I left the hospital and joined my dad, my mom, and their dog, Panzer, in their tiny new government-funded home in the country outside of Grand Rapids. But within weeks, my dad started getting wanderlust and cabin fever. In January 1963, my granddad John Kiedis decided to uproot the entire family and move to the warmer climes of Palm Beach, Florida. So he sold his business and packed up the U-Haul and took his wife and six children, plus my mom and me. I don’t remember living in Florida, but my mom said it was a pleasant time, once we got out from under the yoke of the abusive patriarch of the Kiedis family. After working at a Laundromat and saving some money, my mom found a little apartment over a liquor store in West Palm Beach, and we moved in. When she got a bill for two months’ rent from Grandpa Kiedis, she promptly wrote to him, “I forwarded your bill to your son. I hope you hear from him soon.” Mom was working for Honeywell by then, pulling in sixty-five dollars a week, one week’s worth of that going toward our rent. For another ten dollars a week, I was in day care. According to my mom, I was a very happy baby.
Meanwhile, my dad was alone in his empty house in the country. Coincidentally, the wife of one of his best friends had left him, so the two buddies decided to move to Europe. Dad just left the house with his car still in the garage, packed up his golf clubs, his typewriter, and the rest of his meager possessions, and took off for Europe on the S.S. France. After a wonderful five-day trip that included the conquest of a young French woman married to a Jersey cop, my dad and his friend Tom settled in Paris. By then, Jack had grown his hair long, and he felt simpatico with the beatniks on the Left Bank. They had a pleasant few months, writing poetry and sipping wine in smoke-filled cafés, but they ran out of money. They hitchhiked up to Germany, where they were inducted into the army to get free passage back to the States on a troopship.
They were packed in like sardines, tossed around on turbulent seas, and dodging vomit along with insults like “Hey, Jesus, get a haircut.” That ride home was the worst experience of my father’s life. Somehow he convinced my mother to let him move in with her again. After her mother died in a tragic car crash, we all moved back to Michigan in late 1963. By now my father was determined to follow the lead of his friend John Reaser and enroll in junior college, ace all his courses, and get a scholarship to a good university and ultimately get a good job and be in a better position to raise a family.
For the next two years, that was exactly what he did. He finished junior college and got many scholarship offers but decided to accept a scholarship from UCLA, go to film school, and realize his dream of living in Los Angeles. In July 1965, when I was three years old, we moved to California. I have some vague recollections of the first apartment that the three of us shared, but in under a year, my parents had once again split up, once again over other women. My mom and I moved into an apartment on Ohio Street, and she found a job as a secretary at a law firm. Even though she was in the straight world, she always maintained that she was a closet hippie. I do remember her taking me to Griffith Park on the weekends to a new form of social expression called Love-Ins. The verdant rolling hills were filled with little groups of people picnicking and stringing love beads and dancing. It was all very festive.
Every few weeks, my routine would be interrupted by a special treat, when my dad came to pick me up and take me on outings. We’d go to the beach and climb down on the rocks, and my dad would put his pocket comb out, and all these crabs would grab it. Then we’d catch starfish. I’d take them home and try to keep them alive in a bucket of water at my house, but they’d soon die and stink up the entire apartment.
In each of our ways, we were all prospering in California, especially my dad. He was having a creative explosion at UCLA and using me as the focal point of all of his student films. Because he was my father, he had a special way of directing me, and the films all wound up winning competitions. The first film, A Boy’s Expedition, was a beautiful meditation on a two-and-a-half-year-old who rides his tricycle down the street, does a big slow-motion wipeout, and lands on a dollar bill. For the rest of the film, I go on a wild ride through downtown L.A. going to the movies, buying comic books, taking bus rides, and meeting people, thanks to that buck I found. In the end, it all turns out to be a fantasy sequence, as I pocket the bill and ride off on my tricycle.
