by Dave Navarro
The teacher instructs Dave, “Play a number on it!”
“What?”
“Would you play a number on it?”
“A number? Not really, but I can play a song.”
“Oh, Dave,” his stepmother, Toby, sighs.
“Boys and girls, sit down. He’s going to play. Now listen,” the teacher says.
“It doesn’t work that way for me,” Dave mumbles, racking his brain for a song that they can relate to. “I just don’t know what I can do. Everything I play just doesn’t work that way, you know what I mean? I don’t know if I can explain it to you now.”
“Dave,” Toby asks. “How about playing them ‘Stairway to Heaven’? It’s mellow.”
“I don’t know. I can’t play ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ Um, does anybody have a question?”
“I have a question,” the older teacher asks. “Was this your first instrument?”
Gabe is gleefully dancing around his brother, beaming with pride. “I need silence,” Dave says. “Um, the first instrument I played was the piano, like that over there.”
“And how old were you?” the teacher asks.
“I was about seven years old. And that is where I got all the knowledge that I have now to play any other instrument. Do any of you kids play music?”
As with every question, pandemonium breaks out as the children yell things about themselves and their fathers and Blue’s Clues and how their grandmother has a piano in the baby’s room. One boy starts crying.
“Dad, help me out here!” Dave begs.
When no one comes to his rescue, Dave saves himself: “So I’m going to play a little of this instrument here, and you guys do whatever you want to do.”
The teachers smile, relieved that he’s going to play a song. “If you feel like dancing or clapping,” the older teacher says, “this is a good time to get up and move to the music.”
Dave riffs for a while as the kids dance in time on their butts, except for Catherine, who is grimacing, her fingers buried deep in her ears. Afterward, the teacher asks the children to thank Dave. One girl in a plaid dress, with the intelligent face of a twenty-five-year-old, walks up to him and whispers in his ear, asking if he’ll be her boyfriend.
Before Dave can respond, a gaggle of boys flock around him, asking to touch his instruments. With much effort, the teachers shoo them outside to play.
“He was very gentle with the kids,” the younger teacher tells Dave’s parents. “I liked the way he talked with them.”
“He’s not used to doing this,” Toby apologizes. “He was very nervous.”
“What do you mean?” asks Dave’s father. “He played guitar for like two hundred and fifty thousand people at Woodstock. And he was nervous about this?”
Although Dave wants the videotape, his father won’t part with it. Like father like son; each one doesn’t trust the other to make him a copy. Dave turns down an invitation to lunch, accepts one to Thanksgiving at their house, then hops in the Benz. “I know them so well,” Dave grumbles. “I am never going to see that tape.”
He continues after a while, “Toby really does understand things more than you think she does. Last time I was over, everyone thought I was fine—and I was, comparatively. I was just snorting coke. But she says to me, ‘You’ve got to get your stuff together.’ I asked her what she was talking about, and she said, ‘The coke.’ I asked her if I was acting like I was on coke. And she said, ‘No, I can smell it on you.’”
Dave’s family lives in a beautiful, multimillion-dollar house in a canyon in Brentwood, which they moved into two years ago. “My father grew up poor in the middle of downtown L.A.,” Dave says. “He started working when he was nine, and his father died of cancer like two years later. They had no money in the house, so he had to provide. He got into the University of Southern California because he was a gymnast. He was probably going to go to the Olympics, but he broke his back and had to stop. He got a masters in journalism, and ended up doing advertising. Since he was a writer, advertising intrigued him because it’s basically using words to convince somebody not just of a way of thinking, like in journalism, but to physically go out and do something. It was a challenge for him, and he worked his way to the top of the corporate ladder until he became vice president of Grey Advertising. By that point, he had already met my mom, who was doing commercials for them.”
Dave pulls over on a suburban side street and, top still down on his convertible, shoots up. The rest of the afternoon is dedicated to the vicarious thrill of shooting up in public. At lunch at an outdoor café on Sunset Boulevard, he returns from the bathroom and declares, “Look at this.” Underneath his watchband, the plunger of a syringe is sticking out. He slowly, breathlessly, pushes it in, in full view of everyone seated around him. Across the street, he points out a billboard for the movie A Bug’s Life depicting a ladybug, a symbol of his and Adria’s relationship, and then to an ad across the street for the magazine Jane, which is meaningful not just because it reminds him of Jane’s Addiction but because there is an article on his photo booth written by Pamela Des Barres in that particular issue. Then, while waiting for the light to change, he sinks the plunger again.
part III CLOSE CALLS
An unfamiliar car parks in front of Dave’s house, followed by a loud knocking on the door. Adria left his place forty-five minutes earlier, in search of a new apartment to rent because of roommate trouble, and Dave is home alone.
