On October 3, 1976, my mom gave birth to my second sister, Jennifer Lee Idema. It was a joyful time in the family, and we had a real nice little unit going on with Steve and Julie and my mom and the new baby and Ashley, the dog. As well as bonding with Jenny, I spent some quality time with Steve. He was always so supportive of whatever I did.
When I returned to Emerson for the second half of ninth grade, a sea change had taken place. When I left, I was the king of the campus in the misfit-outcast realm. But when I came back, it was Tony Who? There were new kids who were in charge now, and some of them had whiskers. (I was miles away from having a single whisker.) So I developed a new identity. I was going to become an actor, mainly because that was what my dad was doing.
Spider had always had an interest in acting. By now he was getting tired of life as the Lord of the Sunset Strip. He was fed up with selling drugs and the constant barrage of people invading the house at all hours of the night. So when Lee Strasberg opened a branch of his institute in Los Angeles, Pops decided to enroll. He’d come home after class all excited about Method acting and sense memory recall and all these new concepts. It all seemed quite a craft to get your head around.
As part of his decision to start in a new direction, my dad cut off his long hair. Overnight, he reinvented himself with a distinctive, slicked-back film noir ’30s gangster look. Within days, I was sitting in a barber chair asking for a ’30s gangster haircut. By this time, all of the other kids were starting to catch up to me, and long hair was no longer a real sign of rebellion and individuality, so I got the haircut and baffled all my schoolmates with this new look. When my dad started wearing double-breasted pin-striped suits with black-and-white spectator shoes and nice white button-down shirts with fancy ties, the first thing I did was go out and get an identical outfit made up. Now it was time for me to enroll in acting school. I took children’s classes with a woman named Diane Hull, and they were wonderful. We were taught that there was more to acting than merely pretending: You really had to get yourself into the headspace of the character you were playing.
After a few months of studying, my dad dropped a bombshell on me. He was going to legally change his name from John Kiedis to Blackie Dammett. For his new last name, he had combined the first and last names of one of his favorite authors, Dashiell Hammett. “What do you want your stage name to be?” he asked me. In one more gesture of solidarity with my dad, I said, “Well, it’s got to be something Dammett, because I’m your son.” So Cole Dammett was born. Get it? Cole, son of Blackie.
From that day on, he was known only as Blackie, both professionally and personally. No John, no Jack, no Spider. But I had the two separate identities going. There was no way I was shaking Tony at school. And my family wasn’t about to start calling me Cole. But Blackie did. He called me Cole more often than not, because he always stayed in character.
With our stage names set, it was time to get agents. He found an agent to represent him, and then he got a recommendation for a child actor’s agent for me. Her name was Toni Kelman, and she was the hottest child agent in all of Hollywood. By the time I signed, I had already been cast in a movie. Roger Corman was doing a triple-R-rated version of Love American Style called Jokes My Folks Never Told Me. It was the quintessential ’70s flick with beautiful naked women throughout. The director had gone to UCLA with my dad, and he came over to visit one day. I answered the door.
“I’m here to see your dad,” he said cordially.
I didn’t know this guy, and I certainly didn’t know his relationship to Blackie, so I summoned myself up to my five-foot-something height and hissed, “Well, who are you?”
What I was saying with my body language was “I’ll kick your ass if you try to come in my house, even though I’m just a kid.” He was so impressed with my confidence that he cast me in two vignettes as this badass kid who tells dirty jokes in a classroom.
Right off the bat, I got hired to do an after-school special and a public-network children’s show. Of course, I was cast as the bad kid in both shows. But it was work. And it was piling up. I started an account at my dad’s bank, and soon I opened that bankbook up and saw a couple of grand in there, a shocking amount of money for me.
I was getting spoiled, cast for every part auditioned for. One afternoon I was at John’s house when Blackie called to tell me that I had just been cast as Sylvester Stallone’s son in F.I.S.T., his next movie after Rocky. I was so excited I ran out of the house, whooping and singing the theme song to Rocky with my arms up in the air. I was convinced that I would be the Next Big Thing because I was co-starring with Sly Stallone, even though I had only one scene with him at the dinner table.
