Karen immediately took charge. She started making out with me, then took me back to her bedroom, where she spent the next three hours introducing me to a variety of sexual experiences I hadn’t even known were possible. She was on her game, doing things like going to the sink and coming back with a mouthful of hot water and giving me a blow job. What in heaven’s name had I done to deserve this beautiful experience?
The next day Mike asked, “How was my sister?” I spared him the details because, after all, she was his sister, but I did thank him profusely for introducing us. Years and years later, he came to me and said, “We’re really good friends, but this is something that’s been bothering me for years. While you were in the room with my sister, I went outside the house and was peeping through the window for a few seconds.” By then I couldn’t have cared less, but it was probably a good thing that he waited as long as he did to tell me.
Mike was into pot when I first met him, so I began to dip more and more into my dad’s stash to satisfy our needs. I knew the hiding places on top of the bookshelves where he kept his half-smoked joints. But he locked his main stash in the same closet where he kept his scale. One day I was hanging out with Mike in his stepdad’s cellar workshop, and I came across a huge cache of skeleton keys. It was a one-in-a-million chance, but I asked Mike if I could try these keys on Blackie’s closet, and sure enough, I found one that worked. So I started to carefully skim off my dad’s stash of grass, quaaludes, and coke. Mike was impressed that I could grab a bud and leave everything so intact that Blackie never realized anything was missing.
My first real bonding trip with Mike happened that semester, when we went skiing on Mammoth Mountain. The Greyhound bus ride up was full of your classic mixed-nut variety of derelicts and forlorn people—a girl with a black eye, a speed freak who’d just been fired from his job, the whole bus culture of weirdos, and us two green kids.
Immediately, I went to the back bathroom, smoked half a joint, then passed it to Mike, and he repeated the ritual. By the time we got to Mammoth, a blizzard had started, and it was pitch black. Our plan was to spend the night in the laundry room of the condos there, a tip that one of my Emerson friends had given me, but the Greyhound left us in the middle of nowhere. We set out in the general direction of the condos, and suddenly Mike got a horrible stomachache. We walked and walked, and we were freezing, and Mike was nearly in tears from the pain. Just as frostbite was about to set in, we made an arbitrary turn and found the condos. We walked into the laundry room, got out our sleeping bags, and rolled one out beneath a rickety plywood shelf for folding clothes and the other on top of the shelf. I popped a few quarters in the dryer and curled up on the floor while Mike slept on the rickety shelf that was meant to hold a few pounds of clothes.
The next morning we went to rent skis. We picked out all our equipment, and Mike tried to pay with the credit card his mom had given us, but the seventeen-year-old girl behind the counter wouldn’t take it. She insisted Mike’s mom had to be there in person to authorize the charge.
Mike tried to explain that his mom was already on the slopes, but she wouldn’t budge. I had to salvage this trip, so I went outside and approached a lady who was getting ready to ski with her kids and asked to borrow her jacket and her ski hat and her glasses. Somehow I convinced her, and I put on her parka and her hat and her big square sunglasses. I took our mittens and hats and stuffed them in the parka to make tits, and I channeled Mike’s mom’s voice in my head, and then I went back into the ski shop and marched up to the girl behind the counter.
“I can’t believe you pulled me off the slopes for this. This is my card, and I gave it to my son. What is your problem?” I said.
The girl was scared out of her mind, hearing this crazy woman’s voice coming from behind this ski mask, and we got the stuff. We had the time of our lives, getting stoned on the chairlift and cutting in line and being the little bastards that we were. Mike had no idea at all how to ski; the first time down the mountain, he fell about fifty times. By the third time, he was keeping up with me. He just willed himself to learn to ski within an hour.
That night we went back to the laundry room and quartered our way through another night. We got in a second day of skiing, and it was time to go home. For some reason, I decided that the ski shop really didn’t have a good inventory system, so these skis were now ours. We walked to the Greyhound station and loaded the rentals onto the bus with everyone else’s skis. We were just about to board when a sheriff’s car drove up. The sheriff got out and said, “You two. Over here now.”
