It's So Easy: And Other Lies (23 page)

When the dust settled, Slash, Steven, and I sat down. The three of us agreed that enough was enough. We were out of there.

I felt used and foolish about going out to Chicago for so long and in the end getting dusted by Axl. Up to then I had not wavered in how I perceived us—as a band and a family and a gang. But this trip solidified some of the flimsy walls that had begun to go up between various parties in our unit. Sure, we were young, wild, and somewhat dumb, but this ill-conceived trip cast a dark cloud over the band—and additional clouds on the horizon were soon to render things darker still.

After the doomed stint in Chicago, I had to reexamine my steadfast belief in the band. The harsh reality was that the old us-against-the-world mentality had waned this year for sure. Steven was fully strung out and babbling incoherently much of the time. Slash had one foot out of the band as a result of feeling betrayed. Izzy had all but checked out. The techs, I soon found out, were secretly looking for other gigs. And to top it all off, we had an expensive bill to pay for the rehearsal space and apartments, the plane trips back and forth, and all the destruction Axl had inflicted on the apartments. We did have the songs that would make up the more meaty, up-tempo sections of the
Illusion
records. But the damage was done and all forward progress stopped for quite some time.

I did, however, have one epiphany in Chicago: cocaine was a nice supplement to my drinking. On cocaine, I could now drink twice as much as I had before. Fucking brilliant.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Back in L.A. we retreated to our houses. They provided privacy for each of us to pursue his own brand of debauchery. Though things with Mandy continued to get uglier and uglier after I returned home, I pulled back a bit from the extremes of Chicago. I rode a mountain bike here and there in a token effort to be healthy. I would take our dog Chloe for walks. I tried not to drink so much and rarely did coke or took pills.

I would hang out with Slash from time to time, but things were getting dark up there at his house in Laurel Canyon. One day he pulled out a stack of Polaroid pictures he had taken around his house.

“Duff, look at these,” he said. “It’s some of those Martian bugs I was telling you about. They’re infiltrating my house and watching me all the time.”

There was, of course, nothing on these Polaroids. But he kept flipping through the stack and pointing.

“See, there’s another one—right there, in the corner!”

Steven was careening off the deep end, too. He had bought a house just three blocks from mine and as a result I was able to check on him more often; what that amounted to in practical terms was watching helplessly as his crack and heroin use escalated. It got so bad, and he seemed so incapable of reining it in, that at one point I found out where his drug dealer lived and took a shotgun to the guy’s house. Fueled by booze, obviously. I waited for him, intending to threaten the fuck out of this dude to get him to stop supplying Stevie with the things that were going to kill him. It’s lucky this guy never showed up—lucky for him, of course, but also for me.

Then we got an offer to play four shows in October 1989 as the opening act for the Rolling Stones at the L.A. Coliseum. It was a huge shot in the arm for us at the time—though that’s probably a poor choice of idioms given the situation in the run-up to the shows.

Mick Jagger negotiated the terms of our gig himself and took care of all the details. We didn’t deal with a Stones lawyer or agent or somebody like that. We expected to, of course. Nope. It was Mick. We would say, We want this much per gig. And Mick would say, No, you’re going to get this much.

Despite the work we now needed to do to prepare for the Stones shows, Slash and Steven showed no sign of pulling out of their drug habits, and Izzy slipped back into heroin use, too. Sometimes those guys put their drug use in front of band practice. One or the other often showed up late or left early from rehearsal—if they showed up at all. But we never talked about the problem. We were never any good at communication, especially when that meant confrontation. If we could have developed those skills then, the story of GN’R might have been very different.

With the shows looming, the
Los Angeles Times
ran a big piece about us supposedly staking our claim in rock and dethroning the old guard. There is one thing no band can ever do, and that is dethrone the fucking Rolling Stones. That would have been true regardless of the state of our band. And I was very nervous about the state of our band going in to the shows. The
Times
article seemed a bad omen to me. Later in life, I would be more apt to listen to that first instinct when committing to various things, but come on, this was a chance to open for the world’s best.

By the time of the actual shows, everything melted into the background because I was so excited. My brother Matt put together the horn section again to play along with a few tunes. He was student-teaching. In the evenings before the shows, he came to the hotel where we were staying, got dressed, hung out in the hospitality room, and drove out to the Coliseum in one of the band’s vans to get ready to play to tens of thousands of people; he told us that during the day he saw kids with GN’R cut into their arms at his school. By this point, the magnitude of our success was weird not only for us, but for people around us as well.

The Stones were great hosts—they hooked all our guests up, and the whole scene was charged. I flew my mom down for the shows. While she was in town, she picked up on the problems between me and Mandy. It was dispiriting to have a relationship I had taken seriously, and had such high hopes for, unraveling—and particularly for that disappointment to take concrete form in front of my mom. But for the moment, Guns was playing with the Stones, a fact that could buoy me in the face of almost any personal setback. Guns was fucking playing with the Stones.

Prior to the first show, Mick Jagger came up to me during sound check. I had on my cowboy boots, as usual, and it was misty and drizzling.

