It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [113]
“To say I didn’t have much hope for you when you left here is an understatement,” said Dr. Thomas.
Hmm.
“I didn’t expect you to live more than six months,” he continued.
Don’t sugarcoat it or anything, Doc. I guess alcoholics who reached the stage of acute pancreatitis didn’t often turn their lives around. I got the point. And it gave me a shot of adrenaline.
Perhaps more striking were the internal changes even Dr. Thomas couldn’t see—the changes in my mind.
I did have one question for Dr. Thomas, however.
“Why does my nose still run so long after I stopped snorting coke?”
“Quitting is just the beginning of the process,” he said. “Your body is still trying to slough it out.”
In other words, my body had become so accustomed to ridding my sinuses of foreign substances that it hadn’t turned off the spigot yet. And that would take much longer than I anticipated—much, much longer.
Soon after I returned to L.A., Cully got the heart-valve transplant he had been dreaming about when we first met. He took six days off from riding after the surgery, then started training for a return to professional racing. I went to his first race back on the World Cup circuit. Being back at this level of competition was a major triumph.
Then Matt Sorum called to see whether I’d be interested in playing rhythm guitar for a Monday-night show at the Viper Room with Steve Jones—the original Sex Pistols guitar player—and John Taylor of Duran Duran. It was tempting. Slash was out touring with Snakepit, so there wasn’t anything happening on the Guns front. And shit, Steve was a personal hero of mine. Still, it would be a big step for me because up to this point I had not played a live show sober. In fact, to the best of my knowledge I had never played sober in my entire life. I always took at least a couple of pulls off a bottle before a show, even at my earliest ones. The myth of being glamorously wasted for gigs was something I guess I had bought into from the beginning. All of my idols were that way, right? Keith Richards, Iggy Pop, Johnny Thunders—and Steve Jones, for that matter. I was terrified at the prospect of playing sober.
Of course, a few years earlier I had witnessed how Iggy could still flip a switch in the studio or onstage even after he got sober—he blew me away with his ability to reach that special place with no substances at all. And Steve Jones was sober now. Matt Sorum and John Taylor, too, so I would be in good company. I decided to go to a few rehearsals. Before I knew it, gig night had arrived and there was a line stretching down the block of Sunset Boulevard in front of the Viper Room.
This was June 1995, and back then the tinfoil-lined Viper Room was Hollywood central, filled with all of the hippest and most judgmental people on the planet. Fortunately the crowd that night also included Cully, Adam Day, and McBob. But still.
Can I do this?
I couldn’t shake the feeling that people were just going to be staring at me. Could I get out of myself without some sort of inebriant to help me? If I had learned nothing else during my career to that point, I did know that if I was too self-aware, I was going to suck. And if that was going to be a nightly occurrence, then I might as well just give it up. But I wanted to try, despite my fear.
It all came down to that old dilemma: fight or flight.
As we got near the little stage, something suddenly took over. I felt that anger. That healthy rage. I wanted to attack the gig, the people there, myself.
The show itself was a bit of a blur—which was good. But I still wasn’t confident about my performance. Sure, I knew I had played the notes correctly. But I didn’t know whether I had been any good. As soon as I could, I went out to find Cully.
“Dude, how’d I do?” I asked him.
“What? How’d you do? Are you kidding? You guys killed it.”
He looked at me and I could tell what he was thinking: We’ve made it back. Cully and I often seemed to know what the other was thinking, so I’m pretty sure he heard me silently add: Together.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
At the