It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [101]
I went straight from there into The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, Green Hills of Africa, and The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway’s writing woke me to the rhythms that could make a phrase or paragraph dance or saunter. I read his poems. I read his short stories. I plowed through two huge Hemingway biographies—even though one was unreadable.
In my new and lonely world of desert-island sobriety, I was at last connecting with something. If I was not yet finding my place in the world, I was at least finding places and ideas and people I could relate to, despise, or aspire to in these great books. As I moved on to other writers, working my way through literary classics alongside my steady stream of nonfiction, the authors also gave me confidence to use my own voice when speaking and to use intelligent words, as opposed to a raised voice that had really only masked fear—fear of how to deal with uncomfortable or incomprehensible situations.
The space between the covers of these books became my place of solitude. Reading continues to represent a meditative haven for me to this day. At the end of every day, whether on tour or at home with my family, I always take time alone at night to read. It has become a time to arm myself for trials to come. And with Guns N’ Roses in 1994, there were definitely trials to come—and soon.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
As the weeks leading up to the bike race passed, I cleaned up my house and bought real food at the grocery store. I had to throw out a lot of my clothing and bedding—my broken body had left bloodstains every-where.
Truck, my former bodyguard, came over one day to check in on me, and I was in the middle of doing laundry.
He opened the dryer.
“You know you have to clean out the lint trap, right?” he said.
I smiled. I knew that by now. I appreciated the fact that he was trying to look out for me.
I went to bed early every night and woke up at the crack of dawn. I read Gavan Daws’s Prisoners of the Japanese and pondered my solitary life. Though it was only two months earlier that I had landed on this deserted isle, it now seemed like a whole other lifetime ago. I was alone for the first time in a long time—except for Chloe padding around the house—and the isolation felt wholesome. It was not the type of isolation I had felt when my band was on top of the world and I was in a fishbowl, gasping for a breath of fresh air and praying for a friend to pick up the phone. Please pick up, Mom—God, I hope you’re home. Please pick up, Andy or Eddy or Brian or Matt or Joan or Claudia or Carol or Jon. That kind of isolation made it seem logical for me to give the keys to my house to a drug dealer so that someone would be there when I came home on breaks from the tour. That kind of isolation made me invite entire clubs of derelict partiers up to my house at closing time. That kind of isolation made me start suicide notes countless times, only to stop because I couldn’t do that to my mom. At least not in such a direct way.
No, I was alone by choice now, and I was dead set on starting a new life for myself based on solid ground. I was in uncharted territory and had no idea how to do what I wanted to do. I trained hard, drank plenty of water, and watched the booze weight fall off me. I lost fifty pounds in the first three months following my acute pancreatitis. I prayed to my training hills and found deep faith in the physical suffering of the present and the mental suffering of the past.
The race had come to represent much more than a nineteen-mile