About a week after I was terminated from the band, I had a defining moment of sadness. I was talking to Bob Forest, and he told me that my ex-band had been nominated for L.A. band of the year at the first annual L.A. Weekly Music Awards. For our circle, that was similar to getting nominated for an Oscar, so it was pretty exciting. Bob asked me if I was going to go to the ceremony. I told him I wasn’t talking to the guys, so I couldn’t imagine showing up.
But the awards show happened to be at the Variety Arts Theatre, a classic old venue right smack downtown. Coincidentally, I was in the same neighborhood that night, trying to hustle more drugs for my money than anyone wanted to give me. I was down to my last ten dollars, which is not a good feeling, because on a night like that, you want to be inebriated, and instead I was barely high. I remember doing a speedball with some gang dealer guys when I realized the L.A. Weekly event was going on.
I stumbled into the lobby of the theater in a bit of a haze. It seemed unusually dark inside, and there was hardly anyone there, because the show was in progress. The doors that led down the aisles of the theater were open, so I leaned up against one of those doors and started scanning the audience for my old bandmates. Sure enough, they were in the front. I hadn’t been there for more than a minute when I ran into someone I knew who said, “Man, you shouldn’t be here. This is going to be really sad for you.”
Just then they announced the winner of L.A. band of the year: “The Red Hot Chili Peppers.” “We won! We won the damn award!” I cheered to myself. I looked over at the guys, and they all had big grins and a pep in their step as they marched up onstage in their fancy suits and hats. Each guy got his award and made a little speech like “Thank you, L.A. Weekly. Thank you, L.A. We rock. We’ll see you next year.” Not one of them mentioned our brother Anthony who did this with us and who deserved a part of this award. It was like I had never been there those last three years. Not a fucking peep about the guy they had kicked out two weeks before. No “Rest in peace,” no “May God save his soul,” no nothing.
It was a poetically tragic, bizarre, and surreal moment for me. I understood getting kicked out, but I could not understand why on earth they didn’t have the heart to give me a shout from the podium. I was too numb to feel sorry for myself; I was just trying desperately not to think about how bad I had fucked up and trying to escape any responsibility or reckoning. So I just said, “Ah, fuck them,” to myself and tried to borrow five dollars from someone in the lobby so I could go out and continue to get high.
Money for drugs was a real issue for us, but one day Kim got a big check, and we went out and got a ton of smack and went back to her place to do it. I got so high and felt so good that I said to Kim, “I got to get off this stuff.” Sometimes when you get that high, you think you’re going to feel that good for the rest of your life, and you actually believe you can get off dope; you can’t imagine that euphoria ever going away.
“I’m going to call my mom, go back to Michigan, and get on methadone,” I told Kim. As far as I knew, that was the cure for addiction.
We were drooling and way too high for anyone’s good, but Kim thought it was a great idea, so I picked up the phone and dialed my mom. “You’re not going to believe this, but I have a pretty bad heroin problem here, and I’d like to come back to Michigan and get on methadone, but I don’t have a penny to my name,” I said.
I’m sure my mom was in shock, but she immediately tried to act together and rational. She must have sensed that my life was on the line and that if she flipped out and got judgmental, I would never come home. Of course, if she could have seen the way we were living, she would have had to be committed to a mental asylum.
She made the arrangements, and the next day the ticket arrived, but we couldn’t stop getting high. The day of the flight came, but we had been getting high all night, and when it was time to go to the airport, we were incapable of getting it together. I called up my mom and made up some stupid lie about why I couldn’t leave that day, but I’d change the ticket to the next day. That went on and on, and each time it was “I’m coming tomorrow, I’m coming tomorrow,” while Kim and I were up in her house getting plastered.
Finally, I made up my mind to leave, but I had to do one last run and get really good and loaded right before the flight so I could be high the whole way home. The morning of the latest flight came around, and we went downtown to buy a bunch of balloons of dope and some coke.
Kim was driving an old Falcon that she had borrowed, and I kept jumping in and out of the car, looking for good deals on the street, filling the pockets of my trench coat with heroin, cocaine, spoons, cotton, syringes, you name it. I was out on one of the downtown streets when I saw someone that could be useful to me on the other side of the street. I crossed in the middle of the block, and before I knew it, a cop barked out, “Hey, buddy, you in the trench coat. Why don’t you come over here?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Kim parked behind the wheel of the Falcon. She slumped down and started moaning.
I weighed 120 pounds if I was lucky, and my hair was one big helmet of matted hair, like an elephant ear. I was wearing this trench coat that was hanging off my body, and my skin was a strange shade of yellow and green. I also had on canvas high-top sneakers, which were black and red and filled with marker drawings that I’d done. On the top of one of the shoes, I had drawn a pretty nice Star of David about the size of a silver dollar. Oh, and I had dark glasses on.
I was so busted.
By now the cop had backup.
“We saw you jaywalking back there, and you look a little suspicious,” the first cop said. “Why don’t you go ahead and show us your ID?”