My dad’s budding career as a director got derailed in 1966, when he ran into a cute young roller-skating carhop who introduced him to pot. When I was about four, my dad and I were on one of our outings, walking down Sunset Strip, when he suddenly stopped and gently blew some pot smoke into my face. We walked a few more blocks, and I was getting more and more excited. Then I stopped and asked, “Dad, am I dreaming?”
“No, you’re awake,” he said.
“Okay.” I shrugged and proceeded to scamper up a traffic light post like a little monkey, feeling slightly altered.
Once my dad got into pot, he started hanging out at the music clubs that were part of the new scene on Sunset Strip. Correspondingly, we saw less and less of him. Each summer my mom and I returned to Grand Rapids to see our relatives. Grandma Molly and her husband, Ted, would take me to Grand Haven Beach, and we’d have a great time. During that stay in the summer of 1967, my mom ran into Scott St. John at Grand Haven. After they spent some time together, he talked her into returning to Michigan with him, in December 1967.
The move wasn’t all that traumatic, but Scott coming into the picture was definitely disturbing. There was nothing calming or soothing or comforting about this chaotic character. He was big and tough and swarthy and mean, with black greasy hair. I knew that he worked at a bar and that he got in a lot of fights. One time I woke up early in the morning and went into my mom’s room, and he was lying on the bed. His face was just obliterated, with black eyes and a bloody nose and a split lip and cuts. Blood was everywhere. My mom was putting ice on one part of his head and cleaning up the blood off another part of his face and telling him he should probably go to the hospital. He was just being gruff and gnarly and mean. It was unsettling, knowing that my mom was in love with this guy. I knew he had been a friend to someone in the family, but I didn’t realize that he was my dad’s best friend.
Scott had a short fuse and a big temper, and he was physically volatile. It was the first time in my life that I had received pretty hard-core spankings. One time I decided that I didn’t like the tag in the back of my favorite blue jacket because it was itchy. It was pitch black in my room, but I knew where the scissors were, so I went to cut the tag out, and I ended up cutting a huge hole in the coat. The next day Scott saw the hole, pulled down my pants, and spanked me with the back of a brush.
So it was a rough little patch there. We were living on a very poor side of Grand Rapids, and I entered a new school to finish kindergarten. Suddenly, I stopped caring about learning, and I became a little rogue. I remember walking across the schoolyard and just cursing wildly at age five, stringing together forty curse words in a row, trying to impress my new friends. A teacher overheard me and called a parent/teacher conference, and I started developing the mentality that authority figures were against me.
Another manifestation of my emotional discombobulation was the Slim Jim episode. I was with a friend of mine, and we had no money, so I stole some Slim Jims from a candy store. The owner called my mom. I can’t remember my punishment, but shoplifting Slim Jims wasn’t the average thing for a six-year-old boy to do in Grand Rapids.
In June 1968, my mom married Scott St. John. I was the ring bearer, and at the reception, I got a purple Stingray bicycle as a gift, which elated me. Now I equated their marriage with a great bicycle that had training wheels.
There was a stretch around this time when I didn’t see much of my father, because he had gone to London and become a hippie. But every now and then I’d get packages from England stuffed with T-shirts and love beads. He’d write me long letters and tell me about Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, and all these different bands he was seeing, and how great the English girls were. It was li
ke my dad was on some kind of psychedelic Disneyland ride off in the world, and I was stuck in Snowy Ass, Nowheresville, U.S.A. I knew that there was this magic out there in the world, and that my father was somehow the key to it. But I also, especially in retrospect, enjoyed growing up in a calmer clime.
That summer I went out to California for a few weeks to see my dad, who had returned from London. He had an apartment on Hildale in West Hollywood, but we spent a lot of time in Topanga Canyon, where his girlfriend Connie had a house. Connie was a fantastic character with a huge shock of flowing red hair, alabaster skin, really beautiful and crazy as could be. Besides Connie, my dad’s friends were all these quintessential drug-saturated hippie cowboys. There was David Weaver, a nonstop-talking huge man with shoulder-length hair, a handlebar mustache, and basic California hippie attire (not quite as stylish as my dad). He was a brutal brawler who fought like a wolverine. The last corner of my dad’s triangle was Alan Bashara, a former Vietnam vet who sported a huge Afro and a big, bushy mustache. Bashara wasn’t a macho, tough-guy hippie; he was more the Georgie Jessel of the group, spewing a mile-a-minute comic shtick. So with David, the cool, tough, fighting guy; my dad, the creative, intellectual, romantic guy; and Alan, the comedian, it was working for all of them, and there was no shortage of women, money, drugs, and fun. It was round-the-clock partying with these guys.
