by Dave Navarro
MESSAGE #2
Monday, March 29, 6:04 A.M.
“Anyway, as the guy who is my cowriter, I think it’s important for you to know that this is going to be a story that has to come out. The truth of the matter is that the project I was doing was quit by this guy. He walked back into his old situation without informing me or asking me or telling me or even having the courtesy to give me a phone call—or even a return phone call. He contributed half a chorus to one song, and I agreed to give him that money. He wants more than that, yet he hasn’t done a stitch of work since. He doesn’t know what this band is about. He doesn’t know who I am anymore. He doesn’t know how to be a man or be earnest, and I think I’m ready to do a piece about this somewhere. I think that we should pen this piece, or at least I should. Would you help me out with it? Bye.”
MESSAGE #3
Monday, March 29, 10:20 A.M.
“Neil, it’s Dave. I’m going to go to rehab. It’s, whatever. You have the key to my house, or I guess I’ll call you from there. They probably won’t let me make calls for like a week or so, in which case do what you have to do at my house. And check on it. I probably won’t be able to talk to you for a while. I trust you with the house. If you could check on it. Actually, you have to call my housekeeper and tell her not to come anymore. She’s listed on my computer, under Miranda. Sylvia Miranda, M-I-R-A-N-D-A. If you have to, call Jen and she’ll tell you what the number is. I don’t know what her number is. I’m sorry, but there’s really nothing I can do about this. Okay, bye.”
MESSAGE #4
Monday, March 29, 1:08 P.M.
“Hey, Neil, it’s Dave. I’m at the airport. Call me up. Bye.”
MESSAGE #5
Monday, March 29, 7:15 P.M.
“Hey, dude, it’s me. I’m almost at the place. Maybe I’ll try you from there if I can. Okay, bye.”
MESSAGE #6
Monday, March 29, 7:42 P.M.
“Shit, dude, you’re still not there. Listen, this is my last chance. I’m in Tucson. I’m so upset right now. I don’t know if I can call you again.”
HUMAN VOICE #1
Tuesday, March 30, 11:04 A.M.
Finally, Dave calls when I’m home. I’ve been worrying about him for over twenty-four hours, wondering what is going on. Somehow, between messages number two and three, an intervention of some sort took place. When he speaks, he is clearly in pain. He sounds worse than I’ve ever heard him, worse even than when he called overdosing in December or turned yellow last month. For the first time, I’m confronted with a dilemma I haven’t had to face before: Do I start the tape recorder?
This is the rawest, most real, most anguished state I have ever heard Dave in. And he needs me—not as a documentarian but as the friend I’ve become through getting so close to his life in the process. If he is reaching out to me as that friend, one who supposedly hasn’t betrayed him, I can’t start the tape recorder. But, at the same time, I wonder, when Dave’s out and clean, will he ask me for the tape? Maybe he is really just calling me so that I’ll record it and he can document his state of mind at the moment. Ultimately, the conversation is left unrecorded, just remembered.
Speaking from the pay phone at the clinic, he explains that he is going crazy, that he doesn’t know what to do. He feels betrayed. Some of the people on the business end of his record pulled an intervention on him, which is upsetting to Dave because he says he was planning to check into rehab as soon as the record was finished. He feels that they didn’t trust him to do it himself, and consequently they stabbed him in the back by springing this intervention on him.
“The work I did was the work I did while I was like this,” he groans. “They don’t understand that the album means more to me than my life.”
But he is backed into a corner: if he completes rehab successfully, his people will think that they did the right thing when he feels they didn’t. But if he runs away, they’ll feel like he’s beyond hope and abandon him and his record. “If I leave here, I lose,” he finally decides. “It’ll make everybody who doubts me right. So I’m going to stay.”
part I THE SWEEP
I stop by Dave’s house today to help his formerly fired assistant Jen “sweep,” as she puts it. Evidently he called her with a mission to search for and either destroy or confiscate all traces of drugs, paraphernalia, and anything reminiscent of his old habits before he returns from rehab.
