It's So Easy: And Other Lies (38 page)

Of course, a few years earlier I had witnessed how Iggy could still flip a switch in the studio or onstage even after he got sober—he blew me away with his ability to reach that special place with no substances at all. And Steve Jones was sober now. Matt Sorum and John Taylor, too, so I would be in good company. I decided to go to a few rehearsals. Before I knew it, gig night had arrived and there was a line stretching down the block of Sunset Boulevard in front of the Viper Room.

This was June 1995, and back then the tinfoil-lined Viper Room was Hollywood central, filled with all of the hippest and most judgmental people on the planet. Fortunately the crowd that night also included Cully, Adam Day, and McBob. But still.

Can I do this?

I couldn’t shake the feeling that people were just going to be staring at me. Could I get out of myself without some sort of inebriant to help me? If I had learned nothing else during my career to that point, I did know that if I was too self-aware, I was going to suck. And if that was going to be a nightly occurrence, then I might as well just give it up. But I wanted to try, despite my fear.

It all came down to that old dilemma: fight or flight.

As we got near the little stage, something suddenly took over. I felt that anger. That healthy rage. I wanted to attack the gig, the people there, myself.

The show itself was a bit of a blur—which was good. But I still wasn’t confident about my performance. Sure, I knew I had played the notes correctly. But I didn’t know whether I had been any good. As soon as I could, I went out to find Cully.

“Dude, how’d I do?” I asked him.

“What? How’d you
do
? Are you
kidding
? You guys killed it.”

He looked at me and I could tell what he was thinking:
We’ve made it back.
Cully and I often seemed to know what the other was thinking, so I’m pretty sure he heard me silently add:
Together.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

At the time of that Viper Room show, I had been out of the public eye for more than a year and no one really knew anything about how I had been spending my time. My life was super-private as I recovered and trained. I guess I never noticed that I’d undergone drastic physical changes. Of course, Axl, my doctor, and my brothers and sisters and mom had noticed the changes and made encouraging comments. But I wasn’t prepared for the response following that first concert at the Viper Room.

Matt Sorum called me the day after the show.

“The rumor is you got liposuction and a face-lift!”

“What? No way!”

“Yep, that’s what everyone is saying.”

The extent to which my path diverged from the typical Hollywood path was never so clear as it was through those rumors. Actually, I took them as a compliment.

Another thing happened that night that hadn’t happened in my life for a while: I interacted with women. Some of them even showed interest in me, even went out of their way to make it easy for me to talk to them, I could tell. But I looked at everything differently now and wasn’t quite ready for any of that. I still had more work to do. Besides, what would I do with a drunk girl or someone who was a scenester or club kid? I really had absolutely nothing in common with these people. My life was all about literature, martial arts, healthy food, and mountain biking. I was a stone-cold nerd. I was only in Los Angeles because I was still trying to work with GN’R. The nightlife ethic there was something I now saw as shallow.

I went home alone that night.

Now that I knew I’d be able to continue to play music, it rekindled an incredibly strong urge to do it right away. I looked forward to a string of gigs Matt had lined up in September and October of 1995. I really liked the guys in the band, too—Steve Jones even started mountain biking with me.

The Viper Room was jammed with beautiful women every time we played. John Taylor proved to be a total chick magnet. After a while I thought maybe I was ready to try again. The first girl I started hanging out with was also sober. She started talking a lot about “the program.” At first I had no idea what she meant, though it was clear that I was supposed to know. Turned out she meant AA.

“I don’t know about that stuff,” I told her.

She started leaving clothes at my house. I would gather them up and put them in a pile.
No, no, no, be honest.
After a few weeks, I took the clothes back to her.

“I’m still trying to figure everything out,” I said. “But one thing I do know is that I’m not ready for a girlfriend.”

My old friend West Arkeen started to call me more often around this time, too. He had struggled with crack and heroin addiction since the day I met him in Hollywood back in 1985. For many years I felt helpless to do anything to straighten him up—despite pleas from his various girlfriends, I was just too fucked up myself to possibly play a role in addressing other people’s addictions. I realized in retrospect just how bad off he must have been if people around him had called me, of all people. Of all people! I was constantly putting myself in harm’s way to get hold of drugs and drinking myself toward organ failure, and compared to West I had my shit together. Really? Wow.

