Scar Tissue (35 page)

“We want to dance, play us a song,” the girls were pleading. There was no stereo in the room, so we broke into a cappella renditions of some of our songs and some Led Zeppelin covers. We were running around the room singing songs to two girls whose asses were pinkened by the marks of a spatula. One thing led to another, and John and I both wound up in the bathroom with the two topless girls, who had become naked girls. John was standing in the bathtub, and I was sitting in the sink, and we had a fevered little sex party. What’s amazing was that the girls were so nonchalant about it, making small talk while they blew both of us. John and I looked at each other and shrugged. “Whoooaa, Baltimore. Who knew?”

By the time we got to Japan in January, not only were we all getting along, we were also starting to feel like a real band. We played a warm-up gig in Nagoya, then picked up momentum in Osaka. After the show, the promoter took us all out to a Japanese sushi feast, where Mark Johnson won a job by downing the largest ball of leftover wasabe. By now I had made the observation that Japanese girls were much more reserved and not as overtly sexual as their American or European counterparts. Normally, we’d all be carousing or at least trying to hang out with some girls, but their quietness and shyness seemed off-putting. You can’t entirely be fooled by appearances, because in the end, we’re all biologically driven creatures, and if you get your foot in the door, the biology can take over and the culture can lose its power.

On the way out of the restaurant, I persuaded a gorgeous Japanese girl and her fairly homely friend to accompany John and me back to the hotel. After about five hours of nonstop subtle loving coercion, at the break of dawn, the gorgeous girl was so turned on and so unable to repeat that she couldn’t possibly have sex that she gave in and gave up the whole enchilada of love. It was an incredible experience to see her go from “No, no, I’m not that kind of girl” to “Please fuck me more.” It was all good, and she slept over and we spent the morning together.

Now it was time to take the train to Tokyo, and she was a bit weepy. She insisted on meeting us at the train station to say goodbye. When I checked in to my hotel in Tokyo, there was a demanding message waiting for me. “You must send for me now,” she wrote sternly. Must send for her now? Maybe there was some Japanese etiquette that if you have sex with a girl, you must send for her now. I didn’t know, but I didn’t send for her. That night we played to another polite and restrained audience. After the show, I was sitting backstage when I looked up and saw the cutest girl I’d even seen in my life walk into the dressing room. She was a five-foot-nine, nineteen-year-old blond Nordic goddess with big blue eyes, a boyish bowl-cut hairdo, and an unbelievable smile. Plus, she was wearing a T-shirt with a huge face of Woody Allen on it, and her tits were poking out of each of Woody’s eyeglasses so that his eyes seemed to be going in different directions. I couldn’t have put in an order with God for a more perfect physical specimen.

At that very moment, my destiny became clear to me. She was my new girlfriend. As she walked into the room, I whispered to every dude who was near, “Back off. That’s my girl.” Then I walked straight over to her.

“Hi, my name’s Carmen,” she said. “I’m visiting from San Diego.”

I introduced myself and told her that we’d be hanging out for the next year or so, and she seemed amenable.

I swooped Carmen up, and she joined us for dinner. Then she came back to my hotel room. Unlike the girl from Osaka, we didn’t have to wait till daybreak to get in bed together. She was so beautiful, and I was so attracted to her, that I got nervous about having this sexual moment. Carmen sensed my uneasiness and, with a calm and loving grace, said, “This is such a perfect moment. No matter what happens, there is no place in the world that I’d rather be than lying with you right here.”

Whatever wave of insecurity that I was feeling got washed away under the tsunami of her love. That night became one of the most powerful and magical coming-togethers I’d ever experienced. I felt like I had ended up in the lap of true love, with this girl who was different from anyone else I’d ever met. There was a certain whimsy about her; she was smart and she knew good music. She seemed relaxed and loving, and we were pure magic together, and I was completely and utterly prepared to be her man from that point forth.

Carmen was an Elite model working in Japan, and the next night I went and stayed with her in her little model’s apartment in Tokyo. We started sharing our stories that night, and hers was rife with dysfunction. Her father had abandoned her when she was still a baby, and she never was able to connect with him. She told me she had relatives back in Missouri who were full-out white trash living in makeshift lean-tos along the river and eating squirrel for dinner. It was all pretty intriguing. Without realizing it, I reversed the roles of my former relationships and began becoming a caretaker for her.

