It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [114]
Matt Sorum called me the day after the show.
“The rumor is you got liposuction and a face-lift!”
“What? No way!”
“Yep, that’s what everyone is saying.”
The extent to which my path diverged from the typical Hollywood path was never so clear as it was through those rumors. Actually, I took them as a compliment.
Another thing happened that night that hadn’t happened in my life for a while: I interacted with women. Some of them even showed interest in me, even went out of their way to make it easy for me to talk to them, I could tell. But I looked at everything differently now and wasn’t quite ready for any of that. I still had more work to do. Besides, what would I do with a drunk girl or someone who was a scenester or club kid? I really had absolutely nothing in common with these people. My life was all about literature, martial arts, healthy food, and mountain biking. I was a stone-cold nerd. I was only in Los Angeles because I was still trying to work with GN’R. The nightlife ethic there was something I now saw as shallow.
I went home alone that night.
Now that I knew I’d be able to continue to play music, it rekindled an incredibly strong urge to do it right away. I looked forward to a string of gigs Matt had lined up in September and October of 1995. I really liked the guys in the band, too—Steve Jones even started mountain biking with me.
The Viper Room was jammed with beautiful women every time we played. John Taylor proved to be a total chick magnet. After a while I thought maybe I was ready to try again. The first girl I started hanging out with was also sober. She started talking a lot about “the program.” At first I had no idea what she meant, though it was clear that I was supposed to know. Turned out she meant AA.
“I don’t know about that stuff,” I told her.
She started leaving clothes at my house. I would gather them up and put them in a pile. No, no, no, be honest. After a few weeks, I took the clothes back to her.
“I’m still trying to figure everything out,” I said. “But one thing I do know is that I’m not ready for a girlfriend.”
My old friend West Arkeen started to call me more often around this time, too. He had struggled with crack and heroin addiction since the day I met him in Hollywood back in 1985. For many years I felt helpless to do anything to straighten him up—despite pleas from his various girlfriends, I was just too fucked up myself to possibly play a role in addressing other people’s addictions. I realized in retrospect just how bad off he must have been if people around him had called me, of all people. Of all people! I was constantly putting myself in harm’s way to get hold of drugs and drinking myself toward organ failure, and compared to West I had my shit together. Really? Wow.
As I talked to him now, it seemed as if West was serious about cleaning up, and I felt that I also now knew some things that might help him—even if I didn’t yet feel equipped to help anyone with sobriety myself. So I invited him to join me down at the dojo. One of the teachers at the House of Champions, Sensei Anthony—a world-champion eskrima stick fighter from Australia—took a particular interest in West’s case and soon agreed to train him. Anthony seemed undaunted by all the scarring on West’s body from needle marks and abscesses. Anthony studied up on the ins and outs of drug withdrawal. It was a war; Anthony took it upon himself to help West fight it. West proved a dedicated student and poured himself into his training. After a few months, I figured West was out of the woods. I figured he had found what he needed in martial