“You tell me when, and I’ll be there with Crazy Horse,” he said.
By the night of the show, Gloria’s condition had worsened, but she made it to the concert, and I was thrilled to introduce her to Neil. It was a magical moment to see these two people come together.
We got Gloria a little apartment on the water in Venice Beach, because she was always about the ocean, but she’d lived inland in Venice for thirty years. We hired a nurse and paid for her treatments, but the doctors had caught the cancer too late. I got to the hospital in time to say the painful “I know that you’re dying, so you have to know that I love you.” She didn’t want to die in the hospital, so they brought her back home to the beach, and she faded away.
From “Venice Queen”
And now it’s time for you to go
You taught me most of what I know
Where would I be without you Glo
G-L-O-R-I-A
Is love my friend, my friend, my friend
I see you standing by the sea
The waves you made will always be
A kiss goodbye before you leave
G-L-O-R-I-A
Is love my friend, my friend, my friend
Writing By the Way, our next album, was a whole different experience from Californication. John was back to himself and brimming with confidence. So we did the same thing we always did. Back to the Swing House, four guys holed up in a room with guitars and drums and mikes, playing every day for hours. We started finding some magic and some music and some riffs and some rhythms and some jams and some grooves, and we recorded it and added to it and subtracted from it and pushed it around and put melodies to it. I started collecting words by the score and listening and getting inspired by what the guys were playing.
All this time, I tried to make it work with Claire. She had started her own clothing line. She was productive and creative, but we weren’t clicking as a two-person singular entity. We even went to a couples counselor, a practical, smart, unbiased woman who gave us some tools to work with, but nothing ever amounted from it; the changes that needed to happen didn’t happen.
Sometime that summer, we half broke up. Claire moved into the downstairs bedroom, in theory, until she found her own place. I wasn’t going to kick her out again. But of course, that led to late-night visits between floors. The forbidden fruit of liaisons in the downstairs bedroom on top of piles of her clothing did wonders for our sex life for a while. But eventually, we split up, and I rented a small bungalow for her in Beverly Hills. I let her keep the car until the lease expired, and she returned it to me without any door handles or stereo or carpeting. It was symbolic of our relationship. I tried to do her a favor, and she returned it destroyed and told me that the insurance would cover it.
Even after she left the house, our relationship continued off and on. Instead of relapsing with drugs, I’d relapse with Claire. We went back to Saint Bart’s after Christmas in 2001 and rented a house on the beach. One day she wanted to learn how to surf, so we paddled out about a quarter of a mile until we got into the break, but the waves were big as houses, too big to learn on. We found ourselves in the crunch zone, where the waves were coming over us, so we held our breath and waited till the set went by. In the upheaval, the leash on Claire’s surfboard had snapped, so I swam over and gave her my board. We finally made it back to shore. But in the confusion of the storm-swelled waves, we made the mistake of coming back in over a coral reef instead of going through the channel. The good news was that we were alive, but the bad news was that we had to walk over this coral reef, and the coral had barnacles and sea urchins. Even little waves were enough to push you around, so we were getting poked and sea urchined, the spines of which break off, are impossible to remove, and cause you much discomfort.
Claire started yelling hysterically at me, as if I wanted her to get urchined. I spent the next two days calling doctors and rushing to pharmacies to get her some relief, but she was crazed. She was so mean to me the whole trip that, once again, I realized she wasn’t the girl for me.
While we were still in Saint Bart’s, I reached a breaking point. “ Claire, you’ve got to go home,” I told her. “I won’t sit here and be yelled at. I’ve done my best to make it a pleasant journey for you and to share my life with you, but you’re impossible to be with.” I sent her the hell home, and we broke up again. Sometime the next year, I relapsed. I’d keep getting back with her because I missed her friendship, but I always got the same result, never any progress. Four years into the relationship, she was as smolderingly distraught over the littlest things in life. She’d lie there steaming in bed over a fight the size of a ladybug. I would apologize and say, “Let’s forget about it, my bad. I love you, I care about you, I want you to be happy, let’s enjoy this love and this life.” But she wouldn’t let go, she wouldn’t choose to be happy.
