It's So Easy: And Other Lies (37 page)

“We’ve never sat down and said, ‘Look what we did,’” I said. “I know we’re not the type of band to high-five or whatever, but we never even went out to dinner and just shook each other’s hands.”

“You know,” said Axl, “you’re right. But we still could.”

It took getting sober and contemplative about the whole situation, but now it struck me as sad that we hadn’t stood face-to-face and congratulated one another—alone, without management or minions around. At this point, it would have been just Axl, Slash, and me, but there would still have been value in doing it. It could have led to something else we needed to do: to take stock of where things stood, to take a step back and remember that despite the centrifugal forces driving us apart now, we had started the band as friends.

“We should never lose track of that fact,” I said.

Axl was definitely behind the idea, but I never set up any kind of meeting. Somehow it was already too late. This was right around the time the movie
Interview with the Vampire
came out, featuring a cover of the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” credited to Guns N’ Roses. Guitar work by Paul Huge, Axl’s childhood friend, had been added to the track and Slash was more furious now than ever.

There was something else keeping me from acting on it, too. My panic attacks had finally subsided, I was getting comfortable in my own skin, gaining confidence, becoming an adult; I had lost all that booze weight, was feeling good, feeling calm, feeling centered; I had been sober for a good chunk of time. I liked the person I had become. I had made it through—or so it seemed. It dawned on me that perhaps I had let people’s perceptions of me define who I was. In other words, I had believed the hype. I wasn’t Duff-the-king-of-beers anymore. So was I Duff–from–GN’R or Duff-the-punk-rock-guy anymore? I didn’t have to be. These definitions now seemed a bit adolescent. Maybe I was finally growing up, glad my turbulent teens and twenties were a thing of the past. And despite my protectiveness about Guns, it hit me: the band was no longer the most important thing to me.

I decided to spend a quiet New Year alone in Hawaii. I didn’t take my bike with me, but I wanted to continue to exercise. So I decided to go running. I headed out to the beach and started to run. At some point, I became aware of the padlock and chain—that I’d worn around my neck since Guns got signed—clanking against my chest.

Bam, bam, bam.

Damn, it was heavy.

Why did I wear this thing anyway? As a tribute to Sid Vicious? To carry his torch and safeguard punk? Was that how I needed to identify myself?

Bullshit.

I found a guy who was taking care of the lawn at the complex where I was staying.

“Hey, man, you have any bolt cutters?”

“Sure,” he said. He motioned for me to follow him.

He led me to a maintenance shed. He rummaged around inside and emerged with a set of bolt cutters.

“Can you cut this off?” I said, pulling at the chain around my neck.

He shrugged. With a quizzical look on his face, he grasped the chain between the blades of the bolt cutters. I craned my neck in the other direction and he snipped the chain in half with a forceful jerk of the handles.

I’d like to say I heaved it grandly into the Pacific and watched my former identity recede into the depths, but I didn’t. I threw it into the dumpster next to the maintenance shed, said thank you, and finished my run.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Back in L.A., the House of Champions was in constant motion with kickboxing pros getting ready for fights in the United States or abroad. Once they saw that I was dedicated to training and wasn’t some pampered rock star, they began to help me with my workouts with Benny. I started to do technique-only sparring with some of these guys and saw the speed at which I would be expected to compete. Okay, note taken.

Sensei Benny was like a father figure to me, and I never called him by anything but his title in or out of the gym. Not because he demanded it—in fact, he specifically told me I could address him less formally outside the dojo—but because I felt that strongly about his role in my life. He was a teacher; he deserved a different level of respect. I continue to this day to call him “sensei.” After a few months of one-on-one workouts with Benny, we started to work out together with another guy at the gym named Michael Morteo. Like Benny, Michael was strikingly calm. He had been a martial artist since age five. Michael, too, was a sensei; when he walked through the dojo, students turned and bowed to him out of respect. But Michael was my age and the longer we worked out together, the more I came to think of him as a friend. Even so, I rarely shared personal things with Michael, either—all he cared about was the work. Everything was about that day, that moment, that punch or kick.

Benny would sometimes have me and Michael spar in the room upstairs with one of my legs bound to one of Michael’s. I still had a strong fight-or-flight instinct at that time, but tied to my opponent I could not possibly run. So I had to fight, to deal with the challenge at hand. I got tired, I got hit, I wanted to fall over. Michael connected with some good punches—though this was technique sparring and the blows were not full strength or meant to hurt. Still, getting hit helped bring home the lessons I’d been trying to master. After taking a few smacks in the face, I found it easier to remember to keep my right hand up in a defensive position when not punching.

Sparring exposed any lack of focus; I got a lot of black eyes.

The shakier and more exhausted I was after these sessions, the better able I was to focus during my meditations afterward. With my mind still and clear after a throw-up-inducing workout, my mental safe house began to take shape. In my head, it was an actual house. The main room resembled the dojo, with one wall covered in full-length mirrors. I began to furnish the house with the things I thought I would need: a suit of armor, vials of cleansing potion, amphoras of pure water, and an arsenal of weapons—hey, life was tough, so, yes, there were swords in my safe house.

