Acid for the Children: A Memoir

by Flea

Hillel would stand atop the bridge’s edge, a look of fierce concentration on his face, always on the verge of launching his long thin body into the open air, sometimes bending his knees like he was about to go, but something always stopped him from surrendering to it. He thought about it a lot. We’d sit down below on the sandy shore of the river in our underwear, laughing and yelling words of encouragement, and sometimes he’d be up there apprehensively for an hour, just on the verge, but ultimately always walked away. He finally issued the proclamation, “Jews don’t jump.”

A few months later I found myself there in that same music room, talking to the kids and jamming out for them. The kids were beautiful, the jamming and talking was cool, but I walked away from the experience shaken. The last time I had been in that room was twenty years before, and it had been packed full of kids playing French horns, clarinets, violins, basses, trombones, flutes, tympani, and saxophones, all under the capable instruction of orchestra teacher Mr. Brodsky. It was a room alive with sound and learning! Any instrument a kid wanted to play was there to be learned and loved. But on this day, there were no instruments, no rustling of sheet music, no trumpet spit muddying the floor, no ungodly cacophony of squeaks and wails driving Mr. Brodsky up a fucking wall. There was a volunteer teacher, a group of interested kids, and a boom box. A music appreciation class. All the arts funding had been cut the year after I left Fairfax, under the auspices of a ridiculous law called Proposition 13, a symptom of the Reaganomics trickle-down theory. I was shocked to realize that these kids didn’t get an opportunity to study an instrument and blow in an orchestra.

Revisiting the school music room in 2000.

My god, they invented the Sony fucking Walkman! Can you imagine holy fuck! Oh how we fucking marveled! After you smoke a spliff, you walk to Tree’s house for a bowl of beans, put on the headphones, and trip down the street blasting Coltrane into the center of your fucking brain! We couldn’t fucking believe it.

After Anthony and I had a victory lap graduation dinner with our families all together, my mother handed me a crisp hundred-dollar bill. I was shocked by her generosity and tucked the neatly folded greenback into my pocket, walking tall, wealthier than I’d ever been in my life. Strolling around with those two zeros in my pocket I had the power to do anything. Later that night, driving drunk on the way home after some graduation partying with the boys, I got the bright idea of how to use that pot of gold. Get a hooker!

She told me, “Twenty dollars for some head,” I nodded nervously and we drove off. She instructed me to make a right turn here a left turn there, and I realized I was scared to death. Once she was in the car, all the seductive mystery, all the fantasy, all the thinking about sex flew away and I was left in the close quarters of the yellow Rabbit with a hard, mean, tall, brutal, and imposing woman who knew I was a scared boy. I’d never thought it past the initial image of the erotic long legs bright orange skirt me getting my cock sucked part, and now I found myself with someone bossing me around and telling me where to drive. As we were headed farther away into the night, I was panicked, she leaned over to my side of the car, rubbing me through my pants, telling me what to do, I just wanted it to end and for her to go away, this went on and on for what seemed like hours; it was actually about ten minutes. Finally, she told me to pull over. It was the end of night and dawn was creeping in. We were in Hancock Park, an expensive residential area, parked in front of one of its nice big houses, which sat behind a huge manicured lawn, filled with a perfect, content, healthy, sleeping family that would soon awaken for nice big happy breakfast. She told me, “Gimme the twenty, let’s do it.” I was terrified, and nervously reached into my pocket for the hundred, wondering why I hadn’t thought to get change, wondering how I could get rid of her. I felt in the part of my pocket where th...

A story about getting a hooker once after getting $100 from his mom for graduation.

But the truth is, I was an asshole. Once I realized the deal was that she loved me no matter what, and would pine for me when I ran off with my friends, I was callous with her feelings. I used the relationship when it was convenient. I had no idea what I was doing. I had never seen a healthy relationship, and it was gonna be a long time before I even began to try to understand how to build one. A pompous fool, I loved having someone who thought I was cool and propped up my ego.

No institutions of higher learning for me. All that cutting class, along with my Fuck it, I’m gonna be in a band anyways attitude, lent itself to some miserable report card days, and no one was gonna be paying my way into any fancy $$$ university. (Despite my sucky grades I did rock star my way in to the University of Southern California later, at the age of forty-six. And I loved it there.) I tried a couple of junior colleges for a week here and there, but I knew it wasn’t for me. Walking around a college campus eating their shitty food in an attempt to set up a “stable” future? I saw it as a lame security blanket, and the most cowardly, futile, boring, colossal waste of time on earth. Don’t forget, I knew it all.

