Don't Try This At Home

by Dave Navarro and Neil Strauss

June

"Do you know what to do when somebody shoots up too much?"

That's the first question Dave Navarro asked as we started our collaboration June 1, 1998, making it clear I had more than a story on my hands: I had a life. Not a series of past events filtered through the dirty grate of memory, but a heart that was still beating. To document it's beating was the goal, and if the past was relevant at all, it was only as the blood that coursed through that heart and gave it a reason to beat. Or not to beat. Because at times, it didn't want to.

That night, Navarro showed me what he called his Spread movie. It begins with a phone call to a rehab center. Dave tells the operator that he's in trouble and needs help badly; the operator says she'll call back later. The rest of the movie is a series of scenes he filmed to the accompaniment of his music. It centers on 3 images: a spoon in a bowl of Jell-O, symbolizing the nourishment of his past; a spoon with a rock of cocaine, symbolizing the nourishment of his present; and a picture of his mother, the bond that connects both spoons. In the movie, he sticks his arm in front of his mother's picture and shoots up, an image all the more disturbing if you consider that Navarro's mother was murdered [when he was 15]- by an ex-boyfriend, a man her son had grown to love and trust. The movie seemed disgusting not because of the images, but because of Navarro's eagerness to exploit a tragedy for the sake of a self-aggrandizing art film. At least, that's what I thought until Dave said it wasn't an art film. It was his will.

"That was my checkout movie," he said. "I was going to take a bunch of pills afterward, because I thought it wouldn't be as ugly as being found with a needle in my arm and blood all over the place. I got the idea from [the book] Final Exit, which I always considered a how-to manual. But when I started editing the video, somehow it showed me there was something to live for, there was something else I could do creatively."

Navarro stood up and rolled thick black curtains across a window overlooking Los Angeles ("I bought a house with a picture window so I could imagine myself pissing on L.A."), as if that would keep the sun from rising. And it did, at least for us and a statuesque, raven haired drug dealer who sat mute on the floor with her arms wrapped around her knees.

All did not seem well at Navarro's Hollywood Hills home. At the same time, things had never been better. Since a split with the Red Hot Chili Peppers in 1998 and a stint with 1997's suitably named Jane's Addiction Relapse tour, Navarro was in a strange transition. In the months leading up to June, his role in 2 famous rock bands had ended; he had a messy parting with the label and was going to release his solo project; the friends and relatives he was closest to abandoned him; he suffered a rough break up with a girlfriend; he started shooting up coke and heroin again; and he bought a photo booth.

Socially, artistically, and chemically, Navarro restructured his entire life- or had it restructured for him- with the photo booth serving as a way of systematizing friends, dealers, prostitutes, and strangers passing in and out of it. By the end of this yearlong book project, a process piece chronicling 12 months of his life in photo strips, essays and conversations, the outcome of these changes will become clear. This is a story that will either have a happy ending or a tragic one: There is no in-between.

"Maybe I'll die and make the book a best seller for you," Navarro said that first night. It would have been easy to laugh off the comment or think of it as a self-pitying plea designed to make the listener feel uncomfortable but it was not a joke or a test. As he spoke, he tied off his left arm with an RCA cable and plunged a syringe into a vein, tapping the plunger as the phone rang. He picked it up, needle dangling from his skin like a cigarette from someone's lips, and put the caller, Marilyn Manson's drug-addled bassist Twiggy Ramirez, on speaker phone. Twiggy had just snorted a fingernail size line of ketamine, a cat tranquilizer and was freaking out. His walls and Star Wars toys were closing in on him, the red wine wasn't bringing him down and he wanted to come over.

One of the biggest changes Navarro made in his life this month concerned transforming his Hollywood Hills home into a cross between a crack den, an after hours club, a halfway house and Andy Warhol's Factory. It became a fucked up focal point for wretched freaks and glamorous stars to gather and discover that, inside, the freaks felt like stars and the stars like freaks. The house is best summarized by the road sign perched 100 feet uphill: DEAD END: NO TURNAROUND.