Weaver and Bashara had a house near Connie’s, and they ran a rather enormous marijuana business out of Topanga Canyon. When I first got there, I didn’t realize all this; all I saw was a lot of people constantly smoking pot. But then I walked into a room, and Weaver was sitting there counting stacks of money. I could tell that the vibe was very serious. I thought, “Okay, I don’t even know if I want to be in this room, because they’re doing math,” so I went into the next room, where there was a small mountain of marijuana on top of huge tarps. Connie would constantly have to come get me and take me out to play in the canyon. It was “Don’t go in that room! Don’t go in this room! Keep an eye out, make sure no one’s coming!” There was always the element of suspense that we were doing something we might get caught for, which would give a kid some worry, but at the same time, it’s like, “Hmm, what’s going on in there? Why do you guys have so much money? What are all these pretty girls doing everywhere?”
I do remember having a sense of concern for my dad. At one point some friends of his were moving from one house to another, and they filled this big open truck with all their possessions. My dad jumped up and rode on top of the mattress, which was precariously balanced on top of all of the other belongings. We started moving, and we were careening down these canyon roads, and I was looking at my dad barely holding on to the mattress, going, “Dad, don’t fall off.”
“Oh, don’t you worry,” he said, but I did. That was the beginning of a theme, because for many years to come, I’d be scared to death for my dad’s life.
But I remember having a lot of fun, too. My dad and Connie and Weaver and Bashara would all go to the Corral, a little shit-kicker bar in the middle of Topanga Canyon where Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles and Neil Young played regularly. I’d go with the adults, and I’d be the only kid in the crowd. Everyone would be wasted, drinking and drugging, but I’d be out on the floor, dancing away.
When I got back to Michigan, things hadn’t changed much. First grade was pretty uneventful. My mom worked days as a secretary at a law firm, and after school I’d stay with a babysitter. But my life took a decided turn for the better in the fall of 1969, when we moved to Paris Street. We’d been living in a real poor white-trash section of the city, with lots of quadruplexes and shantytowns, but Paris Street was like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Single-family houses and manicured lawns and neat, clean garages. By now Scott was mostly out of the picture, but he had stayed around long enough to impregnate my mother.
Suddenly, I had a trio of beautiful young teenage girls watching me after school. At age seven, I was a little too young to be having crushes, but I adored these girls in a sisterly way, in awe of their beauty and their budding womanhood. I couldn’t have been happier to spend time with them, whether it was watching TV or swimming in the local pool or going for walks in the small wildlands in the area. They introduced me to Plaster Creek, which would become my secret stomping grounds for the next five years, a sanctuary from the adult world where my friends and I could disappear into the woods and make boats and catch crawfish and jump off bridges into the water. So it was definitely a huge relief to move to that neighborhood where everything seemed nicer and where flowers grew.
I even liked school. Whereas my previous school seemed dark and dismal and dreary, Brookside Elementary was a pleasant-looking building that had beautiful grounds and athletic fields that ran beside Plaster Creek. I wasn’t as JC Penney as the rest of my classmates, because we were on welfare after my mom gave birth to my sister, Julie. So I was wearing whatever hand-me-downs we’d get from the local charitable institutions, with the occasional “Liverpool Rules” T-shirt I’d get from my dad. It didn’t really register that we were on welfare until about a year later, when we were at the grocery store and everyone else was paying in cash, but my mom broke out this Monopoly money for the groceries.
