Slash (35 page)

That was no reason to stop the party, as far as I was concerned, since there was plenty of coke left to shoot. No matter how meticulous you are with the smack, it will always be done well before the coke. And when you start really shooting coke, the hallucinations you get are so real that you can no longer tell yourself that you’re just high and that it’s your mind playing tricks on you. It’s like being on acid, but with a whole different attitude. It’s scary and realistic, and not at all psychedelic. In my case, it got violent and terrifying. I had enjoyed that element of the drug in the past, but this time I went over the edge.

I kept shooting coke that night just to keep shooting; I’ve mentioned how I liked sticking the needle through my skin, into the vein, and feeling the drugs enter my body and take over. I also loved the ritual; the cooking, the straining, and the tying off almost as much as the high. I was pretty content with myself just going through those motions for a few hours.

And then things got weird. I started shadowboxing monsters that I saw on the other side of the sheer curtains that framed the large king-size bed. I was bobbing and weaving, as if I were working out at a gym. This shadowboxing continued all night long until the sun came up, drowning every shadow in the room and ending my activity. Once I snapped out of that trance, I figured that I should probably head out in search of Steven and Doug.

First, I decided to shower, to straighten up a bit. But before that, I opted for one last shot of coke. I felt great when I got under the big rain-style, luxury showerhead. And as I was there under the nice warm water, the coke hallucinations hit me harder than they had that night or ever before: full daylight was coming in through the skylight, but I watched as long shadows emerged from the corners. They crept up the floor toward me, up the glass of the shower, and took the shape of the shadow monsters I’d boxed earlier. They were right in front of me, filling the glass door, and I wasn’t going to let them get me, so I punched them as hard as I could, sending the entire pane of glass into pieces all over the floor. I stood there with a cut hand, under the water, paralyzed, paranoid, scanning the bathroom for other assailants. And that’s when my little buddies showed up.

They always looked like the creature in
Predator
to me, but a fraction
the size and translucent blue-gray; they were wiry and muscular with the same pointed heads and rubbery-looking dreadlocks. They’d always been a welcome, carefree distraction, but this hallucination was sinister. I could see them gathering in the doorway, there was an army of them, holding tiny machine guns and weapons that looked like harpoons.

I was terrified; I ran across the glass on the floor and slammed the sliding-glass door to the bathroom shut. Blood began to form in a pool under me, issuing out from my feet, but I didn’t feel a thing; I watched in horror as the Predators squeezed their limbs between the door and door frame and began to slide it open. I put all my weight against it in an effort to hold it shut, but it was no use; they were winning and I was losing my balance on all of the broken glass.

I decided to flee: I broke through the sliding-glass door, cutting myself further and spraying debris all over the room. When I ran out of the bungalow, the bright sunlight, the shocking green of the grass, and the colors of the sky were overwhelming; everything was jarring and vivid to me. Everything in my room had been so real that I was not prepared, in my condition, to be so suddenly transported from the drawn curtains into the shimmering daylight.

I just ran…fully naked and bleeding, down the fairway, away from the army of Predators I saw over my shoulder every time I turned to look. I needed a reprieve from the harsh daylight, so I ducked through the open door of another bungalow. I hid behind the door, then behind a chair, as the Predators began to fill up the room. There was a maid in there, making the bed, and she started to scream when she saw me. She screamed louder when I tried to use her as a human shield to protect myself from the small hunters on my trail.

I fled again, running at top speed through the resort with a translucent army at my heels; the colors and scenery only added to my dementia. I made it to the back of the main clubhouse and went through the back door and into the kitchen; all of the cooks and activity were dizzying, so I ran out of there, right into the lobby. There were guests and staff everywhere and I remember grabbing a well-dressed businessman standing there with his luggage, once again using him as a human shield. He seemed so together that I believed he could hold the Predators at bay, but I was wrong. They
actually got to me at that point and started climbing up my legs, loading their little guns. The businessman didn’t want anything to do with me; he shook free so I backed into a utility closet somewhere near the kitchen. As a crowd gathered, I ran out of there again, back outside, eventually finding darkness and shelter in a shed on the fairway, where I hid behind a lawn mower, until finally, the hallucinations began to subside.

