by Dave Navarro
DAVE: I said, “Call me back. I have a friend who wants to work with you.”
EVE: Oh, okay. Cool. Good answer.
DAVE: “Good answer”? I’m not on a fucking quiz show.
BONNIE: What do you think the job interviews are like with her?
DAVE: What?
BONNIE: What do you think she looks for?
EVE: Your pussy.
DAVE: She looks for a girl who she thinks is pretty and smart but not too pretty or too smart.
EVE: Uh-oh.
DAVE: You have to appear controllable.
EVE: Okay. I get it. You can’t be too smart because then you can, like, steal her business.
DAVE: You’re not anyway, but, yeah, that’s the idea.
EVE: Actually, I’m only going to do it for two months. I swear to you.
DAVE: Not true.
BONNIE: Don’t make comments like that.
EVE: Okay, but I know myself. I walk away all the time. It’ll get to me.
DAVE: No.
EVE: And all the—
DAVE: No.
EVE: Wait. You don’t understand. Money and nice things aren’t that important to me. It’s just that I want to get out of stripping. And I want to work the minimum amount of time that I have to so that I can spend more time doing what I really want to do. I don’t need to have twenty grand in the bank or a nice car. I have my ’97 Chevy Blazer and that’s fine.
DAVE: Okay, I’m not questioning what you’re …
EVE: But I want you to be able to talk to me two months from now and I want to be able to say, “Yeah, I’m out in the clear. I even have five grand in the bank while I’m looking for another job.” I want you to be proud of me. I want to show you.
DAVE: If you say so, I’ll put my faith in you.
EVE: I couldn’t live with myself if I kept doing it for a year, but I could live with myself for like a month or two.
DAVE: Well, you might hate it, but you might love it. Don’t set a time limit yet.
EVE: When I told everyone I was moving to Vegas to go dance, I was there for three days and then I was back.
[Several cuckoo clocks go off]
EVE: I’m sorry, I’m, like, tweaking on the interior. But I’m, like, conscious that I’m annoying people because I can’t make any sense.
BONNIE: What would you do if you ordered a prostitute and Eve came over? Would you have sex with her?
DAVE: Probably not. But she wouldn’t come over without my knowing it.
BONNIE: Let’s just say she did. Say the madam said, “I got a new girl tonight, a hot blond,” and Eve had changed her name to Amanda. And you didn’t realize it was her until she came over.
DAVE: I still don’t think I would.
EVE: Why is that?
DAVE: Because part of the whole game and process and reasoning behind calling them …
EVE: … is the inonotomy.
DAVE: “Inonotomy?” Oh, anonymity. Yeah. I don’t want to call and have a girl I know come over and have to say to her, “Wow, isn’t this weird? Oh my God. It’s you. Ha-ha, isn’t that funny?” I’m just looking for an empty experience.
EVE: You want a total stranger.
DAVE: Yeah. My rule is, if the penis comes out of the pants—or if any pants come off—it counts as sex. That’s why I don’t have intercourse with anybody. Actual intercourse leads to phone calls, whereas anonymous sex doesn’t. That’s why they call it “intercourse.”
EVE: Damn, so I lost out on a potential client.
DAVE: But if I called and asked for you, that’s another story.
EVE: Ah, there you go.
DAVE: But basically if someone I knew—not just you—showed up, I don’t think. I would be into it Unless of course it was somebody I knew I wanted to have sex with.
EVE: Like Cher.
DAVE: Oh, man, if Cher showed up here, man, I’d be all over her shit.
EVE: Maybe I’ll use the name Cher when I start.
DAVE: That is great fucking comedic timing.
EVE: Seriously. Tell me, are you physically attracted to me at all?
DAVE: No.
EVE: You’re not, are you? I’m not saying I’m beautiful, but, like, why? What if we went downstairs and I physically aroused you …
DAVE: You couldn’t physically arouse me right now if you wanted to.