"I used to feel like it was such a fucking chore that all I ever really looked forward to was going home and turning myself off in an environment that was somewhat of a sanctuary," Navarro, shirtless, with Calvin Klein's creeping out of his jeans, said about the house's past. "It had to be immaculately clean and free of responsibility. I was living my life very much in a regimented fashion, following the strict way of health and sanity. I was so fucking strict about what I ate and put into my body and how I looked, that I was miserable."

When Navarro decided that on an emotional level he didn't feel any better clean than fucked up, he relapsed- returning to the habit he thought he had kicked 5 years earlier. It was a conscious decision, he always says, not a matter of circumstances.

Then came the photo booth concept, a triumph in cynicism, mistrust, and fear of abandonment. Though the project- documenting everyone who steps in the house over the course of one year- was so many things, at it's core it was an experiment to prove or disprove Navarro's Hypothesis No. 1: The only people who stay in your life are the people you pay. Your friends and family will disappear but the cleaning lady, pizza delivery man and the drug dealer are forever.

The month had its share of tales that would be whispered about at Hollywood bars; Leif Garrett coming over at 6:30 AM to fix a curtain rod in exchange for, well, I'll leave it to your imagination; Rose McGowan picking up what she thought was a stack of poker chips only to be told by then fiancé Marilyn Manson that it was a masturbation sleeve a prostitute had given Navarro; a television crew waiting outside for 45 minutes as the producer tried futilely to wake a partied out Dave, checking his pulse to make sure he was alive; Navarro sleeping with ueber-groupie Pamela Des Barres in order to put his penis in the same place Jimmy Page's once was.

But perhaps the best tales that the month produced took place on the rare nights when Navarro actually left his social laboratory, a feat in itself, considering the strong magnetic pull his house had come to have over him. And each time, his destination was a party at the Playboy Mansion. For the 1st of 2 parties in June, Dave and Twiggy rented a limousine. As the car arrived to pick them up, Navarro turned to answer the door and knocked one of his small glass unicorns off a shelf. He noticed that its tiny horn had broken off. He searched the floor, but the fragment was nowhere to be found.

"Let's go, let's go!" Twiggy urged, jumping around with childlike energy.

"Dude, I cant, " Dave said darkly, crawling around on the floor on all fours. "I have to get that horn. I feel like bad things are going to happen to me if I cant find it."

Obsessed, he spent the next hour using a lamp with the shade removed as a makeshift flashlight, searching for the horn whose loss he considered a symbolic disaster. Eventually, he found it and made it to the party, where- with the lucky horn in his pocket- he picked up a Playmate and a Penthouse Pet. The Playmate was an argumentative model who quickly earned herself the nickname "The Pooper," since she constantly tried to manipulate the events of the night in the direction of gas stations, diners and bars where she could take foul-smelling shits in private. The drop dead gorgeous Pet, renamed "Where's my Purse" after misplacing her handbag 8 times that night, went on to earn herself the honor of being quite possibly the stupidest woman ever to sleep with Twiggy. And that says a lot.

Dave's next visit to the Playboy Mansion would be his last, not by choice but by necessity. His companion at the time was Melissa, a petite brunette with a large wound on her back- the result of recent friction with the carpet in Dave's studio, which still bore the corresponding bloodstain. Melissa had been excited about the party for months, spending 3 hours getting ready. When she finally showed up, dressed in new clothes from the boutique Fred Segal, she found Dave sleeping. She was so upset that she burst out crying as she shook him awake.

After she finally coaxed Dave into the shower, the doorbell rang. Melissa, tears of dashed expectations in her eyes, answered the door to find a very dolled up prostitute with a garder belt hanging out from the bottom of her skirt. The woman, a former Heidi Fleiss escort, held a bag full of hooker wear in one hand and doggie biscuits in the other.

Dave walked upstairs in his underwear, looked at her and- much to Melissa's disappointment- knew her name. "Sara!" he exclaimed. "It's not cool for you to do a drop-by without calling."

"Well," she said, "I'm dropping these clothes and dog biscuits off for Sylvia," another prostitute. Then she proceeded to sit on the couch, pull a crack pipe out of her purse and light it with a small silver torch.

Dave asked her to leave then ran downstairs. "What the fuck?" Melissa yelled after him. "We're late for the party. Enough of this drama. Let's go already!"