I’d caused quite a bit of a commotion by then; the cops had arrived and, along with a crowd of onlookers, they confronted me in my hiding place. I wasn’t seeing the Predators anymore, but when I gave the cops my testimony, it involved a detailed re-creation of how they’d chased me all over the resort trying to kill me. I was still high enough that I told the story without a shred of self-consciousness. Everything around me still looked pretty bizarre; even when Steven broke through the crowd and handed me a pair of sweat-pants. The cops took me back to my room and found a bag full of syringes, but no drugs; and since I had a prescription for Buprinex, (which did not get you high,) I was allowed to have syringes and nothing seemed amiss.

Still, the Arizona police weren’t buying it: at some point they left me in the room to discuss among themselves what to do with me. I was still convinced that everything I told them had happened, which didn’t help exonerate me at all. They kept staring at me, like, “okay.” They eventually took me in, once they found coke residue in the spoon on the floor. But Doug stepped in; he called Danny Zelisko, this high-powered promoter in Phoenix, who managed to keep me out of jail. Doug and Danny hustled me out of there, minus one shoe, because one of my feet was far too injured to wear one. They got me on a private jet and flew me the fuck out of there. Without Danny’s help, I was looking at serious jail time. Thank you again.

WHEN I LANDED IN L.A., I WAS PICKED
up and snuck into a suite at the Sunset Marquis. My speedball rally at the golf course had left me exhausted, so I went straight to sleep.

I woke up to Duff standing over the bed. “Hey man…you awake?”

“Yeah,” I said, trying to figure out exactly where I was.

“Get some clothes on, I’m going to wait for you in the other room,” he said. “I have to talk to you about something.”

“Okay, cool.”

I walked into the living room and every seat in the place was full: my managers, my mom, my bandmates (except for Izzy and Axl)—aside from my drug dealer, almost everyone I knew was there. It was an official intervention. I was still getting my bearings, but I immediately thought that it was ridiculous that Steven was there because he needed rehab as much as I did, if not more. I stared at him, just thinking,
Hypocrite.
Everyone else’s attendance meant something to me. I’m not quite sure what, but definitely something. Almost everyone there also had something to say.

My security guard Earl said, “Slash, you were vibrant and alive in Chicago. In Chicago you were so strong. I can’t stand to see you like this, in this weak condition.”

My mom was stupefied. She sat there in silence for the most part.

Alan Niven was typically bombastic. “Slash, you
have
to go to rehab,” he said. “It’s all been arranged.”

They all said that they loved me, and God bless their hearts, I’m sure they meant it, but being confronted that way was so heavy that it lost something in translation. I was completely cornered, so my usual bullshit lines about being fine were not going to work. I was stuck with no defense, I was guilty without a trial, and there was nothing I could do. Like anyone in that situation, my lying had come into harsh focus.

I never blamed my mom for any of this, I never for a moment thought that this was her idea; she looked as confused as I did that day. The rest of them were scheming motherfuckers as far as I was concerned. Regardless, if I was going to make it right with the band, I’d have to go to some clinic in Tucson called Sierra Tucson, and so I entered rehab for the first time.

The thing about rehab is that you have to want it. When you do, it works wonders—but when you don’t, it may clean out your body, but it won’t change your mind. That is precisely what happened to me my first time: I went through detox, in a very secure, sterile environment, but there was no way in hell that I intended to take part in any aspect of the clean-living community that is phase two of rehabilitation.

But before I even got there, I did what every dedicated junkie does: I told everyone at my intervention that I agreed with them, that I intended to go along with their plan for me, so long as I could spend one last night in my
own bed before I set off to clean up in the morning. They said okay, because my shenanigans had run their course as far as they were concerned.

