I spent the night at Louie’s, since they were afraid that I’d run off again. I wasn’t much of a pill detoxer, but I asked Louie to call some doctors and line me up some pills. I didn’t want to be the suffering, shivering, sleepless, muscle-aching guy. The plan was for me to go to Christmas at my mom’s and head for Saint Bart’s in the Caribbean and get healthy. Our next commitment was to play a huge festival in Rio, but that wasn’t until January 21. It was the same old broken record, the pipe dream of going somewhere warm and getting straight and then going back out to work and fulfill my professional responsibilities. The fact was, if I didn’t get better, I wouldn’t have any professional responsibilities. You can’t start and stop and expect everything to be okay, because there will be a day when you go to stop and you can’t. Every relapse is the worst one, but this one was the longest of the bunch, and the idea that I was causing Claire so much emotional anguish was weighing heavily on me, even though I was trying to ignore it.
Our relationship was shaky to begin with. A certain amount of volatility and drama can be healthy and keep things fun and interesting if you’re willing at any moment during a fight to say, “This means nothing. I love you, let’s forget about it.” We didn’t have that ability. I eventually wanted us to go there, I wanted less drama, but we never evolved into that. Being with Claire was hard. She was probably the girl I loved the most of all my girlfriends, but also the toughest one to make things work out with. If I had put that much effort into any of my other relationships, I’d be married with five kids now.
Claire was too pissed off to go to Michigan with me, which was fine, because I was going to be a drooling Mongoloid for a couple of days, pill-detoxed out. But my mom was happy I was home, and it was nice to hang out with my sister Jenny and her boyfriend, Kevin. By the night of December 23, I had run out of my sleeping pills and muscle relaxants. It was pretty scary, because I had no buffers and couldn’t get much sleep.
The next night was Christmas Eve. It may sound like something out of Dickens, but I had a moment of clarity about my using that night. It wasn’t the first time. Years earlier, when I was still living at the Outpost office building on Hollywood Boulevard, I had been shooting coke for a couple of days and was in a bit of a cloud when I walked out of my room into the hallway. There was a huge floor-to-ceiling window in the hall, and I looked out of it and saw a sliver of the Hollywood sky. I stared at the sky, and for the first time in my life, a voice went off in my head: “You have no power over what happens in your life. Drugs dictate exactly what you’re going to do. You’ve taken your hands off the steering wheel, and you’re going wherever the drug world takes you.”
That had never changed. The feeling would well up inside of me, and no matter how much I loved my girl or my band or my friends or my family, when that siren song “Go get high now” started playing in my head, I was off.
Now it was Christmas Eve and I was raw, without a single grain of medication in me. I drove over to a meeting in Grand Rapids. Before I entered the building, I paused and considered my choices. I could turn around and drive down to the ghetto. I knew the precise corner, I’d seen the dealers, so I could go cop some dope and get high in a matter of minutes. Or I could walk through those doors and turn my life over to a power higher than myself, and start walking out of the woods of my dependency.
I saw what I had been doing and where I’d been, and I didn’t want to succumb to that kind of energy any longer. Giving myself up to a higher power was easy: I’d had so many experiences all over the world when I communed with a power greater than myself.
I walked into that meeting and announced myself as a newcomer and was welcomed with open arms. And I recommitted myself to recovery, just as I had done on August 1, 1988, when I went to my first rehab. I made the full-on commitment to getting better, no waiting for the right time, no “if I don’t like the way things are going,” no back doors. December 24, 2000, is my sobriety date, which is a festive holiday date, and very uncommon. Most dope fiends get loaded for the rest of the holidays and then get sober after New Year’s.
I had called Claire the day before and asked her to come out for Christmas and then to Saint Bart’s with me. She agreed, even though she was still mad at me. She flew into Grand Rapids, and I went to pick her up at the airport. Not only was I ashamed for having done what I’d done and what I’d put her through, but I was also terribly insecure about everything at this point, because I was torn up. She was plain pissed off. We hadn’t even gotten out of the airport before we got into a Mexican standoff. We weren’t fighting, but we were just so angry at each other. We ended up sitting on opposite benches in the waiting room.
