Scar Tissue

by Anthony Kiedis

  All summer I told people about the wonders of living in Hollywood, and about the different, interesting people I had met and the music I was listening to, which was everything in my father’s collection from Roxy Music to Led Zeppelin to David Bowie, Alice Cooper, and the Who.

  In July of that summer, my mom married Steve. They had a beautiful wedding under a willow tree in the backyard of their farmhouse out in Lowell. So I felt that things were okay for her and my sister, Julie. I went back to West Hollywood at the end of the summer, anxious to resume my California lifestyle, and to get back to someone who would become my new best friend and partner in crime for the next two years.

  I first met John M at the end of seventh grade. There was a Catholic boys’ school immediately adjacent to Emerson, and we used to razz each other through the fence. One day I went over there and got into a verbal put-down match with some kid who claimed to know karate. He was probably learning his forms and had no idea about street fighting, because I whomped on his ass in front of the whole school.

  Somewhere in that melee, I made a connection with John. He lived at the top of Roscomar Road in Bel Air. Even though it was in the city, there were mountains and a reservoir behind his house that had a giant waterfall that drained into another reservoir. It was the perfect playground. John’s dad worked for an aerospace company and was a heavy drinker, so nothing was discussed, feelings were not talked about, you just pretended like everything was okay. John’s mom was super sweet, and he had a sister who was confined to a wheelchair with some degenerative disease.

  When I started eighth grade, John became my best friend. It was all about skateboarding and smoking pot. Some days we could get pot, and some days we couldn’t. But we could always skateboard. Up to that point, all of my skateboarding had just been street skating for transportation, and jumping off curbs, basically getting where I had to go with a modicum of style in the way I rode; really, it was as functional as it was anything else. In the early ’70s, the sport started to elevate, and people were riding in drainage ditches and along banks and in emptied-out swimming pools. It was about the same time that the Dog Pound skaters in Santa Monica were taking skateboarding to a new, higher semiprofessional level. John and I were doing it for fun and challenge.

  John looked like an all-American kid. He had a real taste for beer, and we’d go and hang out in front of the local country market and talk adults into buying beer for us. Getting drunk wasn’t my preferred high, but it was kind of exciting to get out of control in that way, to feel you didn’t know what was going to happen.

  We graduated from asking people to buy us six-packs to pulling off heists for our booze. One day we were walking through Westwood and saw workers at a restaurant loading cases of beer into a third-floor storage area. When they left for a second, we climbed up on a Dumpster, grabbed the fire-escape ladder, pulled ourselves up, opened the window, and took a case of Heineken that lasted us for the next couple of days.

  We graduated from beer heists to stealing whiskey from the supermarkets of Westwood. We’d go to the supermarket and take a bottle of whiskey and slip it up a pant leg, pull the sock up over it, and walk out with a bit of a peg leg. It was terrible-tasting, but we’d force ourselves to get it down. Before we knew it, we were out of our minds on the firewater. Then we’d skate around and crash into things and get in mock fights.

  At a certain point, John decided to grow his own marijuana garden, which I thought was very inventive of him. Then we realized it would be easier to search out other people’s gardens and steal their weed. One day after we’d searched fruitlessly for weeks, we found a patch that was guarded by dogs. I diverted the dogs, John stole the weed, and we brought all these huge plants back to his mom’s house. We knew we had to dry them out in the oven first, but John was worried that his mother would come home, so I suggested since most people were still at work, we should use somebody else’s oven.

  We walked a few houses down from John’s, broke in, cranked the oven, and shoved this mound of weed in. We stayed there for an hour, and though the weed never became smokable, now we knew how easy it was to break into people’s houses, and we started doing that with some regularity. We weren’t out to take people’s televisions or go through their jewelry; we just wanted money, or stuff that looked fun to have, or drugs. We went through people’s medicine cabinets, because by now I’d seen a lot of pills and I knew what to look for. One day we found a huge jar of pills that said “Percodan.” I’d never taken one, but I knew they were considered the crème de la crème of painkillers. So I took the jar and we went back to John’s.

