It's So Easy: And Other Lies (34 page)

I went straight from there into
The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, Green Hills of Africa,
and
The Old Man and the Sea.
Hemingway’s writing woke me to the rhythms that could make a phrase or paragraph dance or saunter. I read his poems. I read his short stories. I plowed through two huge Hemingway biographies—even though one was unreadable.

In my new and lonely world of desert-island sobriety, I was at last connecting with something. If I was not yet finding my place in the world, I was at least finding places and ideas and people I could relate to, despise, or aspire to in these great books. As I moved on to other writers, working my way through literary classics alongside my steady stream of nonfiction, the authors also gave me confidence to use my own voice when speaking and to use intelligent words, as opposed to a raised voice that had really only masked fear—fear of how to deal with uncomfortable or incomprehensible situations.

The space between the covers of these books became my place of solitude. Reading continues to represent a meditative haven for me to this day. At the end of every day, whether on tour or at home with my family, I always take time alone at night to read. It has become a time to arm myself for trials to come. And with Guns N’ Roses in 1994, there were definitely trials to come—and soon.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

As the weeks leading up to the bike race passed, I cleaned up my house and bought real food at the grocery store. I had to throw out a lot of my clothing and bedding—my broken body had left bloodstains every-where.

Truck, my former bodyguard, came over one day to check in on me, and I was in the middle of doing laundry.

He opened the dryer.

“You know you have to clean out the lint trap, right?” he said.

I smiled. I knew that by now. I appreciated the fact that he was trying to look out for me.

I went to bed early every night and woke up at the crack of dawn. I read Gavan Daws’s
Prisoners of the Japanese
and pondered my solitary life. Though it was only two months earlier that I had landed on this deserted isle, it now seemed like a whole other lifetime ago. I was alone for the first time in a long time—except for Chloe padding around the house—and the isolation felt wholesome. It was not the type of isolation I had felt when my band was on top of the world and I was in a fishbowl, gasping for a breath of fresh air and praying for a friend to pick up the phone.
Please pick up, Mom—God, I hope you’re home. Please pick up, Andy or Eddy or Brian or Matt or Joan or Claudia or Carol or Jon.
That kind of isolation made it seem logical for me to give the keys to my house to a drug dealer so that someone would be there when I came home on breaks from the tour. That kind of isolation made me invite entire clubs of derelict partiers up to my house at closing time. That kind of isolation made me start suicide notes countless times, only to stop because I couldn’t do that to my mom. At least not in such a direct way.

No, I was alone by choice now, and I was dead set on starting a new life for myself based on solid ground. I was in uncharted territory and had no idea how to do what I wanted to do. I trained hard, drank plenty of water, and watched the booze weight fall off me. I lost fifty pounds in the first three months following my acute pancreatitis. I prayed to my training hills and found deep faith in the physical suffering of the present and the mental suffering of the past.

The race had come to represent much more than a nineteen-mile bike ride. Making it through the race would mean I had successfully navigated the first stage of a totally different course, too—one out of a previous life and into another, one out of despair and into hope. Preparing for the race at Big Bear was a fight for survival and sanity and maybe, just maybe, a chance to overcome. The nineteen mile markers of the race would collectively represent the first mile marker in my sobriety.

Meanwhile Guns was trying to happen. If the band was going to work for me, it was going to have to work with me sober. We booked a rehearsal place. The first day Axl didn’t show up. The next Slash failed to show. After a week of that, I stopped going down there unless one of them called me to say he was actually walking out of his house.

Slash was beyond the heavy nodding, but he was still using heroin. Still, that posed no immediate problem for me. When I saw him ducking out to fix, I wasn’t thinking,
Oh, that looks good.

Axl had demonstrated a lot of compassion over the years—and especially in the wake of my pancreatitis. That’s what also drove me crazy. He knew that I’d changed my life around, that I got up early and went to bed early, that I was doing whatever I could to stay alive. And yet, right at this point he made a big switch and became a night person.

One night he showed up at the rehearsal studio as I was packing up to leave.

“Sorry, man, but I have to go,” I told him.

“What do you mean you have to go?”

“Dude, it’s four a.m., and I’ve been here all fucking night. I’ve got to get home.”

“Fuck that, man!”

What made dealing with Axl maddening was the fact that he and I were also in agreement on a lot of things. One of the points of contention between Slash and Axl was a batch of songs Slash brought to the table. Axl thought it was Southern rock—not Guns N’ Roses material. I backed Axl.

Slash and I started trying to write new stuff with other guitar players added to the mix. This was the first time we’d written without Izzy to bounce ideas off of and to bring ideas of his own.

Zakk Wylde, who played with Ozzy Osbourne on and off for years, brought energy and enthusiasm that was lacking within Guns at the time.

“We can build on the legacy,” he said excitedly. “We can make something great. Listen to this.”

He saw a piano against the wall and sat down and elegantly played it. I had no idea he could play piano at all, much less like this. We recorded a few demos with him, but nothing panned out.

Then Axl wanted to bring in a guy named Paul Huge.

“You want to bring in your old buddy from Indiana?” Slash said incredulously.

“Look, he’ll just jam with us and maybe it’ll work out,” Axl said.

