by Bob Forrest
But I worried. I could see so much of me in that kid. At eleven, he was reading William Faulkner and understanding him. And I was convinced that I had passed along an ill-defined, unhealthy mental gene. He could be a wiseass and a know-it-all, just like me. On the other hand, I could also see he was a gentleman and was kind and tolerant. He also loved music, and as he became a man, he got more into that.
He’s one of the most talented songwriters I know. He performs under the name Terrors. Of course, the music of his generation is different from the music of mine. He writes beautiful songs, but he performs them in a lo-fi style that makes it difficult to hear the lyrics. I tell him to lose the reverb and the distortion. He looks at me and smiles. I hope someday to record an album of his tunes, Songs My Son Wrote.
Like any father, I want him to be rewarded for his talent like I was for mine. For ten years, I had money, I traveled the world … and I didn’t have to have a regular job. Not long ago, Elijah accompanied me on guitar as I sang the first song I ever wrote about him, “My Boy,” which appeared on Thelonius Monster’s 1990 album Stormy Weather.
My boy, well, I’ve never even held you in my arms, boy
But you’re my boy
My boy, well, I’ve only seen you
I’ve only seen you once or twice, boy, oh
But you’re my boy, and one day you and me, boy
We’re gonna have it out, yeah,
One day you and me, boy
We’re gonna have it out, yeah,
And I know you’ll probably hate me
But that’s life, boy, my boy, yeah
I was moved and I cried. When we finished, he said to me, “I never hated you like you thought in that song, Dad. You were a good father … when you were around.” But all too often, I wasn’t. I was incapable. It was the drugs and the drink, and the scene only continued to grow darker.
ARISE, LAZARUS, AND WALK!
John Frusciante had always had a reputation for following his own special beat—and for being a major endorser of any and every drug known to man, woman, or child. He was artistic and he could be sensitive. For a short time, he sat in on guitar with my band Thelonious Monster, but after Hillel Slovak died from an overdose on June 25, 1988, John joined the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Lately, I had become concerned about my old friend. I hadn’t gone around his place much since the Viper Room days of a few years earlier. The tragedy of that night and the ever-increasing air of weirdness at John’s had kept me away to a degree. But I had heard things. Some of them unbelievable. It was 1996 and I was pretty sure he’d hadn’t left his Hollywood Hills pad in months. He’d been surviving on drop-offs and deliveries. Most of those, I’m sure, came packed in Ziploc bags from any number of sources that cultivated and catered to an exclusive celebrity clientele and helped them to get by. Given my own continuing go-rounds with under-the-counter pharmaceuticals, it wasn’t my place to judge John, but some of the things I’d heard about him were disconcerting. Most people don’t hold all-night conversations with the ghost of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, which manifested its ectoplasmic presence out of one of John’s stereo speakers. I thought it might be a good idea to go to see how John was doing … or at least check to see that he wasn’t in what a medical examiner might call “a state of mottled decomposition.”
Following the same protocol from the Viper Room days, I traced a circuitous route to John’s house. I’m not sure why I did this. It wasn’t as if I was afraid of prying eyes at this point. I wheeled into the driveway and stood for a moment to take in the dry, medicinal smell of eucalyptus that scented the air. John’s house looked pretty much the same as always. The lawn and the landscaping had recently been tended. If he had passed into the Great Beyond, somebody was still paying the gardeners. And I knew it wasn’t Ian Curtis’s shade.
The door creaked open when I pushed. Do you know those public-service TV commercials with an antidrug message that always show a doper’s pad as some dimension of hell straight out of a Bosch painting? John’s place was worse. The squalor was alive and crawling, and I walked straight into a wall of foul smells as soon as my feet crossed the threshold. The furniture didn’t just have cigarette burns—the telltale spoor of the nodded-off junkie—there was a mattress that had been pulled into one corner that looked as if someone had tried to construct a pit barbecue in its center. Bottles containing liquids the origins of which I didn’t even want to guess were strewn on the floor. Not that I would look down on him. This was, when you come right down to it, pretty normal for the way lots of junkies live, but Frusciante was doing it big and taking it to new and dangerous levels. This verged on performance art, the kind where no one gets out alive.