Even all my troubles with Claire couldn’t derail my sobriety. My Wednesday breakfast meeting was grounding, and everyone got into the idea of being of service. We were picking people up and taking them to meetings and bringing new guys into that particular circle so they could see sobriety wasn’t about giving up the party, it was just creating a new, saner party. Having a moment of clarity was one thing; I’d had moments like that before. It had to be followed with a dedicated push of daily exercise. It’s a trite axiom, but practice does make perfect. If you want to be a strong swimmer or an accomplished musician, you have to practice. It’s the same with sobriety, though the stakes are higher. If you don’t practice your program every day, you’re putting yourself in a position where you could fly out of the orbit one more time.
The good news is that being in recovery is a blast for me. I love going to meetings, I love hearing people speak. Some of the speakers are boring old twats with nothing to say, but some of them are truly angels. At one meeting I saw this big heavyset Mexican transsexual, in full woman’s garb, tell her life story. She was up there cracking jokes and singing and talking and sharing the message of being of service, and she positively glowed. When she left, I knew that I’d seen an angel. I’ve seen the same thing with cowboys from Montana and preachers from down south, all types of people who used to be the walking dead and now are carrying this message of light and love and recovery. Meetings are a gas. It’s like a combination of a free seminar and a lecture and a social. Sometimes there are even hot girls. And people are funny and creative and festive. As the book says, “We are not a glum lot.”
All those years when I was going in and out, I’d lie to myself and say, “You’re just relapsing, you’re not going back to use for good. This is a temporary condition.” It always went on longer than I planned, and I was able to come back, but now I knew that I had come back for a purpose—it wasn’t because I outwitted drug addiction. It was because something, somewhere, wanted me alive so I could be a part of creating something beautiful and helping somebody else.
I’d made the decision to stop doing drugs many times before, but I never followed up with the daily maintenance, the cultivation of a path to a spiritual awakening. I think that anyone who comes in and works all of the steps and goes to meetings and is of constant love and service is guaranteed to stay sober. But anyone who comes in like I did in the past and picks and chooses and thinks, “I’ll do it some days, I won’t do it others. I’ll work some steps, but I won’t work the others. I’ll take the call sometimes, but sometimes I’m too busy,” is doomed to failure. You can’t buy seven tenths of the way into the program and expect to get seven tenths back; you get nothing back unless you give yourself completely.
Another thing that I think is genius about the program is that they realize you can’t preach sobriety or try to make converts out of alcoholics. What’s crucial is that you take care of yourself and in doing so become a program of attraction, rather than promotion. The minute you say “Hey, this is what you should be doing” to an alcoholic or a drug addict, nothing will come of it. If you just do your thing, then someone will see it and think, “That
guy used to throw up on his trousers, but he looks like he’s enjoying himself now.” There’s no alcoholic in the world who wants to be told what to do. Alcoholics are sometimes described as egomaniacs with inferiority complexes. Or, to be cruder, a piece of shit that the universe revolves around.
Which is okay, because there’s a way to deal with that. You’re feeling like shit? Go get out of yourself and do something for someone else, voilà, you don’t feel like shit anymore. You’re confused and you’re driving yourself crazy? Go call a guy who’s got three days sober and has no clue what to do. The minute you get out of your self-centered mind-set, you’re instantly freed of your own pain. The trick to staying sober is to constantly be of service to another alcoholic. It’s like perpetual motion. All these people freely gave you what was given to them, and now you get to give it to someone else. It’s a constant source of energy, like recharging a battery, only there’s no pollution or toxic runoff.