“Who is it?” Dave asks.
“Hey, it’s Sven, from Rude Awakenings. I just talked to Adria. She’s on her car phone and told me to come right over.”
Dave squints at the fuzzy security monitor: the man is burly and heavyset, well over six feet.
“I didn’t call you,” Dave panics, assuming that Adria has plotted a drug intervention to clean him up. Sven looks like just the type of guy they send to enter addicts’ houses, strap them down, and wait until friends, relatives, and counselors come streaming in to coax them into rehab.
Dave’s September resolution to check into the rapid detox facility has by now been completely forgotten. He went to his initial doctor meetings, but never checked himself in for treatment. “I’m in the middle of a lot of work right now,” Dave tells Sven through the door, trying to drive him away. “I don’t know what you’re here for.”
“What are you talking about?” Sven asks. “Just let me in. Adria called me. It’s all right.”
Slowly, it dawns on Dave that Rude Awakenings is not a rehab facility, but a pot delivery service. However, Dave is given a rude awakening anyway: Sven walks in, drops off a plastic bag of weed, and tells Dave that a close friend (an actress who danced with Jane’s Addiction on the Lollapalooza tour) fatally overdosed. To make matters worse, she had started using heroin on the Lollapalooza tour.
If this is a warning, it goes unheeded. Two nights later, while Adria is out of town for the weekend, Dave overdoses himself. He was arguing with a girl on the phone (as his drug use has increased, so has his sensitivity and tendency to blow up meaningless statements into all-out verbal wars). After he hung up, at about eleven-thirty A.M., he loaded up a needle. “I remember going down and thinking to myself right before I went out that whoever was coming over here would wake me up,” Dave recalls the next day.
Who was coming over? “I don’t know,” Dave shakes his head. “The doors were locked, so there was no way anybody was getting in.”
At five P.M., Dave woke up, dazed but alive. He stood up to leave the room and crashed straight into the mirror.
“The scariest thing about it” he says, “wasn’t the fact that I was in danger but that I wasn’t scared at all.”
part IV GOOD OMENS/BAD OMENS
DAVE: I’m thinking that if things continue the way they have been, it’s not out of the question that Adria and I would live in the same home. I just can’t live in this one with her.
THERE ARE TOO MANY GUESTS AND TOO MANY MEMORIES?
Yes, there are too many memories, too
many guests and, more important, I just cannot feel alone in any room in this house. There is always somebody else there. I guess I should be happy because my house became what I’d always wanted it to be: a miniature Factory type of place. Not in the sense of great art coming out of here, but in the sense of freaks hanging out and, at the same time, work being done. But lately I’ve been scared of the energy that’s coming around.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY “ENERGY”? YOU SEEM TO KEEP PEOPLE YOU LIKE AROUND YOU.
I don’t mean it on that level. I feel like there’s a really intense thing that’s going to happen.
WITH THIS HOUSE?
Yeah, or to me.
SOMETHING GOOD OR BAD?
There’s the Ouija board experience, and the overdose, and that fact that I’m doing so much documenting. There’s the website, the book, the record. What is all that leading to? What is it supposed to be documenting?
I HOPE YOU’RE NOT USING THE DOCUMENTATION AS AN EXCUSE FOR SELF-DESTRUCTION, TO SOMEHOW RATIONALIZE IT TO MAKE THE PROJECTS INTERESTING.
No, in fact the documentation is doing the opposite. It is making me freak out to the point where I’m seriously considering some major changes.
LIKE MOVING IN WITH ADRIA?
Yes, leaving this environment, trying to clean up somewhere. Not so much because I feel like I need to clean up but because I’m worried there is some bizarre destiny waiting for me if I stay in this realm. I don’t know. I get these feelings and sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re wrong. I don’t know whether by vocalizing this, I’m confirming that it will happen or dismissing it.