“What’s the problem?” I said innocently.
“Those skis are stolen property. I need some ID,” he said.
“Oh, no, no, no, no, we’re not taking these. Did you think we were taking these skis? No, no, we rented these, and we were actually going to bring them back. In fact, we could probably just leave them here and go now,” I desperately riffed.
We finally convinced the guy to just ticket us, and we promised to come back up and resolve the issue. We made it back down to Hollywood. The trip had been a monstrous success, even with a bad taste left in the mouth from the sheriff thing at the end. Some time passed and no calls, no summonses, no bad news coming from up north. And then one day it happened. Both Mike and I had been keeping an eye on the mail, but on the same day, while we were in school, both Blackie and Walter got letters.
Now we were in serious trouble. Walter was strict, and my dad wasn’t having any kind of extra inconvenience in his life, especially because minors had to bring their parents to court in Mammoth. Now these guys had to deal with our problem. We were thinking it was going to be the end of the world as we knew it, but oddly enough, both our dads used that trip as a bonding session with their sons. Ultimately, we got off with a slap on the wrist, and all we had to do was write a letter every couple of months for six months, telling them how we were doing.
But my ski escapade with the authorities was minor compared to what would happen to Blackie that fall.
It was the perfect fall California day—sunny and beautiful. I came home from school about three-thirty P.M., like any other day, but my dad seemed a little aggravated over something. We were in our living room, which had a nice picture window that looked out over our front yard, when Blackie froze in his tracks. I looked out and I saw these Grizzly Adams–looking guys, big, burly lumberjack types, lurking in our front yard. My dad put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I think these guys might be undercover—”
As soon as that word came out of his mouth, the solid oak front door was kicked in. Simultaneously, the back door was flattened, and a phalanx of guys with shotguns and bulletproof vests and pistols poured in. Their shotguns were loaded and cocked and aimed right at my dad and me. They were all screaming, “Freeze! Freeze! Get on the floor!” like we were some huge operation. One false move of the finger and we would have been full of lead. They handcuffed us to each other on the couch and set about the business of systematically destroying our house.
It turned out that my dad had called a prostitute to come over a few nights earlier, but when she got there, she wasn’t my dad’s cup of tea. To be a good sport, he offered her some cocaine. She stormed out and called the cops and told them that Blackie might be the Hillside Strangler, who was terrorizing L.A. at that time.
The cops spent the next two hours shredding mattresses and going through every article of clothing in the closet and stealing all these nice switchblades that I’d bought in Tijuana, so they could go home and give them to their kids. Thankfully, they weren’t finding any drugs. Just when I was thinking that they might not discover my dad’s treasure trove, one of the anal knuckleheads burrowed a hole up into the ceiling of the back closet and found everything. At that point my father and I knew the gig was up. They took out the big rocks of coke, the bags of weed, and the huge quaalude jar.
They started deliberating what to do with me. They were talking about taking me to juvie, but I knew I had to stay out of jail so I
could help Blackie get bail. I convinced them that I had nothing to do with any of this and I needed to be in school in the morning. They finally agreed that I could stay in the ransacked apartment, and then they took Blackie away.
We were both crushed. I had visions of my dad going away for years. So I called up Connie, and she got her new boyfriend to put up his house as collateral. The next day, Blackie was out of jail. He had saved up around seven grand, which he had to immediately put down for a good lawyer; this put even more of a strain on our finances, because he had really cut down on his dealing and was more into his acting.
Luckily for us, a few months earlier I had been cast in a Coca-Cola commercial, and that was pretty good bank for a fifteen-year-old kid. But it generated more friction with my dad, because I was making more money than he was. He even tried to get me to pay some rent, which became a bone of contention between us, as did the 20 percent he was already taking out of my acting income as my manager. All of this was creating a schism in the Kiedis partnership.