“Are you sure you even wanted to come here?” I asked.
“No, I’d be happy to get right back on the next plane and go home,” she said.
“Then you should.”
“Then I will.”
“Great, take your ticket and go talk to the lady, and adios.”
We sat there for an hour, going back and forth. There was no way on earth I was going to let her get on a plane and fly away. I don’t think she would have, but that was the way we were acting. To add to the general absurdity, I had accidentally taken a large dose of Niacin, thinking I was taking a different liver-cleansing herb, so my face was beet red. Finally, we stopped the foolishness and went home. We spent the next few days in Michigan, trying to become friends again, but it was rough. There was a lot of stuff that felt unresolved and strained between us. Though I’d been there with her when she was using and had to forgive her and go forward, she wasn’t having an easy time saying, “Okay, you’re a sick motherfucker, but you’re willing to get sober now, so let’s lighten up on each other.” She was still holding it against me.
We flew to Saint Bart’s, where we were going to share a boat with ten other people, an idea I would never recommend in retrospect, especially when you’re not feeling your best. It didn’t go that well down on the island. I’d had some shift of consciousness and was looking to move in a positive direction with respect to the energy I was putting out, but Claire was stuck on being pissed about everything. At one point, I’d either eaten some bad food or some residual toxins were coming out of me; I felt horrible and crawled into bed in our cabin. Everyone was going on a side trip for the day, but I couldn’t get up and I couldn’t eat, so I asked Claire if she could just hang out with me and be together and watch movies in bed.
“No, I want to go and do the activities with all the other people,” she said, and left.
I had another moment of clarity when I thought, “I don’t care how much weird stuff we’ve been through, I’ve been so good to her on so many levels. I’ve taken care of her to the best of my ability, but she doesn’t have the capacity to take care of me when I need her. She’s not a giving person, and she can’t be my girlfriend.” I made a decision in my mind to end it. But I didn’t want to freak her out or ruin the vacation, so I didn’t tell her, I just let her know that I wasn’t happy. I was also willing to be proven wrong.
On New Year’s Eve, we went to a party on a yacht, and Claire busted my balls all night. There was a Basquiat painting on this boat, and I was standing there admiring it when two nannies came up to me. They were frumpy and a bit homely, but they were acting flirty toward me. I was in no way interested, so I bantered with them for a minute, no fucking big deal. But Claire had been watching and swooped in as soon as they left. “Why were you flirting with those girls?”
“I was looking at a painting, and two wenches came up and interrupted me, so I made a few jokes and sent them on their way. That’s not flirting,” I explained.
That was it. She wouldn’t talk to me for the rest of the night. There we were, under the stars on a beautiful island, and she would not give up this imaginary fight. That solidified my decision.
The next day we got on a plane to go home. It was hard, because I loved her like crazy, and the idea of being alone did not appeal to me. Plus, I didn’t have the slightest inter
est in any other girls. But I didn’t want to live with the constant discontentment. So I turned to her and said, “ Claire, this is over between us. It’s not working. I don’t want to do this anymore, so you’re going to have to move out.”
She didn’t try to discuss things in any depth. She just wanted to know where she was supposed to live. I suggested she move in with her sponsor, and when we got back to L.A., she did.
I was terrified to be starting afresh without this girl to whom I had dedicated my life. But it was also a relief that I didn’t have to tiptoe around on eggshells and be afraid of a nanny coming up and talking to me. Little did Claire know, I was never unfaithful to her, but if I acted nice to a strange girl, I’d pay for days.
When I got back, I threw myself into recovery and started going to meetings and reaching out to people. I must have been sober for a week and a half when I got a call that a friend of mine who had been sober was back out on the streets, homeless, hopeless, helpless, hustling, and losing at every turn. Everyone had been trying to reach him, to no avail, so I called and left a message on his cell phone, saying, “Hey, there’s a whole big life of fun and you’re missing it all. Come on back and give me a call.” He called the next day, and I took him to a meeting and we got sober together. He thought I sounded so happy and prosperous that I must have been sober for years, so he was shocked to learn I had about two weeks under me.