  “How many should we take?” he asked.

  “Let’s start with three and see what happens,” I guessed. We both took three and sat around for a few minutes, but nothing happened. So we took a couple more. The next thing we knew, we were out of our minds on an opium high and loving it. But that was a onetime thing. We didn’t take the Percodans again.

  Our small successes with pulling off heists emboldened John. He lived across the street from his old elementary school, and he knew that all the day’s receipts from the cafeteria were kept in a strongbox and stored in the freezer every night. It turned out that during his last month as a sixth-grader, John had stolen a set of the janitor’s keys to the school.

  We plotted out a strategy. We got some masks, wore gloves, and waited until after midnight one night. The keys worked. We got into the cafeteria, went to the freezer, and there was the strongbox. We grabbed it and ran out, right across the street to John’s house. In his bedroom, we opened that box and counted out four hundred and fifty dollars. This was by far the most successful take we had ever had. Now what?

  “Let’s get a pound of pot, sell some, and make a profit and have all the weed that we ever wanted to smoke,” I suggested. I was sick of running out of pot to the point where we would have to clean pipes to try to find some THC resin. I knew that Alan Bashara would have a pound of pot lying around, and he did. Unfortunately, it was shite pot. I had the idea to sell it out of my locker at Emerson, but that was too nerve-racking, so I ended up taking the pot home and selling it out of my bedroom, all the time dipping into the brick and smoking the better pieces. At one point, I was trying to sell this shitty pot to a couple of junkies who lived across the street, but even they were critics. When they saw my bottle of Percodans, they offered me five dollars a pill. I sold the whole jar in one fell swoop.

  The pinnacle of my eighth-grade drug experimentation with John was our two acid trips. I didn’t know anyone who took LSD; it seemed like a different generation’s drug. Still, it sounded like a more adventurous experience that wasn’t about getting high and chatting up the ladies but about going on a psychedelic journey to an altered state. That was exactly how I saw my life then, going on these journeys to the unknown, to places in the mind and in the physical realm that other people just didn’t. We asked all around, but none of our stoner friends knew how to score acid. When I went to Bashara’s house to score the weed, it just so happened that he had a few strips with twenty little pyramid gelatin blotches, ten bright green and ten bright purple. I took two hits of each color and ran home to John. We immediately planned the two trips. The first would be that upcoming weekend. We’d save the second for when John and his family went to their beach house in Ensenada, Mexico.

  We went with the purple acid first. Because it was so pure and strong, we immediately got incredibly high. It was as if we were looking at the world through a new pair of glasses. Everything was vivid and brilliant, and we became steam engines of energy, running through the woods and jumping off trees, feeling totally impervious to any danger. Then the spiritual aspect of the acid kicked in, and we started to get introspective. We decided to observe families in their homes, so we broke into different backyards and started spying on the residents through the windows; as far as we were concerned, we were invisible. We bellied up to the windows and watched families eat dinner and listened to their conversations.

  Th
e sun began to set, and John remembered that his father was coming home from a business trip that day and he was due for a family dinner.

  “I don’t think that’s a great idea. They’re going to know that we’re crazy out of our minds on acid,” I said.

  “We know we’re crazy high on acid, but I don’t think they’ll be able to tell,” John said.

  I was still dubious, but we went to his house and sat down and had a full formal dinner with John’s straight-laced dad and his sweet mom and his sister in the wheelchair. I took one look at the food and began to hallucinate and couldn’t even think of eating. Then I started watching with fascination as John’s dad’s mouth opened and these big words came floating out of it. By the time John’s parents started turning into beasts, both of us were laughing uncontrollably.

  Needless to say, we both absolutely loved it. It was as beautiful and remarkable and hallucinogenic as we ever could have imagined. We’d had mild hallucinations from smoking pot, when we might see colors, but nothing where we felt like we were traveling to a distant galaxy and suddenly understood all the secrets of life. So we could hardly wait for our next acid trip in Mexico.

