I thought a bit more about my decision to ask John to help out.
He continued. “I don’t want to preach to anybody like you and Anthony do. Look. I don’t do drugs anymore. I don’t like to get high anymore. But if someone wants to do them, they should. They totally should.” I was kind of surprised to hear him say that, but I also realized that John, like always, was staying true to his ideals and beliefs. He was consistent. I had to give him that, and I understood where he was coming from.
“I think he’s really sick, John. We should go talk to him.”
“Okay.”
I called Layne’s mother back. “John and I will talk to him. I don’t know how much it will help.”
Layne’s mom said she understood. “You know, Bob,” she told me, “Layne’s got an odd sense of humor. I told him that John had gangrene once. He said, ‘In his arm? That’s terrible, Mom. John’s a guitar player. He needs his hands and arms. Me? I’m just a singer. I can get by without them.’ I know he was joking, but I don’t like to hear stuff like that. Can you try to talk sense to him?”
“We’ll talk to him,” I said. I hung up the phone and wondered how much good it would do. Frusciante was probably right. You can’t preach to anyone. Sometimes, you can’t even point them in the right direction. A horse won’t drink if it doesn’t want to.
And so we went and found Layne. He didn’t look good at all. His mind still worked but he was a million miles away. He played a video game while we talked.
“Hey, Layne,” I said. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing. I know why you’re here,” he said as he idly fiddled with the control.
“Your mom’s worried, man. You don’t look too good.”
“I’m okay, though. Really.” I wasn’t sure what he based that on. He was adamant that he was fine. He pretended to listen. Neither John nor I could reach him. The newspapers had to have had his obituary on standby. After more fruitless talk, John and I left.
“I don’t think he’ll come out of this,” I said.
“It’s his life, man,” said John.
He was right. On April 5, 2002, Layne died from what the autopsy later indicated had been a coke and heroin cocktail. He had become so reclusive that nobody knew he was gone until April 19, when the police—along with his mother and father—found him decomposing in his condo after getting a tip that there had been no activity on his bank card for the last two weeks. On the table was a stash of cocaine and a couple of crack pipes.
Of the people I tried hardest to reach—John Frusciante, Jeff Conaway, Mike Starr from Alice in Chains, Steven Adler, and Jason Davis, the voice actor and oil company heir—two are dead, two are sober, and one still gets high. I loved them all, but love, or a reasonable facsimile, is never enough to fix an addict … even though in the absence of drugs and alcohol, an addict will search for something to fill that void. Sex is often the easiest score.
It’s why I’ve become quite in favor of what’s called gender-specific rehab—at least for the heterosexual community. Women and men in rehab almost always have some real problems in addition to their addictions. They’re what might have been called in a less-enlightened time “damaged goods.” They’ve been sexually abused or traumatized by life and usually have some form of clinical mental illness. It’s not their fault. They just happen to be people living in twenty-first-century America, and a girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do, as does a guy. When you put these people in a mixed-gender group, they can cause real chaos. They know how to manipulate situations and use their sexuality to their advantage. It can be tragic to watch it unfold, but there’s not much anyone can do but warn against it and hope people will be able to override their basic biological urges. Mostly, it’s a lot to ask, but you have to try to get them to see the light.
“Hey, man, you need to concentrate on yourself,” I might try to advise some poor lovelorn addict. “Get your own life straightened out. Now’s not the time to fall in love—especially with someone who, if you don’t mind my brutal honesty, is way more fucked up than you are.”
“Fuck you, Bob,” he might spit back. “You can’t tell me what to do. You don’t know how I feel. You don’t know how we feel about each other!”
“You sound like a goofy, love-struck teenager, dude.”
“Well, maybe you’re right, man,” he’ll say. But a week later you’ll see him furtively sharing a cigarette with his rehab girlfriend and you’ll know that there are some things that are stronger than any dire words of warning you might choose to use.
Redemption from the disease of addiction is entirely possible—but it has to be done alone. And yet, addicts constantly search for love and approval, and when their expectations aren’t met, they become resentful. Drugs and alcohol become their intimates. These substances may wreak havoc in users’ lives, but they’re constants. And they’re always there.
I had plenty of resentments when I started my journey. I was upset that my musical career had not followed the course I had projected. My friends Anthony, Flea, and John Frusciante had all started out like me and became some of the biggest rock stars on the planet. Why not me? What had happened? Back in the bad old days before my sobriety, I found myself at a Los Angeles drug house. It was nothing like you see in the movies. It wasn’t in a “bad” part of town. There weren’t gangsters with guns. There weren’t even the