I had lent Claire our car, so I bought a new one. Then I moved out of my apartment. Any space that’s been used repeatedly by you and your girlfriend doesn’t have a nice collection of vibes. I was lucky to rent the coolest house of all time. It was Dick Van Patten’s old house, high up in the Hollywood Hills, an old Craftsman house that was the first one built on the hill back in the roaring ’20s. It had been occupied by the person who watched out for fires, because it had a vantage point that went from the Cahuenga Pass to the Valley, and all the way from downtown L.A. to the ocean. It was the insanest, most panoramic view of all time. And it was a beautiful, refreshing place to start a new life.
I had a new house, a new car, and no girlfriend. The week I moved in, a bunch of my sober friends started a Wednesday brunch gathering. We met first at Musso and Frank’s, a terrific old-school restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard, but when the weather got nicer, we moved to Joseph’s Café, where we sat outside and talked basketball, music, politics, girls, and sobriety. Then we’d all go to a nearby meeting. Pete Weiss and Dick Rude joined up. Flea came to the brunches but skipped the meetings. This Wednesday group was a significant part of my new sober thrust. When the weekend would roll around and I might be tempted to get high, I’d remember, “Nope, gotta be at Joseph’s on Wednesday. The guys are counting on me.”
The meeting we went to was on Yucca and Gower, a meeting where there was an eclectic mix of homeless people, transvestites, and Hollywood weirdos. I took a commitment to set up the chairs for the meeting, so I’d get there half an hour early. I did that for a year, and that also kept me sober, because if I went out and got high, who would set up for the meeting?
That first week in January 2001 was the occasion of another renewal of life for me. Back on my birthday in November, Guy O, who is one crafty gift giver, knew that I’d been talking about getting a dog for years. He also knew that I loved Rhodesian ridgebacks. I came home that day, and there was a little red wagon on my doorstep, with a stuffed animal inside it and a photograph of the most beautiful Rhodesian ridgeback ever. The attached note said, “Your puppy will be ready the first week in January.”
Guy had found the best California breeders, in a little mountain town called Julian, about an hour inland from San Diego. Dick Rude and I drove down there to get my dog. I was the last person to pick up a puppy, but the owners had chosen the firstborn, biggest, strongest male and set him aside for me. He was also born the first week in November, so he’d been there for a couple of months and had gotten attached to the lady who ran the farm. My dog looked at me when I walked in, like “Oh no, what are you doing here? I live with this lady. I hope you don’t think you’re going to take me away.”
He was so afraid to leave the safety of his home and this big, loving woman who cared for him that he looked destroyed. I picked him up and said, “Dude, we’re moving to Hollywood. You’re my guy.” I had Dick drive home, and I sat him on my lap and held him the whole way back. I tried to tell him it would be okay, but he was so afraid of this big wide world he was facing, especially when we started hitting traffic on the 405.
He came up to that house with me, and I had to go through the massive ordeal of training him from scratch. Ridgebacks are the most willful of all breeds, and I was crate-training him. He went through diarrhea fits and barking fits and got skunked three times in the backyard. It was a constant job, raising this crazy puppy, but we were also having the time of our lives, playing in the backyard, with him smelling flowers and chasing insects and playing with sticks. I named him Buster, after Buster Keaton, one of my all-time favorite comedians.
Sometime in the middle of January, I met a new girl. I wasn’t in the mood or the mode to go womanizing, but I went out with Guy one night to a club and saw this extra-fine girl from across the room. There was a line of guys waiting to talk to her, but I just cut the line, took her away, and sat her down on a couch. That line waited for the rest of the night, but they didn’t get any face time with her, especially after she told me she’d had a dream that we would meet and spend time together. Her name was Cammie. She was an actress who lived in a Laurel Canyon house with a lesbian Playboy centerfold and Paris Hilton. She was wonderful and beautiful and smart and funny, and she started staying over at my house and became my girl.