He shambled into the front room and didn’t look surprised to see me at all. He nodded and said, “Hey, man. I was thinking about you.” He wore the terminal addict’s waxen, gray pallor over his sunken cheeks. I’d seen that face before in my own mirror, but, like his pad, this was beyond the beyond. The effort it took to acknowledge me left him winded. It looked like his body was consuming itself to maintain the stasis of its high.
It was John’s own treatment program. He said he had kicked heroin cold-turkey—an impressive feat, no doubt—but he still smoked crack on a perpetual cycle and drank heroic amounts of alcohol. His eyes glittered maniacally from a skull framed with lank, brittle hair. His arms, from years of needle abuse, were a gnarled mess of old abscesses and healed-over wens. When he smiled, his teeth showed through black.
There was one thing that didn’t fit. John wore the typical crackhead drag: a sweater that looked moth-eaten, jeans falling from the place where he used to have hip bones … What didn’t compute were his boots. They were brand-new pearl-gray lace-ups with lavender and green leather inlays. They stood out because I knew he could only have bought these boots in London. They came from a little shop on Carnaby Street. I remembered a day in 1992 when John and I met over coffee at Denny’s on Sunset and I had seen him wearing them; he had told me to buy a pair the next time I was in London. Seeing this footwear confused me. Had this walking-dead junkie somehow managed to board a plane and fly halfway around the globe to buy a new pair of boots? I asked him, “You been to London lately?”
He followed my eyes to his boots. “No, Bob, these are the same boots.”
“They can’t be. They would be, like, five years old.”
“They are. I just wear ’em here. I haven’t been outside in a while.”
“Man, you should get out. Check out your yard. Your gardeners have knocked themselves out.”
I would have been amused by this dazed and confused small talk, but my friend was crashing as a viable living organism in front of my eyes. The footwear might have concerned me, but his eyes terrified me. He was twenty-seven years old, and he had a look that recalled every old man with senile dementia I had ever passed on the streets of Hollywood. Whatever candles burned behind those eyes were fluttering out. Not many years earlier we’d shared a sort of punk rock bravado about our favorite rock stars who’d died young—Gram Parsons, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison. Seeing John’s life and spirit exit in curls of smoke from the glass pipe scared me. I saw all my illusions about cool, success, fame, and having a good time die. John wasn’t just my friend. He had a true gift as a guitar player. And it was all going up in crack smoke. I couldn’t fully admit to the depths of my own problems, but I could see John’s with crystal clarity. I had to do something. He was becoming mummified in this place. I knew if he stayed here any longer, he was going to die.
“Man, don’t your teeth hurt?” I asked.
He nodded and palmed his jaw. Of course they did. If you neglect yourself long enough, your teeth are the first things to go. You smoke enough crack, your teeth rot out from the smoke and lack of saliva. Oddly enough, he was in a place where the thing that might really kill him wasn’t drugs but an infection from his derelict, abcessed teeth.
My reaching out to him from a place of understanding worked. I was surprised that he was
willing. I guess he was done. We walked out to my Jeep. “Wow. You’re right,” he said, blinking like a deep-sea creature pulled too fast to the surface. “Those bougainvilleas look great.” It was, no doubt, the first time his boots had touched the gravel walkway in years. One of the gardening crew, an older Mexican, had just walked around a corner of the house and stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of this wan apparition who looked a lot like Saint Lazarus. The only thing missing was a dog to lick John’s hands.
We got into my Jeep. I picked up my cell phone to call Las Encinas Hospital. John looked perplexed. “What’s that?” he asked.
“It’s a cell phone. They’ve been around for a while now, John.” I guess he’d been so isolated he hadn’t seen one before.
When I dropped him off at Las Encinas and saw the staff of chirpy people walk him in, I felt like I’d delivered him to a new and better life. This was the motherfucker of all good deeds. I really cared about him and I had pulled him from death’s door.
I must be a pretty good person, I thought. I was in my Jeep driving onto the 101 freeway and on autopilot, I turned back toward John’s house. My next thought was, I bet he has a bunch of shit in his house. No sense in letting it go to waste. I’m going to get high.