But instead, Dave called Sylvia, who came by for her belongings. He sat on the couch with her and got into a long conversation about how it wasn't cool for the other prostitute to do a drop-by. Melissa called a limo, which took an hour and a half to arrive. By the time she and Dave finally arrived at the Playboy Mansion, the party was well into it's 5th hour of revelry.

Wandering through the estate's tacky game room, they noticed a girl following them. When Navarro walked into the bathroom, the girl slipped inside with him. "Oh my god, Dave Navarro!" she gushed. "I fucking love you. I want to suck you off so bad." He shrugged as if to say, "Whatever you want," as she dropped to her knees.

Afterward, she trailed behind Dave and Melissa until the trio found themselves in the larger of the game room's orgy chambers, with mood music playing, a spongy floor, adjustable soft lighting and boxes of tissues scattered around. Dave's interest in entering the room was purely to get his drugs in his system, but then a 3rd girl Dave knew appeared.

As Dave sat down to pull out his supplies, he suddenly found his pants down and 3 naked women using the orgy room as it was intended. "It was like something out of a movie- and it was all happening as I pulled out a syringe to get high, which was part of the decadence, "he remembers.

In a gesture not unlike the 1997 Fiona Apple incident that landed Navarro in trouble (spraying a message to the singer in blood- or as he puts it, from the bottom of his heart- on her dressing room mirror at a concert), Dave took out his rig and started writing on the wall in blood. "The mansion has always been somehow holy to me, and I began to feel weird," he says, "All my life I'd wondered what it was like and here I was at 30 squirting blood on the walls with 3 naked girls at my feet. So I cleaned it off. But it was too late. They had the whole thing on video. When we left the room, several security guards escorted me out if the mansion and asked me never to return. I wonder what they did with the video."

September

One night, Navarro constantly checks a new security camera he installed to patrol the front of his house, a sign of either the paranoia that stems from too much coke or the obsessive nature that led to the addiction in the 1st place. In addition, a trip to the Spy Store has resulted in cameras in every room- VCR's and clocks with hidden lenses, positioned more for documentation than actual security.

Later, a small, somewhat chunky girl appears on the security monitor. Dave lets her in. She has dyed metallic auburn hair and is wearing all black except for the fur trim around her jacket. She calls herself Hope and is attractive, but only because she is making an extreme effort to look that way. Her breasts are pushed up so that they peek over the top of her lacy dress like 2 thumbs pressed together.

She first talked to Dave when one of her friends- whom she says is a stripper and Dave says is a prostitute- was staying at the house of a speed freak named Taylor. The stripper/prostitute gave Hope a phone number and said it was Taylor's but it turned out to be Dave's. "He kept asking me for my phone number," Hope explains. "I said, 'You could be a psychopathic murderer.' And Dave told me, 'I'm not a murderer because my mother was murdered.' I thought he was fucking with me because my mom died. She committed suicide 2 years ago."

Hope says she moved to Los Angeles to get into porn films but she just did a couple then quit. "She was probably a prostitute," Dave whispers when she goes to the bathroom, "judging by all the madams she knows."

We gather around the television and Dave puts in a video of a documentary in progress about Jane's Addiction's Relapse tour. Hope watches it while he sits at the computer loading images into his website. The final scene is a beautifully filmed shot of Dave leaning over Perry Farrell and joining mouths with him in a passionate French kiss. Hope turns to Dave,

"You don't have a girlfriend, do you?"

"Why?"

"I cant imagine you spending all that time on the computer," she says flirtatiously. "I'd throw it out the window."

Hope is probably trying to regain the power she lost by confessing that she is attracted to Dave but instead only succeeds in pushing a button.

"Well, I don't think I'd want you as my girlfriend," Dave responds. "I don't think I'd want a girlfriend who did films."

"Why? I did bondage films. All girl-girl."

"When I say that, I'm not putting down films. I'm not emotionally strong enough to separate sex on film from reality. I don't trust anybody."

"Neither do I," Hope says, trying to cut her losses and return to common ground.

"The very guy who raised me raped and murdered my mother and my aunt. When you see that happen, you realize anybody is capable of anything."

"So what happened with your mother," Hope says crossing her pale, pudgy legs on the floor. "Who found her?"

