It's So Easy: And Other Lies (33 page)

I believed that. The mental work had started as soon as I saw my mom in her wheelchair forced to tend to me, to worry about me—anxious she might have to grieve for me. I was done. Now that I had been granted this reprieve, it was time to turn my shit around.

When I got to my house, my yellow lab, Chloe, was waiting faithfully at the front door, just as she always had been whenever I came home between tour legs. I had brought her with me when I flew up from L.A. and Andy had taken care of her while I was in the hospital. Chloe seemed to sense my fragility; she stuck close to me at all times and nuzzled me even more than usual.

Thanks to the Librium, it had been a kind withdrawal from alcohol—at least while I was in the hospital. They juiced me pretty good in there. When they sent me home, they gave me a two-week supply of Librium pills. And there was a prescription—you know, take two pills six times a day, then two pills five times a day, and so forth, with the number of pills diminishing each day.

That was my first challenge. But I did it; I did exactly what the prescription said. Still, I was shaking all the time. During the first few weeks, I shook so badly from alcohol withdrawal that I was afraid to drive my car. I was sure I would crash it. I found an old steel mountain bike in my garage and started riding that instead.

One of the first things I did was to go to the grocery store to buy food. It was a novel idea at the time—it had been years since I really shopped for food. Now here I was, thirty years old, an adult with a credit card, a checkbook, and an ATM card. I could buy whatever I wanted in the store, but I had no idea where to start. I thought everyone was staring at me—I was sure my shaking was freakishly visible. It had also been so long since I had been anywhere sober that I didn’t know how to act or how to deal. It was like being on LSD. The lights in the store were glaringly bright and I could swear the music was playing hidden messages. I grabbed some milk, barbecue sauce, and cigarettes, and that was all.

I looked at the girl at the cash register.

“I give you this money, right?”

My shirt was drenched in sweat and I was having a full-blown panic attack.

She nodded nervously, barely able to disguise her disgust. She gingerly took the money from my hand, trying to avoid actually touching me.

Something I failed to realize was that simply functioning in life again was going to be my biggest hurdle. I guess I always thought that avoiding bars and drug dealers and cravings would be the biggest impediments to sober progress. Yes, those things would be a challenge, but first I had to figure out things like what time to go to bed and what to do with my waking time.
How do I talk to someone on the phone now? Who do I call? Should I tell people that I’m sober? Should I just go away somewhere and disappear? How are people going to view me after a crisis like this? What the fuck should I do?

Those questions reverberated until the fragile web of my existence shook. How was I going to play music again? Could I do it sober? Guns N’ Roses was a shambles, and the dynamic inside the band—if you could even call it that—had changed. Was there anything there to salvage, and if so, could I do it in a completely new and unfamiliar state of mind?

Initially I rode my heavy old mountain bike just to stave off the shakes, but I quickly realized riding made me feel better. And it was something to fill the time. Those first few days I just rode around aimlessly and only realized I’d been out for a long time when darkness gathered. Without ever thinking about it, I soon found myself riding around for eight hours a day—slowly, in flat areas, but all day long.

My muscles ached each morning. I hadn’t exercised for years. But the soreness lifted my spirit. Not spirit as in mood, but my actual spirit—my body was so wrecked from abuse that my spirit was the only thing keeping me afloat, all I had left.

After about a week of long flat rides, I began to challenge myself on the bike. Seattle is hilly and I had no trouble finding steeper and steeper climbs to test my endurance and my tolerance for pain. These increasingly hard rides came to represent a form of self-flagellation, a way to punish myself for all the damage I had done to myself and others. I could feel this healthy new kind of pain searing every muscle fiber and neuron in my body. I was on fucking fire—and I liked it.

As the weeks passed, my endurance started to increase and my mind started to clear. It was like I hadn’t been alive for a long, long time. I was smelling the grass and trees for the first time in years. Smell is the strongest sense we have, and my long-dormant olfactory system was triggering memories that I had thought lost. The whiff of newsprint reminded me of riding in the backseat of my sister Joan’s car, delivering newspapers along my paper route one morning in middle school when she saved me from doing it on my bike in the rain.

The smell of Lake Washington evoked memories of swimming and fishing with my brother Matt. Rain on fresh-cut lawns took me back to practices when, from ages eight to fourteen, I played pee-wee football. Our team always had the smallest players in the city league, and our coaches compensated by putting a premium on physical conditioning. The hope was to run other teams into the ground. The practice field adjoined a steep hillside. Anytime someone screwed up a block or jumped offside, we would instantly hear our coaches say: “To the hill, gentlemen!” This was the cue to run wind sprints up and down the muddy incline. It was intense and I got sick frequently, but we weren’t allowed to stop to throw up—we just kept running. The coaching staff always said such suffering built character.

Like that, biking for entire days hurt but also felt somehow positive—as if the aches might represent a moral victory of some sort. And for the first time in years, I thought I might actually have a chance at survival. I started to feel
human.
My kidneys no longer ached when I urinated, and my stomach hungered for actual nourishment.

Eddy came over to my house with a book on nutrition, outlining a diet suited to the reduced capabilities of my body’s digestive system in the wake of the damage to my pancreas—lots of fish and greens. He told me he had decided to go on the diet with me.

Those first few weeks out of the hospital were probably the most important in my entire life. People say things happen for a reason, and if I hadn’t been shaking so badly, I probably would never have hauled that rusty bike out of my garage. And if I had never straddled that old frame and cranked those creaky pedals, I might never have held it together in those early days—I simply had no idea what else to do.

Of course, I was still in a band that was trying to make a new record. At some point, I would have to return to Los Angeles and that thought terrified me. The only hope I had was to get a mountain bike down there. It would be the first thing I did, I told myself.