I would be delinquent if I didn’t mention that, sexually speaking, Carmen was from a different planet. She was the most sexually magnified person I’d ever been with, and in retrospect, I think it was a compulsion. She lived through sex, and whatever pain she was experiencing, it was nothing that sex couldn’t fix. I was all for it, because I had a lot of pain and troubles of my own, so as our relationship developed, whenever we had a problem, we’d just have sex. She would say things like “I can come twenty times in a row without a problem. I could come for an entire hour straight,” and she could! Nothing could ever prepare you for meeting a girl who’s built like that, psychologically and physiologically.

God bless Carmen Jeanette Hawk for being my first girlfriend at a new time in my life when I was vulnerable and needing to locate my confidence. Of course, we were in a faraway land, and as much passion as I was feeling for her, I was going to England, and who knew if I’d ever see her again. I desperately wanted to, but time and distance have a way of playing tricks with your best intentions.

After Tokyo, I had every intention of not being a single person anymore. I wasn’t out there on the hunt in England, but when we stopped in New York on the way back, I met a model named Karen who was a big, sturdy, muscle-toned goddess from South Africa. It was confusing, because I had fallen head over heels for Carmen, but she was still in Japan, and Karen was warm and friendly and interested in hanging out. She was a picture of health, full of cheek, full of breast, and full of heart.

We had a break in touring, so I went back to L.A. and moved back into my apartment on Orange Drive, which was now devoid of Ione’s stuff. A few days later, I got a great package from Karen. It was filled with professionally shot beautiful nude photos of her. By then Carmen had returned from Japan and moved in with her mom in San Diego. We made plans for her to come up and spend a weekend with me, and it was a portentous experience. We spent the first few wonderful days in bed together, just getting really close. Then I had to go do some errands, and I left my little sex kitten purring contentedly under the covers. When I returned to the bedroom, there was confetti all over the room. I had no idea what had happened until I picked up one of the pieces of confetti.

“Oh, shit. That’s a nipple. She must have found the pictures,” I thought.

I was right. And Carmen was not having any of it.

“If you’re seeing me, why is this girl sending you photos of herself?” she raged. “That fucked-up hussy slut can just go ahead and lose your address.” This was a mild outburst compared to what was to come.

But I adored her and she was so much fun and she had the greatest laugh and she was always smiling. I don’t want to gush on about the sex things, but she was the most sexual person I had ever found myself in love with. She was starting to pick up some steam as a fashion model, so she decided she was going to move to L.A. Because I had recently gotten out of that long-lasting situation with Ione, I was gun-shy about her moving right into my house, so we went apartment-hunting and found her a cute one about two miles away. After spending about a week there, she ended up living with me. Thus began a topsy-turvy, whoopsie-daisy relationship, which was sometimes fun and always exciting.

I won’t say she was manic-depressive, but she was manic something. She would go from bam, through-the-roof happy, excited, grab-kiss sex to ready to sock me straight in the face because she was convinced I was looking across the street, down and around the driveway, and trying to memorize the house number where a beautiful girl had just entered. Half the time I had no idea what she was even talking about; her imagination was running wild. But those times were always balanced by the ones when she would let me tie her up and blindfold her in bed and take Polaroid pictures.

In April 1990, Lindy held a band meeting to tell us that by the end of the week, we’d have our first gold record.
Mother’s Milk
was about to go over five hundred thousand units sold. It was no thanks to EMI, who were the most backward people ever, except for Kim White, who always believed in us and who fought to get our record played on college radio and helped it cross over to the alternative charts and then mainstream radio.

EMI flew us to New York to have a party celebrating our first gold record, but none of it meant anything to us. It seemed awkward and disingenuous that EMI was trying to create this celebratory ambience of record-sales success. Still, in the midst of that hurricane of weird record-company energy, I looked at Flea, and we hugged and embraced and felt that we’d really accomplished something that we’d never done before, even if it took us four albums and countless ups and downs.

