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Traci took a long slow look around. “I’ll be right back,” she said in her pouty little voice. “I forgot something in my car.”

“Yeah, cool,” I said. “Then we’ll take off.” I was high, and not particularly aware of time passing, but I soon realized that she’d been gone far too long to ever be coming back.

I was this lone guitar player with a snake, just doing my thing, shooting my scene.

MY NEXT HOME WAS A HOUSE IZZY AND I rented up in the Hollywood Hills, and that lasted for about a month. It was partially furnished with all the basics that one might need—beds, a microwave, all of it. We had fun while we were there and I also managed to write a lot; I wrote “Coma,” and the two of us wrote “Locomotive” in that house; there was some creativity going on.

Adam Day shacked up with us as well. He is the guitar tech that has been with me for nineteen years. Adam moved in and, as much as our professional relationship has thrived since, that was the last time he ever tried to live in close proximity to me.

Around then we shot the videos for the Lies album, which was topping the charts, along with Appetite . We shot the “Patience” video in two places; one was the Record Plant, where we had actually recorded the songs; that is where we shot the footage of us playing live. The rest of it—the various band member scenes—were done at the Ambassador Hotel, where Bobby Kennedy was shot. At the time it was closed to the public but open for movie and video shoots.

I had two snakes that had been given to me when I had my apartment on Larrabee: one was a six-foot red-tailed boa constrictor named Pandora that was a gift from Lisa Flynt, Larry’s daughter. The other was a nine-foot female Burmese python named Adrianna. Both of them lived in my bedroom closet and both were in the video. I had just moved them to the new house and I remember that the day of the video I sent Adam to get them and he came back completely freaked out—and without the snakes.

“Um, yeah, well, I tried to get them,” he said nervously. “But they are out of the cage, loose, and on your bed.” So I had to go back to the house to fetch them—no one else would.

I remember that day pretty well; I was just starting to become one of those junkie musicians that assumes that what they’re doing is so commonplace and accepted that they almost do it out in the open. I showed up at that shoot, breezed by all of the lighting and camera guys who’d been huddled around all day preparing for this scene, and locked myself in the bathroom. I was now that guitar player whose reputation preceded him and I lived up to it: I stayed in there for eight minutes, then came out loaded and lay in bed with my boa around me. I didn’t do much as they shot what they needed. I don’t think I said a word to anyone. It must have been surreal; it wasn’t the sixties anymore; it was actually the end of the eighties. In the sixties musicians traveled with their entourage and did shit like that. I was this lone guitar player with a snake, just doing my thing, shooting my scene.

AFTER RENTING FOR A WHILE, I DID what anyone with new money should do: I bought a house like my business manager told me to do. I still had no clue as to my future or how to handle finances; I had no material aspirations at all. I didn’t spend much on anything at that point; money was still an abstract concept to me. Possessions had never mattered to me, though suddenly everyone around me began to be very concerned with them.

I found a house off Laurel Canyon, which was the area of L.A. that set my mind at ease: it reminded me of the best memories I have of my youth. I bought my first house on Walnut Drive, just off Kirkwood, which is just off Laurel Canyon, and it was forever known as the Walnut House. Incidentally, Walnut Drive was just off the street where Steven fucked the thirty-year-old at Alexis’s party so many years before.

The Walnut House was a two-bedroom, funky little tucked-away pad in need of interior design, so it seemed natural to me to hire the team that had styled the “Patience” video to transform my new house into a similarly gypsylike environment. They found all of the furniture at thrift stores and antique furniture shops, and while they got it all together, I moved in with our international publicist, Arlette. She had been hired on back when we played those first three English dates at the Marquee. She’d taken a maternal shine to me, probably because I was such a stray puppy at the time. She let me bring my snake Clyde over, who’d been living with Del James for a while, as well as Pandora and Adrianna. Actually I moved a bunch of other snakes in there, too, into the living room of her two-bedroom apartment off Cynthia and San Vincente in West Hollywood, where Arlette still lives. She was incredibly generous to let me bring all of my pets there; unfortunately, she also had to deal with my rampant heroin habit: every single night one shady character or another came around back and knocked on my window… her window, technically. I knew she wasn’t a huge fan of my reptiles, but she was less a fan of me staying up all night, shooting dope, and having undesireables stop by in the wee hours of the morning.

A funny thing happened with the snakes, though. Arlette was scared of them at first but she became, with no encouragement from me, a true snake freak. I eventually gave her a baby Burmese python that grew to fifteen feet long. They became great friends: she took him swimming with her, she’d take baths with him, and she talked to him like he was a dog. She was convinced that the snake was human and understood everything she said, and I must say that he acted like it.

Arlette was very concerned for my welfare when I lived with her and she pointed out the obvious: I had transformed myself from a happy-go-lucky alcoholic into a fiendish monster junkie who bore no resemblance to the guy she’d known all those years. I knew she was right; I knew I didn’t look all that healthy and I didn’t feel all that healthy. I stayed with her for three or four months but I did little to change.

Instead, I occupied myself with the redesign of my house. It was turned into the gypsy opium den I wanted: they refinished all of the molding and wood, and painted every room in dark colors. The kitchen was a deep forest green; my favorite drug bathroom was entirely black. Another room was painted midnight blue and the living room was deep purple. There was a sepia tone to another room, as if it were out of an old Western movie. I also bought myself my first car to go with my first house: it was a Honda CRX, and like every car I’ve ever had, it was black inside and out.

I was pretty out of control at the time. I remember showing up to meet the contractor to talk about redoing my bathroom and thinking that breaking out a few lines would be a good way to break the ice.

He and I stood in the bathroom as he walked me through the work that needed to be done.

“Yeah, yeah, cool, man,” I said. I slapped down the toilet-seat cover and cut out four thick lines of coke. “You want one?”

He looked pretty uneasy. “No, no thanks. I’m on the job,” he said.

“Okay, right, that’s cool,” I said. “I’ll do yours, then.”

“It’s not just that, it’s also eight o’clock in the morning,” he said smiling apologetically.

At that moment I was every single nightmare cliché of what that guy had ever heard about rock stars, rolled into one: even more so because he had been hired to turn my extra bathroom and its huge corner Jacuzzi into a massive snake terrarium that took up a quarter of the room. He was going to build glass walls from the floor to the skylight to enclose the tub, which was elevated, plus add a set of Plexiglas stairs so that you could see my pets wherever they might be. I couldn’t wait to fill it with trees and all the other shit that snakes like. In the Walnut House I kept about ninety snakes and reptiles: I had lizards, caimans, all kinds of animals.