Anthony Kiedis
Scar Tissue

A book like this seems to burst with life and then immediately plunge into an abyss of death. The pages ooze with suffering and depravity, a pain and sense of lack that never abandon the viscous flow of the narrative. I knew more or less everything about the life of this controversial character, to say the least, but reading those stories through his words is different. The surgical lucidity with which Anthony exposes his scars is impressive, almost vivisecting himself and the people he has encountered in forty years of rule-breaking life.

It strikes not only for his personal madness, for the rot and immorality of so many experiences, but above all for the look it casts on the reality in which he was embedded. A boy who, from childhood, knew the world straightforwardly, without pretenses, with a father who never hid anything from him, who was a drug dealer and held sex and drug parties at home while his son was in middle school. Kiedis' trajectory intercepts the perversion of 1970s Los Angeles from an early age and lets himself be enchanted by it. From a victim, a son sacrificed on the altar of his father's vices and artistic failures, he progressively becomes a perpetrator, the tireless engine of his self-destruction.

Talking generically about drug addiction never really conveys the idea. A detailed account is needed. The amount of thievery, deceit, pet crimes, bullying, and lies this man committed before he turned twenty is impressive even for those familiar with rock artist biographies. A more depraved and violent Bukowski, an antisocial being who in his explosion overwhelmed dozens of people, broke the hearts of girls (always quite inclined to embrace that perverse motion), touched the lowest points a human born and raised in the United States of America can touch.

There is a nefarious drive that is not easily explained. A psychology treatise would be needed. What we find before us after a few pages is a split, mistreated, excluded, and aggressive child, who soon bears the weight of prejudice. Few means, little money, but abnormal appetites, titillated by the tangential vision of that glittering world in which his father had a non-marginal role: that of the stars' dealer.

The line that separates the first choices devoted to transgression and the mechanical behavior of the broke addict continuously seeking a high is thin, but rarely does he have the economic resources to ensure it. In truth, the first were not real choices, but just flat emulation of the adult world surrounding him. For him, that sick society was the only possible one because elsewhere he felt out of place, rejected. The most natural choice was to get lost in the mists of substances because the normal bourgeois reality was too difficult and repellent for an outsider like him. It is striking the lucidity (always very harsh with himself) with which he tells his initiation to the most excessive vices, the precise accuracy with which he talks about the drugs taken and the far from orthodox ways he procured the necessary money.

A monstrously sincere book in everything it examines, and it's not just about drugs. Kiedis develops forms of addiction to everything. He feeds on people, almost sniffs their soul, gets high with sex, with the mania of having, be it women, fashionable jackets, or simple whims he just cannot help but satisfy. This voracity combines with an ego that is never self-indulgent, and what results is a form of autopsy of his own body, in an infernal delirium that perhaps even he was not fully aware he was living. But the wisdom of hindsight is relentless and the same strength with which he sought the stupor, Kiedis puts into digging inside himself and painting a character that makes quite an impression.

On one hand, the fumes that took him away from full self-awareness, extracted him from a hic et nunc that was too boring for a penniless hippie who had licked the dazzling world of the high with the tip of his tongue. A self-rejection expressed violently in that process of self-destruction. On the other hand, an equally excessive need for love. Anthony falls in love every day, and it seems sincere. He drags his women into his abyss, lives their embraces as forms of exorcism from his inner demon. He sucks out the good and then lets them wither, but not with malice; he simply falls in love again, with another. And he does not seem driven by some sordid form of opportunism. Those feelings are true and constitute a form of care, never really enough, for those voids that had opened in his heart of a rejected boy, never truly cradled by the parent. Excluded, repudiated, mocked. His thirst is unquenchable and he drinks from the source of carnal pleasure, but not only. With every girl, he seems to truly seek peace, a life, a love.

In all this, there is a band that comes forward whose history is anything but simple and linear. Kiedis appears very lucid in postulating his aesthetic ideas, his sensitivity to trends (as existential brands) and his true passion for music, admiration for the greats of rock (up to Beefheart), attention for new things (nothing escaped him from the Los Angeles scene). Along with this, a full awareness of his limits emerges, the sense of inadequacy and the consequent effort to create-be, difficulties with singing; yet a strong desire lives in him to measure himself against the audience through concerts in which he always tries to give his best, despite everything. As if he owed something to those people who, inexplicably (in his view), had gone to listen to them by paying a ticket.

There are so many dynamics that cannot be summarized in a review, the anecdotes are dense and ruthless. Kiedis has had a chance to say he regrets part of the book, for the pain he caused. It is not hard to believe him, because in the pages he speaks without mincing words and does not hold back in dispensing judgments and recounting prurient details. In this sense, almost twenty years after its publication, the volume appears almost incredible, certainly sensational, in a hypocritical and false era like the current one. Such a text today would cause dozens of scandals, and partly something remains. Once he had a 14-year-old girl, knowing her age, and this was recently mentioned in an acid piece by the Guardian on the latest album.

It is a juicy work on one hand, to be devoured in a few days, precisely because of its narrative density and the amount of incredible episodes that are succinctly exposed. But the slightly manic curiosity of each of us in reading how far a man's madness can go must ultimately give way to the educational function. I think it's useful to fully understand how far one can fall, how deep the downward spiral is, just not to start down it.