The needles that Dave melted together and called his artwork. Gone. The shotgun he pointed at the Department of Water and Power workers and the ammunition kept in the safe. Gone. The skull-decorated box he used to transport drug paraphernalia on rare nights out. Gone. The mail-order package full of probably harmless pill containers. Gone. The needles scattered around the living room, the drug residue on the coffin coffee table, and every single spoon in the house. All gone. However, we do not dispose of a singing bird clock and rubber urine bag that arrive in the mail as we sweep because we can’t seem to figure out a connection between them and drug use other than the fact that they were clearly ordered while on drugs.
As we throw out every cigarette that is missing its filter, Jen reminisces about the time Dave got sick from accidentally injecting threads from the cigarette filters he uses to absorb melted drug residue. She visited the house to find it freezing cold with Dave sweating madly. But he didn’t want to call 911, she explained, because he didn’t want to deal with the infamy that would ensue. So she sat up with him all night, watching him sweat more and more, watching the pain increase until the couch was soaking wet. Afterward, he told her, “You saved my life. I can never fire you.”
Two months later, he fired her.
“Initially when he would explain the book to people, he was talking about the whole concept of documenting a year in his life and watching people come and go and then come back or go forever,” Jen remembers. “And personally that’s what I’ve done. I’m sure that last year we didn’t think I’d go a month without talking to him. Then I was gone for over three months. And now I’m back helping him almost exactly a year since this all began.”
Jen and I spend hours in the house, looking for drugs that Dave has secretly stashed or that dealers with his house keys have concealed. We know most of the hiding places by now: inside the spout of the drainpipe, underneath the turntables, behind the security camera over his doorbell, in the silver-dollar-shaped slots on the back of his Macintosh computer monitors, and in guitar cases, vases, drawers, pianos, cassette boxes, and coat pockets.
Just when we are about to leave, sure that we’ve made a thorough sweep, I stand on a chair to see if I should collect any of the books of photo strips lined up on top of the photo booth. There I find a needle, a gun, a bong, and a Virgin Mary altar candle. Inside the candle, the wax has been burned halfway to the bottom: in the empty space above the wax, there is a ball of tinfoil wrapped in black electrical tape. Jen gets very excited when she sees it. It is impossible to tell how long it’s been there: weeks, months, years?
Inside the obsessively wrapped package, there is a fingernail-size lump of black-tar heroin and a rock of coke about half the size of a golf ball. So I drive home with several grams of coke and heroin, a handgun, a shotgun, a bong, several boxes of shells, and a bio-hazard jar that we found full of needles in the trunk of my car. I can only imagine what would become of me if I were pulled over.
I wonder, as I drive home, if Jen and I are really doing any good. We’ve only taken away the things that are obvious tools for drug use or self-destruction. The problem is that everything in the house is reminiscent of drugs, from the dead-end sign outside to all the modifications Dave made inside while on drugs—the purple-painted walls, the chrome kitchen, the cuckoo clocks.
“I walked up there with Keanu Reeves the other day, and all I could think was, ‘Dave did drugs here, Dave did drugs there,’” Jen muses. We all want Dave to come back and stay somewhere else—Laguna Beach, Malibu, wherever. When we talk to him, however, he keeps saying he c
an’t wait to get back to his house. But what’s he going to do there? We’re going to have to spend twenty-four hours a day with him.
part II THE NOTE
Whenever Dave calls from rehab, he sounds miserable. Every time I try to ask how he is or what he’s doing, he becomes quiet and melancholy. “I really hate it here,” he says. “I’m trying to get transferred back to L.A. It’s just terrible, dude. Tell me some good stuff. I don’t want to think about how bad it is here.”
Perhaps to keep a plot in his life, he has fallen in love with a fellow patient. “She’s the worst fucked-up junkie chick you ever saw, but she’s so cute,” he says. “She looks like she’s totally going to die.
