“Anthony, I have to show you something,” she screamed. “I’m so in love with you. Look what I did!” She pulled down her pants, and there was my name tattooed right over the old pubic mound. There was a guy standing a few paces behind her. “This is my boyfriend, but he doesn’t care. I’m all yours if you want me,” she said.
“Yeah, thumbs up, dude. Take her, she loves you,” this guy said.
I didn’t take him up on his offer, but Hillel and I looked at each other and realized that maybe all that touring for the last three albums had finally amounted to something. We still weren’t getting radio airplay, but we were definitely infiltrating the psyche of American youth.
Touring was usually not a lucrative endeavor for us. After Freaky Styley, we each got three grand. But following this tour, Lindy announced that after expenses and including T-shirt sales, we were getting twenty-two thousand.
“To split?” I asked.
“No, we each get twenty-two thousand,” Lindy said.
That was a quantum leap in finances for us, so my first order of business was to get a nice place to live for my angel girlfriend and me. But every time I’d go look at a place, they’d hand me a long application. I thought I could just fork over some dough and the house would be mine, but every landlord was asking for me to list my last five residences, along with my last five places of employment. Okay: The last place I lived was with my girlfriend’s mother, before that was my manager’s couch, before that a squat in Pasadena, before that I was homeless, before that it was another girlfriend’s mother, before that it was Flea’s sister’s bed, before that a house that didn’t have a door. My references weren’t looking too good. They’d ask for bank-account numbers and credit cards, but I didn’t even own a checkbook then. All I had was twenty-two thousand dollars in cash.
Eventually, I went to see a two-bedroom house on Orange Drive. It was a ’30s triplex, very art deco, with wood floors and an old tiled bathroom. It was paradise. And it was a thousand dollars a month. After I inspected the place, the Russian landlord handed me an application, but I gave it right back to him.
“I can’t fill this out. It doesn’t work for me,” I told him.
“Then you can’t have the house.” He shrugged. “Get out of here.”
I pulled out a shoe box with five thousand dollars in cash. “This is the first five months’ rent. If you don’t like me after five months, then kick me the hell out,” I offered.
He looked at the five grand. “The house is yours,” he said.
So I had our dream house, and I still had a lot of money. I decided to celebrate my new acquisition with the yin/yang of drug use—a nice pile of heroin and cocaine. Once again, I started speedballing like a maniac. There was no furniture in the house, and I didn’t even know how to get the electricity turned on in my name, so I went out and bought five watermelons and dozens of candles. I cut the watermelons in half the long way, and set them all over the floor of the house and shoved candles into their cores. So now the entire house was a sea of halved watermelons and candlelight. I inaugurated the bathroom by shooting up a ton of coke and dope.
I picked up Ione and brought her back to our dream house. She looked a little skeptical, especially because there were mad streaks of blood down both of my arms, and my eyeballs were spinning around in my head.
“I’m with you, we’re in this together, it’s going to be okay, but my mom is not having this,” she said. “In fact, she’s on her way down here right now.”
“Baby, don’t you worry about a thing. I’ll handle the mom. This is my forte,” I said. “They always told me I should have been a lawyer. Watch me work.”
Enid pulled up in front of the house, and I marched out into the street, my shirt covered in blood, with crazy eyes and matted hair. She got out of her car and stood under the streetlight with her arms crossed, just beside herself.
“Enid, it’s going to be okay,” I reassured her. “I love your daughter with all of my heart. I would die for your girl. She’s my baby, and I’ll take care of her as good as you did.”
She looked at the blood and then at me. “But you have a problem. You’re not well.”
“Enid, trust me. This is a passing phase,” I said.
Enid was peeking past me into the house and staring at the watermelons and candles, probably convinced this was some sort of Satanic ritual sacrifice of the virgin. But somehow, in the midst of this debauched debacle, I was able to come to some state of clarity and convince Enid that things were going to be okay. I sent her home and kept her daughter, and we started our life together in that house.