Once back at John’s place, I didn’t have any trouble locating his stash. I used it to cook up a crack rock the size of a baseball. To me, it was a work of art. It almost seemed a shame to break off a chunk and destroy its pristine roundness, but that’s exactly what I did. I shoved the ivory-colored chip into a glass tube that had one end stuffed with a filter made from a copper scouring pad. I brought it to my lips, held a flame to the rock, and inhaled deeply. I heard the sizzle and pop as it melted and felt the smoke numb my tongue and throat. I held it in for as long as I could and then exhaled a cartoonishly huge billow of white smoke. I watched it expand and felt my heart start to race while I heard my blood pulse through my ears before the hit slammed into the front part of my brain and lit up every conceivable pleasure receptor.
I didn’t think of this as “stealing.” Junkies never do.
There’s an old story in recovery meetings that goes, “The difference between a drunk and a junkie is this: An alkie will steal your wallet. A junkie will steal your wallet and then help you look for it.” That’s the kind of friend I was. Everything boiled down to that one sputtering rock in the pipe.
I was at the tail end of a dark period, and I was bone-tired of the life I had been living. The years 1993 through 1995 were a blurry, bleary-eyed mess that I would just as soon have forgotten if they hadn’t left such a hard stamp on me. They’d wrecked me and shamed me. There had been that awful moment in January of 1993 when I sang the national anthem at a Clippers game at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena. I had been asked to perform the song, and I was a Clippers fan. What could possibly go wrong? I drank heavily and smoked some crack to sharpen up before I went in front of the crowd. I had the idea to sing the song as a slow, folkish antiwar protest tune. I think I was the first punk rocker to have ever been asked to sing the national anthem at any American sporting event. Clipper Ron Harper even gave me a little pat on the ass like jocks do at games in anticipation of what was sure to be a stirring and thought-provoking opening to the game. “Go get ’em, Bob!”
“Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for the singing of the national anthem, tonight being performed by Bob Forrest!” The crowd gave me a huge ovation. I walked out to my mark and faced the microphone. I stood on the waxed and polished hardwood floor and started the song.
Oh, say can you see …
I blew it. Badly. I forgot the words. I froze. I had to start over. My throat was tight and my voice sounded strained. The song was a complete mess and the crowd started to boo me. Their cries became deafening. Paper cups and trash were tossed at me. Ron Harper shook his head in disgust. It was an utter embarrassment. I could sense some real hatred in the stands. The Clippers lost and a lot of people felt my performance had jinxed the team. I was seen as “anti-American” and disrespectful. In the parking lot, after the game, two marines approached.
“Hey, dude, good song,” the bigger one said.
“Wow. Cool. I’m glad you guys got what I was trying to do.”
“He didn’t mean you sang it good. He meant that the song is good,” said his buddy, a squat, muscular guy who resembled one of those little dorm refrigerators.
“Yeah,” said his bigger friend. “We’d give our lives for that song, and we don’t appreciate some dumb-ass getting up there and making fun of it.”
“That’s not what I—”
Before I could finish, I caught a roundhouse left in the jaw and went down hard on the asphalt, the heels of my palms scraped raw on the rough surface. I tried to get back up but was hit again in the temple. I heard the dull thud as the blow crashed into my skull. It was plain I couldn’t fight these two, so I curled up and tried to protect my head and vitals as best I could. They stomped me with their hard-soled shoes. It was as quick and brutal a beat-down as any ever given in a prison exercise yard, and it left me dazed, bruised, and reeling. The next day, out on the street as I made my way to the corner liquor store, it felt like every eye that passed was on me. A dog approached me. “Do you want to bite me?” I asked it sarcastically. It just stood there with one of those goofy dog smiles on its face. It gave a friendly bark and wagged its tail. “Ah, well, here’s a creature that just takes me for who I am. You don’t hate me, do ya, boy?” I bent down to give it a pet. “Good doggie,” I said. The pooch and I had a nice moment of heart-to-heart communication until its owner saw me and shouted, “Get the fuck away from my dog, man! I saw what you did last night, you rotten little fucker! I fought in Vietnam, for cryin’ out loud! I ought to get my gun and put one in your noodle, creep!” It had come to the point where I couldn’t even pet a mangy mutt in the street without drawing somebody’s anger. It was dispiriting and I was exhausted. Little did I realize that there was worse to come.
