Over the Wall 5 страница

"I don't think I can do this anymore," he told me. I'd known that this was coming. It was so obvious; nothing was happening with the band.

"I know," I said. "I figured that's what you were going to say. I totally understand."

Then Flea dropped the bombshell. "The only way I could imagine carrying on is if we got John back in the band."

That threw me for a loop. "Why would John ever want to come back and play with us again?" I asked Flea. "He doesn't care for me and didn't really care for the experience."

"I have a funny feeling that he might be standing on the verge of making a comeback, a personal resurgence into the land of the living," Flea told me.

"That would be a wonderful miracle," I thought. And the second miracle would be if he'd even think of playing with us again.

"You've got to be crazy. John is not going to want to play in this band. It doesn't sound remotely possible, but if it is, I'm open to it," I told Flea.

John and I hadn't had much contact since he left the band, except for the odd and unplanned moments that we'd run into each other. Even then, you'd have thought there would be a lot of anger and resentment and dislike, bordering on hatred, but every time I saw him, there was no display of that.

The first time I saw him was a few years after he left the band. I had heard all these horror stories about John's descent into a drug hell, and I knew that Johnny Depp and Gibby Haynes, the lead singer of the Butthole Surfers, had even made a film documenting the squalid conditions that John was living in. If you saw that film, you knew that this was the home of a person who had absolutely no interests in life other than shooting drugs and painting.

I also heard about the interviews that John was giving journalists extolling heroin use. He'd even shoot up during interviews. I wasn't interested in reading that stuff or looking at the film. I didn't listen to his solo records at the time. I couldn't celebrate his lifestyle because it seemed like he was killing himself. There were a lot of people who were glorifying that and wanting to participate and wanting to get free drugs. Granted, his art, the songs he was writing, were great, but it didn't feel right for me to condone this eccentric person's demise. This guy used to be my best friend, and now his teeth were falling out, so I didn't look at it like other people might: "Oh, he's a genius, it's okay." I didn't care if he was a genius or a fucking idiot, he was rotting away, and it wasn't fun to watch.

I knew he'd been painting for years, inspired by Basquiat and da Vinci, so when I heard that he was going to have a show at the Zero Gallery on Melrose, I decided to pop in the day before the show opened and have a peek at the paintings. I dropped by, and lo and behold, John was there hanging the show himself. We were both a little startled. He was high on coke, and his hair was shorn, and he had big black circles under his eyes and was smoking Gauloises. He was shockingly thin, a skeleton in a vest, this little bone man, but he had a lot of vigor because he had a lot of energy and chemicals in him, so it wasn't like he was passing out or looking weak.

Instead of being "Fuck you, I hate you, you suck," we were happy to see each other. His paintings were disturbing but beautiful. It was weird, because I think we wanted to dislike each other more than we were able to.

The next time I saw him, he had deteriorated quite a bit. Everyone was worried about his arms, which were all abscessed because he never did learn how to properly administer an injection; he would just go for the stab-and-poke mode and hope for the best. He wound up checking in to Exodus, my old haunt, in December 1995, more for his physical health than his mental health. The doctors there were seriously concerned that he was going to get gangrene and have to lose a limb unless he'd wash and take care of his arms, which he refused to do.

I called him up and asked whether it was okay if I came to visit him. He was fine with it and asked if I could bring him some cigarettes and a pastrami sandwich with a lot of mustard. So I showed up and he ate the sandwich and I tried to get him to wash his arms. Again, our exchange was kind and loving and caring, so different from what everyone around either of us thought our exchange would be like, based on our past turmoil. I still hadn't recognized how unhealthy my own dynamic of relating to him had been before he left the band. I never understood just how sensitive he was and how hurtful I was capable of being. I didn't know that all of the jokes and the jabs and the kidding and the goofing and the sarcasm had really hurt his feelings and had a long-lasting impact on him.

Long after John quit, Flea said to me, "Do you have any idea how much pain you caused John?"

"What are you talking about? He and I were best friends, we spent every waking moment together. We played pool together, we chased women together, we ate Lucky Charms together. We were two peas in a pod."

