It's So Easy: And Other Lies (41 page)

Still, when it came to leaving the band, it wasn’t about Axl. I just had new challenges on my mind.

Unfortunately for both me and Axl, more than a decade passed before we ever spoke a single word again. It’s sad, but the history of GN’R is so fraught with barbs and accusatory hand grenades that complete separation seemed to be the one and only answer for a while—for such a long while, in fact, that it seemed we might never meet again. I was just too damn exhausted from living on a razor’s edge for so many years. I didn’t regret the choice I made, but I eventually did wish we could still have been friends and have gotten together once in a while.

Susan and I went to see our doctor when she was two weeks overdue. He said he was going to make us an appointment to go into the hospital the following morning so they could induce labor.

Whoa!

Okay. We’ll just go home, pack some things, and get a good night’s sleep before we go and have our child the next morning. Yeah, right. We packed our stuff just fine, but the sleep part did not happen. We were way too excited. And ridiculously nervous.

When doctors induce labor, they introduce a drug called Pitocin into the mother’s bloodstream. Of course, they have to use the right amount at the right time to get the best results. In Susan’s case, however, they must have used too much because she went into sudden, acute labor.

Okay.

Shit, no doctor yet? No epidural? No spinal block?

Time to practice what we had worked on for the past few months: the meditation.

“Just look into my eyes, babe,” I said, “and stay with me.”

Easy for me to say.

Susan showed me through fifteen excruciating hours of labor that she owned the warrior spirit of ten men. She powered through all that pain and confusion. I know she was more scared than she had ever been in her life, but she never quit and never cried.

And then it happened.

Our daughter.

My
daughter.

My baby girl.

I have a baby girl?

I have a baby girl!

We named her Grace.

Now life made sense. This was why I had survived my pancreatitis.

This was why I had survived my waterskiing accident. I was here to be the father of a baby girl, and I was, at last, ready for it.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

Susan and I basked in parenthood. I learned to swaddle Grace, and I came to relish soothing her on my shoulder during those cool autumn nights in our quiet new surroundings.

Our dog, Chloe, had not only settled into the new house but had quickly made a new bed right underneath Grace’s crib. Just as she had gone everywhere with Susan while she was pregnant, Chloe now stuck close to the baby all the time. As Grace grew into a toddler, Chloe would gently play ball with her. It was astounding to watch them interact.

I decided to take another course at Santa Monica Community College—an intro-level business class. My decision to continue to take classes thrilled my mom, whom I was talking with even more now that Susan and I had a baby. Mom and I had excited discussions about the possibility of my going to college—not for a course or two, but for a degree. Her Parkinson’s disease greatly limited her physically, but her mind remained smart as a whip. My uncle John had told me many times that my mom was the smartest kid in the family, and that in another era she would have gone off to college and become a doctor or lawyer herself.

Thank God I didn’t have much work to do just then, because school ate all my nonbaby time. I didn’t know how to use Word or Excel. I had to learn rudimentary computer skills on the side. And I still didn’t know what the fuck I was doing at the most basic level. I would read everything, I would write down way too much, and I would take notes on all the wrong things in class. I didn’t know how to filter through my notes to get what I needed. I would go to the library and wouldn’t know what to look for. When I went back over texts I had read, practically every sentence was highlighted. I knew the material when a test came, but it was overkill. It would take me literally ten times the amount of time to prepare as the other students.

I had to relearn the learning process. I kept at it even when I felt I wasn’t getting any better at studying. I knew I could do it. And the process of formal education sparked me. Suddenly the world of finance became a fascinating, living thing for me. Again I got an A. And I immediately signed up for another class—introductory economics.

By early 1998, I began to record music again, too. I poured myself into it, working every day. Despite my departure from Guns, our old label, Geffen, remained supportive of my solo career.

“We’re backing you, Duff,” I was told at a meeting with Geffen staff. “This album will be our top priority for the first quarter of 1999.”

Despite my songwriting and recording, my latest class, and my workouts, Susan and I managed to find time to constantly shuttle back and forth between L.A. and Seattle—it was great to be able to share Grace’s first year with my mom. During my teenage years, my relationship with my mother had really blossomed when I quit taking drugs after my first panic attack. We had sat down over tea together nearly every day back then, and I had been able to come clean to her about some of the things I’d gotten into—like stealing cars—while struggling to find my way. It had been like that since my pancreatitis, too, and now, in 1998, we were becoming even closer as I learned to be a parent. I wanted to be around Mom as much as possible.

I was also beginning to think I really did want to attend a proper university. By the middle of 1998, I had completed three different business classes with a 4.0 GPA. I figured any school would most certainly see that I was a genius, right? Shit, with those grades I thought Yale and Harvard would fling open their doors.

Then I remembered: there was a grand old university situated atop Capitol Hill in Seattle, the school my uncle John had attended, Seattle University. When I was very young and still doing well in school, my mom would have liked nothing better than for me to have followed her brother to Seattle U.