Not long after I got out of the hospital, Axl came up to Seattle to visit me. He was the only member of the band who had called me in the hospital, though McBob and Adam Day from the crew also called. I think from afar it must have sounded to Slash like just another brush with the line—and besides, he was dealing with an addiction of his own. Not that anyone owed me a call in a situation that was of my own making, but Axl’s concern still touched me.

Axl and I talked about Guns. The challenge was to figure out how we were going to make a new record and what direction we were going to go musically. Obviously the trust and understanding within our band—the sense that we had one another to rely on like a family—had been tainted, perhaps irrevocably. A lot of wedges had been driven between us. Looking back now, it is all so fucking clear. But at the time I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that people we were paying to facilitate the business side of our band seemed willing to exacerbate all the personal problems among the people who made up the band—that they could be so selfish and moneygrubbing and shortsighted.

Now, however, I was doing sober things with Axl, riding bikes and eating healthy food, and, once he returned to L.A., talking with him on the phone about productive musical directions. Maybe he, too, had changed. Maybe there was something to salvage in Guns N’ Roses. Axl and I decided we should regroup and start writing the next album.

Fucking hell, I really have to go back down to L.A.

How was I to avoid my old ways in the city where I had almost killed myself? How would I keep the drug dealers from stopping by my house? Or all the friends I partied with?

Fucking hell.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

When I got down to L.A. in June 1994, I was five weeks sober. Before even going up to my house I stopped at the Bike Shack, a cycle shop in Studio City. One of the first things I noticed in the shop was a sign-up sheet for a long-distance cross-country mountain-bike race in Big Bear, California. The race would take place in seven weeks. There was a beginners category. I had never entered a race or done any sort of individual sport before. I found the thought of it a bit daunting and alien, but what the fuck? I was on my bike all the time and every day. I might as well train for an event. I figured someone at the bike shop could give me some tips. Besides, if I entered this race, it would give me a concrete reason to stay sober until a certain date—a goal.

I registered for the race.

I had never felt so alone, yet now I also felt strangely invigorated. Next I picked out a new mountain bike. Though I had been using an old no-name steel bike, I decided to splurge on what I thought was a pretty nice bike—a Diamondback. After all, this was my thing now and I wanted a good bike.

I knew I had a lot to deal with. For one thing, I had to cut it off with my wife, Linda. She was not understanding about the situation. How could I have expected her to be? Our relationship was based on getting fucked up together.

Aside from my dog, I was very much alone in Los Angeles, as I felt it prudent to throw out my black address book filled to the brim with the names and phone numbers of people I partied with—and who would probably like to keep on partying. No one likes to drink or drug alone. A fence encircled my house, and I kept the front gate shut. I didn’t drive Laurel Canyon anymore. I took different roads so I didn’t have to pass my dealer’s house and all my party buddies’ places. People tried to come around sometimes, people from the past, but word got around that I wasn’t going back to that world. For the most part, it turned out, addicts were pretty respectful—
oh, he’s gotten out of the game.

I had no program, no Alcoholics Anonymous, no community around me. I had Eddy, who was sober, but he was in Seattle. Izzy was sober, too, but I’m sure he still had doubts—
is Duff really sober?
Ed and I continued to talk almost daily on the phone. He gave me tips on things to eat and on books to read—things to feed my mind. He flew down and stayed with me as I went through the initial divorce papers and struggled with the realization that I was a two-time loser in the marriage department. He helped me to understand that my idealized vision of love could never have been attained in the fucked-up state I had just come out of.

With the Big Bear bike race on the horizon, I spent a chunk of every day riding hard on the steep hills near my house. On one of my first rides, I went through Fryman Park, intending to cut through it to familiar trails in Wilacre Park, farther down the slope. But I ran across a trailhead in Fryman Park I’d never noticed and took it. As I rode up one section, something caught my eye in a gulch next to the trail.
What the fuck is that?
I stopped the bike and peered over the edge for a better look. Below sat a grotesquely misshapen heap of metal—the wreck of an old car. It turned out this was the point directly below Dead Man’s Curve. I had found my trail of choice.

Mornings I was still panic-ridden. I felt myself gasping for air after what seemed like an eternity dunked underneath a thick green film of pond muck. I was sober, but thirsty. My mind had almost atrophied from lack of stimulation. Now that my life had taken a turn for the better, I felt that I needed to read. I wanted to experience the things I had missed out on, all of the books high schoolers were required to read. It’s not as if I was nostalgic for the days of high school, but I was curious. F. Scott Fitzgerald? Shakespeare? Melville? Where do I start? Fiction, nonfiction?

Someone gave me the Ken Burns Civil War documentary on VHS. I would go to my bedroom early each night, around nine, and pop in one of those videotapes. I was enthralled. I could not get enough. So I started to read books about the war. Then other wars. I went from the Civil War to the First World War to the Second, back to the Revolution, forward to Vietnam.

When I happened upon a book by Ernest Hemingway set during the Spanish Civil War, it dawned on me that I had yet to delve into my initial plan: to plow through some of that required reading. For me, that book,
For Whom the Bell Tolls,
was the one that suddenly unlocked the world of literature. Hemingway’s descriptions blew me away. They were sparse but beautiful. When he wrote of hunger or pain, I felt sudden pangs of soreness and dread. And when one of his characters talked about alcohol addiction, I cringed: “Of all men the drunkard is the foulest. The thief when he is not stealing is like another. The extortioner does not practice in the home. The murderer when he is at home can wash his hands. But the drunkard stinks and vomits in his own bed and dissolves his organs in alcohol.”