It's So Easy: And Other Lies (32 page)

“Yeah, I know, Doug. And that’s why we have to—”

“No, you’re not getting it. I manage Guns N’ Roses.”

“Are you trying to tell me you manage the
name
Guns N’ Roses?”

I was still a member of the band. Not a paid hand. Slash and I still had the same equity stake as before. We had just relinquished control of the name.

Doug looked at me with no expression.

“You manage the guy who owns the name Guns N’ Roses—is that where you’re going, Doug?”

He shrugged. That
was
where he was going.

I was apoplectic with rage. I couldn’t even speak.

We boarded the plane.

Only five more shows in Europe. Five. More. Shows.

You can make it.

After twenty-six months, the final concerts of the
Use Your Illusion
tour appeared on the horizon. We had tacked on two shows in Argentina at the end of the European leg, and then it was over. Just two more flights to go now: Paris to Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires to L.A. The finish line had come to seem like a tangible, physical threshold—I could practically see it out the window of the plane as we floated toward Argentina in mid-July 1993, for those last two shows.

By this point, the members of the band had long since stopped showing up for sound check, so the crew would play our instruments, test the equipment, and set levels without us. For this, the crew had assembled a shadow band and even developed a signature tune: “Crack Pipe” by an Atlanta act called the Coolies. The song was from an album called
Doug,
a spoof rock-opera about a skinhead who bashes a gay chef, steals his cookbook, and becomes rich and famous. Of course, there’s a downfall—it was an opera, after all—and “Crack Pipe” came during that last section.

On the night of the very last show, three hours elapsed after the opening band finished. No Axl.

Please, can’t this end without any more people fucking getting hurt?

Please.

Audiences in South America tended to throw a lot of rocks, and with no sign of GN’R, things were getting ugly. Our production manager gathered the guys who formed the crew band.

“Get up there,” he said. “You’re playing.”

A huge scream went up from the audience as the crew band jogged out to their places and the entire stage set sprang to life. The band launched into a tune. The lights pulsed. Then the jumbotron video screens lit up and showed McBob and the rest of the guys rocking to “Crack Pipe.”

Suddenly 50,000 people started shouting what must have been obscenities.

Then Axl arrived. There would be no riot.

When we finally took the stage for that last show in Argentina, I peered out at the crowd.

This could be it.

Remember this moment, remember this scene, this stadium, these fans.

We limped back to L.A. and quickly went our separate ways. Back into our private lairs to lick our wounds. Except me. For me it was straight off to rehearsals. Geffen had released
Believe in Me
while Guns were still in Europe, and now I was off on my first solo tour.

That’s when Axl called me, telling me I was crazy to go back out.

“It’s what I do, Axl.”

Besides, I wasn’t going to sit still.

Keep moving, keep moving.

After the incident a few months before with my coke dealer and his pregnant wife, I had quit coke. For the most part that had stuck so far. It would be easier to stick with it on the road. I just had too many drug connections in L.A., and my life there was intertwined with coke.
Keep moving.

The tour started with three showcase appearances in clubs in L.A., San Francisco, and New York. And it started badly. I had switched from vodka to wine, but immediately found myself drinking about a case a day. Wine, wine, wine. And blood.

Blood in San Francisco when my wife, Linda, got into a scrap backstage and traded punches with another woman until teeth started rattling to the floor. Blood in New York as fistfights broke out in the audience. Then we flew to Europe to join the Scorpions’ tour. A fistfight broke out between a couple band members in an airport. Blood. Our lead guitar player pulled a knife on the bus driver in England. Talk of more blood. Blood, blood, blood. And wine. I often had to travel alone to get to the next town early to do publicity. I showed up at a record signing in Sweden swilling wine from the bottle. Got skewered in the local press for that—a lot of young kids in line for autographs.

We played some inspired shows, but there were also times when I shouldn’t have been up there playing, times when I let it go too far and my performance suffered. There I was in huge venues, playing with my own band, under my own name, not bringing my A-game.

What’s your excuse now?

At the end of that leg, I needed another guitar player. Couldn’t keep the guy who stabbed our driver. I called Paul Solger, my old bandmate from Ten Minute Warning back in Seattle. I hadn’t spoken to him in ten years. He was sober.
Want to tour with my band?
He said yes.

