“I thought I recognized you. What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I work here. I’m the dishwasher. I also clear tables out front.”
She looked at me, and I couldn’t read her thoughts. I hoped she wasn’t pitying me. That would have crushed me.
“I just wanted to stop and tell you how much I loved listening to those Thelonious Monster records. They meant so much to me. I just wanted to say thanks for all the music.”
I was dumbfounded and stammered a thanks and watched her walk out. How do you respond to something like that? I also thought that maybe I didn’t really give a shit anymore. Great. She liked my music. What of it? A lot of people did. Nice to know, but it didn’t matter. Here, in the steamy kitchen of Millie’s Cafe, I was just a guy named Bob who washed the dishes to pay the bills. I was just some former junkie who tried to live his life as best he could. I was free from dope, free from a lot of the negative feelings that had haunted me since childhood … and I definitely wasn’t caught up in the viselike grip of the Hollywood entertainment machine. I lived day-to-day and it wasn’t so bad. In fact, right then I realized that everything was okay. I might not have been a big rock star living in a mansion or driving a Bentley, but I had a roof over my head and a car. I had people who cared about me, like Anthony, Flea, and my girlfriend Max. I had a job to do and it was a beautiful spring day. I felt satisfied. I felt good. For the first time in years, I started to feel more comfortable with myself. The strangest part was that I had no idea, not a clue, why it was working this time after all my previous failures at sobriety. Sometimes, that’s how recovery is.
YOU COME AND GO LIKE A POP SONG
I’ve decided
I’m not going through it again
—“Hurt,” the Bicycle Thief
In February of 1996, I got busted, got clean, and made the supplicant’s journey to Cri-Help, a twelve-step facility in North Hollywood, to attend meetings and get the counseling I needed to help me stay on the straight and narrow. The music business—among other things—had left me traumatized and I knew I needed to do what so many people had told me to over the years: Just grow up, man! It wasn’t an easy thing to do. I had very little training in it. The music business is practically designed so that the performers live in a state of perpetual adolescence. I started working at Millie’s Cafe, and, for the first time in years, I went to a real job. I stayed eighteen months in that sheltering, humbling cocoon before I decided I had to move on. But there was no way I was ready to go back to the music business, even though I wasn’t qualified for much else. I became reclusive and resentful, a tightly wrapped ball of self-pity who avoided old friends, at least the ones who still cared about me, simply because they had successful music careers and here I was, a dishwasher. I had also burned bridges and run scams as a dope fiend—it goes with the job description—and a lot of people didn’t want anything to do with me.
I took a job as a messenger for a movie company. The streets of Hollywood were ones I knew intimately and although they were the same dirty, crowded, traffic-choked avenues they had always been, I saw them from a completely different perspective now that I was shuttling envelopes and packages from place to place. I wasn’t a rock star anymore, that’s for sure. I was just another anonymous Worker Joe who did the nine-to-five to pay the bills and take care of my own day-to-day expenses. It was tough work, but it was also good to be out in the open and feel the wind blow through the window as I drove down Hollywood Boulevard. The famous names written in brass and embedded in the slick terrazzo left little impression on me. The ghosts of Hollywood’s past may have been all around, but to the tourists who walked up and down the street in flip-flops and T-shirts, many of those names didn’t register a blip. Once you’re gone, people forget who you are. It felt like it had happened to me. I had put a lot of time, energy, and work into my music career, and now I had nothing to show for it.
It was a difficult time for me, but I had my girlfriend, Max Smith. She’s probably the most significant woman in my life other than the mothers of my children. I had been on the radio call-in show Loveline one night. She told me after we had been dating for a while that she first became of aware me when she heard me on that show. I was fucked up, for sure, but I was also funny, open, and vulnerable. She
