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
