It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [105]
My social life had now expanded big-time: instead of just me, there was me and Cully. I had someone to get lunch with now. He also began to bring some of his buddies over for our rides and before I knew it, I was riding with some of the best mountain bikers in the world. These guys had no idea about drinking or doing drugs—they were pro athletes. Sometimes they would come over to my place before or after rides. Hey, wow, nice place—oh, you’re that Duff, wow. My first new friends were X Games jocks. I was starting to believe I could craft an enjoyable life without booze, without drugs, without parties.
Adam Day caught the mountain-biking bug, too. He and I started to do a daily grinder in the brutal hills below my house. Soon Adam joined Cully and the gang as well. What was amazing for me to see with these pro bikers was just how hard they trained. It took genuine suffering to get good at this type of sport. It also struck me that self-discipline wasn’t the only byproduct of all that painful work: humility seemed to accompany it. There was always someone better, and always something you yourself could do better. The other eye-opener for me was the way they viewed food first and foremost as fuel—fuel for their bodies that should be kept as clean burning as possible.
One Sunday morning I went out to the house of one of Cully’s friends to watch some football with a crew of professional mountain bikers. There were some empty beer bottles around.
One of the bikers said, “Oh man, I’m so hungover.”
“What did you guys do last night?” I asked.
“We partied like rock stars!”
“Huh,” I said. “What does that mean to you?”
“I drank a six-pack by myself,” said the hungover guy.
I chuckled.
Cully nodded in my direction and said, “Oh, don’t fuck with this guy.”
Cully knew. I had talked a lot with him since we became friends. Now I told the rest of them. I told them how much I drank, I told them about the blow, the rocks of coke I’d shove up my nose, about having no septum, about throwing up and drinking the throw-up because there was alcohol in it. The whole thing. And their faces dropped.
“Yeah,” said the guy, “we partied like mountain bikers last night.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
I still did not go out at night. I was too scared, to be honest. Besides, nothing out there held any interest for me. Go hang out with drunk people? No thanks. Go see a band? No, I had spent the last fifteen years touring and playing live shows. Go see a movie by myself? I was much more interested in books at this point. I was living the life of a monk. I even decided to cut out sex for a while.
How could I start a relationship if I didn’t even know who I was? There was another aspect, too: I was scared to death of the opposite sex at this point. Not because I had two failed marriages. Because I was sober for the first time in my adult life and had no experience dating sober. No, I would hold back on that for a while.
Though I continued my daily rides on the steep hills surrounding my house, with the race at Big Bear a few weeks behind me I began searching for another challenge. I thought I had pushed myself pretty hard on my mountain bike, and the race had given me added confidence. When Cully and I did our hard rides, up steep grades, pushing the pace, I found any negative thoughts I had in my mind at the bottom of the hill disappeared by the time we reached the crest. We were so tired and so hungry at the top that we forgot about any demons that might have been plaguing us at the bottom. My system would get so taxed I’d vomit. I called it “throw-up cardio.” In fact, eating enough and keeping it down became one of my biggest problems. The new misery—burning, physical pain—helped cure me of the old.
I wanted more. More pain. Something