BABY UNICORNS<
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A strange thing has happened. As the photo strips have decreased in Dave’s house, they’ve increased elsewhere. More than one hundred fans of Dave’s webpage began their own project this month. They scoured their hometowns for coin-operated photo booths, took their pictures, and posted the results on a webpage. The fans—age two to forty-two, from America and Europe, employed everywhere from day care centers to adult novelty stores—call themselves “Baby Unicorns.”
They wrote to Dave: “You worry that you’re on your own now, but know that you have us. You will always have us. We love you, your art, and your music. This site is our present—to you—from us, your Baby Unicorns.”
In some ways, the fans have proven themselves to be more loyal than many of Dave’s friends. With the parties becoming rare at the house, most of the familiar faces from June and July have disappeared. Instead, there is the strange gray-bearded face of Eugene Berger, the magician; a lawyer with an eye-patch who invented the Mylar balloon; a sweet, gregarious older woman who was actually part of Warhol’s Factory scene; and other odd characters whom Dave and Adria met during an attempt to have a normal night out at a middle-aged neighboring couple’s dinner party. Instead, they ended up bringing the hosts and their guests back to Dave’s house.
Adria sleeps over almost every night now, alone in bed downstairs while Dave stays awake upstairs for days at a time. Things are a little too quiet at Dave’s house, too settled. The surface may be calm, but underneath a dark current is raging.
part I IT’S TOO BAD DAVE CAN ONLY DIE ONCE; HE’S GOT SO MANY IDEAS
“Do you know how I wish that I could be found dead? I would like to have my house completely emptied. I’d make a deal with the Salvation Army and have them take everything out of here so that the whole place would be empty. Then I’d paint every wall and surface in the house white—immaculate, beautiful white. I’d leave a note on the door that says, ‘Come on in, I’m dead downstairs.’ And downstairs I’d be lying naked with a framed picture of Phyllis Diller or Carol Channing or that guy who’s got the puppet named Madam. I fantasize about that.”
part II SHOW AND HELL
It is nine A.M., and Dave is supposed to be outside his house with the car running. But there’s nobody there. I pound on the door. Inside, the phone is ringing. I keep knocking, the phone keeps ringing: neither is answered.
He must be inside, because I have never, since this project began in June, actually seen him outside of the house. Today was to be the first day we left this hideaway dimly lit by computer screens, this former Factory, this current love nest. For the past month, Navarro has been in an on-and-off fight with his father; each feels that the other doesn’t respect him. Today is supposed to be a morning of atonement. Dave is scheduled, at nine-thirty A.M., to be a show-and-tell item for his four-year-old half brother Gabe at Sunshine Preschool. His father is counting on him, his stepmother is counting on him, and, most important, Gabe is counting on him. It is Dave’s opportunity to step out of his house and his own self-absorption and prevent his younger brother from being scarred by feelings of mistrust and abandonment toward those he loves.
I turn the key in the lock, and step inside. The living room is bathed in dim red light and the blue glow of computer screensavers, to the side of which rests a translucent magenta bong. A leather-clad leg is drooped over the arm of the couch, and a bare arm hangs to the floor. I hope, as others have before me these past months, that he is asleep.
Shake. Push. Prod. Poke. Hit. He stirs, sleepily, and slowly a pale look of drowsy confusion is replaced, inch by inch, coloring his face from bottom to top with a flush of guilt. The phone rings again, and he picks it up, assuring his father that he is on his way. Five minutes later it rings another time, and his father is reassured for another five minutes, until the phone rings again.
Dave dresses and loads his truck with a black bass given to him by Twiggy Ramirez and a guitar with the cover image from the Jane’s Addiction Nothing’s Shocking album on it. As he locks up the house, he points out the photo booth, which has an OUT OF SERVICE sign hanging from it, and explains that he’s been using a Polaroid camera for documentation while waiting for a repairman to come over and fix a photo-strip jam. He is fully awake now, and we climb into his car to drive west to the Bel-Air nursery school. In the parking lot, Dave’s father and stepmother are waiting, faces clouded with a mixture of anger and relief. His father is an athletic, avuncular man, a young-looking sixty-six. His stepmother, Toby, is a smiling blond woman who seems completely content in her role as perfect homemaker and hostess. In other words, she is the exact opposite of Dave. Dave begs his parents to wait outside, explaining that they make him uncomfortable, but they insist on coming inside to videotape the lesson.