The band’s suspicions that we were moving to another level of popularity were confirmed when KROC asked us to play a daytime promotional show at the Palamino in the Valley, a classic old-school, beer-drinking, barroom-brawling cowboy venue where people like Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles had played on their way up. The day of the show, we drove to the gig and were within a half a mile of the venue when we got caught in a massive traffic jam. It was like the Rose Bowl Parade. Traffic was stopped, and there were cops on horseback, and we were indignant because we had to get to our show. Then we realized that all the traffic was from people converging on the Palomino for our show. Between the power of KROC and the celebrated sons of the moment returning from their tour, we had stopped traffic.
I must have gone on a pretty serious dope bender around this time, because in pictures of me from that show, I was frighteningly thin. Mario had reentered my life, and I was back to borrowing Ione’s car and going on runs with him. One day, in the midst of an outing, we were running out of money, so he suggested that we go deeper into the jungle of downtown, where the drugs were stronger and less expensive. We piled into Ione’s Toyota and drove down to skid row, where 90 percent of the people on the street looked like extras from The Night of the Living Dead. Even though it was broad daylight, Mario and I looked like an unlikely duo to be rolling through those streets. I had taken all of my drugs and syringes and spoons and put them up under the driver’s-side visor of the car. Mario was in the passenger seat, scanning the streets like a computer for the right guy. I was driving cautiously, but all of a sudden, I saw a cop car in the rearview mirror. I alerted Mario, and he told me to make a left, so I dutifully put on the signal, got in the proper lane, and made the turn. The cops kept following us.
“Pull over by this alley,” Mario said. As soon as I got near the curb, he opened the door and bizalted right out of the car. Now the cops were coming out of their car toward me.
“Who’s your friend there?” the first cop said.
I tried to stay calm. “Uh, that’s Flaco. Just a guy I know.”
“Well, do you know your friend Flaco there is an escaped convict and on the most-wanted list?” the other cop said.
Next thing I knew, I was under arrest for being in the company of an escaped felon. Luckily, they didn’t search the car, but they did put me in the back of their patrol car, and we started canvassing the neighborhood for “Flaco.” Sure enough, they drove down some alleyway, and there he was. He looked at me like I had ratted him out, but when he got in the car with me, I made it clear that I hadn’t said nothing to nobody. They took us to jail and separated us. They interrogated me, but I told them nothing, so they returned me to this glass-enclosed cell that was about as big as a large couch and stuffed with other prisoners. I was sitting there bemoaning my fate when I got a visit from the FBI.
“FBI? I don’t even know this guy. I was just giving him a ride and—”
“Don’t talk so much,” the fed cut me off. “We’re here to take pictures of your teeth.”
Apparently, I fit the description of the Ponytail Bandit, a white kid who had successfully knocked off dozens of Southern California banks. Finally, a forensic dentist arrived and stuck his damn fingers in my mouth and turned to the agent and said, “This is not the guy.”
They transferred me to the Glass House, the downtown L.A. County jail. It was a hellhole. By now my d
rugs were wearing off, and I hadn’t slept in days and was feeling raw and empty and nervous. On arrival, they told me I’d have to undergo the old strip-down and bend over, spread my butt cheeks, lift up my nut sack, peel my foreskin back, full-body check, because they didn’t know how long I was going to be in there and they didn’t want me keestering in goods. The only problem was that they had just passed a new law that stipulated if you had track marks on you, you’d have to do a ninety-day mandatory sentence. And I had some track marks. So on my way to the full strip search, I started talking to the cop about to search me. I began to empathize with him, telling him I understood how rough it was being a cop, and he told me about his family, and we related as two humans for a minute. He asked me what I was doing downtown, and I told him that I was trying to get back in college and get my life together, just lying my ass off, trying to make friends with him. As soon as I took off my shirt, he looked amazed.
“Holy Toledo, look at your arms! You know that’s a ninety-day mandatory,” he said. I just laid on the bullshit about how I’d be fired from my job and I couldn’t get back in college and I had to support my mom, who was disabled.
“Put your shirt on and keep your arms covered the whole time you’re in here,” he said.
After I’d spent the next few harrowing hours in a big dormitory room with fifty other inmates, a guard came into the cell and told me I could leave. Waiting for me in the corridor was Lindy.