EVE: All I know is that normally I can pretty much get any guy I want, as far as looks are concerned. I’m tweaking and I can’t talk, but I’m wondering if there is something in my personality that turns people off. I’m trying to see if there is something wrong with me because I was with this actor, and I brought him over to Bonnie’s. And we all started fooling around, then he left me and got with Bonnie and never called me again. And I’ve never been rejected before.
BONNIE: There’s one more thing I want to do: Do you have a mop?
DAVE: It’s in the same place as the brooms were. Use your fucking head.
BONNIE: Shut up.
EVE: I still want to kind of talk about the prostitute thing.
DAVE: Well, keep going, come on.
EVE: Okay, you asked me a question earlier, and you said …
DAVE: Have you ever shit in somebody’s mouth?
EVE: Oh, God, I want to talk about the prostitute thing.
DAVE: One hooker told me that guys wanted her to shit in their mouths.
EVE: Did she do it?
DAVE: No. She’s like, ‘You can get hepatitis from that shit. Why would you want me to shit in your mouth?”
EVE: Oh, he can get hepatitis. Who cares what he gets? If he’s taking that risk, he wants it.
DAVE: Yeah, but she just didn’t see any reason to do that.
EVE: I mean, some of these guys are, like, intelligent men. They know the risks of eating shit.
BONNIE: I’m an intelligent person. I don’t know the risks.
DAVE: Yeah, people get hepatitis. All the time. In fact, I narrowly escaped it.
BONNIE: Very funny. Seriously, though, would someone get it because they had cuts in their mouth? I don’t understand how you get it.
DAVE: Because you digest it and it goes into your bloodstream immediately.
BONNIE: Oh, I thought they spit the shit back out. They actually swallow it?
DAVE: No, they chew it first, and then they swallow it. It’s kind of like beef jerky.
BONNIE: Do they, like, plan it out with the prostitute in advance, and kind of tell her what they want her to eat?
DAVE: Dude, I don’t know.
BONNIE: I’ve read that sometimes they put Saran Wrap on their face, and they have them do it that way.
DAVE: Oh, come on, that’s disgusting. That’s so gross.
EVE: So, you asked me if I ever considered the prostitute thing before tonight.
DAVE: I’m just interested.
EVE: I started thinking about it seriously a week ago. I started a job as a masseuse giving finishing touches or whatever.
DAVE: Finishing touches?
EVE: Massaging the penises. And that day, I said, “What’s one step further?” Because what I was doing was definitely sexual. I tried to justify it every way I could, saying that it’s just a muscle and thinking of it as an extra arm or something. But it still felt sexual. I don’t know.
BONNIE: So do you think you could do it?
EVE: Well, if I had clients like him [pointing to Dave], hell, yeah, I could do it.
DAVE: But a lot of them will be rich creepy foreign men who will want you to like smell their penises.
EVE: Maybe if the madam girl really liked me, I could ask her not to send me to Persians or something.
DAVE: The guy’s gonna want you to smell his penis. “Smell my penis!”
EVE: That’s what turned me off the masseuse thing: my last client was a Persian and he had a huge accent and he was like, “Suck my balls.” And I got really grossed out, and I ran away and didn’t come back the next day.
DAVE: Did he ask you to smell
his penis?
EVE: No, he put my mouth on his balls, and the area between the balls and the anus.
DAVE: “I want you to smell my penis!”
EVE: With the whole prostitute thing, I want to do that for one or two months so that I can focus. I can’t focus on anything creative right now because I have fucking twelve messages a day from creditors. I’m very desperate right now. And here I am fucking partying for two days when I could have been making two hundred dollars at the strip club. But I feel like what’s two hundred dollars? That’s not going to help me.
DAVE: And plus you got to hang out with me.
EVE: Well, I’m enjoying the moment. I live in the moment, that’s for sure. But I also hope that the madam thing will work out for me.
DAVE: I really hope not, but I will do what I can. Well, maybe I would rather it work out for you this way than have you look somewhere else and get fucked over.