WHAT YOU ARE SAYING RIGHT NOW ISN’T GOING TO CHANGE YOUR DESTINT OR YOUR FATE. ONLY ACTING ON IT WILL.
Well, there’s nothing to act on except to not be here.
THAT’S ONE WAT OF ACTING.
I think all this is going to lead to us making a great book.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN?
Because it’s going to have an angle of fore-telling this event.
OH, DAVE, STOP IT. ALL YOU ACCOMPLISH BY SAYING THIS IS THAT YOU JUST MAKE YOURSELF SCARED.
It’s going to be a good angle to put into the advertising.
STOP IT. IF TOU REALLY THINK YOU’RE GOING TO DIE OR SOMETHING, YOU SHOULD GET OUT OF HERE AND GET CLEAN.
I know, but then a part of me feels like if I get out of here and go to Palm Springs, I might get killed on the way down there. I don’t know if there’s a way out.*
THIS IS GETTING OUT OF HAND. STOP THINKING ABOUT IT.
There are two things that I can think of that would lead me to believe that I am not in any danger. One is that—and this is a really dumb one—a psychic foretold the position I’m in right now to Adria before I left on the Jane’s tour.
WHAT DID THE PSYCHIC SAY, EXACTLY?
That he’s off drugs now, but he’s going to get back on them and he’s going to get really bad for a long time. But then he’s going to get off them and have a better life than he ever knew before. Now what does that mean? It could mean that I am going to have a better life in the eternal gates of heaven, or it could mean that I’m supposed to learn something from this time and apply it. First of all, I’m not sure if I believe in the psychic thing anyway, but at the same time, whatever eases your mind you tend to believe. The other thing is that I just don’t believe anymore that what I have to do on the planet’s done.
BECAUSE NOW FOR THE FIRST TIME YOU ARE MAKING MUSIC AND ART ALONE, WITHOUT COLLABORATORS.
Right, some people in my life have been hindrances to some of the things I’ve wanted to do. Even a lot of people who come to my house just try to use me. Like there was a stripper I took home pretty recently and she took a blue coat that Versace had given me and sold it to the Hard Rock Cafe. It makes me so bitter, and I hate being bitter.
*A week later, Dave and Adria drive to Palm Springs. Adria is at the wheel of his car, it is raining, and Dave is scared shitless that at any moment they are going to get into an accident. He calls constantly from the road, panicking between bouts of backseat driving. (Some of the worrying can be attributed to the fact that he was run off the road a week earlier while driving down the hill from his house.) “Write this down,” Dave says. “It’s a great idea for a movie: a guy and girl are driving in a car and rapping. The girl is doing human beatbox. They human beatbox together and get in an accident. And they die.” Dave pauses, then adds, “Adria brought me to talk to her therapist yesterday.”
BUT YOU WERE USING HER TOO IN YOUR OWN WAT. THAT’S ONE OF THE CONSEQUENCES OF TRADING OFF TOUR FAME TO GET FEMALE ATTENTION.
But she had spent a lot of time with me and pretended like she was my friend. I don’t know. I get so disappointed. I really try so hard with people. I don’t know if that ultimately may be one of the angles of this story, because you wrote once that I trust no one, and maybe you were joking. But that’s really what this whole project is about. The list of people who have fucked me over is unbelievable, and I don’t want to make this a “poor me” thing, but I just don’t trust anybody. I can count on my hands the people who haven’t fucked me over yet. I could say that you haven’t fucked me over yet.
BUT I’VE ONLY KNOWN YOU FOR A FEW MONTHS.
Okay. I don’t know where we’re going with this but I know it’s important. Like, I know that something’s up with Twiggy, though he’s actually being really nice.
ARE YOU GOING TO GO OFF ON TWIGGY?
Yeah.
WHT?
I don’t know. I don’t have a reason, really.
YOU’RE LIKE A CAT OR SOMETHING. YOU GET UNCOMFORTABLE IF SOMEONE GETS TOO CLOSE; THEN YOU PUSH THEM AWAY.
The long and the short of it is that it appears that I push people away who are close to me, but the truth is that it’s the people who are close to me who take advantage. Or they get caught up in a stupid ego thing. Like with Adam Schneider: I posted something on my website saying that I’m “coproducing a film on Jane’s Addiction with a guy named Adam Schneider,” and he wrote me back a letter saying that he was so offended that I referred to him as “a guy named Adam Schneider.” And maybe Twiggy’s not as anal as that, but I feel dishonesty from him.