“You motherfucker, I called you at nine this morning. It’s nine at night! What took you so long to get me out of here?” I screamed.
“Well, Swanster, I got some advice from some of the other guys, and everyone seemed to think maybe it was a good idea if you chilled out in here for a minute and got some idea of where your life was going,” he said. “It really wasn’t my thinking. My thinking was if I was in there, I’d want to get out, but they said, ‘Maybe if we let him sit in there for a little while, it’ll help.’”
“Look, motherfucker, you better give me forty dollars, because that’s not brotherly, leaving me in there like that,” I said.
“Whoa, forty dollars? Swanster, I don’t know if I should do that,” Lindy said.
“That’s the least you could do. If you don’t give me the forty, I’m going to be sick,” I warned. He gave me the money and drove me to a place where I could cop.
While my drug use remained blatant enough to send me to the Glass House, Hillel was battling his own demons in private. Whereas before, we’d be together or there’d be girls involved, a whole party atmosphere, now it was more reclusive and isolated. There was a dark feeling to it. He was going off into a more constant and necessary use of heroin and cocaine, while I was becoming more of a periodic binger. I’d go ballistic for a week, and people always murmured and rumored and gossiped and spoke behind my back about how I’d be the first person they knew who’d die of drugs. Every now and then, even Hillel would come to me and say, “Dude, don’t kill yourself. Look at you, you’re close to death.” Ione was terrified, telling me, “Please don’t die. I can’t handle it.”
That winter the band embarked on our first proper European tour. London was our first stop. Come the night of the show, Hillel was too sick to leave his room. Flea and I went to his room, and it was incredibly sad to see him losing the battle with this darkness. He didn’t have that look in his eye that said, “Yeah, I’m losing, but I’m going to fight this thing through.” Instead, he was wailing, “I can’t do this. I’m dying here.”
We convinced him to come to the club, and we took the stage and went into our trademark sizzling beginning, but Hillel was not part of what was happening. We tried playing another song, and Hillel stopped and mumbled to me, “I can’t do this,” and left the stage. I looked over at Flea and Jack and said, “Do something,” and then I ran backstage, where Hillel was slumped over, crying into his hands.
“Hillel, you can do this. Get your fucking guitar and come back.”
“No, I can’t,” he moaned. “Cancel it. It’s over.”
I ran back onstage, and we proceeded to play an entire set of a very rhythmic bass-and-drums-and-vocal thing. We started breaking out the jokes and the banter and the one-liners, and no one left, no one booed, people just went back to dancing and jumping around, but it was obviously the weirdest show we’d ever played, because there was no guitar. A couple of days after that, Hillel was fine, and he and I were back to joking about keeping an eye out for suspicious-looking characters who might be able to hook us up with a little of the downtown.
Somewhere in Europe, a car full of Dutch weirdos showed up. They were there to document our tour. They had a lot of great behind-the-scenes tumult to capture, especially when Jack entered a totally manic phase of his life. He had been an extremist when it came to love, maybe because he was a late bloomer in that arena. Once he latched on to a girl, she meant everything to him. He had been in this tight union with a woman, and while we were in Europe, she left him for a guy we knew. Jack got the horrible news while we were in Berlin. After the show, I scored a bunch of coke and went to a club and wound up making out in a bathroom stall with this beautiful German girl who didn’t speak a word of English. After a while, Flea and Lindy had left, and I was all alone there with this girl, gacked out of my mind. I was willing to go at it right in that stall, but she wanted to take me home, and I wanted to get some coke, so we met a dealer who fronted me a bunch of drugs.
The next morning everyone was boarding the bus to go to the next venue when I pulled up in a big black Mercedes limo, accompanied by the drug dealer, a big, burly guy. He grabbed me, held me like a toddler, and marched me over to Lindy and told him that he was in possession of my passport and wouldn’t give it back until Lindy paid for the blow I’d done the night before. No one was too happy that Lindy had to spend band money to bail me out.
During all of this tumult, poor Jack was out in the middle of the lawn surrounding the hotel, literally banging his head repeatedly on a tree.