When I got to the set, I went to Stallone’s trailer and knocked on the door, figuring we should bond before we shot our big scene.
“Who’s that?” said a gruff voice from the trailer.
“It’s Cole. I’m playing your son in the scene we’re about to do,” I answered.
He cautiously opened the door. “Why are you here?” he said.
“I’m playing your son, so I thought that we should get some hang time in so I could develop—”
Stallone interrupted me. “No, I don’t think so,” he said and looked around for a PA. “Somebody come and get this kid. Get him out of here,” he screamed.
We did the scene, and when I delivered my big line, “Can you pass the milk?,” the camera wasn’t exactly in tight for a close-up. It turned out to be a don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it role, but still, it was another credit.
Having been in F.I.S.T. helped when I went to Paramount to audition for a film called American Hot Wax, which was the story of Buddy Holly and the DJ Alan Freed. It was a big movie, and I was auditioning for a key role in the film, the president of Buddy Holly’s fan club. After cattle calls and innumerable callbacks and even a screen test, it narrowed down to two candidates—me and the hottest child actor around, Moosie Drier. I was confident that I’d get the role because Blackie had gone all out to help me prepare for the role, learning all of Buddy Holly’s songs and buying the big horn-rimmed glasses. So when Toni called me to tell me that I hadn’t gotten the part, I was shattered.
That night Connie took me to a friend’s house, and we went on a total drug binge—snorting coke, smoking pot, sipping booze, and chatting about how I was going to get them next time and end up being the biggest movie star this town ever saw and yadda, yadda, yadda, an endless stream of nonsensical cocaine gabbing between the boy who had just lost the role of a lifetime, the lady who wanted to help him out but really was kind of lost herself, and the guy who just wanted to get in the lady’s pants. It went on until the wee hours of the morning, when the coke finally ran out, at which point the reality ran in, and it was not so nice. The chemical depression of the drugs wearing off, combined with the reality of the loss, made for a brutalizing twenty-four hours for me.
Despite my other early success, I wasn’t the most disciplined or diligent of acting students. I dug it and I participated in it and I learned from it, but I wasn’t committed to putting all of my energy into that world. Having fun with my friends and running around town and skateboarding were still high on my list. Getting high was high on my list.
I had already discovered the pleasures of cocaine before that night Connie tried to cheer me up. When I was thirteen, Alan Bashara had come over to our house on Palm in the middle of the day and told my dad that he had some incredible cocaine. Back in the ’70s, cocaine was very strong and very pure; it wasn’t so chemical-heavy as it is these days. I’d been seeing the adults do it for the last year and a half in the house, so I told them I wanted in.
Bashara made me a line, and I snorted it. Twenty seconds later, my face went numb and I started feeling like Superman. It was such an unabashedly euphoric rush that I felt like I was seeing God. I didn’t think that feeling would ever go away. But then, boom, it started to wear off.
“Whoa, whoa, can we get some more of that?” I was frantic. But Alan had t
o leave, and my dad went about his business, and I was bummed out. Fortunately, the young boy’s chemistry doesn’t take that long to recover. An hour later, I was fine and moving on to the next thing.
So I fell in love at first sight with cocaine. I would always check the house to see if there was anything left behind from the night before. There frequently was. I’d scrape the plates with a razor blade and scour the empty glass vials and cobble the residue together, then take it to school and share it with John. But we always waited for school to let out. Except for that half quaalude, I never did drugs in school.
Cocaine inadvertently led me to heroin. I was fourteen and with Connie one day when she took me for a ride to Malibu. We wound up at a coke dealer’s house where all these adults were doing massive amounts of the white powder from a huge pile on the drawing table. I was right in there with them, monkey see, monkey do, and we were all as high as can be. At one point they decided to go out somewhere. By now there was only one small solitary line on the mirror. “You can stay here, but whatever you do, don’t do that little line,” they said. I just smiled and said okay.