  John’s folks had a beautiful house on a white sandy beach that went on forever. We dropped that green acid in the morning, walked out to a sandbar, and stayed out in the ocean for seven hours, just tripping on the shimmer and sparkle of the water, and the dolphins, and the waves. Those two times were the best acid trips I ever had. It seemed later like they stopped making really good LSD, and acid became much more speedy and toxic-feeling. I’d still hallucinate wildly, but it was never again as peaceful and pure a feeling.

  I don’t want to imply that John was my only friend at Emerson, because that wasn’t true. But again, most of my friends were outsiders in the social scheme of things. Sometimes I’d have the occasional feeling of less-than. I was less than because I wasn’t as rich as most of these kids. I also felt left out when it came to girls. Like every good boy going through puberty, I started fixating on every hot girl who came into my line of vision. And Emerson was full of them. They were rich little prima donna debutante girls with names like Jennifer and Michele. Their skintight Ditto jeans came in a myriad of pastel colors and did something truly wonderful to the young adolescent female body. Just framed it, formed it, cupped it, shaped it, packaged it perfectly. So I couldn’t take my eyes off them.

  But whenever I approached a girl and asked her to hang out with me, she’d go, “You’re joking, right?” They were beautiful, they were hot, but they were snobs. All those girls wanted a guy who was a couple of years older, or one who had some game or a car. To them I was a freak to be avoided, and I hated it. The same sense of confidence and self-assuredness that I took into my other life, my club life and my party life, and my father’s friends’ life—where I felt at ease and in control and capable of communicating—I just didn’t have that with the girls in my junior high school. They didn’t give me anything in terms of confidence-building—with the exception of Grace.

  Before I talk about the anomaly that was Grace, I should backtrack and pick up the thread of my sexual history. After my liaison with Kimberly, I had no sexual involvement with women for about a year. But around the same time as my Kimberly experience, I discovered the art and joy of masturbation, thanks to National Lampoon’s Photo Funnies. For some reason, masturbation was not a subject that my dad broached. He taught me every minuscule part of the female anatomy, but he never told me that if I needed sexual satisfaction, I could do it myself. National Lampoon inspired me to figure it out.

  All this experimentation took place one afternoon in my add-on bedroom. I wasn’t a horribly late physical bloomer, but I was by no means early. Around the first month that I was even capable of having an orgasm and ejaculation, it dawned on me that I could use photos to achieve that end. Surprisingly, I didn’t use my dad’s vast collection of Penthouse and Playboy magazines. I was attracted to the realism of the girls in those Lampoons, the fact that the girls weren’t in the conventional postures of what was supposed to be sexy. They were just real naked girls. Shortly thereafter, I would abuse every magazine I could in my quest, especially in high school, when it would become almost a contest to see how many times you could jack off in one day, and what stimuli you were jacking off to, and what implements you were incorporating into the process. But that was much later.

  Around the time my hormones started raging, I had the wonderful experience of being babysat one night by Cher. I was in the eighth grade and still hanging with Sonny and Connie from time to time, and for some reason, they got jammed up, so Cher volunteered to watch me for the night. We camped out in her bedroom, having a heart-to-heart talk for hours on end, really getting to be friends for the first time.

  After a while, it was time for bed. Because it was a large house and I might get spooked being alone, Cher let me crash on her bed until Sonny and Connie came to pick me up. In my mind, there was a bit of tension—not that I was going to make any moves on this woman, just the idea that I’d be in bed with such a gorgeous creature. But I thought it was okay because we were friends.

  Then Cher got up to go to the bathroom and get ready for bed. It was dark in the bedroom, but it was light in the bathroom, so I watched her take off her clothes, all the while feigning to be on my way to sleep. There was a woman’s naked body, and it was long and slender and special and just thrilling. Not that I had the wherewithal to want some physical relationship with her, but in my mind, it was a stimulating and semi-innocent moment. After she put on her nightgown, she walked back into the room and got into bed. I remember thinking, “This is not bad, lying next to this beautiful lady.”