“No,” both Slash and I said.

“Yes,” said Axl.

This wasn’t some wedding band you could just bring friends into. If I wasn’t going to bend for the sake of one of my best friends—Slash, and his Southern-rock songs—I sure as hell wasn’t going to let a stranger come in and fuck around with Guns.

“Fine,” Axl said. “How’s this: you guys try him out on your own, give him a few days.”

We let him come in. Gave him a couple of days. It was hopeless.

We told Axl.

“Fuck you guys,” he said.

That was pretty much it for Slash. After that he concentrated on his solo band, Slash’s Snakepit, and eventually released a record under that name early the next year.

I started to get calls from our manager, Doug, and from Ed Rosenblatt, the president of Geffen Records, pleading with me to somehow get the band back into the studio. I suppose in their eyes they finally had a sober and clearheaded member of the band who could somehow pull everything together. But Jesus, I was only just sober, and if they knew how fragile my sobriety was at that point, maybe they would never have called. I still didn’t know if I would stay sober for the rest of my life.

Sure, I could say I was done. But I still had urges. The urge to grab a bottle of vodka and take the edge off when these motherfuckers called me, for instance.
Goddamn it, I can’t have a glass of wine to take the edge off?
Maybe
urge
is the wrong word. Perhaps it was more a sense of disappointment: disappointment that I had used up all my chits.
Really, fucking never?

Then again, maybe they would have called even if they thought it might imperil my sobriety. If anyone entrusted with the care of the band had actually given a fuck about the health of any of us, Guns would have been pulled off the road and put into therapy years ago. This was not lost on me as the phone calls became more and more frequent. These trusted professionals were after the gold and I was only a means to an end. They could all go fuck themselves.
Hey, band manager, why don’t you stick your neck out and actually manage the fucking band instead of worrying if you’ll get fired for saying what needs to be said? There will be no band to manage if you keep on being a pussy and passing the buck!

If I was going to “save” my band, it would be for us, not for them. We had already made a lot of money—and I had reached the seemingly unattainable dream of making a living from playing music. But for the people calling me now, their lone concern was making
even more
money, regardless of how. Money hadn’t been my motivation to get into music in the first place, and money wasn’t now going to motivate me to get dragged back into a situation that I hadn’t yet figured out how to fix—or even whether I wanted to
try
to fix.

Besides, I had a bike race to ride.

CHAPTER FORTY

From my days up at Lake Arrowhead, I knew altitude adjustment could take a couple of days. The Big Bear race course started at 7,000 feet and climbed to 8,500 feet. I found a bed-and-breakfast up on Big Bear Mountain and stayed there for a few nights prior to the race.

Slash’s guitar tech, Adam Day, had started riding with me in the run-up to the race, and on race day he showed up to cheer me on, a sign of friendship I will never forget. As I took my bike off the rack on the back of my truck, I had to laugh at myself. I suddenly realized just what a neophyte I was. Of the thousands of people I saw getting ready, I was the only one wearing high-top sneakers, cutoffs, and a backward baseball cap. Everyone else had on proper bike shorts, click-in riding shoes, and aerodynamic crash helmets. The bikes themselves were slick, light racing machines made of titanium or carbon fiber with front and back shocks. My Diamondback had no suspension whatsoever. I looked like a hick. My teeth started to chatter audibly. Oh well. I had trained for this and I was not going to back down now. I consoled myself with how far I had come in such a short time.

When the starting gun blasted, a mad rush of bikes crushed me, knocking me over, and I scrambled to get back on my bike and back into the race. The first part of the course climbed a brutally steep incline. This was my zone. Hill climbs were my chosen place to suffer; suffering was my gateway to serenity. I dug in and started my climb, my race. I was soon passing the guys who had knocked me down in their fancy costumes on their fancy bikes. I rode and I climbed and I passed even more riders.

My mind cleared and I even started to enjoy the scenery. I realized I was lucky to be here. The race was becoming fun and relaxing, and after fifteen miles, I had spaces of open fire road all to myself and could spot the finish line a few miles down the mountain.

I smelled the baked earth and aromatic shrubs. The sun-saturated air itself seemed to have a scent. Maybe the stifled feeling of being inside a fishbowl had been only partly imposed from without—maybe all along part of my disconnect from the full spectrum of life had been the result of my dulled senses. Now I heard birds screech, dried leaves rustle, pebbles skid out from under my tires. And even though my pulse was racing with the exertion, the pounding in my chest didn’t fill me with dread and paranoia the way it had when my whole being seemed to shudder sickeningly with every frenetic beat of a coke-fueled heart.

The course veered from the crest of the ridge, and as the last few downhill miles clicked away, I realized I would finish this race. There is no way I can express how exultant I was at that moment. I knew my life was truly in my own hands, that I could dictate its course, and that whatever crazy way I had figured this thing out without the help of a treatment center or rehab, it was working—for now. I finished the race in fifty-ninth place out of the three hundred riders in the beginner class. A fucking miracle.

Once I finished the race, I milled around at the stands set up to cater to riders and spectators. Bike manufacturers had brought in their sponsored pros to man their displays. People could get autographs. But I didn’t know who the pros were.