It would be darn near impossible to justify the wisdom of injecting a solution of cocaine and water directly into your veins. I can’t remember how we learned to do it properly (Anthony knew how, I guess), but we did, and in the beginning we were quite organized about the ritual.

Then existential despair; its voice will grow louder and clearer, your sense of strength, mega-poignant meaning, and insight disappears, and you begin to feel bereft of any sense of things being okay You’ll feel like an empty shell, in horror of your very existence. You are a weak and shaky loser. Every thought of insecurity and lameness you’ve ever experienced is more and more magnified and taking over your being. It increases its awfully implosive intensity and you feel yourself being dragged down, pulled into a murky bottomless pond of death. (Note: If you don’t feel this way, complain to your dealer.)

I didn’t really see how destructive geezing was until I witnessed someone else doing it while I was sober.

My behavior was just as irrational and bizarre when I was on a coke-shooting binge, yet it seemed perfectly logical to me at the time. When I was crawling around on the floor looking for rocks of crack and accidentally smoked rat poison, that seemed like the proper thing to do.

And all that part about being so fastidious with the cotton balls and rubbing alcohol and fresh new syringes? That didn’t last long. For instance, a year or so later when I was acting in the film Suburbia, I was at a party with a bunch of the kids from the movie and a guy named Bugboy was in possession of a fucked-up old syringe. All the numbers and lines were worn off it, it had a dull needle point, and was filled with a powerful batch of crystal meth and water. People were standing around and just stuck their arms out, about four or five of us.

Dear God, thank you for my survival, my benevolent guardian angel watching over me, thank you. Wow. Shit. I lived, I didn’t OD or get AIDS. Could I have been stupider? More self-destructive?………………………It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Through all this insanity, I never stopped reading. Good literature could very well be the thing that stopped me from going over the edge, becoming a junkie, or completely frying my brain. Crucial to my sense of self was the sanity, moral guidance, and intellectual stimulation I got from books. The sanctuary that well-crafted novels provided reset me into a healthy state.

I met Buk once, sitting on a stool, sucking on a Budweiser, in a downtown L.A. bar. I controlled my excitement and he tolerated me. He’d written a particular poem that melted my heart, an ode to his cat, “The History of One Tough Motherfucker.” That poem made me cry, I told him so, and he accepted my praise graciously. Then he said, “So you love cats, what else do you love?” I told him I also loved basketball, to which he replied sardonically, “Ahh a bunch of black guys in stinky shoes running up and down and up and down BLAAAHHH,” then turned his head to speak with someone else. He came from another world. It was rare for me to find someone to whom I could relate my love of reading. A couple of my closest friends actually put me down for it. They both said the same thing—that I was living in a fantasy world because I couldn’t deal with the real one.

Meeting Charles Bukowski.

My last straight job was working for a beautiful man: Dr. Miller, at the aforementioned animal hospital on Melrose and Robertson.

I repaid his kindness by stealing from him. I wanted geeze money for me and AK, so I figured I’d sell dog food and pocket the twenty bucks. About fifteen years later, when I called him to confess that I had stolen, to apologize and pay him back, he said, “Oh Michael, I never would have expected that, you were such a nice boy, I’m so pleased that you contacted me.” We went on to have a good chat reminiscing, no anger from him or display of disappointment, just forgiveness and appreciation. He was an enlightened soul.

About Dr. Miller, for which Flea worked at an animal hospital.

Dr. Miller was a saint of a man who looked out for me time after time. I treasured that job cleaning up dog shit; there was a lot of love there. Enlightenment never comes where you expect it.

In that moment, I learned that no drug was ever necessary for a mind-opening experience.

He was doing meditation.

I was thrilled that a musical instrument could scare me, it was beyond notes. The band blasted into “Wasted,” the room erupting into a wild throbbing throng. Pure primal joy, all for one. The physicality and speed of the music, the sheer free abandon of the crowd and the band joined together pulsing as one. Something awakened in me. I realized music could jar people out of their comfort zone, challenge them as to the very meaning of their existence. All the times in my life I’d wanted to disrupt things, to shake things up, and I now saw it being done in the healthiest way. Real alchemy. I fell in love with punk rock.

Before leaving L.A., we went over to some girl’s apartment who gave us mohawks while we listened to the Smiths. Freshly mohawked (believe it or not, it was completely unacceptable to have a mohawk; jocks hadn’t coopted it yet, and people wouldn’t even talk to you), we headed downtown to the L.A. train station.

“Posting” was our terminology for coming down from shooting cocaine. The trip down is an instant abject sadness. As if your heart was broken to smithereens, all your hopes, vital energy, and worldly belongings gone, and your dearest loved ones dead. We paid money and risked our health for that feeling. Go figure.

