Read Online Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis - Free Book Online Page B

joyful time in the family, and we had a real nice little unit going on with Steve and Julie and my mom and the new baby and Ashley, the dog. As well as bonding with Jenny, I spent some quality time with Steve. He was always so supportive of whatever I did.
    When I returned to Emerson for the second half of ninth grade, a sea change had taken place. When I left, I was the king of the campus in the misfit-outcast realm. But when I came back, it was Tony Who? There were new kids who were in charge now, and some of them had whiskers. (I was miles away from having a single whisker.) So I developed a new identity. I was going to become an actor, mainly because that was what my dad was doing.
    Spider had always had an interest in acting. By now he was getting tired of life as the Lord of the Sunset Strip. He was fed up with selling drugs and the constant barrage of people invading the house at all hours of the night. So when Lee Strasberg opened a branch of his institute in Los Angeles, Pops decided to enroll. He’d come home after class all excited about Method acting and sense memory recall and all these new concepts. It all seemed quite a craft to get your head around.
    As part of his decision to start in a new direction, my dad cut off his long hair. Overnight, he reinvented himself with a distinctive, slicked-back film noir ’30s gangster look. Within days, I was sitting in a barber chair asking for a ’30s gangster haircut. By this time, all of the other kids were starting to catch up to me, and long hair was no longer a real sign of rebellion and individuality, so I got the haircut and baffled all my schoolmates with this new look. When my dad started wearing double-breasted pin-striped suits with black-and-white spectator shoes and nice white button-down shirts with fancy ties, the first thing I did was go out and get an identical outfit made up. Now it was time for me to enroll in acting school. I took children’s classes with a woman named Diane Hull, and they were wonderful. We were taught that there was more to acting than merely pretending: You really had to get yourself into the headspace of the character you were playing.
    After a few months of studying, my dad dropped a bombshell on me. He was going to legally change his name from John Kiedis to Blackie Dammett. For his new last name, he had combined the first and last names of one of his favorite authors, Dashiell Hammett. “What do you want your stage name to be?” he asked me. In one more gesture of solidarity with my dad, I said, “Well, it’s got to be something Dammett, because I’m your son.” So Cole Dammett was born. Get it? Cole, son of Blackie.
    From that day on, he was known only as Blackie, both professionally and personally. No John, no Jack, no Spider. But I had the two separate identities going. There was no way I was shaking Tony at school. And my family wasn’t about to start calling me Cole. But Blackie did. He called me Cole more often than not, because he always stayed in character.
    With our stage names set, it was time to get agents. He found an agent to represent him, and then he got a recommendation for a child actor’s agent for me. Her name was Toni Kelman, and she was the hottest child agent in all of Hollywood. By the time I signed, I had already been cast in a movie. Roger Corman was doing a triple-R-rated version of Love American Style called Jokes My Folks Never Told Me . It was the quintessential ’70s flick with beautiful naked women throughout. The director had gone to UCLA with my dad, and he came over to visit one day. I answered the door.
    “I’m here to see your dad,” he said cordially.
    I didn’t know this guy, and I certainly didn’t know his relationship to Blackie, so I summoned myself up to my five-foot-something height and hissed, “Well, who are you?”
    What I was saying with my body language was “I’ll kick your ass if you try to come in my house, even though I’m just a kid.” He was so