I DON’T KNOW. IT SEEMS LIKE TOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH HIM IS THAT HE’S SOMEONE YOU CALL AND TALK TO AND HANG OUT WITH. I DON’T THINK HE HAS ULTERIOR MOTIVES.
He doesn’t, but you can be dishonest in other ways. I’m not a mind reader. I could be wrong. I don’t think I know what trust is.
IT IS TRUE THAT A LOT OF PEOPLE IN YOUR LIFE ARE DISAPPEARING: ADAM, YOUR DAD, THE STRIPPER WHO TOOK YOUR VERSACE COAT, THAT GUY WHO MADE YOUR WEBSITE, AND, SINCE ADRIA’S BEEN BACK, TORI HAS BEEN GONE. SO WHO ARE THE FRIENDS LEFT IN TOUR LIFE NOW?
Adria and my old sponsor from rehab who’s been a fucking asshole. Somehow my cousin, Johnny, has left my life, which really bums me out because he’s one of the only family members I really relate to. And Jen’s almost out. I’m going to fire her.
YOUR ASSISTANT?
She gets me so mad. I can never reach her because she’s online. So I’m going to fire her through an instant message. That’s the only way to get her attention. It will just say “Goodbye,” or, “Welcome. You got fired.” So along with that stripper and everyone else, there’s another person who’s going to disappear this year. Looking over all these months of photographs, I’m starting to wonder about something.
WHAT?
Why do we expose all our secrets and vulnerabilities to a girl we want to sleep with for one night but not to the housekeeper who’s always in our lives?
BUT AREN’T ALL THESE THINGS JUST CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR OWN BEHAVIOR? AREN’T YOU JUST BRINGING IT ON YOURSELF?
[silence]
part V IT’S TOO BAD DAVE CAN ONLY DIE ONCE …
“My next record, if I do one, I want to be like a suicide, with a funeral and everything. Everybody romanticizes what it would be like if they killed themselves. So I want to capture it on a record, and make it a conceptual piece. And hopefully I’ll know wha
t it’s like, or try to know. The first half will be me whining, and the second half will be someone missing me and telling me what it was like at the funeral: who went and how many minutes the eulogy lasted and what I looked like in my coffin. I just thought of it today. Maybe I should write the first half of the record, then really commit suicide and have somebody else write the second half. But how will I get to hear it? What if I don’t like what they’ve done?”
part I THE FIRST TIME (WITH SOUND EFFECTS)
“I was eleven or twelve when I started getting high. I was with a friend, Bobby Eisenheimer, who used to just lay on a couch in his room all day [plastic bag crinkling]. One night, we just looked at each other, and I said, ‘Let’s get drunk, what’s that like?’ I had no idea of the chain of events that would be set off by that question. It just came to me, almost like a religious revelation, like a burning bush speaking to me [lots of chopping sounds]. So we went into my mom’s liquor cabinet and took a sip out of everything we could find. We mixed every bottle and drank so fucking much. I remember calling up the girls in my class and saying all kinds of shit. We laughed so hard that night [scraping noises].
“The next thing I remember is my mom coming downstairs. I was laying in a pool of vomit, and both of us were out of our minds. It was horrifying to wake up in that world. I remember that night so well, and I also remember that the next night I wanted to get drunk again. That was the first time [huge snort].
“I didn’t really touch anything for a long time after that. Except for the first time I did acid, because that was an accident. I was thirteen and it was about eleven o’clock at night [another huge snort]. I took two hits and ended up talking to my dad all night, trying to pretend like I wasn’t out of my mind.
“I next did drugs with Stephen Perkins in high school. He and I were in the drum section of the marching band, the Tri-Toms. I’d pick him up every day before school and we’d do coke, smoke pot, and split a six pack, all before eight A.M. [more chopping sounds]. That’s how we started our days. We’d be so fucked up at school, but I somehow managed to get by most of the time, until my mom died. When my mom died it was all over. I had an excuse for everything. I could rationalize all of my behavior, and get away with … [CRASH] Oh fuck [scraping noises, from floor].”