The minute they closed that front door, WHOOSH, I snorted up that line. When they came back in, they saw that the line had been Hoovered.
“Where’s that line?” someone said.
“Well, I got confused . . .” I started an alibi.
“We better rush him to the hospital. He’s going to OD.” Everyone was getting frantic. Unbeknownst to me, that little line was China White heroin.
But I was fine. Really, really fine. I realized that I liked the heroin even better than the cocaine. I was high on the coke, but I didn’t feel jittery or nervous. My jaw wasn’t grinding. I wasn’t at all worried about where my next line of coke was going to come from. I was in a dream, and I loved it. Of course, on the ride home I threw up, but that was no biggie. I just asked Connie to stop the car real quick, and blupp, right out the window. They were keeping a keen eye on me, sure I would go into cardiac arrest, but nothing ever happened. I loved it, but I didn’t pursue it.
By the end of ninth grade, on the surface, things seemed to be looking up. Blackie was studying acting and really getting into his roles, sometimes to a frightening extent. He became a regular at the Hollywood Actors Theatre, which was a nonequity ninety-nine-seat theater off Hollywood Boulevard. Whether he was playing a bit role or the lead, he’d completely immerse himself in the character. A lot of it had to do with finding the look of a person. He became a great master of disguise, changing his wardrobe, his hair, his glasses, his posture, and his demeanor. He’d decorate his scripts with pictures and writing and artifacts that were representative of the character.
The problems began when he started to become his characters. And they reached a boiling point when he got cast as a transvestite in a Hollywood Actors Theatre production. Blackie was so completely unafraid of what people would think of him, and so completely enraptured with the idea of becoming this character, that he lived as a transvestite for months. He had taken all these pictures of himself in drag and mounted them above the fireplace, along with charts and graphs and diagrams and posters pertaining to transvestitism.
Then my brawling, voraciously hetero dad started wearing cutoff hot pants with his whole package encased over to one side in nylon pantyhose. He’d put on a tube top and wear gloves with rings over them. His makeup would be immaculate, down to the hot-pink lipstick. He’d prance around the house in high heels, sucking on a lollipop, talking all crazy gay. It got worse when he started to go outside like that. He’d just walk up and down Hollywood Boulevard, talking to strangers in character.
I started off supportive and proud of his great commitment to his art. But in the end, I broke down. All of my masculinity was being challenged. So when he started yelling at me one day for some school problem, I called him a faggot. The second that word came out of my mouth, he took a swing at me. And my dad was fast. Somehow I managed to catch his right jab before it could connect. I was about to counter with a punch of my own, but I got only halfway before I thought it wouldn’t be a good idea to get violent with my own father. By now he had shoved me up against the bookshelf, and there was this fist-holding standoff between us. Ultimately, there was no bloodshed, but the energy was violent and ugly. And something would never be the same between us for decades to come.
Chapter 3
Fairfax High
I’ll never forget my first day of high school. I arrived at Uni High and checked in with my counselor to get my class assignment. Then she dropped the bombshell.
“Tony, I know you’ve been going to Emerson for three years under a false address. Because you don’t live in the district, you can’t go to school here.”
I didn’t know it then, but that was one of the most eventful twists of fate I’d ever experience.
I went home to figure out which high school was in my district. It turned out to be Fairfax High, a sprawling school on the corner of Fairfax and Melrose. I went there the next day and felt like an alien in a sea of people who already knew one another. Because I was a day late, a lot of the classes I wanted were full. I didn’t know any students, I didn’t know any teachers, I didn’t even know where the cafeteria was.
I started filling out my class forms, and when they asked for my name, I impulsively wrote “Anthony” instead of “Tony.” When roll was called, the teachers all called out “Anthony Kiedis,” and I didn’t correct them. I just became Anthony—this slightly different guy who was more mature, more in control, more adult.