As I talked to him now, it seemed as if West was serious about cleaning up, and I felt that I also now knew some things that might help him—even if I didn’t yet feel equipped to help anyone with sobriety myself. So I invited him to join me down at the dojo. One of the teachers at the House of Champions, Sensei Anthony—a world-champion
eskrima
stick fighter from Australia—took a particular interest in West’s case and soon agreed to train him. Anthony seemed undaunted by all the scarring on West’s body from needle marks and abscesses. Anthony studied up on the ins and outs of drug withdrawal. It was a war; Anthony took it upon himself to help West fight it. West proved a dedicated student and poured himself into his training. After a few months, I figured West was out of the woods. I figured he had found what he needed in martial arts, just as I had.

But drugs and addiction always lingered in the shadows and crept up on you if you failed to look them off. The moment you think that you have a little breathing room is the exact moment you need to redouble your vigilance. I already knew this to be true for me. Soon I found out it was the case for my friend Eddy, as well. Ed had slowly slipped back into his old ways and I was too far away in L.A. to see it. He went all the way in and found himself hanging in very dark places. Luckily Andy got wind of what was happening and called me. We set up a drug rehab for Eddy. Then we both called him. He agreed to go into rehab that night.

If I was going to avoid those pitfalls, I was going to have to further steel myself mentally. The only way I knew how to do that was to push myself even further physically. I started sparring as often as I could alongside my workouts and bike rides.

Despite all the training at bobbing and weaving, when I climbed into the ring I often forgot everything as soon as I took a blow to the head. That was the biggest shock—getting punched or kicked in the head, especially in the nose.

I’d hear someone yelling in my corner and recognize the words:

“Bob! Jab!”

But it just didn’t sink in. When I got hit I tensed up and shut down.

When I wasn’t mentally focused, my head got treated like a punching bag, bobbing back and forth as I took blow after blow. But once I got used to it, it became no different than being punched in the shoulder. I was able to relax despite taking a shot to the head. Soon I found taking a good punch in the face oddly satisfying.

Pain is good.

Then I began to actually
like
getting hit in the head. Or kicked in the head. Anything. I started taking shots I saw coming and could have parried.

Pain feels good.

Benny snapped at me when he realized I was taking unnecessary blows.

“I didn’t train you to be that guy. The impact is what we try to avoid. Start playing chess, not checkers. This is a chess game.
Life
is a chess game.”

I had to learn to distinguish between good pain and bad pain. Of course, what I was experiencing when I threw up in the gym was different from the pain in my sinuses as coke had burned away my septum. But the ache from getting hit was not the same as the ache from hard work either. Let
good
pain float away.
Honest
pain.

Never move back in a straight line.

Never set.

Redirect.

Fight your opponent as he fights you.

Place your opponent where you want him.

One day Sensei Benny told me I was ready to get in the ring again.

“It’s your time,” he said.

I trusted Sensei Benny with my life by now, and so when he said I was ready, then ready I was. I didn’t blink.

I don’t know if Petey “Sugarfoot” Cunningham remembers the three rounds we went inside the ropes, but I sure do. Petey was the world middleweight champion at the time and was tuning up for a title defense. I was just another sparring partner, mere fodder. But I was fast.

Petey was faster. Much, much faster.

In my first round with him, I knew I was watching a showman at his best. He was known for his high kicks to the head and his lightning-fast axe kicks to the shoulders. I had fairly solid defenses now for anything around my head, but the axe kicks happened so fast that pretty much every one of them landed. By the end of the second round, and all through the third, my arms were useless. My shoulders had taken a beating the likes of which I’d never felt before. But I did not get knocked out—or even knocked down. I did not panic or get flustered. I knew my sensei had put me in there to learn and to prove once and for all that I would and could protect myself.

When the final bell rang and we were finished, Petey came up to me and said, “You can go home and tell your friends you lasted three rounds with the world champion!”

I am not sure whether he was bragging about himself or surprised that I had hung in there. It didn’t matter.

I went to see a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert with Axl not long afterward. When I left after the gig, two dudes started shouting at me:

“Fucking faggot! Short-haired faggot!”

In the old days, that sort of thing would ring in my ears, and if I walked away I’d feel like a pussy. Two years earlier I would have been like, “Fuck you, I’ll fuck you up.” Now I had a hard time picturing why I would have been offended. If someone thinks you’re gay or is dumb enough to think that calling you gay is an insult, who cares? And if someone is ignorant enough to say it in public, they’re probably just drunk. I just laughed to myself as I kept walking. It didn’t matter at all.

Benny had talked to me about the confidence to walk away. I had also seen guys from the dojo who I knew could literally kill someone just walk away and smile when someone tried to antagonize them. What was it to them?

Having that same sort of reaction now to the two guys yelling at me confirmed that Benny’s lessons were indeed sinking in: I had gone to my mental safe house and realized I didn’t need a sword. Confidence was a weapon.

All this fight training, it turned out, was designed to enable me
not
to fight.

PART SIX