The reason the program is so successful is because alcoholics help other alcoholics. I’ve never met a Normie (our lingo for a person who doesn’t have a problem with drugs or alcohol) who could even conceive of what it’s like to be an alcoholic. Normies are always going, “There’s this new pill you can take and you won’t want to shoot heroin anymore.” That shows a fundamental misunderstanding of alcoholism and drug addiction. These aren’t just physical allergies, they’re obsessions of the mind and maladies of the spirit. It’s a threefold disease. And if it’s partly a spiritual malady, then there’s a spiritual cure.
When I say spiritual, I’m not talking about chanting or reading Eastern philosophy. I’m talking about setting up the chairs at a meeting, picking up another alcoholic and driving him across town to a meeting. That’s a spiritual lifestyle, being willing to admit that you don’t know everything and that you were wrong about some things. It’s about making a list of all the people you’ve harmed, either emotionally or physically or financially, and going back and making amends. That’s a spiritual lifestyle. It’s not a fluffy ethereal concept.
My friend Bob Forrest is a spiritual person. He doesn’t go to church and he doesn’t talk about God and he doesn’t go do charity events on weekends, but he’ll sit and talk for hours to a guy in jail who can’t stop smoking crack. That’s curing Bob of his spiritual malady, because he’s willing to do something that’s not really for him, it’s for this other guy. He’s not doing it with the expectation of getting anything out of it, but as a by-product, he is.
In the song “Otherside” on Californication, I wrote, “How long, how long will I slide/Separate my side/I don’t, I don’t believe it’s bad.” I don’t believe that drug addiction is inherently bad. It’s a really dark and heavy and destructive experience, but would I trade my experience for that of a normal person? Hell no. It was ugly, and there is nothing I know that hurts as bad, but I wouldn’t trade it for a minute. It’s that appreciation of every emotion in the spectrum that I live for. I don’t go out of my way to create it, but I have found a way to embrace all of it. It’s not about putting down any of these experiences, because now that I’ve had them, and now that I’m almost four years sober, I’m in a position to be of service to hundreds of other suffering people. All of those relapses, every one of those setbacks that would seem like unnecessary additions to an already tortured experience, are all going to be meaningful. I’m going to meet some other person along the way who was clean for some time and can’t get clean again, and I’ll be able to say, “I was there, I did that for years, I was going back and forth, and now . . .”
I went with Guy O to a kabbalah course the other night, and the lesson was about the four aspects of the human ego, which are symbolized by fire, water, air, and earth. Water represents the excessive desire for pleasure, and I’m a water sign, and that’s been my whole life. I’ve wanted to feel pleasure to the point of insanity. They call it getting high, because it’s wanting to know that higher level, that godlike level. You want to touch the heavens, you want to feel glory and euphoria, but the trick is that it takes work. You can’t buy it, you can’t get it on a street corner, you can’t steal it or inject it or shove it up your ass, you have to earn it. When I was a teenager and shooting speedballs, I wasn’t thinking, “I want to know God,” but deep down inside, maybe I did. Maybe I wanted to know what that light was all about and was taking the shortcut. That was the story of my life, even going back to my childhood in Michigan, when I’d get home from school by going through a neighbor’s backyard and jumping a fence. It didn’t matter if I got bitten by a dog or I ripped my pants on the fence post or I poked myself in the eye with a tree branch that I was crawling over, it was all about the shortcut. My whole life I took the shortcut, and I ended up lost.
Things are good now. Buster and I share a nice house. I’ve got a terrific group of supportive friends. And when it’s time to go out on the road, I’m surrounded by another group of supportive people. One of my main soul mates is Sat Hari. She came into our world in May 2000, when Flea brought her on tour to administer intravenous ozone therapy to him. Sat Hari is a nurse, an American Sikh, a sweet, incredibly sheltered, turban-wearing young lady. She looks like a female version of Flea, with the same gap-toothed smile, the same shape of face, the same color eyes, the same little pug nose. She’s maternal and she’s warm and she’s loving and she’s unassuming, a complete breath of fresh air and female energy, and I don’t mean sexual energy, at least not for me. For me she’s like a sister and mother and caretaker and nurse all in one.