Suddenly, other record companies started paying attention to us, especially after our lawyer, Eric Greenspan, pored over our EMI contract. Even though we were due to deliver three more albums to them, Eric noticed that there was a personal-services clause that made the contract invalid after seven years. We were fast approaching that anniversary. So nearly every bigwig in the industry began putting on a dog-and-pony show for us. Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, invited us to his house in the Hollywood Hills and talked to us about Bob Marley and the history of his label’s involvement in reggae. It was fun, but even he admitted he didn’t have the money to match what the other major labels could offer us.

David Geffen did. He made a serious pitch for us, even flying us home from our concert in Oakland in his company jet. The funny thing was that Warner Bros. had flown us to the concert in their corporate jet. Mo Ostin of Warner’s was the coolest of all the record-company executives we met during this process. He had founded Warner’s, and when Flea and I went to his office, we sat and listened to Mo’s stories about Frank Sinatra, Jimi Hendrix, and Neil Young, who were all on his label. Later in the negotiations, Mo invited us out to his house in Brentwood. If you put a roof over the better part of Disneyland, that’s how big this house was. After giving us a tour of his home, he took us outside. His compound was set on top of a mountain that looked all the way from the ocean to downtown L.A. His pool was the size of a small lake, and when he invited us to have a dip, Flea and I stripped down to our underwear and dove in. When we got out of the pool, there was a butler with hot towels waiting for us. Despite all the opulence, Mo was a real human being with a huge spirit and a palpable love for and connection with music.

While this courtship was going on, we decided to move on and begin work on our next album. We weren’t going to work with Michael Beinhorn again, so we started talking to other producers, one of whom was Rick Rubin, who was famous for his work with the Beastie Boys. We had considered Rick as a producer around the time of
Freaky Styley,
and he came to visit us with the Beasties at our EMI rehearsal space. Later on, he told me that the whole time he was there, he sensed the darkest, most oppressed energy in that room, and he couldn’t get out soon enough. But now we were all in a different place, and we talked to Rick and really liked him. Rick had transformed himself from a brash, aggressive, obnoxious caffeine-saturated carnivore New Yorker into a mellower, kinder, gentler, spiritually minded, incredibly giving vegetarian Californian.

So Rick came on board, and we began preproduction in this rehearsal space out in a quiet section of the Valley on Lankershim called the Alleyway. The facility was a big, high-ceilinged space with couches and a loft and a great stage, just fifteen minutes away from where we all lived. As soon as we got into the place, we become the most prolific we had ever been. We just couldn’t stop writing music. We’d jam all day, get super ideas, and then Rick would come and lie on the couch for hours at a time, taking notes, taking naps, and taking in all the music by osmosis. He wasn’t in our face, he was real laid-back, but soon we realized that he didn’t miss a beat. He gave us wonderful ideas for arrangements, and then he worked with Chad on drum patterns and beats.

On Halloween we took a break from working to attend a costume party thrown by an enigmatic filthy-rich guy who lived in a Bel Air mansion. He had built a huge outdoor stage and hired Jane’s Addiction to play his party. All of us agreed that we would attend the party in matching costumes, which consisted of a huge rubber strap-on dildo and nothing else. I dutifully put mine on and went to the party with Carmen, who was appropriately costumed. We got there, and lo and behold, there was my good buddy Flea, totally naked except for his dildo. Then I saw John sporting his fake hard-on. Chad also didn’t chicken out, even though it was the end of October, and it was pretty chilly. So we were four naked guys with hard-ons trying to act like nothing was wrong.

Jane’s Addiction started playing, and everyone started singing along. At one point, Stephen Perkins from Jane’s Addiction asked us if we wanted to play, so we decided to play the Stooges’ “Search and Destroy,” something we’d been rehearsing at the Alleyway. There were literally hundreds of people at this party, and we got up on that huge stage naked as motherfuckers but with giant hard-ons. It was like walking on the moon, we were extra-amped because of the nakedness and the coldness and the gesture of camaraderie from Jane’s Addiction, who had always been in a little bit of competition with us over the years.