Charlie Chaplin, ever the Freudian, said, “The first thing any man does, consciously or not, when meeting any woman, is size up the possibilities of having sex.” Of course, after the sizing, the answer is often no possibility at all.

The three of us drove along for a few miles making small talk, when Dawn says she has to pull over for a second. She stops the car by the side of the highway, gets out, and disappears behind some bushes. A few minutes go by and Anthony and I are exchanging puzzled looks. Next thing ya know, a dude pops out from behind the bushes in lumberjack shirt and Levi’s and says in a manly voice, “Hi, I’m Don!” Hahahaha, the guy changed out of his woman’s look to go back home to his wife! What a genius.

Snakefinger previously had a band called Chilli Willi and the Red Hot Peppers but I swear to you from my heart, we did NOT know that when we came up with our RHCP name later.

The recently completed tour had begun with Hillel in a state of weakness. He was pale, depleted, and ghostly; his spirit diminished. During the first show, he left the stage after one song, unable to keep it together because of dope sickness. He gathered his strength as the tour progressed though, and as he kicked the habit, his soul, humor, and flowing funk grew back into its naturally evolved state. It had become clearer than ever that this drug thing was no game. I saw it rob Hillel of his natural truth for a time. This was no experimental romance of youth anymore. It was fucking terrible.

As we walked in our apartment I noticed a huge quantity of messages on the answering machine. The first one was from RHCP manager Lindy, who said tersely, “Call me as soon as you get this,” and hung up. The phone was ringing off the hook, Loesha answered, didn’t say anything, just looked confused, and passed me the phone. The sky fell in. Hillel was dead. I crumpled to the floor. No more nothing. No more dancing. No more arguments or petty bullshit. No more supportive discussions. No more yearning. No more discovering ourselves together in the funky grooves. No more of the easy laughter at the unsaid jokes. No more chance to fix it. No more righting the ships in our fleet gone astray out to sea. No more outdoing each other with the absurd. No more of his soulful guidance that had helped me profoundly time and time again. No more nothing. His inspiration lives in me. I would never be the Flea y’all know without him.

Michael Jackson was playing through the shitty speakers. The song ended, and the radio announcer started gushing about how many zillions of records M.J. had sold, so excited about the massive triumph. Ignoring the artistic greatness of M.J., I thought, I don’t give even the tiniest little speck of shit. I’d never cared about mainstream success, and if anything, it repelled me. If something was popular, it meant it was boring, and I didn’t want to hear it.

As I became conscious of music sales and commercial success in the early eighties, I was arrogant. Though there was popular music of the time that I loved, like Grover Washington Jr. with Bill Withers doing “Just the Two of Us,” for the most part I categorically rejected, ignored, and/or insulted any mainstream music. I heard it as a product created for thoughtless people that didn’t really love music. They just did what they were told and embraced the pabulum forced down their throats so they could get laid. Squares and lames. If everyone liked it, it couldn’t be good. Gimme the underground stuff, the weird stuff, the stuff for people who really care.

I was jamming with Joel frequently, but we were just too damn crazy, high, and unorganized to get it together. Besides his profound influence on my musical growth, the only thing that remains from our twosome is a recording, one obscure burst of rhythm we composed, “You Always Sing the Same,” which Joel sang in French. Anthony sings it in English on the first RHCP album.

His name was Larry, he told me he had recently acted in a film for Francis Ford Coppola called Apocalypse Now. I didn’t know what a Coppola was, but it sounded important.

So many of the people who hung out on the scene at that time, ones I knew and respected, ended up strung out, in jail, given up on their dreams and barely surviving, or dead. I always get a profound pleasure whenever I run into anybody from my past who is doing well and whose spirit is aglow.

Gary Allen explained that he knew a chemist in Germany with access to a new drug, MDMA. He said it was the happiest drug ever made and we had to try it. A couple of nights later we did, sitting out on a cliff in the Pacific Palisades feeling the loving euphoria and talking the night away.

They treated new drugs like people treat a new restaurant today.

I had still never tried heroin. I know this sounds crazy considering I’d been shooting up cocaine and meth like a fucking lunatic, but heroin scared me. Smack acolytes had been effectively vilified in my psyche by movies and books. I had some ridiculous theory that cocaine left your system quickly and wasn’t so bad for you. I could spike up coke all night long until my arm was a bruised and swollen mess and I’d become a shivering psycho, but the idea of doing one shot of heroin and mellowing out terrified me.