“But,” he adds, “no one in here’s seen anything like my case either. They say, ‘Dude, what happened to your arms?’ No one can believe it’s tracks. I guess I never really looked at them; they’re gnarly.”
I ask him about some of the things Jen and I found in the house. “I bought that piss bag because I was going to make an art piece out of it,” he explains. “I was going to call it ‘Grandpa’ and hang it on something. And I liked the bird clock because each hour has a different type of bird chirping.”
He wants me to leave a hundred dollars on his computer table for his maid to pick up. When I return to the house two days later, for some reason I check under the doormat. Underneath, there is an envelope from Mary containing a unicorn bookmark and a note saying that she has taken back a delivery of drugs she left him there, since it’s been lying beneath the doormat uncollected for several days. The funny thing is, when Jen and I swept the house a week ago, there was nothing under the doormat. He must have called her and ordered the drugs sometime since then. But why?
D—
I had left something on your doorstep but I hadn’t heard from you so I came back. Call me when you get here. I’ll be up or someone can wake me up. I have something I think you should try. Something different.
I’ve missed you a lot the last couple months. I feel so helpless knowing that you feel like your life is over. No matter what you decide I’m positive you can make the best of it. Your so good at pulling things together when the going gets tough. There’s so many different options for you.
Well, I won’t keep going on, but please call so I know your o.k.
Allright?
Love,
M
part III THE CONFESSION
“I went in to talk to this doctor, and I was just trying to get a general sense of what the whole plan was for me here. I was telling him about my CD and how it has a lot to do with the grieving process for my mother, because that’s what they’ve been making me focus on and work on here. And he interrupts me and goes, ‘Dave, listen, I’m telling you now, I’m not going to listen to it.’
“But I wasn’t asking him to listen to it. I was just telling him what it was about. I got so fucking mad that I stood up and said, ‘Fuck you, you’re not even listening to me.’ I went to my room, packed my bag, called a cab, and signed out A.M.A., which means ‘against medical advice.’ I got into the cab and said, ‘Take me to the airport.’ I had a hundred dollars with me. The cab driver looked pretty cool, so I said, ‘Hey, where can I get heroin and cocaine in this part of Tucson?’
“She goes, ‘Oh, well, we’d have to go down to South Sixth Street, although that’s a really gnarly part of town.’
“I said, ‘Well, there’s a hundred dollars in it for you if we can make that trip.’
“So we drove around to all these places and finally got a toothless black guy and his wife to get in the cab. And they were telling us, ‘Turn down here; turn down there; no, slow down; make a left here; slow down; pull up in front of this house.’
“Finally, the guy goes in, gets the drugs. By the time all this was done, I looked at the meter and it was eighty-five dollars. I had just spent my only hundred dollars on drugs and the airport was like an hour away from where we were. So the rest of the day was used up going to Western Union, calling everyone I could think of and begging, ‘Wire me some money.’ I even went to a bank to get an advance on my American Express card, but they told me they didn’t do that there.
“The cab driver was cool because I told her, ‘Look, if you can deal with me, I’ll give you an extra grand.’
“I kept going back again and again to Western Union, waiting in line and asking if the money came through. But it never did. I finally called my manager, who said, ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing? You’re going to ruin everything. Everyone is counting on you staying in rehab; you’re not going to have a record to come back to if you don’t. Put the cab driver on the phone.’
“Apparently, my manager had told everyone not to wire me the money. So he said to the cab driver, ‘Look, lady, there is no Western Union money coming in and he’s not going to be able to pay you. The only way that you’re gonna get your meter is if you take him back to where you picked him up.’