Gabe, a tiny Muppet version of Dave but without a Van Dyke beard, runs and hugs his brother’s legs, asking him why he’s wearing all black. A blond teacher named Rita, who has been baby-talking her students for so long that she’s forgotten how to speak to adults, pats Gabe on the head. “I like guitar music,” she tells Dave. “I used to take lessons.”
“Sweetie pie,” Toby asks Dave, “will you pose for a photograph with Gabe and his teacher?”
Dave, scratching furiously at his left arm, declines: “Can I use the bathroom first?”
This may seem like a bad start. But once Dave emerges, he is the Captain Kangaroo of rock and roll. After Gabe shyly, staring at the carpet, introduces his brother and a special toy that makes music, Dave slowly and surely wins over every little heart in the room, except for that of a little girl named Catherine, who keeps plugging her ears with her middle fingers.
“Criss cross, apple sauce,” the teacher says, and the kids drop cross-legged onto the floor, forming a large semicircle around Dave, who is squeezed into a tiny chair in the corner of the room. Dave films everybody with the camera, then flips the monitor around so they can see themselves. Already he is breeding a future generation of self-documentarians.
“Do you know what my name is?” one kid asks.
“Is it Michael?” Dave asks, sweetly.
“No.”
“Roger?”
“No.”
“Freddy?”
“No.”
“I don’t know. What is it?”
“My name’s Turboman.”
“That’s nice. Do you see that man standing over there with the camera? That’s my dad. This is all his fault.”
Dave strikes a C chord on his guitar. Catherine plugs her ears. “What was that?” one boy asks.
“That was my guitar. But, you see, that’s not how it always sounds. But when you’re talented like me …”
The sarcasm is lost on the audience. “Is that a rock guitar?” a boy in a striped shirt asks.
“It depends on whose hands it is in,” Dave says. “This is an electric guitar, and the reason it’s called an electric guitar is because it’s plugged in. It uses electricity so we can hear it. Whereas other guitars are used by—”
“I have a guitar,” one boy interrupts. And soon everyone is chiming in: “My brother plays guitar”; “My father has a book with a picture of a guitar in it.”
“Well, I can see it’s a good thing I came down here today,” Dave says with a flicker of impatience only perceptible to those with two-digit ages.
“Coyotes! Pandas!” the teacher says sternly. “Wait. One at a time, one at a time.”
“Does anybody here have brothers or sisters who have drums?” Dave asks.
He is answered with a resounding no.
“I didn’t think so. But if you ever want to get back at anybody, start playing the drums.” Dave noodles on the guitar a little, playing with the tremolo bar. “Gabe said earlier that this is a special kind of toy. And I make a living with this toy. Do you know how your mommies and daddies go off to work every day to provide a house and food for you guys? This is my job. I’m a guitar player in a rock band.”
“What are those drawings on your arm?” a gi
rl in a blue-and-white Alice in Wonderland dress asks about Dave’s tattoos.
“It’s the same thing as that little design you have right there,” Dave replies, pointing to a heart sticker on her cheek. “It’s something to look at and find pretty. Some people like them, some don’t.”
“What’s that?” Turboman asks, pointing at Dave’s other guitar.
“That’s called a bass guitar, and we’re going to talk about that in a second. It’s a much lower-sounding instrument, a little more bottom-end-y. Usually people who are less intelligent play those.”
With a sigh, the teacher named Ruth intercedes, “He’s joking!”
“Now, this bass guitar was given to me by a special friend, so this is not only a toy but also something I value, and cherish, and collect. Some people collect stamps. Now what else can people collect?”
The kids start screaming: “Toys!” “Rocks!”
“How about snails?” Dave asks. “I used to collect snails.”
“I don’t like snails,” says one boy. “Me neither,” says the kid next to him. Soon, the whole room is talking about snails.
“All right, you can stop with the snails,” Dave says gently, playing a blues scale on the guitar. “When you hear music on the radio, they make it with one of these. And other instruments. Usually a couple of people get together and play separate instruments together, and that is how music is made.”
“David,” the teacher interrupts, “can you play them a song?”
“Do you know ‘Old McDonald’?” another, older teacher asks.
“Can I play the guitar?” a kid asks.
Dave holds out the instrument, and the kids rush toward him, striking the strings, burying Dave in cotton and pigtails.
“Does anybody have any questions?” Dave asks.
“Why do you have black all over you?” Catherine unplugs her ears to ask.
“It’s my favorite color,” Dave replies.
“I like Blue’s Clues,” says one boy, setting off an avalanche of discussion on the subject.