EVE: That’s what I’m saying. I want to have the opportunity to meet someone of your stature and provide a good, reliable service. Because I thought to myself, “If I do this I want to just do it with like high-class, nice people, like celebrities.”
BONNIE: Yeah, she’ll probably be screwing celebrities, huh?
EVE: How many celebrities really use call-girl services, though?
DAVE: Four out of five recommend them.
EVE: Okay, people, I know this about myself and I think I can do this because I’ve done things that I normally wouldn’t. I can do something awful and turn my conscience off, and separate myself from the act. I’m talking about, like, maybe sex for money. And I won’t feel guilty about it the next day because it’s almost like I’ll forget about it.
BONNIE: Yeah, I remember you telling me about that one thing.
EVE: Yeah, I still don’t feel guilty about that. It doesn’t bother me. I can just separate myself from the act, which is the same thing a serial killer or murderer does. I have an ability to control my conscience. I can say, “Okay, you’re gonna do this, and you’re not gonna feel guilty about it.” Like I cheated on my boyfriend of four years and actually convinced myself that it didn’t happen. I even forgot about it until he found out six months later. And I am still in denial because my imagination is just like whacked. And I think that’s the same thing with like Hitler or serial killers: they just separate themselves. And I think a lot of women have that.
[The doorbell rings. A cab arrives to take the girls home.]
BONNIE: Is your house clean?
EVE: My house?
DAVE: Well, I had a wonderful time meeting everybody.
BONNIE: I did too.
EVE: Thank you. I hate it though when we bond over drugs like this for hours, and then you never talk to the person again.
DAVE: You’re choosing to do that. I’m not bonding over drugs.
EVE: I mean, you know how people feel like they’re great friends and then they never really talk again.
DAVE: Oh, I didn’t say that you guys were great friends either, did I? I just said I had a really nice time meeting you. You’re not my friends. Fuck, what do you think this is? This is not a game. This is my life.
part IICRACKING UP IN THE CITY THAT NEVER SLEEPS
“I’m going to kill myself.”
Dave is calling from New York, where he’s been working on his album for the last two weeks, and he’s despondent. “It’s about Adria,” he says angrily. “I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to comfort a good friend who’s very depressed and just moved here. And he let it slip today that he was dating Adria. He thought I knew. We should make this a chapter. If somebody’s going to be fucking me over, they shouldn’t do it while I’m writing a book.”
On top of that, Dave rages, he has been removed as a producer from the Jane’s Addiction documentary and no one will tell him why. Since his liver failure last month, he says he has seriously cut down his needle use. But now he wonders what the point of being careful is.
As Dave talks, the line suddenly goes dead. Return calls to his room are met with a busy signal.
I don’t hear from him again until the following night. “You know, when I talked to you last night I had a lethal syringe loaded up,” he begins. “I called a friend of mine who was at the Academy Awards, and told her that Adria was dating my friend Conrad and that this was it. I was going to do it. And she wasn’t able to help me.”
As soon as he hung up, help arrived in the form of a call from a producer working on his record. He was worried because Dave had shown up to the studio five hours late that day. “How are you doing?” the producer asked.
“I’m doing really bad,” Dave replied. “I don’t know what to do.”
When Dave told the producer his plans to give up on everything and leave the record half-finished, the producer became hurt and upset. He seemed to really care about the music, which surprised Dave. As the producer talked and talked about the music, Dave slowly came to a conclusion not unlike the one he arrived at the last time he wanted to kill himself (when he made his checkout film and put Montell Jordan in the CD player). And that conclusion was that his work was not yet done.
“It was kind of like with the movie,” Dave explains. “Except that with the movie I realized I cared about something I was making, and this time somebody else cared about something I was making.”
As the conversation wound down, Dave picked up his lethal syringe, pointed it into the air, and squeezed out the excess heroin, watching it arc into the air in a thin stream and then drop into the carpet. The rest he shot into his arm to put himself to sleep—for the night only.