“What’s wrong with Jack?” I asked Flea.
“His girlfriend’s left him, and he doesn’t know what to do,” Flea said.
We were still at a level where we were intimately connected to the audience. People would come backstage to meet us after the show, and we’d hang with them and even go back to their houses and check out their record collections. They were loving us and appreciating us and willing to give us the shirts off their backs, though we were still like one of them. It becomes so much different when you pull up in a tour bus, go through a back door of a giant building, go backstage, take the stage, go back off, and get back in the bus. There’s no connection with the street or the local culture. We used to invite the whole audience back to our hotel. That was one of our ongoing jokes. I’d say, “There’s a party in room 206 at the Finkelstein Hotel on Rotterwheel Avenue.” That would be Flea’s room. And he’d grab the mike and go, “No, no, the party’s in 409. 409,” which was my room.
Despite Hillel’s meltdown and poor Jack starting a long and arduous section of his life, that tour did have many, many happy and magical moments. It’s always at the end of a tour that you become this organic vessel. You’re tight and it’s effortless and you become one heart beating together. But then we flew to New York and played a big college show at NYU. I made a deal with Hillel not to get high before the show, because New York was dope town, but I lost sight of him before the show and when I got backstage, he was high on smack. Flea and I were furious.
“Dude, this is not happening. If you want to do this, do it after,” we cajoled him. “Let’s play the show and then go party. But you’re not capable of doing that.” And he wasn’t. Hillel was pulling the exact routine that I had been before I got kicked out of the band. And when we got back to L.A., we fired him. Hillel started to miss rehearsals, and Flea was like “Fuck this. Hillel, you’re out of the band.” We began rehearsing with an ex-Funkadelic guitarist named Blackbird McKnight, whom Cliff had introduced to Flea. Hillel was bummed and sulking but accep
ting of his fate. We tried it with Blackbird for a few days, but then we decided to give Hillel another chance.
Then we went back to Europe to play a few festivals. We did a huge outdoor show in Finland on the same bill as the Ramones. It was a great show, one big massive orgy of eighty thousand drunken half-naked Finnish people. We rocked this enormous audience, but they weren’t there to see us, they were there to see the Ramones. After our show, we all assembled to watch the Ramones, who weren’t the most engaging fellows if they didn’t know you. They kept to themselves in the backstage area. Before they went on, they went through their entire set in the dressing room with unamplified instruments.
When they went out, we huddled at the side of the stage, and someone came up with the idea of taking off our clothes and running onstage and doing a little dance in homage to the Ramones. Hillel was dead set against it, but Flea and Jack and I stripped down and skanked naked across the stage during “Blitzkrieg Bop.” Later that night, I ran into Johnny Ramone and their manager in the lobby of the hotel.
Johnny bitched me out: “Who the fuck do you think you are to get on our stage during our show without your fucking clothes on? That was not cool.”
“I’m sorry. We did it because we love you. We didn’t mean to interfere with your aesthetic,” I apologized. Johnny stormed away, but Joey Ramone, who’d been lingering in the shadows, came up and whispered to me, “Personally, I thought it was kind of cool,” and then walked away.
Our next stop was Norway, and on the way to Oslo, we had to take a long train ride. Hillel and I wound up sharing a berth. I always had a deep connection with Hillel. He had that capacity to allow people to go past the barriers of their comfort zone with how much they wanted to reveal to people. I set up those cutoff barriers all the time with my close friends, always reserving 25 percent in a mystery zone. But with Hillel, you were comfortable showing that hidden 25 percent. I bonded with him closer than I ever did to any other male. Maybe part of it was that we shared the sickness of drug addiction. You can’t understand the experience of addiction unless you’re an addict, too. Hillel and I had that in common, but he also had a capacity for forgiveness that was beyond most mortals’. No matter what you did or what your flaws or failures or weaknesses were, he would never hold them against you. Unlike Flea, who had a real scrapping-brother-type relationship with me, Hillel wasn’t competitive. He was paternal in a way. He wasn’t a braggart, he wasn’t a macho guy. He prided himself on being a man, but not in a macho way.
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