“And she did. It was gnarly having to walk back into rehab. I felt like an outlaw, like the Indian who threw the furniture through the window in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I had to go through detox all over again. Then I got the flu. It was terrible. But today has been a really good day. My dad came to visit me, I had yoga class, and it seems like there’s a chance I just might make it through this.”
part I A NOT-SO-TRIUMPHANT RETURN
We failed. The plan was to spend twenty-four hours every day with Dave when he came home from rehab to make sure that he didn’t return to old habits. I had to go to New York for business, so Jen and Tori looked after him. He called as soon as he arrived home and sounded depressed. Reading over transcripts from the documentation of the last year, he noticed that all his talk—for example, his Steve Vai argument—was, to him, based on what he thought were deep, profound spiritual principles of live and let live. But the fact is that it was his misinterpretation of those principles that kept him from benefiting from them. He was being, in other words, a hypocrite.
“These principles are here to help you better your life,” he said. “And I’ve misinterpreted and tangled them up in such a way that they’ve hindered my life.”
On Thursday, he left an extremely sad message on my machine, but then never called again when I left him messages the following Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
On Sunday, Jen calls in tears, sobbing that Dave had kicked her and Tori out of the house, called his dealer, Mary, and started using again. His explanation: he was bored and didn’t know what to do. He has hardly called anyone since then, perhaps because he feels like he’s let them down.
“I’m glad we took the guns out of the house,” Jen says. “He’s really upset. I’m worried he might try to kill himself if he can’t get straight.”
Some of his other friends are less sympathetic. In fact, they’re pissed. One calls and rages: “That guy has taken so much more than he’s given to me in the last year. All he’s done since he’s been back is go out and do drugs. He just blew everything he did for the last six weeks.”
As I return to Los Angeles to find him, I’m bummed out. We thought this book would have a happy ending, but now it’s May 10 and we’re right back where we started. He must feel like shit: everything he prides himself on—his mind, his willpower, his control of himself—has proven useless.
Sometimes, though, people just can’t help themselves. Even if we’re not addicted to drugs—maybe instead it’s gorging on chocolate, smoking, masturbating, staying out too late, picking our noses, or simply saying no to other people—we like to think that we’re stronger than our compulsions. But when time after time we can’t break a habit we so badly want to eliminate, we begin to realize that maybe our willpower and self-control aren’t as strong as we thought they were. Maybe we are just as weak as everybody else.
part II TORI’S STORY
Thursday, May 6
DAVE: I was drug-free and had quit everything. But the second I got out of rehab, I bought a pack of cigare
ttes and started eating chocolate.
TORI: Every vice came back. Addiction started instantly. When I picked him up at the airport, he was nervous. He was shaking from the anxiety of going home. I knew that he was going to have a problem being there. We went back to his place, and Jen was waiting for us. A few things were changed around, but it was still the same place where everything had happened before.
DAVE: There was still a heavy vibe in there.
TORI: When he walked in, he was completely overwhelmed. And Jen was there saying, “Look at this” and “Look at this.” I think it took a lot out of him. Maybe he needed to be alone.
DAVE: It was really hard. So I told them to split. I paged Mary, and then I called her. She was the first person I phoned.
TORI: Everybody kept saying, “How could this happen?” And I said, “Because it’s not just the drugs that he needs to get away from. It’s his emotional stuff that he needs to take care of so he doesn’t do the drugs again.”
DAVE: So Mary came over and I shot up. It was just like the old days.
TORI: Except a big difference was that now he had to lie to everybody about it. He called me two hours later and said, “Come back up.” He was either feeling guilty or wanted someone to be with because he was high again. So I came back and we hung out, although I didn’t know he was high. That evening, he asked me to leave because he said he was going to the gym. But Adria came up and they got into a big fight. And that set him off.
DAVE: I knew that going to the gym would be useless.
TORI: I didn’t know you didn’t go. But when I couldn’t get in touch with you all night long I began to get worried that something was wrong.
Friday, May 7
TORI: For Friday morning, I had made him a facial appointment. I called and called and called, then finally I came by. I knew something was wrong. He answered the door and he was wearing a blue crusty face mask that he had obviously fallen asleep in. He was still groggy and couldn’t walk because his legs hurt for some reason.