Meanwhile, I was totally preoccupied with my budding social life at Fairfax. A few months after I met Mike, I met another person who would become one of the closest friends I’d ever have. Every so often, we’d have weird local high school rock bands that would play on the outdoor stage on the quad at Fairfax. Sometime that first semester, I saw a silly group called Anthym play. When I say “silly,” don’t get me wrong; all these guys were really talented, but they were a little behind the times as far as I was concerned. They were doing covers of Queen and Led Zeppelin, all these bands whose times had come to an end, and they all had these big, poodly-looking, long curly hairdos.
At the gig, some people were passing out these homemade rectangular Anthym buttons, so I took one. I was wearing the pin one day when I ran into one of the guitar players from Anthym. His name was Hillel Slovak. We started talking, and he invited me over to his house for a snack.
Within a few minutes of hanging out with Hillel, I sensed that he was absolutely different from most of the people I’d spent time with. I usually felt like the leader in most relationships with kids my age, because of all the crazy experiences that I’d had as a kid, but I immediately knew that Hillel was at least my equal, and in fact knew a lot of things that I didn’t. He understood a lot about music, and he was a great visual artist, and he had a sense of self and a calm about him that were just riveting. Hillel was Jewish, he looked Jewish and talked about Jewish stuff, and the food in that kitchen was Jewish. He made us egg-salad sandwiches on rye bread that day, which was totally exotic food to me then.
After the sandwiches, we had a meaningful heart-to-heart chat. By the time I left his house, I was thinking, “Well, that’s my new best friend for life right there.” It had been like that when I met Mike and Joe Walters. Sometimes you just know. Hillel had a Datsun B10 station wagon, and we spent many, many nights driving up to the top of the Hollywood Hills, pulling into a rest stop, looking out over the city, putting in some crazy progressive-rock tapes, smoking weed, and discussing the girls at Fairfax.
It was one thing to meet Mike and Hillel, who would both become such important people in my life, but what were the odds that I’d meet three soul mates that first year at Fairfax? I had actually met Haya Handel before Mike or Hillel. During the first week of school, I was in Spanish class, and my eyes were riveted by this amazingly beautiful girl with long brown wavy hair, perfect pale skin, and big brown eyes that radiated with a mad twinkle. She was Jewish, and she was also by far the smartest person in the class, but she was amazingly down-to-earth and surprisingly flirtatious.
Of course, I immediately developed a major crush on her. Whenever I saw her, I’d chat her up. But she soon made it known to me that she was not available as a girlfriend. At first I thought she was seeing this blond guy named Johnny Karson, who would later play a major role in my life, but she told me that he was just her old friend from junior high. It turned out that she was going out with a guy named Kevin, a tall, strapping, handsome black kid who was the star of the gymnastics team. I knew Haya was from a conservative Jewish family, and they felt it would be taboo for her to date anybody but a Jew, so her relationship with the black gymnast was a big secret from her family. We’d talk, and she’d confide in me, “I really want to go out with my boyfriend, but I can’t—it’s too risky, and my parents might find out.” It was all tragic information because it wasn’t me, but I definitely didn’t lose interest and move on.
We sat side by side in another class that semester. It was right after lunch, so I’d always see her boyfriend walk her to class, where they’d do their little good-byes. One day I just decided, “Fuck it, I’m bringing flowers.” I bought a bouquet and wrote a poem, but by the time I got back to school, class had already started. I rushed into the classroom, and the teacher said, “Is there a good reason why you’re late?”
“Well, not really,” I said and handed Haya the flowers and the poem. Everyone oohed and ahhed, and the teacher instantly cut me some slack. Haya was embarrassed, but she realized that this guy must be pretty crazy about her. That signaled the beginning of my getting in with her, but it was a rocky beginning that would stretch out into the next year at school.