Being on welfare bothered her, but I was never fazed by that so-called stigma. Living with a single parent and seeing that all of my friends had mothers and fathers in the same house didn’t make me envious. My mom and I were actually having a blast, and when Julie came into the picture, I couldn’t have been happier to have a baby sister. I was really protective of her until a few years later, when she became the subject of many of my experiments in torture.
By the third grade, I’d developed real resentment toward the school administration, because if anything went wrong, if anything was stolen, if anything was broken, if a kid was beaten up, they would routinely pull me out of class. I was probably responsible for 90 percent of the mayhem, but I quickly became a proficient liar and cheat and scam artist to get out of the majority of the trouble. So I was bitter, and I’d get these ludicrous ideas, such as: “What if we detached the metal gymnastic rings that hang next to the swings, use them like a lasso, and put them right through the picture window of the school?” My best friend, Joe Walters, and I snuck out of the house late one night and did it. And when the authorities came, we scampered like foxes down to Plaster Creek and never got caught. (Many, many years later, I sent Brookside an anonymous money order for the damages.)
My problem with authority figures increased as I got older. I couldn’t stand the principals, and they couldn’t stand me. I had loved my teachers up until fifth grade. They were all women and kind and gentle, and I think they recognized my interest in learning and my capacity to go beyond the call of scholastic duty at that stage. But by fifth grade, I’d turned on all the teachers, even if they were great.
By now there was no male figure in my life to rein in any of this antisocial behavior. (As if any of the males in my life would have.) When my sister, Julie, was three months old, the police started staking out our house looking for Scott, because he had used some stolen credit cards. One night they came to the door, and my mom sent me to the neighbors while they interrogated her. Weeks later, Scott showed up and came storming into the house in a complete violent rage. He’d found out that someone had called my mom and told her he’d been cheating on her, so he rushed over to the phone in the living room and pulled it out of the wall.
I started shadowing him every inch, because my mom was terrified, and I wasn’t having any of that. He started to go into my room to get my phone, but I threw myself in front of him. I don’t think I was too successful, but I was prepared to fight him, using all the techniques that he had taught me a few years earlier. My mom finally sent me next door to get the neighbors, but that was clearly the end of his welcome in that house.
Still, about a year later, he attempted to reconcile with my mother. She flew to Chicago with little Julie, but he never showed up at their rendezvous
spot—the cops had busted him. She had no money to get back home, but the airlines were nice enough to fly her back free. We went to visit him at a hard-core maximum-security prison, and I found it fascinating but a little disconcerting. On the way home, my mom said, “That’s a first, and that’s a last,” and shortly after that, she divorced him. Lucky for her, she worked for lawyers, so it didn’t cost her anything.
Meanwhile, my admiration for my dad was growing exponentially. I couldn’t wait for those two weeks every summer when I’d fly to California and be reunited with him. He was still living on the top floor of a duplex house on Hildale. Every morning I’d get up early, but my dad would sleep until about two P.M. after a late night of partying, so I had to find a way to entertain myself for the first half of the day. I’d go around the apartment to see what there was to read, and on one of my searches, I came across his huge collection of Penthouse and Playboy magazines. I just devoured them. I even read the articles. I had no sense that these were “dirty” magazines or in any way taboo, because he wouldn’t come out and say, “Oh God, what are you doing with those?” He’d be more likely to come over, check out what I was looking at, and say, “Isn’t that girl incredibly sexy?” He was always willing to treat me like an adult, so he talked openly and freely about the female genitalia and what to expect when I ended up going there.
His bedroom was in the back of the house, next to a tree, and I remember him explaining his early-warning system and escape plan. If the cops ever came for him, he wanted me to stall them at the front door so he could jump out the bedroom window, shimmy down the tree to the top of the garage, go down the house behind the garage to the apartment building, then on to the next street. That was confusing to me at eight years old. “How about if we just don’t have cops at the front door?” But he told me that he had been busted for possession of pot a few years earlier, and he’d also been beaten up by cops just for having long hair. All that scared the pants off of me. I certainly didn’t want my dad beaten up. All this only reinforced my distaste for authority.
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