The hope, Benny said, was to reach a point where I would no longer need to be physically exhausted to find this place; I would be able to go there whenever necessary—like when I felt a panic attack coming on or when I had to deal with a threatening person or tense situation and felt somewhat unsafe.

Benny placed a lot of importance on honesty. “Start every day with a clear conscience,” he said. “You should be able to wake up, go to the mirror in your bathroom, look yourself right in the eye, and say, ‘I didn’t lie to anyone I encountered yesterday,’ ‘I didn’t skirt an issue yesterday.’ If you lead an honest life, there are no regrets.”

At first I would actually do that—look in the mirror. I started sleeping really well. Then, concentrating, deep inside my mental safe house, I began to raise my gaze and look myself in the eyes in that full-length mirror in my mind. Maybe getting so loaded all the time had just been a way to avoid dealing with unpleasant truths about myself, a way to flee the consequences of speaking and acting honestly, a way to dull the heavy burden of living with dishonesty?

I looked at myself in that mirror:
Consider yourself checked, McKagan.

“Today is a good day to die,” I heard Benny say.

Huh? I still didn’t get it.

The next big step for me would be fighting in the ring, which I had yet to do. Fighting represented the coming together of all the skills I had begun to develop—the physical, the technical, and the mental. I would have to connect my footwork to the other movements, and I would simultaneously have to play the chess match in my head—move my opponent, anticipate, deflect. And then, of course, there was the cardiovascular test of ring fighting. No matter how many reps you did on a bag, punching and kicking nonstop for a three-minute round in the ring was a completely different ball game.

Without warning, one day Benny took out two sets of headgear and put one on my head. I felt panicked in the headgear—my claustrophobia kicked in—and Benny saw it in my eyes. Or rather in the fact that my eyes were darting all over the place, looking away, looking down. He helped me calm down, concentrate, and work around it.

I also had to get it together because I now knew I was about to spar with someone in the ring—there was no other reason to wear headgear. I had seen people freak out after taking their first real punch in the ring. One huge guy had gone into shock and started weeping. A lot of emotions were released in the gym. I wasn’t sure what to expect from myself.

Sensei took out a jar of Vaseline and daubed some under my eyes. Then he did the same to his face. No. It couldn’t be. He was going to be my first sparring experience? The world champion? I recognized the look on his face from videos I’d seen of him in the ring.

As the bell rang to start the first round, all my technique vanished in a rush of fear and I started to swing wildly. I probably threw some of the worst kicks ever thrown in that dojo. A few minutes into the second round, I saw for an instant the back of my sensei’s head hanging in the air above me and I suddenly woke up on the ground with my head cradled in Benny’s arms.

I had been knocked out by a jump-spinning back kick to the liver. Apparently, a sudden shock to your organs can and will knock you out. This was Benny’s signature kick. An air strike. Like a fighter jet. Aha. Right. Benny
the Jet.

Sensei admonished me for not using my defense. I was still on the ground, still sort of waking up. He said that I should have parried the kick and thrown a counter.

“Yes, sensei.”

He asked me how I felt. To my own surprise, I was actually fine. Getting knocked out wasn’t so terrifying after all. It was like falling out of a chair onto a soft rug. No big deal.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

One year after my pancreatitis, I went back to see Dr. Thomas in Seattle for a physical. He just couldn’t believe my metamorphosis. Not only the changes in my outward physical appearance, but more important, in my organs and blood. He could see no discernible damage—except, of course, for the hole burned through my septum. At the end of the exam, he had a look of amazement on his face.

“To say I didn’t have much hope for you when you left here is an understatement,” said Dr. Thomas.

Hmm.

“I didn’t expect you to live more than six months,” he continued.

Don’t sugarcoat it or anything, Doc.
I guess alcoholics who reached the stage of acute pancreatitis didn’t often turn their lives around. I got the point. And it gave me a shot of adrenaline.

Perhaps more striking were the internal changes even Dr. Thomas couldn’t see—the changes in my mind.

I did have one question for Dr. Thomas, however.

“Why does my nose still run so long after I stopped snorting coke?”

“Quitting is just the beginning of the process,” he said. “Your body is still trying to slough it out.”

In other words, my body had become so accustomed to ridding my sinuses of foreign substances that it hadn’t turned off the spigot yet. And that would take much longer than I anticipated—much, much longer.

Soon after I returned to L.A., Cully got the heart-valve transplant he had been dreaming about when we first met. He took six days off from riding after the surgery, then started training for a return to professional racing. I went to his first race back on the World Cup circuit. Being back at this level of competition was a major triumph.

Then Matt Sorum called to see whether I’d be interested in playing rhythm guitar for a Monday-night show at the Viper Room with Steve Jones—the original Sex Pistols guitar player—and John Taylor of Duran Duran. It was tempting. Slash was out touring with Snakepit, so there wasn’t anything happening on the Guns front. And shit, Steve was a personal hero of mine. Still, it would be a big step for me because up to this point I had not played a live show sober. In fact, to the best of my knowledge I had never played sober in my entire life. I always took at least a couple of pulls off a bottle before a show, even at my earliest ones. The myth of being glamorously wasted for gigs was something I guess I had bought into from the beginning. All of my idols were that way, right? Keith Richards, Iggy Pop, Johnny Thunders—and Steve Jones, for that matter. I was terrified at the prospect of playing sober.