"My dad," Dave says, "I was suppose to stay with her that night but at the last minute I went to my dad's. If I had been there, her boyfriend would have killed me too." He pauses, "It was hard on my dad. She was a model when she was young, on The Price Is Right and in a bunch of commercials. My dad would cry every time they came on. As a teenager I had to be there for him. He had no one to turn to.

"Even then I could imagine what it was like losing the woman you had searched for your whole life, had a child with and still loved even though she left you. So I turned to drugs and music. Those were the 2 things that made me not feel it. Whenever I had a good time, I'd beat myself up for it, which is so unfair to do to yourself."

"I cant figure out which is worse," Hope says, her eyes reddening, "for a parent to be murdered or commit suicide. I don't just feel angry, I blame myself. I hate my mother for what she did and the pain she caused and that she didn't leave me a note."

"I feel guilty," Dave responds, "because before he killed my mother, he broke into my house at gunpoint and held me up and he made me promise not to tell anybody. And I didn't. A week later he killed my mother, so I've always felt like I could have prevented it. He was free for 7 and half years. They caught him through America's Most Wanted [in 1991; he was sentenced to death]. I remember hearing my mom's name on television and then watching a dramatization with an actor playing me. I had to face [the killer] in court last year. I had to take the stand as a witness and to the left of me were pictures from the [crime] scene on a fucking board. I had to ask for them to be covered.

"Do you still have your father to talk to?" Hope asks.

"I'm in a fight right now with my dad," Dave answers, wistfully. "Whenever we're not getting along, he'll tell me not to treat him like one of my fans. I hate that. But I know how important he is to me. It's the same way for him too; if anything happened to me, it would destroy him."

Dave walks into the bathroom to shoot up, then returns to tell Hope he has work to do. She walks upstairs to the photo booth to document her visit and then hesitantly approaches the front door, as if there is something she has forgotten to do. As Dave hugs her good bye, she wraps her arms around his head and tries to navigate his lips towards hers. He turns his head to the side and holds the door open for her.

April

"I went in to talk to this doctor, just trying to get a general sense of what the whole plan for me is here in rehab," Dave says. "I was telling him about my CD and how it has a lot to do with the grieving process for my mother, because that's what they've been making me focus on and work on here. And he interrupts me and goes, 'Dave listen, I'm telling you right now, I'm not going to listen to it.'

"But I wasn't asking him to listen to it. I was just telling him what it was about. I got so fucking mad I stood up and said, 'Fuck you, you're not even listening to me.' I went to my room, packed my bag, called a cab and signed out AMA, which means 'against medical advice.' I got into the cab and said, 'Take me to the airport.' I had 100 dollars with me. The cab driver looked pretty cool so I said, 'Hey where can I get some heroin and cocaine in this part of Tucson?'

"She goes, 'Oh well, we'd have to go down to Sixth, although that's a really narly part of town.'

"I said, ' Well there's a 100 dollars in it for you if we can make that trip.'

"SO we drove around to all these places and finally got a toothless black guy and his wife to get in the cab. The guy goes in, gets the drugs and gives me his needle. But it was totally worn out and the numbers were faded so I had the driver take me to get some Clorox. I cleaned the needle and used it in the back of the cab. By the time this was all done, I looked at the meter and it was 85 dollars. I had just spent my only 100 dollars on drugs and the airport was like an hour away from where we were. So the rest of the day was used up going to Western Union, calling everyone I could thing of and begging 'Wire me some money.'

"The cab driver was cool because I told her, 'Look if you can deal with me, I'll give you an extra grand.'

"I kept going back to Western Union, waiting in line and asking if the money came through. But it never did. I finally called my manager who said, 'What the fuck do you think you're doing? You're going to ruin everything. Everyone is counting on you staying in rehab; you're not going to have a record to come back to if you don't. Put the cab driver on.'

"Apparently, my manager had told everyone not to wire me the money. So he said to the driver, 'Look lady, there is no Western Union money coming, and he's not going to be able to pay you. The only way that you're gonna get your meter is if you take him back to where you picked him up.'

"And she did. It was narly having to walk back into rehab. I felt like an outlaw, like the Indian who threw the furniture through the window in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I had to go through detox all over again. Then I got the flu. It was terrible. But today has been a really good day. My dad came to visit me, I had yoga class and it seemed like there's a chance I just might make it through this."