I was too ambitious and excited by the things I loved to ever become a junkie. And goddamnit, a heroin hangover is the fucking worst. It took quite a while to figure out that the hangover was worse than the high was good, that it was a losing bargain, and stop. Yet, back in my time of using I never did it two days in a row, out of fear of being hooked. I never got strung out. I loved playing basketball, reading books, and rocking out way too much to surrender to a junkie life. Whatever the gene that makes someone keep doing drugs when they consciously understand that it’s destroying their life, I don’t have it, even though both the father figures in my life are/were drug addicts/alcoholics.

I wonder.……is this angst the engine of my life? Is this the reason why I’ve been able to touch people when I play music, when I speak from my heart, why I always go as hard and deep as I can? Is it why when people who care about me tell me to take it a little easier, I say, “No fucking way, it’s all or nothing.” If I was more happy and stable would I be a boring musician?

Up on stage in a packed and adoring club, I’m standing at the back in my sharp suit, covered in sweat at the end of a show, enjoying a Gauloise. Art is up front giving the enrapt audience a talk. “Support live music!”

Flea yelled that in Tel-Aviv in 2012.

It occurs to me that for these hugely influential shows like this FEAR one, and the Echo & the Bunnymen one, I was on LSD. I had mystical experiences, the evaporation of self, and pure childlike wonder at the essence of a loving creation. Maybe I could just go see any lame pop act while tripping and I would gain an awesomely life-changing insight. All music has magic in it ya know, even shitty pop music.

He didn’t introduce himself or ask my name. He glanced over, “You got a rig?” was all he said. I thought he was asking if I had a syringe for dope, that’s what we called it amongst us drug-shooting freak-outs, and I replied, “No.” He shot me a disappointed look, pointing to an old Ampeg amp in the corner. I belatedly realized what he was talking about and said, “Oh, an amp! Yeah I got one in the car!” Man, were my reference points in life askew or what.

Shortly after my audition, Beth and I were out with a couple of friends, driving around in an old Studebaker trying to find a house party in the Hollywood Hills, when one of them said, “I heard FEAR got a new bass player. Some unknown kid called Flea. Can you believe it? Imagine stepping into that band. That kid better be serious if he’s gonna keep up with those guys. That band is fucking hard. I still can’t believe they fired Derf.” I sat in the backseat feeling a surge of pride and happiness, and Beth gifted me a knowing smile. I quietly thought, People who don’t know me talk about me in cars. I’m not just regular old Michael anymore, I’m fucking notorious. I’m Flea.

I learned about being an entertainer. I learned how to talk confidently into the microphone, that I could say anything, anything at all that would stir the pot, add some excitement to the occasion, just to get weird and let the craziness ensue. I learned to use all the sound and fury at my command, that all the energy I had, whether positive or not, could create an event. Whatever passed through my cranium was as good as the next thing. “I had cereal today. There are a family of ants in my ear that tell me what to do so fuck off!” Just embrace it. I learned to rock the people, to connect with them.

The fact that I escaped my drug-using days without catching HIV is one of the most fortunate developments of my life.

The theater was silent and everyone was totally into it when I screamed out “GIVE HIM A FUCKING OSCAR!!!! HA HA HA HA!!!!!!!!!” Even in my distorted inebriated state, I realized it was a hurtful shitty thing to do. The producer tiptoed over and told me to shut up. I realized I had embarrassed myself, and much worse, embarrassed Bill, who was there, after all, with his mom. Now, I have done and said a lot of insensitive, thoughtless, shitty things in my life, probably much worse than that, especially when I used to drink. I wanted to prove how wild I was (needing to prove something, my Achilles’ heel), but that display at the screening has pained me all my life. For years, I’ve carried the shame of that moment. It was a great night for Bill and I shit on it. Mr. Wild Punk Rocker, Flea the Great Bass Player, the mean-spirited, selfish, drunken, arrogant asshole.

—My jazz upbringing. Until I met Hillel I had zero interest in rock music and actually had disdain for it. Thus by the time it became a part of my life, I came at it in from my own weird angle and developed a rhythm all my own.

Man, it was another era, no internet or cable television (well, maybe there was some cable but not for us lower end of the economic scale folks), and I was getting rocked by this amazing shit for the first time. I’d soon start hearing and going to see local L.A. rappers like Ice-T and the Egyptian Lover, but not yet. Music took longer to ferment then. A group of people would discover a sound that would stew in a slow burn, taking in the character of the neighborhood they lived in. The unearthing of new music was a deeply social, communal experience.

It’s been twenty-eight years since I stopped drugs and dedicated myself to a spiritual path, but those hard drugs I did, the heroin, cocaine, and meth, they hurt me bad, it took a long time to really recover from ’em. I hope for you that you don’t waste your energy there. Even the weed. Man, I was way too damn young for that shit, it made growing up a more difficult challenge than it needed to be.