“Uh, I don’t have an ID, but my name is Anthony Kiedis, and I’m actually late getting to the airport to get on a plane and go to see my mom . . .” I stammered.
While this interrogation was going on, the other cop was systematically searching me inch by inch, starting with my sneakers and socks.
I was telling the first cop my date of birth and place of birth and address, and he was writing it all down, keeping me distracted while his partner searched me. The partner was up to my pants, going through the pockets, pulling out whatever scraps of paper and junk I had with me. He even went into the mini pocket, and I was getting more and more nervous because he was getting closer to my side pockets, which were packed with bad news.
“Does that jacket have any inside pockets?” the second cop asked. I started stalling and showed them my plane ticket and whatever else I had in the inside pockets.
Just as he had exhausted all the other pockets and was about to start in on the ones that were loaded, his partner looked down at my sneakers and said, “Are you Jewish? Why do you have the Star of David on your sneaker?”
I looked up and saw his name tag. It read COHEN.
“No, but my best friend in the world is Jewish, and we both have a thing for the Star of David,” I said.
Cohen looked at his partner, who was about to find my stash, and said, “Kowalski, let him go.”
“What?” Kowalski said.
“Let me talk to him for a second,” Cohen said, and pulled me aside. “Look, you shouldn’t be down here,” he whispered to me. “Whatever you’re up to, it’s not working for you, so why don’t you go get on that plane and get out of here. I don’t ever want see you down here again.”
I nodded and, as soon as the light changed, ran across the street, and that was the morning I made it to the airport.
By the time the flight arrived in Michigan I was still loaded on the drugs. I saw my mother in the waiting area and walked up to her, but she looked right past me because I looked like I had stepped out of a grave.
“Hi, Mom,” I said meekly. The look of shock and horror and fear and sadness and disbelief on her face was unbearable. “Let’s go straight to the clinic,” I said.
We drove to the building and asked a worker where the methadone clinic was. They told us that the state of Michigan had discontin
ued the use of methadone six months prior to my arrival. That was really, really bad news for me, because normally, I would go hustle something somewhere. But I had no game left. I didn’t have a penny in my pocket, and I could barely walk.
The counselor offered to admit me to a long-term treatment center, but that was a year’s commitment. I would have rather gone out on the curb and died than check in for a year.
“The only other alternative is the Salvation Army,” the guy said, “but there’s no detox there.”
We drove to a seedy part of Grand Rapids, and I checked in to the Salvation Army. “Thank you, we’ll have your son back to you in twenty days,” they said, and my mom left. I was at a loss. They took me to a big room and gave me a cot. I looked around and saw white kids, black kids, Hispanic kids, alcoholic kids, dope-fiend kids, crack kids, and a smattering of older guys. I fit right in.
I was facing cold turkey. I knew what to expect, because I’d been through it already. I knew I was going to be sick to my stomach, that every single bone in my body was going to hurt. When you’re kicking, your eyelashes hurt, your eyebrows hurt, your elbows hurt, your knees hurt, your ankles hurt, your neck hurts, your head hurts, your back hurts, it all hurts. Parts of your body you didn’t know could experience pain, experience it. There’s a bad taste in your mouth. For a week your nose is running uncontrollably. I didn’t throw up that much, but the worst agony was not being able to sleep. I couldn’t get a wink the whole twenty days. I’d stay up all night and wander the hallways and go sit in the lounge and watch late-night TV. For the first few days I couldn’t eat, but I got my appetite back and started to put some meat on my bones.
After a few days, a staff member came up to me and said, “You have to go to a meeting every day you’re here.” It was cold and snowing outside, and I was feeling pretty miserable, so I accepted my fate and marched along with all the other kids into this little room. I was not in a great state of comprehension, because I was in physical pain and emotionally agonized, but I sat down in the meeting and saw the twelve steps up on the wall. I was trying to read them, but I couldn’t focus my eyes. I was trying to listen to these people, but I couldn’t focus my ears.
I had mocked anything that had to do with sobriety or recovery for my whole life. I’d see stickers that said ONE DAY AT A TIME and I’d be like “Fuck that.” I was a hustler, and a con artist, and a scammer, and a fiend, and a liar, and a cheat, and a thief, all these things, so naturally, I started looking for the scam. Was it a money thing? A God thing? A religion thing? What the fuck was going on here?
But as I sat in that meeting, I felt something in the room that made sense to me. It was nothing but a bunch of guys like me, helping one another get off drugs and find a new way of life. I was keen on discovering the loophole, but there wasn’t one. I thought, “Oh my God, these people are coming from the same place as me, but they don’t get high anymore, and they don’t look desperate, and they’re joking about shit that most people would send you to jail for talking about.” One girl got up and started talking about not being able to stop smoking crack even though she had a kid. She’d had to give her kid to her mother. I was thinking, “Yeah, I’d do the same. I’d be leaving the kid with the mom and disappearing. I did the same thing with my band.”