Fairfax was a true melting pot. There were Chinese immigrants, Korean immigrants, Russian immigrants, Jewish kids, and tons of black kids, along with the white kids. Once again, I started befriending all of the loneliest and the most unwanted kids in school. My first friends were Ben Tang, a scrawny, uncoordinated, huge-bespectacled Chinese kid, and Tony Shurr, a pasty-faced ninety-eight-pound weakling. About a month into the school year, Tony and I were talking in the quad at lunchtime when a tiny, crazy-looking, gap-toothed, big-haired kid came waltzing up to Tony, put him in a headlock, and started roughing him up. I couldn’t tell at first if this was friendly fooling around or if the guy was bullying my best friend at Fairfax, so I erred on the side of friendship. I stepped in, grabbed him off Tony, and hissed, “If you touch him again like that, you’re going to regret it for the rest of your life.”
“What are you talking about? He’s my friend,” the kid protested.
It’s weird. Even though we were starting off on this “I’ll kick your ass” aggressiveness, I felt an instant connection to the remarkable little weirdo. Tony told me his name was Michael Balzary, soon to be known beyond the confines of Fairfax High as Flea.
Mike and I became inseparable. He lived about five blocks from me on Laurel Avenue. Every day we’d walk home from school, scrape together our meager assets, and buy a plate of taquitos to share at this hamburger/taco grease shack. Then we’d play football in the street. In a strange way, I was going from this very adult life with my father, partying and nightclubbing and hanging out with primarily his friends, to having a second, genuine no-worries childhood.
Mike was another outsider at Fairfax. He had been born in Australia. His father was a customs agent who had moved his family to New York and enjoyed a pretty conservative, stable lifestyle until Mike’s mom took up with a jazz musician. Mike’s parents split up, and he and his sister and his mom and his new stepdad moved to L.A.
Mike was painfully shy and insecure, and much more sheltered than I had been, so I assumed the alpha role in the relationship. This would be the dynamic that would continue for a long time, and it would be a beautiful thing, because we shared so much together. However, it would also carry an aspect of resentment for him, because I was kind of a bastard and a mean-spirited bully at times along the way.
Mike would never go anywhere without his trumpet. He was first trumpet in the school band, which meant that we’d work together—I was in play production that year. I was impres
sed by his musical skill and the fact that his lip was always swollen from playing the trumpet. His trumpet playing also opened me up to a whole other world—the world of jazz. One day Mike played me a Miles Davis record, and I realized that there was this type of music that was spontaneous and improvisational.
Even though Mike was living in a more or less traditional family unit, his situation at home seemed as chaotic as mine. He would regale me with stories of his out-of-control stepfather, Walter. For years Walter had dealt with an alcohol problem. He had gotten sober, a concept that I was unfamiliar with then, but now he was a real hermit. I hardly ever saw him, and the few times that I did, he’d be real gruff, screaming because Mike could not remember once to take out the trash on the right day. Every single time it was “Oooh, oooh, I forgot it’s Thursday. I’ll be in so much trouble.”
Mike’s mom was a real sweetheart, even if she had a bizarre Australian accent. But for the first few months I knew him, Mike kept talking to me about his older sister, Karen, who was back in Australia. “She’s a wildcat,” he’d tell me. “She’s really hot. She’s got a million boyfriends, and she’s the best gymnast at Hollywood High. She went streaking in the middle of a citywide competition.” I had to meet this Balzary sister.
Later that school year, Karen finally showed up. She was young and foxy and incredibly forward. By then it was common for Mike and me to sleep over at each other’s houses. In fact, Mike’s room had two tiny cot beds, one for him and one for me. His family had a hot tub in the backyard, and one night Mike, Karen, and I were in the tub drinking some wine. Karen’s hand was continually wandering over to me under those bubbles, and when Mike called it a night and I was about to do the same, Karen grabbed me. “You stay,” she implored. Time to meet the sister.