It's So Easy: And Other Lies (46 page)

When the tour ended I found myself doing a lot of thinking. In hindsight, I could see a number of missteps. But the key mistake was succumbing to a smug sort of complacency about my sobriety. I had overstepped self-assuredness. I had gotten to the point of thinking I was no longer an addict. Relapsing really woke me up.

I am a fucking addict and always will be.

In all the time I had been sober, I had never gone to a support group for alcoholics or to a rehab facility to find out about the biochemical side of addiction. I weighed the idea of trying rehab. I talked to Susan and to Benny. They both thought it would be useful.

Benny revealed that he, too, had faced a drug problem in the past. I had never known. He told me some other guys in the dojo had been through treatment programs, too. I had no idea.

Yes, confidence was knowing I could do anything. But, I realized, confidence must always be rooted in work. In sweat. In pain—
good
pain. And in honesty.

Right now that meant facing reality, and it meant taking advantage of a new level of self-awareness I might be able to get from rehab. I decided to check into a monthlong program. But before I cloistered myself away for a month at rehab, I flew up to Seattle to see Uncle John, who had been diagnosed with cancer and was not doing well.

“Stay sober, Duff,” he said.

Those would be the last words he ever said to me.

In the middle of the monthlong rehab program, Uncle John died. The administrators let me leave to fly up for his funeral—I think they figured it might help in my recovery. I think they also realized I would have just walked out if they had tried to hinder me.

Uncle John had the same knack that my mom had: he could make you feel like you were the most important person in the world. In the first years after Mom’s death, I had felt sorry for everyone else in the family, as I was sure that Uncle John spent an inordinate amount of time talking with me on the phone. I soon realized, though, that he made each of us feel that same way—and all told, there were about fifty or sixty of us by this point.

Remembrances of Uncle John had broad significance in his community in eastern Washington, as he had delivered 15,000 babies over the decades of his medical practice. But despite the crowds at the wake, my uncle once again seemed to be speaking directly to me—now through his eldest son, Tim, who read an Irish prayer John had picked out in advance for the occasion:

Life is not a journey to the grave

With the intention of arriving safely in a well-preserved body,

But rather to skid in sideways

Thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming:

“Wow, what a ride!”

PART EIGHT

YOU CAN’T PUT YOUR ARMS AROUND A MEMORY

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

When my daughter Grace was in the third grade, she came up to me one day and said, “Dad, how come you don’t drink wine when all of the other grown-ups do?”

This was a really good question. She had realized that when guests came over or when we all went out to dinner, other people—including Susan, of course—had drinks. People had asked me how I was going to tell my kids about my past drug and alcohol use. Grace’s question gave me an opportunity to tell her a little bit.

“Well, honey, that is a very good question and I am glad you asked. You see, I have an allergic reaction to that stuff. If I were to have just one glass, I would then have to have another. Two glasses would turn into four, and my allergy would make me want to drink all of the stuff that we have in the house. I would then have to go to the grocery store to buy everything that they had there, and I would drink all of that. I would probably start to get really crazy, and I wouldn’t be like your dad for a while.”

“Oh,” she said. “You’d better not have a glass of wine, then!”

“That is what I am thinking, too, honey.”

Back home in late 2005, I found that two little girls put a rather pink hue on my world. Three exclamations dominated our household:

“Cute!”

“OMG!”

“Awwww!”

I had given up my hopes of them becoming die-hard Mariners fans or backcountry hiking enthusiasts. And so far they showed no interest in the guitar. But I loved that they always seemed to need something from me, even if it was just a simple cuddle. Looking around, I realized I was living the life I had always dreamed of—the life I had given up on as unattainable while in the throes of addiction. Here I was, white picket fence and all. Well, okay, it was actually black wrought iron. But still.

The girls had been asking for a new dog for several years, and up to now Susan and I had always shaken our heads no. We decided the time might finally be right that Christmas. Still, we traveled a ton as a family, and split time between L.A. and Seattle. I had crated Chloe on flights enough times to know that flying was no fun for a pet. If we were to get our kids a dog, we would have to get one that could fly with us in the cabin. Of course, this brought with it another dilemma—I am not the biggest fan of little yip-yap dogs.

We started to pore through dog breed books, feeling ourselves getting excited again about the prospect of a new little guy in the house. (We decided we would get a boy dog to even out the estrogen/testosterone ratio in Casa McKagan.) Every small breed we ran across, however, carried a warning about the way the breed interacted with small children. That is, until we found a picture of a breed that we fell instantly in love with: the Cavalier King Charles spaniel. They were reportedly great with kids—and they didn’t yip. Sold.

The next step was to go online and find some breeders up near where Santa lived. I quickly realized breeders of small dogs were a freaky lot. I received, for instance, a picture of a prospective puppy dressed in a pink dress that matched its owner’s. One breeder didn’t have a computer and didn’t know anybody who did, but said I was more than welcome to meet her at the Kmart just outside of some dinky eastern Washington town and follow her sixty miles back to her farm.

