Running With Monsters: A Memoir by Bob Forrest

tacos and burritos on the sly to struggling musicians and local down-and-outers.
    Now here I was in Jimmy’s pad about to take my first taste of heroin. I had conned him and convinced him I was a regular user of the stuff. Not strung out, but well versed in the mysteries of the medicine. I was excited and maybe a little scared, without a clue about what to expect. This is it, I thought. This is your first step into something deep, Bob . I watched him perform the arcane voodoo ritual of shooting up. I was fascinated as he carefully measured out a dose into a bent spoon like some nineteenth-century backwoods apothecary, added some water, and then cooked it over the flame of one of those sputtering candles on the table. When he determined it was ready, he sucked up the solution into a syringe through a wadded-up piece of wet cotton. I watched him tie off his left arm with a cord, find a ripe and juicy vein, and slide the needle in. He pushed down the plunger. Silence.
    Jimmy let the rush wash over him, then focused. “You sure you’ve done this before?” he asked suspiciously.
    “Fuck yeah, man,” I lied a little too eagerly.
    “You got a point?” was his next question.
    My naïveté showed. I was lost. A point? A point about what?
    Before I could answer, Jimmy said, “Here,” and took my arm, tied me off, and gave me a shot from his own rig.
    This was something. A window opened. A wave flooded in and I felt like I was sinking deeper into the underwater world of Jimmy’s pad. Street noises filtered in from a million miles away. I tamped down a slight flurry of panic and briefly felt nauseous, but that passed as I rode the wave and quickly found my sea legs.
    I’d never felt so fucking great in all my life. This stuff was something I definitely needed to explore more deeply. I became part of a little clique of intravenous drug users. It was a small circle. Don Bolles from the Germs; Top Jimmy, of course; and a dealer named Earache. I lived at the La Leyenda Apartments, which rose like a dirty, skewed Spanish Art Deco iceberg from the concrete sea of Whitley Avenue. My habit began to grow from that first taste, although I ignored all the warning signs. Lori left me after one too many fuckups. I didn’t really care. My interests were becoming narrowed down to three things: dope, drink, and music.
    One day, as I made my daily neighborhood rounds, I ran into Flea—the kid who had flipped my records while I DJ’ed—and his friend Anthony Kiedis. I knew Flea as the bass player from Fear, and I loved that band. I didn’t really know Anthony except from seeing him around at the clubs. “What’s going on, man?” I asked.
    “We’re starting a new band,” said Flea.
    “It’s a whole new thing,” said Anthony. “Punk and rap all mixed up together. Totally unique and new.” They called themselves the Red Hot Chili Peppers and they said they had a gig that night at a place called the Kit-Kat Club.
    “You should come see the show, Bob,” said Flea.
    I was always up for new music, so I went and was knocked out by what I heard. I’d had no idea how good they were. It was mind-boggling. They were right. What they had developed was completely different, a hybrid sound. It was energetic and crazy, and they had charisma. I could see they were onto something.
    After the show, I caught up with them. “That was awesome! Where are you guys going now?”
    “We need to find a place to stay,” said Anthony.
    “Yeah, we’ve been couch surfing,” said Flea.
    “I got you covered,” I told them. “My wife left. I have room. Come stay at my place.”
    They moved in that night, although I don’t know if you could technically call it a move since they arrived with not much more than the clothes on their backs. They had been living as close to homeless as it’s possible to be without actually living in an alley. I was a little concerned about how they might react to my drug use and drinking, but I saw right away that they