About a month later, on a Sunday morning, I went to a meeting in West Hollywood. I was supposed to meet Cammie later that day for lunch. At the meeting, by sheer chance, I saw Claire. I hadn’t seen her for about a month, and the last time we were together was not a pleasant time. I’d gone to visit her at her friend’s house. I knew she didn’t have a job, so as a friendly gesture, I offered her some money. A pretty damn friendly amount of money, an amount of money that no one has ever offered me for no reason. I figured she could use it to pay rent and expenses and maybe get a little car.
“I think I better see a lawyer,” she said.
“About what?”
“I think I could get more money than that,” she said.
“What are you talking about, ‘get more money’? This is a gift. There was no marriage here. You haven’t contributed anything. I’ve only ever helped you, you never helped me back,” I said.
“A friend of mine said I could probably get some money if I got a lawyer,” she explained.
I was mortified. I ended up dealing with some lawyer who proposed that I give her a certain amount of money, but I told him to forget it. It was a chump-assed, bullshit move to pull on someone who was trying to help you out. She came up with crazy stuff like “I moved out here and left my home for you.”
“What? You were sleeping on a couch in a fucking ghetto. I put you through school, and then you left your couch to move into a penthouse.” I wasn’t buying any of it. But Claire seemed confused and scared, so I forgave her and went on with my life. There was no residual “Oh, I miss that girl.” It was like a closed chapter, done, moved on.
Or so I thought. I was so happy to see her at the meeting that at the break, when everyone left the room, I rushed over to where she was sitting, sat down next to her, and started giving her kisses on the cheek. It was an impulsive reaction to seeing her and her smile and her eyes and her smooth white cheeks. We started kissing and cuddling and talking, and five minutes later, I was kissing her on the mouth.
The whole floodgates came rushing open out of nowhere. I had a new girlfriend, my life had changed, this girl was of the past. But here we were, making plans to see each other later that day.
I was so excited. I drove straight to Cammie’s house, because I didn’t want to lie to her or leave her hanging.
&nbs
p; “I’m really, really sorry, but something fucking totally unexpected happened to me today, and it has to do with my ex-girlfriend. I think I’m going to be seeing her, so I can’t see you,” I said.
That night I met Claire at a one-year sober birthday celebration for a friend of hers at El Cholo, a Mexican restaurant on Western. I felt like I had fallen in love and was on my first date with this girl. I was on my best behavior, and every glance she threw me made my heart flutter. Something weird had happened: Not only had I fallen back in love with this girl, it was like starting from the beginning. We ran with it, and she moved right into the house. My house had three stories, and I’d moved my stuff into the upstairs area, so I suggested that she move her things into the bottom story, which had a big bedroom and bathroom and huge closets with a dressing area. It was much nicer than the upstairs. Paradise didn’t last long. Down the line, she started complaining, “Why do I have to have the downstairs dressing area? Why can’t I have the upstairs?” It made no sense. Give her the continent and she wanted the hemisphere.
But at first our love was still in full bloom. The band started working on our next album in March 2001. That month I organized a family trip to Hawaii. I took my mom, both of my sisters, their husbands, and my adorable little nephew Jackson to Kauai. I wanted Claire to come, but she had a work commitment. My feelings for her inspired a song, “Body of Water,” which was a tribute to her spirit and her inner energy, which always had me captivated.
In March we got some tragic news. One of my closest friends and mentors, Gloria Scott, was diagnosed with lung cancer. Her friends quickly rallied around her and tried to find her whatever treatments could help her, but there was a huge need for cash, because she had zero. So we played a benefit for her (and also for Huntington’s disease, an affliction that had struck the family of Flea’s longtime ex-girlfriend) and raised the needed cash. Since Gloria had always jokingly referred to Neil Young as her higher power, I put in a call to ask Neil if by any crazy chance he could perform.
Scar Tissue Page 48
