Scar Tissue.pdf

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Scar Tissue
Anthony Kiedis with Larry Sloman
Summary
Introduction ................................................................................................................................3
“Me, I’m from Michigan” ..........................................................................................................5
Spider and Son..........................................................................................................................20
Fairfax High..............................................................................................................................44
Under The Zero One Sun .........................................................................................................63
Deep Kicking............................................................................................................................79
The Red Hots..........................................................................................................................105
Groundhog Year .....................................................................................................................124
The Organic Anti-Beat Box Band ..........................................................................................154
Refourming.............................................................................................................................180
Funky Monks..........................................................................................................................200
Warped ...................................................................................................................................226
Over The Wall ........................................................................................................................255
Nothing ...................................................................................................................................283
Welcome to Californication ...................................................................................................302
A Moment Of Clarity .............................................................................................................332
Introduction
I’m sitting on the couch in the living room of my house in the Hollywood Hills. It’s a clear,
crisp January day, and from my vantage point, I can see the beautiful expanse known as the San
Fernando Valley. When I was younger, I subscribed to the conventional wisdom, shared by
everyone who lived on the Hollywood side of the hills, that the Valley was a place where the losers
who couldn’t make it in Hollywood went to disappear. But the longer I’ve lived here, the more I’ve
come to appreciate the Valley as a soulful and quieter side of the Los Angeles experience. Now I
can’t wait to wake up and look out on those majestic mountain ranges topped with snow.
But the doorbell interrupts my reverie. A few minutes later, a beautiful young woman enters
the living room, carrying an exquisite leather case. She opens it and begins to set up her equipment.
Her preparations complete, she dons sterile rubber gloves and then sits next to me on the couch.
Her elegant large glass syringe is handcrafted in Italy. It’s attached to a spaghetti-shaped piece
of plastic that contains a small micro-filter so no impurities will pass into my bloodstream. The
needle is a brand-new, completely sterilized microfine butterfly variant.
Today my friend has misplaced her normal medical tourniquet, so she pulls off her fishnet
stocking and uses it to tie off my right arm. She dabs at my exposed vein with an alcohol swab, then
hits the vein with the needle. My blood comes oozing up into the spaghetti-shaped tube, and then
she slowly pushes the contents of the syringe into my bloodstream.
I immediately feel the familiar weight in the center of my chest, so I just lie back and relax. I
used to let her inject me four times in one sitting, but now I’m down to two syringes full. After
she’s refilled the syringe and given me my second shot, she withdraws the needle, opens a sterile
cotton swab, and applies pressure to my puncture wound for at least a minute to avoid bruising or
marking on my arms. I’ve never had any tracks from her ministrations. Finally, she takes a little
piece of medical tape and attaches the cotton to my arm.
Then we sit and talk about sobriety.
Three years ago, there might have been China White heroin in that syringe. For years and
years, I filled syringes and injected myself with cocaine, speed, Black Tar heroin, Persian heroin,
and once even LSD. But today I get my injections from my beautiful nurse, whose name is Sat Hari.
And the substance that she injects into my bloodstream is ozone, a wonderful-smelling gas that has
been used legally in Europe for years to treat everything from strokes to cancer.
I’m raking ozone intravenously because somewhere along the line, I contracted hepatitis C
from my drug experimentation. When I found out that I had it, sometime in the early ‘90s, I
immediately researched the topic and found a herbal regimen that would cleanse my liver and
eradicate the hepatitis. And it worked. My doctor was shocked when my second blood test came up
negative. So the ozone is a preventative step to make sure that pesky hep C virus stays away.
It took years and years of experience and introspection and insight to get to the point where I
could stick a needle into my arm to remove toxins from my system as opposed to introducing them.
But I don’t regret any of my youthful indiscretions. I spent most of my life looking for the quick fix
and the deep kick. I shot drugs under freeway off-ramps with Mexican gangbangers and in
thousand-dollar-a-day hotel suites. Now I sip vitamin-infused water and seek out wild, as opposed
to farm-raised, salmon.
For twenty years now, I’ve been able to channel my love for music and writing, and tap into
the universal slipstream of creativity and spirituality, while writing and performing our own unique
sonic stew with my brothers, both present and departed, in the Red Hot Chili Peppers. This is my
account of those times, as well as the story of how a kid who was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan,
migrated to Hollywood and found more than he could handle at the end of the rainbow. This is my
story, scar tissue and all.
“Me, I’m from Michigan”
I’d been shooting coke for three days straight with my Mexican drug dealer, Mario, when I
remembered the Arizona show. By then, my band, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, had one album out,
and we were about to go to Michigan to record our second album, but first, Lindy, our manager, had
booked us a gig in a steakhouse disco in Arizona. The promoter was a fan of ours and he was going
to pay us more than we were worth and we all needed the money, so we agreed to play.
Except I was a wreck. I usually was whenever I went downtown and hooked up with Mario.
Mario was an amazing character. He was a slender, wiry, and wily Mexican who like a slightly
larger, stronger version of Gandhi. He wore big glasses, so he didn’t look vicious or imposing, but
whenever we shot coke or heroin, he’d make his confessions: “I had to hurt somebody. I’m an
enforcer for the Mexican mafia. I get these calls and don’t even want to know the details, I just do
my job, put the person out of commission and get paid.” You never knew if anything he said was
true.
Mario lived in an old, eight-story brick tenement downtown, sharing his squalid apartment
with his ancient mother, who would sit in the corner of this itti-bitty living room, silently watching
Mexicans soap operas. Every now and then, there’d outbursts of bickering in Spanish, and I’d ask
him if we should be doing drugs there – he had a giant pile of drugs and spoons and tourniquets
right on the kitchen table. “Don’t worry. She can’t see or hear, she doesn’t know what we’re
doing,” he’d reassure me; so I’d shoot speedballs with granny in the next room.
Mario wasn’t actually a retail drug dealer, he was a conduit to the wholesalers, so you’d get
incredible bang for your buck, but then you’d have to share your drugs with him. Which we were
doing that day in his tiny kitchen. Mario’s brother hat just gotten out of prison and he was right
there with us, sitting on the floor and screaming each time that he tried and failed to find a working
vein in his leg. It was the first time that I’d ever seen someone who had run out of useful real state
in his arms and was reduced to poking a leg to fix.
We kept this up for days, even panhandling at one point to get some more money for coke.
But now it was four-thirty in the morning and I realized we had to play that night. “Okay, time to
buy some dope, because I need to drive to Arizona today and I don’t feel so good,” I decided.
So Mario and I got into my cheesy little hunk-of-junk green Studebaker Lark and drove to a
scarier, deeper, darker, less friendly part of the downtown ghetto than we were already in, a street

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