By 1995, I was essentially homeless and I crashed on peoples’ couches. I sold drugs for dealers I knew just to keep myself high. People died around me. It was a rootless existence and my life was in a complete shambles. There were people who offered to help. Big James was a guy in Los Angeles who was the ultimate Thelonious Monster fan. A huge, hulking lump of a man, he’d go into near paroxysms of delight when he’d come to our shows and he was always thrilled to talk to me. He took me in, but room and board—like everything else in this world—came with a price. Big James liked to party and he liked music, and with me under his roof, he hit upon an idea: living room concerts that featured the front man from his favorite band. He had easy access since I stayed in his spare room.
“You’re putting on a show tonight, Bob!” he said enthusiastically one late afternoon, a big goofy grin plastered across his face.
“What?” I asked, not sure I had heard him right. I hadn’t been booked anywhere. Had I forgotten a gig? Not likely.
“Yeah, it’s all set up. A bunch of my friends are going to come over and you’re going to play. It’ll be awesome!”
“Uh, I don’t know, man,” I said. I had things to do. Drugs to take. Friends’ cars to crash. Some kind of trouble waited for me out on the streets and I didn’t want to miss the appointment and be stuck here putting on a half-assed, rinky-dink show in some guy’s living room. I wasn’t in the mood. I was a rock star. I played real-life, honest-to-goodness concerts. I didn’t do stupid stuff like this. I mean, the Red Hot Chili Peppers didn’t perform in some guy’s squalid and festering living room for a bunch of jokers who couldn’t find anyplace better to go to drink cheap beer on a Friday night.
“Well, you are kind of staying here for free, man,” Big James said. A look of hurt and disappointment clouded his usually sunny face. “It wouldn’t exactly kill you to contribute a little,” he said, pouting.
He had me there. He was a good cat and he would lend me money when I asked. Big James fed me. It didn’t feel right to take from t
he guy without giving something in return. Besides, I thought, where else did I have to go? Was I really prepared to sleep in an alley under a soggy cardboard packing crate with only the crook of my arm for a pillow? That didn’t really strike me as a great alternative, so I became Big James’s dancing, singing rock-and-roll marionette. A punk-rock sock puppet. His glassy-eyed friends rolled in, beer drinkers and hell-raisers, and sat around the living room on the cup-cushioned couch and the sway-backed, threadbare chairs while I thrummed away at my guitar and sang my songs like some drug-damaged and deranged cabaret chanteuse. Halfway through what passed for my set, some guy held up a Bic lighter and shouted, “Play some Skynyrd, dude!”
This is like the twilight of the gods, I thought. I live in a fan’s house and I play concerts in the living room. Big James loved it. “The guy from Thelonious Monster stays at my house!” he’d bellow. “Fuck yeah!”
It was a comedown. A big one. In 1993, Thelonious Monster had played before tens of thousands of screaming, can’t-get-enough rock music fans, and now here I was croaking out my songs in front of a crowd of tens made up of a bunch of slack-jawed goobers and voyeuristic gawkers who probably cringed at what they saw. If they remembered the old Bob, this was his comeuppance. It felt like some cruel cosmic payback for some transgression I couldn’t even remember. What could I have done to deserve this? I could see the writing on the wall, the signpost up ahead, the “No Exit” warning. Things were headed toward an ugly, spectacular crash on the dead-end street of my life.
REDEMPTION
On February 3, 1996—the thirty-seventh anniversary of the deaths of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens in a rock-and-roll plane crash—I found myself on rain-slicked city streets in front of Hollywood Moguls, a then-popular nightclub with a façade that resembled, with no weak sense of irony, a decrepit tin toolshed. Traffic lights and headlamps shined on the pebbled mirror of wet asphalt and a cold, sickly rainbow of red, green, yellow, and white reflected back toward a starless sky. The holidays were a month past and although the rest of the city had fallen back into its routine, you couldn’t have guessed from the boisterous club-goers who clogged the sidewalk and bunched up at the door. With a certain crowd, the festivities never ended. And here I was, broke, hungry, down on my luck, but with a firm grip on the invisible keys to every door of the city’s underground as well as its celebrity haunts. I was on the hunt for a soft touch. This was a pattern I had established whenever money got tight, and it was tighter than a firmly clenched fist at the moment. I knew where everybody hung out, and with a little luck, I wouldn’t have to make too many stops before I could spot a friendly face who would let me borrow some cash. Credit cards and checks are worthless currency when you want to buy drugs, and I needed something quick.
