It's So Easy: And Other Lies (2 page)

August 2010

DJ Morty is standing behind a table in the backyard. The anemic last rays of a late-afternoon California sun stream over the adobe roof tiles of the single-story house I share with my wife, Susan, and our two girls, Grace and Mae. In front of the DJ table is a small patch of polished wood planking—a portable dancefloor we rented along with a few little tables and chairs.

Morty scans the tracks on his laptop, fiddles with his MP3 console, and double-checks the cords connecting it all to the amp and speakers. He’s getting ready for the party. I’ve met Morty a few times at other events around town; I often end up feeling like the middle-aged dork at hipster shindigs, and sometimes the most comfortable thing to do is chat about music with the DJ.

Today, though, as the afternoon fades to evening in Los Angeles, I’m even more out of place than usual. Or at least less welcome. Grace is turning thirteen today and we’re throwing a party. Grace has already told me and her mom to stay completely invisible. Her exact words: “You’re
not
invited.”

Ah, the joys of parenthood.

Still, Susan and I are going all out for the party. Birthdays at this age are a big deal. I remember when turning eighteen was considered a milestone, but even at that age my celebration had been limited to a few good friends and family members. Partly it’s to do with socio-economic differences between my childhood and my children’s. These days we live in a far more affluent area than the one where I grew up. When you can afford more, you do more, and the kids in a neighborhood like this develop a set of expectations. So in addition to the DJ, there’s a photo booth and a henna tattoo station.

Another reason we’ve gone all out is that we suspect this could be the last time Grace, the older of our two girls, will want to celebrate at home. Oh well.

Planning this party was bewildering at times. When I called the photo-booth rental company, the first question they asked me was, “What will the theme of the photo paper be?”

Huh?

“Yeah, the machine spits out strips—four little passport style photos on each strip. You can have writing along the side.”

I got up to speed fast. The strips of passport photos will read
Grace’s 13th Birthday Party.

Now the day of the party has arrived and I’m making sure everything is ready. The woman at the henna tattoo table has her book of patterns set out and is comfortably settled into a chair. I take her a glass of water. I hungrily eye the food table, where the makings of a delicious Mexican feast are being laid out. The caterer is even dredging up tortillas, made from scratch, out of a kettle of oil. There’s also an ice-cream bar. I love ice cream. This is going to be a kick-ass party.

DJ Morty puts on Prince’s “Controversy” and cranks the amp up to party volume. I yell to Susan. When she joins me in the backyard, I drag her out onto the little dancefloor and start to shimmy. Little known fact about the original members of Guns N’ Roses: we dance. Everyone knows Axl’s serpentine slither, of course. Far fewer people know that Slash is also a world-class Russian crouch-down-and-kick-your-legs-out dancer. And me, well …

“Dad!” Grace yells.

I stop in the middle of a move and turn to look at her.

“People are going to start arriving any minute!”

She’s mortified. Already.

Yes, yes, yes, I can deal with this. She’s just growing up.

As Grace’s friends start to show up, Grace again makes it clear that she has forbidden us from coming out to the backyard during the party. Apparently parents are an embarrassment at this age. Whatever. Peeking out the back door as the party gets into gear, I see little packs of boys and girls hanging out, smiling, and laughing shyly. Some of these kids are starting to look like adults—one of the boys is almost my height.

An hour or so later I’m thinking I should
really
take a glass of water to the guy running the photo booth and see how things are going for the henna tattoo artist and make sure everyone is behaving. I’m responsible for these kids, after all. Hell, the DJ is a friend of mine, so I have to visit a little bit with him. And, well, the food looks really good, too, and I should probably get a plate for Susan. And while I’m at it, might as well get one for myself.

I’m not snooping, I tell myself as I push open the back door and step out. By no means. I am just being a responsible dad. Yep.

Should I go for ice cream now, or come back for it later?

As I round a blind corner of the house I stop cold, stunned: a boy and a girl are kissing.

Oh shit.

I freeze, not sure what to say or do.

I wasn’t expecting
this.

My mind rushes through a checklist I didn’t even realize I had in my head. It’s a checklist of things I was doing at this same age—and it doubles as a checklist of things that as a parent I do not want a group of kids in my charge doing in my backyard.

Are they boozing?

No.

Smoking pot?

No.

Dropping acid?

No.

