It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [109]
Of course, that confidence depended on more than being able to parry a punch. The draining workouts served as a prelude to daily attempts at meditation, with Benny teaching me to build a mental safehouse, a place where I would always be able to go to collect myself, renew myself. My progress in this department was not nearly as steady—or as easy for me to recognize as it was during the physical workouts. Benny talked me through this, but I had no idea whether I was succeeding as a student.
Benny, who is part Blackfoot Indian, also liked to quote the famous Sioux warrior Crazy Horse, who defeated George Custer’s cavalry forces at the battle of Little Bighorn in 1876: “Today is a good day to die.” The first time he said this, it sounded like a macho throwaway line expressing a sort of I-ain’t-scared-of-nothing ethos. Gnarly, I thought. But the more I considered it, the more I knew there must be something else to it. Benny wasn’t macho, and he never threw out vacuous lines. Despite my inability to pinpoint its meaning, I decided not to ask him about it. This must be part of my mental training. I’d have to figure it out.
After every workout, I would remove my gloves and Benny would take the end of the cloth wrap around my fists and have me back away from him to unravel the wrap. When the wrap had completely unraveled, I held on to my end and the two of us remained connected, Benny holding one end, me the other. As I backed up and then held the taut wrap, Benny made me recite the five rules of fighting:
1. Never move back in a straight line.
2. Never set.
3. Redirect.
4. Fight your opponent as he fights you.
5. Place your opponent where you want him.
But Benny never went in order. It was like a quiz, testing me at my most exhausted.
“Three,” Benny would say.
“Redirect,” I would answer.
“One.”
“Never move back in a straight line.”
“Four.”
“Fight your opponent as he fights you.”
“Two.”
“Never set.”
“Five.”
“Place your opponent where you want him.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
In my twenties, there were two things I never really had to come to grips with: taking responsibility for my actions and thinking about what I would do besides playing music. I just didn’t think that I would be around to deal with that shit. Now, as I began to figure out the first of those two things, I also had to grapple with the possibility that I’d have to solve that second question at the same time. With only Axl, Slash, and me left of the original Guns and progress toward a new record at a standstill, what if the band imploded, as was looking more and more likely?
I still struggled to fill my time, and one day when I was poking around in my basement, I found a crate filled with Guns N’ Roses financial statements. I opened the crate and pulled one out. Then another. And another. I realized I had no idea what they meant. For all I knew, I could have been getting ripped off during all those hazy years of world tours and record-breaking album sales.
My bandmates and I were streetwise, though, and we knew what a shark looked like. I still remembered telling the accountants that I wanted their home addresses. But then I had kind of lost track of the money side of things pretty quickly. Shit, there were weeks when we were out on the road that I could barely remember my own name, much less follow where all our money was going.
One of my older brothers, Mark, was a financial guy at Boeing who really knew the nuts and bolts of investments. I asked him to have a look at the financial statements.
“These are hard to follow even for me,” he said, “and I have an MBA. More than anything else, they’re misleading.”
This was not good. I needed to pay attention to this stuff. And I also needed to find places to invest some of the money I’d made. I couldn’t just leave it sitting