It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [115]
But drugs and addiction always lingered in the shadows and crept up on you if you failed to look them off. The moment you think that you have a little breathing room is the exact moment you need to redouble your vigilance. I already knew this to be true for me. Soon I found out it was the case for my friend Eddy, as well. Ed had slowly slipped back into his old ways and I was too far away in L.A. to see it. He went all the way in and found himself hanging in very dark places. Luckily Andy got wind of what was happening and called me. We set up a drug rehab for Eddy. Then we both called him. He agreed to go into rehab that night.
If I was going to avoid those pitfalls, I was going to have to further steel myself mentally. The only way I knew how to do that was to push myself even further physically. I started sparring as often as I could alongside my workouts and bike rides.
Despite all the training at bobbing and weaving, when I climbed into the ring I often forgot everything as soon as I took a blow to the head. That was the biggest shock—getting punched or kicked in the head, especially in the nose.
I’d hear someone yelling in my corner and recognize the words:
“Bob! Jab!”
But it just didn’t sink in. When I got hit I tensed up and shut down.
When I wasn’t mentally focused, my head got treated like a punching bag, bobbing back and forth as I took blow after blow. But once I got used to it, it became no different than being punched in the shoulder. I was able to relax despite taking a shot to the head. Soon I found taking a good punch in the face oddly satisfying.
Pain is good.
Then I began to actually like getting hit in the head. Or kicked in the head. Anything. I started taking shots I saw coming and could have parried.
Pain feels good.
Benny snapped at me when he realized I was taking unnecessary blows.
“I didn’t train you to be that guy. The impact is what we try to avoid. Start playing chess, not checkers. This is a chess game. Life is a chess game.”
I had to learn to distinguish between good pain and bad pain. Of course, what I was experiencing when I threw up in the gym was different from the pain in my sinuses as coke had burned away my septum. But the ache from getting hit was not the same as the ache from hard work either. Let good pain float away. Honest pain.
Never move back in a straight line.
Never set.
Redirect.
Fight your opponent as he fights you.
Place your opponent where you want him.
One day Sensei Benny told me I was ready to get in the ring again.
“It’s your time,” he said.
I trusted Sensei Benny with my life by now, and so when he said I was ready, then ready I was. I didn’t blink.
I don’t know if Petey “Sugarfoot” Cunningham remembers the three rounds we went inside the ropes, but I sure do. Petey was the world middleweight champion at the time and was tuning up for a title defense. I was just another sparring partner, mere fodder. But I was fast.
Petey was faster. Much, much faster.
In my first round with him, I knew I was watching a showman at his best. He was known for his high kicks to the head and his lightning-fast axe kicks to the shoulders. I had fairly solid defenses now for anything around my head, but the axe kicks happened so fast that pretty much every one of them landed. By the end of the second round, and all through the third, my arms were useless. My shoulders had taken a beating the likes of which I’d never felt before. But I did not get knocked out—or even knocked down. I did not panic or get flustered. I knew my sensei had put me in there to learn and to prove once and for all that I would and could protect myself.
When the final bell rang and we were finished, Petey came up to me and said, “You can go home and tell your friends you lasted three rounds with the world champion!”
I am not sure whether he was bragging about himself or surprised that I had hung in there. It didn’t matter.
I went to see a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert with Axl not long afterward. When I left after the gig, two dudes started shouting at me:
“Fucking faggot!