By the second half of tenth grade, I had somehow burned through all the money I had saved from my acting career, which was mostly dormant, since I just wanted to concentrate on being a regular high school kid. Since Blackie’s cash flow was so meager, I got a part-time job as a delivery boy for an upscale liquor store called John and Pete’s. I loved that job. I’d drive recklessly, breaking all the laws, speeding and going on the wrong side of the street and cutting around traffic to make my deliveries so I could take my time getting back to the store. After a few weeks, I realized that if I hid a bottle of booze or a six-pack in the store trash, I could go back to the Dumpster later, retrieve it, and be good for the night. Combined with the thirty bucks in tips I’d pull in a shift, if I worked a few days a week, I’d have my spending money.
But my first year at Fairfax was mostly an oasis from responsibility. I had all of this beautiful free time to roam and play and walk aimlessly and discover, to talk and get into mischief and steal and vandalize and go visit some friend and try to find some pot to smoke and maybe play some basketball. There really was no pressure, no anxiety. I might have homework, but I did it after dinner.
Mike was my constant companion. On those long walks, we’d pass all of these one-, two-, three-, and sometimes four- and five-story apartment buildings that were built around a central pool. One day an amazing idea was triggered. I looked at the building and said, “That’s a diving board, my friend.”
I had gotten some experience in Michigan with jumping off of railroad trestles into bodies of water. Sometimes we would wait until right before the train came, and it was an amazing rush. Mike was game for anything, so we started out by jumping off second-story buildings into the pools. It didn’t matter if people were sitting around the pool sunbathing; that made it all the more fun, to be that guy who flew out of the sky and landed next to an unsuspecting sunbather.
If there was any chance of getting caught, we’d make the jump and then take off like bats out of hell and cut through some backyards and get away. But there were other times where we’d come out of the water and recognize that we weren’t in any danger of getting busted, so it was yet another opportunity to freak somebody out by yelling or dancing around or mooning.
We finally worked our way up to five-story buildings. Our favorite was on King’s Road. We’d get up on the roof and look down and see a postage stamp of water, and we would go for it. Then I started experimenting with different styles of jumping. I wasn’t about to dive into a pool, but I started jumping off the building backward, doing superman things. I would run out, and instead of jumping far ahead, I’d jump straight up and go into an arch and lie down and then go back straight into the pool.
It didn’t matter how deep the pools were. You don’t need much water to land in. If it’s
a shallow pool, as you hit the water, you let your body go sideways, so you’re using the width of the water as well as the depth.
My dad knew about the jumping, and he wasn’t a fan. He didn’t try to put a stop to it, but he’d lecture me from time to time: “Don’t you go jumping. I know you’re smoking pot all the time. It’s not a good combination.” At that point we didn’t communicate about a lot of things. He’d complain, and I’d ignore him and say, “Whatever. Fuck you.”
One day in June of that year, Mike and I had been eyeing this apartment building just down the block from my house. The pool was small and teardrop-shaped, and the deep end was the smallest section of the teardrop. To get to the top of the building, we had to climb over railings, and we made enough of a commotion climbing up that somebody started yelling at us to get down. We never even thought of aborting. I told Mike to go, and he jumped, and I heard the splash. Then I got up on the railing. I didn’t even look down to see my angle: I was more concerned with the people who were yelling.
I jumped, and as I was in the air, I realized that I had put too much into the leap and I was going to overshoot the pool, but there was nothing I could do about it. The concrete was coming up at me, and I landed smack on my heels and missed the pool by about ten inches. I was dazed and fell back into the pool and started to sink. Somehow, despite being in paralytic shock, I managed to push myself up out of the pool, roll over onto the lip of the concrete, and emit this inhuman sound that sounded like it came from the depths of Hades.
I looked over and saw Mike, but I couldn’t move. Somebody called an ambulance, and the paramedics clumsily rolled me onto a gurney, almost dropping me in the process. They didn’t stabilize the stretcher in the back of the ambulance, so I was bumping around in agony the whole ride to the hospital. It was pain and shock and horror, and I knew something was seriously wrong, because I still couldn’t move.