It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [10]
In the instant I fell forward, the slack in the rope formed a loop in the water and my arm went through it. Then I heard it go zip, snapping taut again.
Searing pain jolted my upper arm at the same moment the rope started dragging me.
Shit, the boat isn’t stopping.
My brother thinks I’m holding on—joyriding.
Sheer terror took hold as water gushed into my mouth and nose and I struggled for breath.
The rope had cut all the way down to the bone on my right arm and stripped the muscle from my shoulder to the elbow—just taken it all down like a sock.
I’m going to drown.
I’m going to die.
Suddenly it felt as though time had been suspended. Everything started to slow down. I looked intently at the cool green light refracted beneath the surface, particles suspended in the sunbeams, dancing in slow motion. Silence replaced the howl of water rushing past my ears. All I felt was the pale sunlight on me. Then the dim underwater light began to burn brighter until it saturated my field of view. A feeling of warmth and bliss washed over me and I sensed a welcoming presence—it felt as if I were surrounded by family, generations of family, forefathers I’d never met but somehow knew. By the time I resurfaced and everyone started to scream and people gathered along the shore of the lake, I had blacked out.
Someone onshore managed to revive me. I was rushed to a hospital. Doctors were able to roll the muscle back up my arm, but we didn’t have enough money to pay for them to reattach it. Obviously we also couldn’t afford cosmetic surgery on it either, so to this day my upper arm looks as if someone took a wedge of muscle out of it with a hatchet.
Soon after the accident, my mom had me participate in a study at the University of Washington on near-death experiences. My recollections appeared in the resultant book, Closer to the Light: Learning from the Near-Death Experiences of Children. That warm, peaceful embrace removed any fear of death I might ever have had. I felt a sense of exceptionalism after that, but I also now operated under the assumption that I would die young—that this had just been a preview of a death that would come sooner rather than later, and definitely by thirty.
After glimpsing the other side, that seemed just fine.
CHAPTER THREE
In September 1984, I pointed the grille of my 1971 Ford Maverick south, with $360 dollars in my pocket. I was twenty years old.
Heading out of town, I had the sensation that I was carrying the weight of Seattle on my shoulders. Obviously that sort of sentiment is overly dramatized when you are barely out of your teens, and it probably also reflected the extent to which, like anyone that age, I maintained a rather more grand sense of my own importance than was warranted by reality. But I had been the boy wonder of the scene, the eighth grader playing in bands with people in their twenties, the kid who could play everything—guitar, bass, drums, none of them particularly well, but all well enough to play in a band. Now, with my sights set on L.A. and the Space Needle in my rearview mirror, I felt as if everyone was counting on me to be “the guy.” Some of the pressure was no doubt self-imposed, but people had started talking once I said I was leaving, taking sides about whether I would make it in L.A. or come slinking back home.
My first stop was San Francisco, where I flopped in a punk squat. The intention: to stay overnight. The upshot: I stayed a week. Inevitably, there was a girl. I also knew and liked a lot of the people in the Bay Area punk scene. Still, I wasn’t interested in joining a band there and playing the same old kind of stuff.
When I finally left San Francisco, my $360 kitty had dwindled to sixty bucks. The situation looked dire. From a gas station pay phone