He motioned to my boots and said, “You going to wear those tonight, mate?”

I shrugged and smiled. I wasn’t sure if he was making fun of me or what.

“You’re going to slip on our stage.”

This was the
Steel Wheels
tour, with an all-metal stage set.

“I’ve got some trainers,” he said. “What size do you wear?”

“Eleven,” I said.

“Me, too,” he said. “We must have the same size willy.”

Wow,
I thought,
Mick Jagger says we have same size willy, and he’s going to let me wear his sneakers.
Despite his kind offer, though, I didn’t wear them in the end: Mick was cool, but his spare sneakers, I’m afraid, were not.

As showtime approached, Axl wasn’t there and everyone—us, the Stones’ people—was sweating and frantic. But he made it at the last minute, the first concert went off without a hitch, and I didn’t slip on the metal stage. Sure, the guys were smacked out of their minds, but I had family and good friends around me, and I did not really pay much attention to what was going on with those guys backstage. I knew that we should have had a band sit-down before the gigs to get everything out on the table, but things had been moving too fast in the run-up to the shows.

Then came the second night.

Before we played our first note, Axl suddenly announced to the 80,000 people in attendance that “if certain people in Guns N’ Roses didn’t stop dancing with Mr. Brownstone,” this would be our last show.

The crowd became absolutely quiet. People in the audience looked at one another; they seemed as confused as we were. They really had no idea what Axl was talking about.

I shrank. I was so fucking embarrassed. And I was so fucking mad that Axl felt he could do this to me. I would have been supportive if he was sufficiently pissed off at certain guys to want to confront them for what was going on—I was with him, the situation was bad. But he needed to talk about that shit in private! Not out here. Never out here.

Once Axl took his concerns public, the times of being a gang—us against the world—were over. We played the rest of the show, but it was a halfhearted effort at best. Afterward, and really for the remainder of our career, we just went our separate ways. That night officially rang the bell for the end of an era in GN’R.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

We should have had a band meeting to talk things out after the Rolling Stones gigs. But we didn’t. I never even told Axl how upset I was. Other things came up, and when not putting out those fires we all just retreated back into our separate lives.

By the end of 1989, there was no longer any way around the fact that my marriage to Mandy was falling apart. Somehow, making our relationship legal had added a level of seriousness that neither of us foresaw. Before we’d gotten married, we never had arguments; we also never saw any reason to look deeper into long-term expectations. Neither of us cheated or lied to the other as things unraveled, but we were both sort of crestfallen that our passion for each other was somehow waning. She had started to take some things out on me, and I was in turn taking things out on her. I think we both hated ourselves for doing it, but it continued to happen. Mandy and I were both extremely young—I was twenty-five at this point—and naive and vodka-filled. It was a match made for friendship but in no way for marriage and children.

The problems in our relationship also seemed more real now that my mom had seen the full magnitude of them. With no more shows on the horizon and both of us constantly together in the house on Laurel Terrace, things came to a head.

Living down the street, Steven had the best vantage point on our relationship. He knew Mandy and I had sought marriage counseling, and he could see I was in a lot of pain even afterward. He was the one who finally confronted me about things—on Christmas Eve.

“Dude, if you don’t have her stuff out by tomorrow, I’m going to do it,” he told me. “That’ll be ugly. You don’t want me coming in there, because I will.”

He was right. It was over. I had to admit it. And I had to act. On Christmas Day, 1989, I gave Mandy the Halliburton luggage Aerosmith had given me and asked her to get out. I was adamant. And I was keeping the dog. Merry fucking Christmas.

I felt completely lost and heartbroken. I thought I had let my mom and family down. I thought I had been caught living a lie. Or rather,
lies,
those little lies you tell yourself to help make your life fit a more idealized image. Now they had all suddenly been laid bare. For me it all boiled down to one simple thing:
Just like my dad,
I thought—in whose footsteps I had tried so hard not to follow.

I was so depressed that McBob, my bass tech, quietly slipped into my house one day and removed my shotgun. He later told me he just didn’t want to leave it sitting around given the way I was acting. He stashed it inside one of my bass cases and left it in a band storage space.

A lot of people around me hoped that once the day-to-day pain of the marriage and its immediate aftermath faded, I would be able to pull back a little from my everyday vodka habit. But instead of straightening out, I kind of fell apart. My drinking had taken off as the marriage went sour. When Mandy left the house, I started to add more drugs to the mix.

My first drink of the day slipped forward, from about four in the afternoon to more like one. I also started to score larger amounts of cocaine so that I could drink more for longer periods of time. It proved a diabolical cocktail for me. Now I could drink until I finally had to sleep—and if you’re doing coke, you don’t have to sleep for up to four days in my case. Only then would I start to see trails. The only other time I slowed down was if someone I respected—like my brother Matt—would say, “Slow the fuck down.” I also found that Valium or codeine could help to bring me down when I finally needed to sleep after a multiday binge. In my mind I was simply using modern scientific methods to get me through a tough time, and I figured I would cut back on the drugs and booze at some stage when the heartbreak subsided.