This was not a cult, not a scam, not a fad, not a trick, not an out-to-get-your-buck type of thing; this was just dope fiends helping dope fiends. Some of them were clean and some of them were getting clean because they were talking to the ones who got clean, and they were being honest about it and unafraid to say how fucked up they were. It flashed on me that if I did this, I could be clean.
I stayed there for the twenty days, not sleeping but going to meetings every day and listening and reading the books and gleaning a few of the basic principles.
After twenty days, I went back to my mom’s house in Lowell, feeling a hell of a lot different than when I came. At age twenty-four, I was totally clean for the first time since I was eleven years old. I was able to sleep through the night, and my mom and I celebrated the next day. My stepdad, Steve, was real supportive, and so were my sisters. I was feeling pretty good, oddly in acceptance of the damage that I had created. There’s a whole lot of optimism in those meetings, with people being freed from self-imposed prisons, so everything seemed fresh and new.
Steve had some old weights lying around the house, and I rebuilt them and did some weight lifting. I took long walks and played with the dog. It had been so long since I’d felt normal, and wasn’t chasing something or calling someone or meeting someone in the middle of the night to talk him out of a bag of something. Amazingly, none of that was on my mind at all.
During my stay at the Salvation Army, I realized that if I didn’t want to keep doing what I had been doing that I’d have to let go of Jennifer. I really wanted to stay sober, and I wasn’t blaming her for my problem, but I knew that if I was with her, my odds of staying clean would be diminished.
I kept going to meetings while I was at my mom’s house, and I learned that alcoholism/drug addiction is a bona fide illness. When you recognize that there’s a name and a description for this condition that you thought was insanity, you’ve identified the problem, and now you can do something about it.
There’s a real psychological relief that comes from discovering what’s wrong with you and why you’ve been trying to medicate the hell out of yourself since you were old enough to find medicine. I wasn’t too clear on the concepts in the beginning, and I still wanted to cut corners and do things my way and take some short cuts and not do all of the work that was asked of me, but I did like the feeling and I did identify hugely. I also felt waves of compassion for all of these other poor motherfuckers who were destroying their lives. I looked at the people in the meetings and saw beautiful young women who had become skeletons because they couldn’t stop using. I saw other people who loved their families but couldn’t stop. That was what attracted me. I decided that I wanted to be part of something where these people had a chance of getting well, of getting their lives back.
After being in Michigan a month, I decided to give Flea a call to check in. We exchanged greetings, and then I told him about the cold turkey and the meetings and the fact that I didn’t get high anymore.
“What do you mean, you don’t get high?” Flea said. “You’re not doing anything? Not even pot?”
“Nope. I don’t even want to. It’s called sobriety, and I’m loving it,” I said.
“That’s insane. I’m so happy for you,” he said.
I asked him how it was going with the band, and he told me that they’d hired a new singer who had a bunch of tattoos, but I could tell in his voice that they weren’t happy with him. I didn’t really care. In no way or shape or form was I trying to get back in the band.
Flea must have heard something in my voice that first call, something that he hadn’t heard since we were in high school. It’s amazing to me, because it wasn’t like me not to be angling my way back into the band as soon as I felt good. But I honestly didn’t care then if I went back to the band or not. It was a real take-it-or-leave-it feeling, which is really not me, because I’m a control freak, and I want what I want and I want it immediately. However, at that moment I was relieved of all of the self-obsessed, driven behavior.
A few days later, Flea called me. “Do you think you’d want to come back here and maybe play a couple of songs and see how it feels to be back in the band?” he asked.
That was the first time I had even considered that as a possibility. I blurted out, “Wow, hmmm. Yeah, I would. There’s really nothing else that I’d want to do.”
“Okay, come back, and let’s get to work,” Flea said.
I got on the plane to go home, riding a whole new wave of enthusiasm for my new life. I decided to write a song about my monthlong experience of going to meetings, getting clean, and winning this battle of addiction. I look back on it, and it seems naive, but it’s exactly where I was at that point of my life. I
took out a pad of paper, looked out the window at the clouds, and started channeling this river of wordology that was cascading toward me.
From “Fight Like a Brave”
If you’re sick-a-sick ’n’ tired of being sick and tired
If you’re sick of all the bullshit and you’re sick of all the lies
It’s better late than never to set-a-set it straight
You know the lie is dead so give yourself a break
Get it through your head, get it off your chest
Get it out your arm because it’s time to start fresh
You want to stop dying, the life you could be livin’
I’m here to tell a story but I’m also here to listen
No, I’m not your preacher and I’m not your physician
I’m just trying to reach you, I’m a rebel with a mission
Fight like a brave—don’t be a slave
No one can tell you you’ve got to be afraid
When I got back to L.A., within two months I was shooting heroin and cocaine again. My sobriety hadn’t stuck for a long time, but now I knew there was a way out of the madness if I wanted it and if I was willing to do the work to get it. I had been given the tools; I just didn’t want to use them yet.
Scar Tissue Page 21