Sat Hari endeared herself to everybody in the band and the crew, and she became the den mother to the entire organization. Everyone used her as their ultimate confidante, spilling their guts to her all day and all night about their deepest, darkest, most untellable secrets. We’ve all had an impact on her, too. She was a controlled, subservient Sikh who was told what she could and could not do, who she could and couldn’t talk to. We showed her a new world of meeting all these freethinking people who were out dancing and loving life. She flourished as a person and came out of her shell. During the By the Way tour, Sat Hari and John and I shared a bus, and it was a cozy, moving cocoon of happiness.
We extended that vibe into the arenas that we played. It was clear after our first few tours that the backstage areas were always cold, stark, fluorescent-lit concrete tombs, places where you wouldn’t want to spent two minutes. So for the Californication tour, we hired a woman named Lyssa Bloom who had a knack for beautifying these rooms. She laid down rugs, put up tapestries, covered the fluorescent lights, put in a portable stereo system, and set up a table of fresh fruits and vegetables and nuts and teas.
So now we hang out backstage before the show, and John, who became the official DJ of the area, programs the music. He and Flea get out their guitars and practice, and I do my vocal warm-ups. Then I make everyone tea and write out the set list. Sat Hari comes in and gives us ozone, and then we stretch on the floor and do a little meditation. We have all of these grounding rituals that keep growing and getting better and better.
Our final ritual before we go onstage is the soul circle. It’s funny how that’s evolved over the years. When we were this brash young band of Hollywood knuckleheads, we would get in a circle and slap one another in the face right before we went on. That got the juices flowing, for sure. Now we get in a circle and hold hands and do some meditation together, getting into why we’re there and what we need to be together. Someone might chime in with “Let’s do this one for the Gipper” or “There’s a thunderstorm outside, let’s tap into that.” There are times when Flea’s the one to give us little words of encouragement. Sometimes it’s up to me to crack a joke or make up a rhyme. Lately, John has become the most vocal member of the soul circle. Chad doesn’t usually instigate, but he’s there with a “hear, hear” thing.
All of these rituals ground me. But ironically, what grounds me constantly is my obsession with drugs. It’s funny—that first five-and-a-half-year period when I got sober, I never had any urgin
gs to do drugs. The uncontrollable obsession that I’d experienced from the time I was eleven years old just vanished the first time I got clean. It was a true miracle. When I came out of my first rehab, the idea of getting high was a foreign concept to me. I could have sat there and stared a big mountain of cocaine in the face, and it would have meant nothing to me; a month before, I would have been shaking and sweating from the physical reaction alone. The way the sneaky motherfucker got his foot back in the door was through those experiences with prescribed painkillers.
Once I started relapsing, I would never get the gift of being relieved from the obsession of doing drugs again. This might seem like a tragic curse, but I look at the bright side of it: Now I have to work harder at my sobriety. When I was relieved of the obsession, I was doing very little work. Now I have no choice but to be more giving and more diligent and more committed, because a week doesn’t go by when I’m not visited by the idea of getting loaded.
For the first year of my newfound sobriety, all of 2001, the feeling of wanting to get high came to me every day. Especially later in the year, after Claire moved out, it got so bad that I couldn’t sleep. One night I got the closest I’d come to going back out there. I was home alone and there was a full moon out. I was writing the songs for By the Way, everything was going well, and I was feeling inspired. I took a stroll outside, and the night was clear, and I could see the alluring lights of downtown.
And I got ready to throw it all away one more time. I packed my little weekend backpack and left a note for my assistant to take care of Buster. I got my car keys and walked out of the house. I got as far as the porch and looked up at the moon, looked out at the city, then looked at my car and my backpack and thought, “I can’t do it. I can’t throw it away one more time,” and I went back inside.
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