Letting sleep settle his problems instead of death, he woke up in a different frame of mind. He decided that his friend Conrad was actually being honorable by admitting that he was dating Adria, while Adria was being a liar by continuing to insist she wasn’t seeing anybody.
Later that day, Dave decided to stop by Conrad’s house to get the whole story. “I’ve been really depressed lately,” Conrad said as Dave entered.
“Yeah, so have I,” Dave replied.
“What do you mean you have too? What’s wrong with you?” Conrad asked.
“Well, dude, that shit you told me about Adria kind of has me fucked up.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The fact that you’ve been fucking her.”
“What?!?”
Dave, it turned out, had completely misunderstood his friend: Conrad had been talking about a time two years ago when Dave had visited his house with Adria on Halloween, but Dave somehow misinterpreted him.
“Oh, so that’s what you were saying!” Dave finally exclaimed, reddening as he realized that he almost killed himself over nothing. “I thought that you were telling me she had been over recently.”
“Why would I say that to you?” Conrad asked.
“Well, the only reason I’m here is the fact that you said it so matter-of-factly. I thought you were being honest and straightforward with me, while Adria was deceiving me.”
“Man, that is so amazing,” Conrad replied, on the verge of tears. “I can’t believe you would still come here and help me after you thought I was sleeping with Adria. That means so much to me, I don’t know what to say.”
Conrad grabbed Dave and hugged him, tears rolling down his face. “Enough with the hugs,” Dave deferred. “I almost wish that shit with Adria had happened so you’d stop hugging me. Anyway, I didn’t come over here to help you. I’m here to see your girlfriend.”
While Dave has been helping out Conrad, Conrad hasn’t exactly been doing the same for Dave. In fact, he has turned Dave on to a new vice.
“By the way, have I ever told you about the amazing things crack has done for my soul?” Dave says in a phone call later that night.
“What?”
“I like smoking the glass dick.”
It turns out that while Dave may have cut down his needle use after last month’s scare, he hasn’t made a dent in his drug intake. He has simply substitute
d one addiction for another. And although Dave may sound glib about the crack, it’s just a continuation of the willful self-destruction-with-a-smile that has been taking place since June. But the difference now is that even though Dave says he is depressed because he is impatient for his record to come out, the real reason may be because he has been wanting to get clean since September but just can’t seem to pull it off by himself. Dave says he’s found a place in Antigua to get treatment, and promises that he will check in as soon as the record is finished.
But Dave should do it before the record is finished. It is okay for him to disappear for a few weeks. Anyone who doesn’t know what he’s doing will think he’s off working on something important. And anyone who knows what he’s doing will see it as evidence of his seriousness and commitment to his solo career.
“I’ll tell you what,” Dave says. “I’ll check in when I get back from mixing in New York.”
He exhales smoke loudly into the phone and, as the conversation continues, he gets woozier and more incoherent until he can’t speak anymore. It is four-thirty in the morning on Monday, March 29, when he hangs up, presumably to go to sleep.
part III A SERIES OF ANSWERING MACHINE MESSAGES
MESSAGE #1
Monday, March 29, 6:00 A.M.
“I hope I’m not waking you up. Or taking your face away from some gash, but that producer is suing me. I just picked up my messages, and he called and said he’s hurt that I’m not giving him any points on the record so he’s filing a lawsuit against me. I called and told him that he quit, he didn’t return phone calls to resolve anything, and all the recordings he did are gone, and the arrangements are different. Nowhere on the record does he appear in any way, shape, or form. So, as it stands, I’m prepared if this thing escalates to seriously go public with this. The guy’s coming after any money he can get his hands on. He just finished two other projects. I mean, I’m starting all over, alone, with a new label, a new lawyer, a new manager, and these little songs I wrote about my past. And he wants like fifty percent of the income on them forever. Where is he getting this? You saw him come over to my house that time? That was not the guy I knew. And this isn’t the guy I knew. He was never like …” [Machine cuts off.]