On to Japan we went. Bottles and bottles of wine each day. My innards burned.
Tums, I need Tums.
Sloppy onstage again.
What the fuck are you doing?

Home to LAX, a long, long commercial flight.
Oh, fuck.

We had a break before heading back across the Pacific for a tour of Australia.

I just can’t do this anymore.

I felt sick, really sick, the worst flu I’d ever had.

Are you going to be that guy—a quitter?

I picked up the phone and dialed the tour manager.

I’m out. I can’t do it anymore.

I was that guy now.

No tour, fine. But I needed to keep moving.

Seattle.

Seattle.

I have a house there. That’s where I’ll go.

March 31, 1994, at LAX, there was Kurt Cobain, looking as lost in the lonely, jagged maze of his mind as I was in mine. Then he was gone.
Man, I really wish I’d asked you to come over to my house that night when we landed. I’m sorry.

May 10, the paralyzing pain. The unbearable pain. The pain, the pain.

I’m going to die. Here. Alone.

Andy.

Please let him come upstairs. I don’t want to die alone.

Dr. Thomas.

Demerol. Nothing. Demerol. Nothing. Sheer panic.

Emergency room.

“Kill me.”

I begged over and over.

“Please, kill me. Just kill me. Kill me. Please.”

PART FIVE

A GOOD DAY TO DIE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

As I was pleading with the ER doctors to kill me, they brought in an ultrasound scanner so they could monitor my burst pancreas. My childhood doctor, Dr. Thomas, was in charge of assessing the ultrasound images they kept taking at regular intervals in preparation for emergency surgery.

Landing in the Northwest Hospital that day didn’t surprise me. In fact, the surprise was that I was alive at all in May of 1994. I had long thought I would die by the age of thirty—and I had just reached that milestone in February of that year.

You knew this was coming,
I thought.

All you ever wanted to do was leave your mark on the world.

Get in, get out.

You’ve done that.

I figured as part of Guns, I’d left a big mark.

What else do you have left to live for anyway?

Then Dr. Thomas suddenly said, “Hang on a minute.”

My pancreas had expanded and then burst. But now it was starting to contract again. Once the expansion stopped and the blood started to coagulate, they decided not to perform surgery after all. I just might be able to survive with my organ intact—no dialysis necessary. Instead of wheeling me down to an operating room, they continued to monitor me in an intensive care unit.

They put me on really high doses of morphine and Librium. At first I had buttons to push to self-administer them. For the first two days, it was constant. Pushing the button, pushing the button. Then, at some point on the third day, I realized,
Wow, I didn’t push the buttons as many times this hour.
By the sixth day, they took the buttons away from me—because I was a full-on junkie. They switched me to drip doses.

I started to have withdrawal from the morphine.

I’ll never forget when my mom came to the hospital to see me. She was in a wheelchair, from Parkinson’s disease. There I was, her youngest son, with a morphine drip in my left arm and a Librium drip in the other arm for the shakes from alcohol withdrawal.

I saw myself in the hospital bed with tubes in my body and her in the wheelchair.

The order isn’t right here—I should be taking care of her. It’s not right.

You’re a fuckup.

You’re a fuckup.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

The old adage about addiction is that the first thing you have to do is to admit you have a problem. In my case, I already knew I had a problem; the key for me was admitting how selfish I was being.
Look, you’re hurting your mom.

I didn’t know whether I would survive during those first few days in the hospital, but I felt strongly that if I did live, I would be prepared to change. When I was released from the hospital, Dr. Thomas asked me to come talk to him in a consultation room.

“I’ve arranged for you to enter a drug and alcohol rehab facility near Olympia,” he said. “We can transport you directly there.”

I thanked him for all his help.

“I think I can do it on my own,” I told him.

I saw the look in his eyes change. Instead of expressing a helpful glint, they now betrayed skepticism hardened by experience. Frustration crept into his tone.

“Duff, if you have one more drink you will die.”

I thanked him again. “Two weeks alone here in the hospital has done as much for me as any rehab could possibly do.”