Listen, lady, I saw
Deliverance.

Luckily for us, Santa came through on Christmas morning. The girls went wild with excitement. They quickly agreed on a name for the new dog. The day before, they had gone to NORAD’s Santa Tracker Web site and ended up trading emails with an “elf” named Buckley. So Buckley it was. (And yes, the site really exists.)

I still wanted to address the chronic sinus infections that had kept me under the weather for much of the last few years. I had a CT scan done at an ear, nose, and throat specialist in L.A. It turned out my sinuses were totally fucked up—completely closed in some areas, burned through elsewhere, and in no shape to rid themselves of infection. That would explain the constant prescriptions for antibiotics I’d gotten over the last few years when I came down sick time and time again. The doctor proposed laser surgery to cut out the scar tissue in my head, the remnants of all that coke use a lifetime ago. I was ready to try anything that might help me avoid getting sick and having to miss workouts. And the one thing that
might
have given me pause—getting addicted to whatever medication they gave me—actually did not. At one time or another, I had tried virtually every kind of drug, and, somewhat miraculously, there was a type I disliked: painkillers.

The surgery itself took only about two hours—though I was knocked out for it, of course, and it took me an hour or so to come out of the fog of general anesthesia. They had packed cotton all the way back inside my head to stanch the bleeding. For three days I had long strings hanging out of my nose—the only means of pulling the cotton plugs back out. There was simply no way to breathe comfortably through my nose. This was something I had not figured on, and it triggered my claustrophobia. I nearly had a panic attack.

When the day came to pull the cotton out, I was relieved.

Then the doctor attempted his first pull.

FUCK!

I jumped so high I nearly hit my head on the ceiling. That first tug at all the scabbing inside my head felt like a knife being jabbed into my brain. I nearly shit myself. Literally. Poo.

Not long after I finished surgery, I received a call from Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains to see whether I would be interested in playing rhythm guitar for a few reunion shows. I had remained good friends with the guys in the band since they partied at my place after their first L.A. concert in 1990. I knew firsthand the utter heartbreak these men had gone through (and continue to feel) at the loss of their singer and brother, Layne Staley, to an overdose. Layne had been a lion of a man with a gentle soul and a wicked sense of humor—like Andy Wood, like Big Jim, like Todd Crew, like West Arkeen.

The band was struggling with self-doubt about going forward after Layne’s death. The remaining members were hyperconscious that some longtime fans thought continuing without Layne would be somehow sacrilegious. While his death was sad and needless, I for one did not think it meant the door should be shut on a band that had changed the landscape of modern rock. My opinion may not have been a popular one, especially in Seattle. But for me, the choice was clear: these guys had to move on because they still had way too much to offer the rock-and-roll world. In an age of paint-by-numbers corporate rock, we fucking needed Alice in Chains.

I dove headfirst into the Alice in Chains catalogue. My critical peek inside these songs, riff by riff, opened my eyes to what truly amazing song craftsmanship went into them. I began to feel truly honored to be connected in any way to this musical history. Playing the songs live with them that spring of 2006 ranks as one of the most treasured moments I have experienced as an artist, period. As the band’s confidence grew with permanent new member William DuVall, I could almost see the new life being breathed into the music. This minitour settled any questions about why or how. It was a truly moving sight to see, gig after gig.

Jerry summed up his thoughts in an interview a few years later: “Here’s what I believe. Shit fucking happens. That’s rule one. Everybody walking the planet knows that. Rule two: things rarely turn out the way you planned. Three: everybody gets knocked down. Four, and most important of all: after you take those shots, it’s time to stand up and walk on—to continue to live.”

Around the same time, I decided I needed another source of physical suffering, of good pain. I had run a marathon. Where could I push things from there? Well, books about exploration and mountain climbing had become a real passion of late—I’d read
Into Thin Air,
of course, but also
Touching the Void
by Joe Simpson, and Alfred Lansing’s classic
Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage.
Suddenly a natural next step occurred to me: to test myself against mountains. Richard and Laurie Stark—our family friends who ran Chrome Hearts—had become friends with an aspiring high-altitude climber named Tim Medvetz, who had already summited Mount Everest. One night at a party, they introduced me to him and an unlikely climbing duo was born. Tim—better known as “Biker Tim” from the Discovery Channel’s
Everest
series—became my mentor, and we soon climbed some of the local peaks in Southern California, starting with 10,500-foot Mount Baldy and 11,500-foot Alta Peak. Seattle’s Mount Rainier became a long-term goal for me as I started to learn how to use crampons and ropes, practiced high-altitude survival methods, and grew accustomed to cuddling with Tim in a tiny high-camp tent.