I started smoking pot at a really young age: fourth grade, to be exact. I took my first drink in the fifth grade and tasted LSD for the first time in sixth grade when I was offered blotter acid by an eighth grader on my way to Eckstein Middle School in Seattle. In the Northwest, mushrooms grew everywhere—on parking strips and in people’s backyards and just about everywhere else—and I soon learned which ones got you high. By the seventh grade, I was an expert at distinguishing liberty-cap mushrooms from all the ones that didn’t get you high. I first snorted coke in seventh grade, too. I also tried codeine, quaaludes, and Valium in middle school. There wasn’t a huge stigma attached to child drug use in the 1970s, and there weren’t warnings blaring everywhere about the dangers.

Then I got into music. The early punk-rock movement in Seattle was pretty minuscule, so we all knew one another and played in one another’s bands. I was only fourteen when I started playing drums, bass, and guitar in various bands, and I went on tour with the Fastbacks at a time when other kids in my class were eating cotton candy and dreaming of the day they’d be old enough to get their driver’s licenses. I continued to drink a ton of beer and to experiment with LSD, mushrooms, and coke.

Are these kids taking mushrooms?

No.

Cocaine?

No.

Then, sometime in 1982, as the music scene became bigger and a recession hit Seattle, we all noticed a huge influx of heroin and pills. Addiction suddenly skyrocketed within my circle of friends, and death by overdose became almost commonplace. I witnessed my first overdose when I was eighteen. I saw the first love of my life wither away because of smack and one of my bands implode because of it. By the time I was twenty-three, two of my best friends had died from heroin overdoses.

Heroin?

No.

Thank God.

These kids aren’t doing drugs or drinking. No telltale scents or dilated pupils out here.

My mind races on to other activities I had gotten into by Grace’s age.

My best friends and I started hot-wiring cars in middle school. Car theft led to breaking and entering. I remember breaking into a church one night in hopes of getting some microphones for my band. My liquid courage at that age had no conscience. When I couldn’t find any microphones, I swiped the Communion chalices to use as pimp cups for my cocktails. That crime made the papers.

Any of these kids stealing cars?

No.

I saw all these kids arrive. Their parents dropped them off. None of them arrived on their own.

Oh, God, what about…?

I was introduced to sex in ninth grade. The girl was older—I was playing music among an older set of people. The thing about that first time, though, is that I got the clap. Of course, I couldn’t just stroll up to my mom at thirteen and announce that I had something wrong with my penis. Luckily for me, somebody in this older group of friends steered me to a free clinic run by Catholic nuns. The experience was not cool at all. Nope. It scared the hell out of me. Still, after a three-day dose of low-grade antibiotics, I was gonorrhea-free.

But these kids are not having sex. In fact, these kids’ hands aren’t even wandering. No, these kids are just kissing.

Sex?

No.

This reverie—the run through my mental checklist—takes less than five seconds, but the boy and girl have stopped kissing and are now standing there frozen, their shoulders pulled awkwardly up toward their necks as if to withstand the bluster they expect to come their way.

I take a deep breath.

“Sorry,” I say.

I nod and quickly retreat back into the house.

PART ONE

KNOCKIN’ ON HEAVEN’S DOOR

CHAPTER ONE

I’ve known a lot of junkies. Many of these addicts have either died or continue to live a pitiful existence to this day. With many of these same people, I personally witnessed a wonderful lust for life as we played music together as kids and looked toward the future. Of course, no one sets out to be a junkie or an alcoholic.

Some people can experiment in their youth and move on. Others cannot.

When Guns N’ Roses began to break into the public consciousness, I was known as a
big
drinker. In 1988, MTV aired a concert in which Axl introduced me—as usual—as Duff “the King of Beers” McKagan. Soon after this, a production company working on a new animated series called me to ask if they could use the name “Duff” for a brand of beer in the show. I laughed and said of course, no problem. The whole thing sounded like a low-rent art project or something—I mean, who made cartoons for adults? Little did I know that the show would become
The Simpsons
and that within a few years I would start to see Duff beer glasses and gear everywhere we toured.

Still, given what I’d seen, a reputation for drinking didn’t seem like a big deal. But by the time Guns N’ Roses spent twenty-eight months from 1991 to 1993 touring the
Use Your Illusion
albums, my intake had reached epic proportions. For the round-the-world
Illusion
tour, Guns leased a private plane. It wasn’t an executive jet; it was a full-on 727 we leased from MGM casino, with lounges and individual bedroom suites for the band members. Slash and I christened the plane on our maiden journey by smoking crack together. Before the wheels had left the ground. (Not something I recommend, incidentally—the smell gets into everything.) I don’t even remember playing Czechoslovakia; we played a stadium show in one of the most beautiful cities in East Europe not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the only way I knew I’d even been in the country was because of the stamp I found in my passport.

It wasn’t clear anymore whether or not I would be one of those who could experiment in his youth and move on.