Free Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis Page A

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 to 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