  The next woman who would advance my sexual education was also older than I was. Becky was an ex-girlfriend of Alan Bashara. She was about twenty-four at the time and small and beautiful, with adorable curly hair. She was also into quaaludes. I would go on errands with her, and she’d break up some ludes, and then we’d pile into her Fiat and drive around town. The days would always end up with us both getting high, coming home, and fooling around. Our sessions turned into great instructional lessons for me, because she showed me exactly how to go down on a girl. One time she even told me to massage her buttocks. “Wow, I never would have thought of that!” I marveled.

  Sex was still pretty sporadic for me in the eighth grade. But even then there wasn’t a kid I knew who was getting laid. Every one of my friends was destined to stay a virgin for the next few years, so part of the joy for me was going to school the next day and telling my friends, “Hey, I spent the night with a girl.” They were like, “Whoa, that’s beyond comprehension.” They were even more amazed after my experience with Grace at Emerson.

  It started, like a lot of my sexual encounters at that time, with a quaalude. Or half a lude, to be precise. I brought a lude to school and split it with John. We planned to meet up at lunch and share our experience of what it was like to be high during school. By the fourth period, I was totally loaded. I was in my journalism class with a beautiful girl named Grace, who was very physically developed for a fourteen-year-old, especially for a Japanese girl. I knew that she had always had a crush on me. Suddenly, I had a brainstorm. I asked the teacher if I could take Grace on a campus assignment and wander around and see if we could generate some stories for the class newspaper. I was assertive because I was high and feeling the gregarious coercion of quaalude running through me. The teacher said, “Okay, just make sure you’re back before the end of class.”

  Grace and I left the classroom and walked down the hallway, right into the men’s bathroom, which was this big old beautiful bathroom built in the ’30s, with lots of stalls and a tall ceiling and huge windows. I started to play with her breasts and kiss her, and she loved it. I was high and she wasn’t, but she was just as horny as I was and equally willing to have this experience. Just as I began to finger her, a little kid came into the bathroom, saw us in the stall, and screamed and ran out. Instead of panicking and ab
orting the mission, I was determined to find a safer place. So we walked around the campus and found a janitor’s utility shed behind one of the bungalows. We immediately stripped down and started going for it. Much to my surprise, she seemed to know exactly what she was doing. As soon as I came, I stood up, and since I was a teenager, my dick stayed hard. Instantaneously, she went right down on her knees and started giving me a blow job, and I came again. I was amazed. How did she even know to do that? We got dressed and ran back to class, giggling the whole way. As soon as I got to lunch, I told my friends the whole story, and they were dumbfounded and envious. That was just another day at the office for me, because I was pretty willing to do whatever came my way.

  In July, I went back and spent a typical summer in Michigan, a relaxing domain of forest and lakes and peach orchards, shooting my BB gun and hanging with Joe and Nate. But when the summer ended, my mom and I decided that I should stay on in Michigan for the first semester of ninth grade. My mom was pregnant with her third child, and she wanted me around for the birth so I could bond with my new sibling. Because she and Steve lived in Lowell, which was in the country, I wound up going to school in a town with a population of under two thousand people.

  Most of the kids ostracized me. All the popular guys, the meatheads who were sons of farmers, were calling me “girly boy” and “Hollywood” and “faggot” because I had long hair. When school started, I showed up wearing different clothes and a different haircut and a different attitude, and these hay-baling hillbillies wanted to kill me. My only solace was my relationships with girls, who seemed to appreciate me a little more. That semester I hooked up with a hot Hispanic girl and a blonde named Mary, who was the winner of L’Oreal’s Long and Silky hair contest in the Midwest. She was beautiful and a year older, but our relationship never developed into the full-blown romance that I had envisioned. We spent most of our time together holding hands and making out, and she let me touch various parts of her body, but she never gave up the whole enchilada. I couldn’t tell if she was humoring me because I was younger and two heads shorter than her.