"No, you hurt John's feelings a lot of the time," Flea said, "because he looked up to you and you were so brutal to him." That was the first time I was even aware that my love for him had ended up being a difficult experience for him.

When John left the band, I resented him for not being my friend and for abandoning our musical comradeship. But all the time that he was out of the band and going through his anguish, I prayed for him constantly From going to meetings I'd learned that one of the reasons that alcoholics get loaded is because they harbor resentments. One of the techniques they teach to get rid of a resentment toward somebody is to pray for him or her to get everything that you want for yourself in life - to be loved, to be successful, to be healthy, to be rich, to be wonderful, to be happy, to be alive with the light and the love of the universe. It's a paradox, but it works. You sit there and pray for the person you can't stand to get everything on earth that you would want for yourself, and one day you're like "I don't feel anything bad toward this person."

That was part of the reason I prayed for John. The other part was that I didn't want him to die a sad and miserable death, so I prayed for him almost every day. I would sit there and say, "Whoever's out there, whoever's getting this thought from my mind, could you please look after John Frusciante, because he needs it."

In January 1998, Bob Forest convinced John to check in to Los Encinos, the same old-school treatment facility that housed W. C. Fields, back in the day. John had already kicked heroin by then, but he had been smoking crack and drinking. I went to visit him there, and he seemed committed to being in there, but a little peculiar. Our conversations were sparse and unusual. Every now and then we'd talk about a Nirvana song or a da Vinci drawing.

During one of my visits, we were sitting there having one of these minimalist conversations when John jumped off the bed and went flying into a perfect James Brown split, circa 1968. Then he got up and sat back down. I don't know what his motivation was, but it seemed like he was feeling his oats and letting it be known that he still had the fire to fly into a James Brown split, if need be.

I was open to the possibility of John coming back to the band, even if it still seemed remote to me. After leaving Los Encinos at the beginning of February, John rented a small apartment in Silver Lake. One day in April, Flea went over there, and they sat together and listened to records. Then Flea popped the question: "What would you think about coming back and playing in the band?"

John started sobbing and said, "Nothing would make me happier in the world." They both cried and hugged each other for a long time. Then Flea took a trip to Cambodia, which gave John and me time to clear the air and talk about the problems we had in the past. We went to the Farmer's Market, one of my favorite places in all of L.A., and sat down and had some salmon tacos.

I broke the ice. "Do you have a problem with me at all about anything?"

"No, not really," he said. "What about you? Are you mad at me for anything?"

"I thought I was, but I don't feel mad right now. I thought we should probably go over all this stuff, but I don't feel bothered by any of it anymore," I confessed.

"Me, neither," John agreed.

Flea was expecting to get a report of some daylong deliberation deal, of all this animosity dredged up, but neither of us was feeling it. The major problem was John didn't even have a guitar to his name. So we went over to the Guitar Center, and I bought him a great old '62 Stratocaster.

John was thrilled by the idea of being back in the band, but he was also scared, because he hadn't played a guitar for a very long time. We decided to make his return low-key - nothing mattered other than playing music. We didn't give a fuck about record deals, or the fact that our manager had quit, or that our record company had lost interest in us. None of that mattered. We just wanted to get in a garage and rock out together.

Flea was living in an incredible Mediterranean superstructure in Los Feliz, a famous old house because tons of musicians like Bob Dylan and Lou Reed had lived there. We assembled in Flea's garage, a portion of which he had converted to a rehearsal space. Chad had set up his drums in the corner. Flea had this look on his face like "Okay, no great expectations. Let's just play music." We had some shitty little PA system set up. John wore a look of uncertainty, but he plugged in his guitar, and we started playing. And it was us again. I think I might be the only one who thought so, but the room filled up with heavenly music, made for no motive other than to see what it sounded like when we banged our instruments together.

For me, that was the defining moment of what would become the next six years of our lives together. That was when I knew that this was the real deal, that magic was about to happen again. Suddenly we could all hear, we could all listen, and instead of being caught up in our finite little balls of bullshit, we could all become players in that great universal orchestra again.

14.

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