A plan was starting to take shape in my mind.

By fall, I had an entire album done, which Geffen planned to release as
Beautiful Disease
on my birthday, February 5, 1999. An index of some lyrical themes explored on the songs:

Number of lines about getting kicked in the head: 2

Number of veiled references to GN’R breakup: 2

Number of drug deaths mentioned: 2

Number of songs about a person whose drug habit imperils his or her ability to parent: 1

By the end of 1998, promotional copies of
Beautiful Disease
had been sent out to magazines and the press campaign was in full swing. I ducked into Tower Records one afternoon and saw my album on their big list of upcoming releases. Cool. I formed a band in anticipation of touring the record. This group became the first incarnation of Loaded, the band that’s been a constant in my life ever since.

For most of the press interviews, I would go to the Geffen office and talk on the phone with writers planning to cover the album. One day in December, I headed over to the office for another round of phone interviews. When I walked in, everyone was in hysterics, crying.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“We were just bought. There are going to be mass layoffs.”

A few days later, I went to the office again—this time to meet with an executive of the new corporate entity. I was ushered into a conference room. He came in and shook my hand.

“Here’s the story,” said the exec. “I’m going on a ski vacation and I’m going to listen to all the upcoming releases with my kids. We’ll decide whether they have a future with the label or not. When I come back I’ll let everyone know. I’ll have each artist into my office to tell them personally where they stand.”

I never heard what his fucking kids thought of my record. In fact, I never heard from the guy again. On my birthday—the day of the album’s supposed release—an intern from the label called and left a message on my answering machine to say it wouldn’t be released that day or any other day.

I subsequently offered to buy the album back from the label so I could release it some other way. After all, I had put a lot of work into it and was proud of the results. I said I would pay all the recording costs—about $80,000. They said no, sorry, we will only sell it at a profit. You can have it back for $250,000. Otherwise we’ll just keep it in the vault.

Fuck this,
I thought.

This was just another test, another challenge.

Rise above.

I rented a van and Loaded did its first-ever tour, punk-rock style, playing the songs from the unreleased album up and down the West Coast for a few weeks. I wanted to stay in motion rather than sitting around and stewing over the severing of this last tie to the past.

That tour reminded me of one of the reasons punk was so great: the interaction with the audience. The fans weren’t in Row 600. They weren’t behind a barricade. They were right in front of our faces. Obviously, if they were at our show, we shared musical interests; the sweaty intimacy of these hastily organized, small gigs amplified that feeling of camaraderie.

Still, once I was back in L.A., I began to think.

Fuck this business.

Fuck this whole fucking town.

You’ve been itching to go back to school. So let’s fucking do it.

I pictured myself up at Seattle University, following in Uncle John’s footsteps. I pictured my family living in our place on Lake Washington, far away from L.A.’s bullshit. I pictured being able to visit Mom every day.

We were already shuttling back and forth to Seattle constantly. I asked Susan what she would think about moving there full-time. We started talking about marriage, too. It felt like the right time, so I proposed to her. We started to plan an August wedding. We sold the place in Malibu. And along with our toddler and an aging yellow lab, the soon-to-be Mr. and Mrs. McKagan moved to Seattle.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Those first few months in Seattle in 1999 were an exciting time. Grace had just passed eighteen months and was building up a vocabulary. I started counting the words she used and quickly hit one hundred. We saw my mom nearly every day. Together with Mom and my uncle John—my mom’s brother, a doctor, and sober since the early 1980s—I tried to figure out what I wanted to study when I started at Seattle U—which now felt like an inevitability. Finally I decided on my goal: the undergraduate business program at Seattle University’s Albers School of Business and Economics.

Then one afternoon in April 1999, I was driving to my mom’s place with Susan and Grace. We had just stopped to pick up some lunch for her at Taco Time. My phone rang.

Mom had died.

What? I just spoke to her this morning! This can’t be!

Mom had been battling Parkinson’s for a long time, but the doctors thought she had a lot of life ahead of her. Anyone who has lost a parent knows the huge and bottomless hole left yawning in the lives of the children. For a while at first, it was tough to curb some habits—I would instantly reach for the phone to call her every time Grace used a new word, for instance.
Mom, guess what Grace just said …

My mother’s death had a huge impact on me. Her sage advice and calm demeanor helped not only me but dozens of my friends—and even kids who were random strangers to me. I’ll never forget coming home on various occasions after I’d left the family house to find bedraggled punk kids sitting with my mom, talking over a cup of tea about whatever was eating at them. That sort of generosity of spirit was important for me. Always had been, and I hoped it always would be.

Her well-lived life informed and influenced all that I did in my own life, and I’d been striving to hew closer to her ideals as I’d put my life back together in recent years. While I was devastated, I could at least take consolation in the fact that she’d witnessed my determination to start a new life, to form a family, and to get an education.