I went back to my house, retrieved my stash, did my fix, and hung out with Megan—who was completely unaware of this entire event going down. I told her that I’d be away for a while on band business, and in the morning, I got up bright and early, fixed again, and got into the limo with Doug to go to Tucson. This place was in the middle of the desert in every way: there were no markets, housing developments, strip malls…nothing civilized was within miles. It was a little sober oasis.

I was checked in to a two-bed room, but never had a roommate for the duration of my stay, which was
great
. The first three or four days of drying out were typically awful, though they were made less drastic due to the combination of medications I was given. I’d never kicked that way, so it was a welcome relief, but nothing quite so comfortable that I could eat anything or sleep soundly for more than an hour or two at a time.

After a few days, once the sweats and the anxiety and the inescapable discomfort receded, I was comfortable enough in my own skin to get out of bed and walk around a bit. It was all that I could do; I wasn’t ready for human interaction at all. But the moment I emerged from my room, the staff was all over me to attend group therapy. It was out of the question—just because I could walk didn’t mean that I wanted to talk. I wanted to avoid other people so much that I waited until I was totally famished to seek out food, because doing so meant encountering strangers in the cafeteria.

I learned later that should I have checked in a week earlier; I’d have known one person there: Steve Clark, the original guitarist for Def Leppard. Steve was in there for drugs, but as is customary in places such as those, once you surrender to their methods, they find countless other “afflictions” that are ailing you. In that frame of mind, sex and just about anything else, if you look at it from a certain perspective, can be seen as an addiction that rules your life. In Steve’s case, I hear they labeled him as a sex addict and slapped a “No Female Contact” patch on him after he broke the regulations by talking to the same girl more than once in private. He didn’t take to that too well and he promptly checked himself out of there. Steve died of a drug overdose two years later.

When I wasn’t in my room at Sierra Tucson, I spent most of my time sitting at a massive table with a giant ashtray for a centerpiece. I did my best to avoid conversing with the other residents. When I couldn’t avoid it, the conversation generally went like this.

Some stranger would sit down and start smoking nearby.

“Hey, what are you in for?” they’d ask me.

“Heroin.”

Usually, at the mention of that word, at least one or more other patients present and within earshot would start visibly twitching and scratching themselves.

“Yeah, cool. That’s nothing. Let me tell you
my
story…”

Most of the people I met there had multiple addictions and personalities so complex that they defied all of my preconceived notions. They were a strange collection of individuals from all walks of life; it was just like
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
and like Jack Nicholson’s character, I was convinced that I was the least fucked up of all of them. I was operating under the impression that I knew what I was doing when I was doing it, no matter what it was, while these people didn’t seem to know what they were doing at any moment ever and had no idea of what they’d done to get here.

After another three or four days, that was it; I decided,
FUCK THIS
. I was sick of rehab on every level, from the staff encouraging me into group sharing and whatever might come from that to the too-fast friends I met while smoking that wanted to meet up on the outside to score drugs together when they got out in a few weeks.

When it came down to it, I wasn’t at all prepared to surrender in any way, shape, or form. I was in the middle of the desert, it was fucking hot, and I saw no productive way to spend my next twenty-two days there. I told the head nurse that I needed to check out immediately, and she did everything she could to stop me. The founder of the place even came down to talk me into staying.

He was the type of New Age cowboy that can only exist in the American Southwest: he wore a ten-gallon hat and lots of turquoise jewelry and cowboy boots, and spoke at length about his personal journey to sobriety. He was commanding and insisted that I hadn’t yet begun to do the
real
work. He wasn’t wrong, but I didn’t give a shit—nor did I care to buy into his road to cleaning up whatsoever.

“Look,”
I said, just pissed. “You can’t keep me here, man.
You can’t.
So give me a phone and get me my stuff, because I’m leaving. I’m leaving right now.”