It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [119]
At long last, I felt ready for this. Those dark hours and days and weeks and years fell by the wayside there in Hawaii as Susan and I discussed our next move. We would be a team, come hell or high water, and it was going to kick some serious ass.
Confidence is knowing you can do something even before you try it.
Could I be a good father?
Yes.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
When Susan and I returned to L.A., we started to do all of the typical things an expecting couple did. We bought stacks of books on childbirth and parenting. We found a prenatal doctor. We enrolled in child-birthing classes. Of course, until you actually have a baby, there is nothing that can prepare you for having a child. It’s all sort of make-believe until the baby comes. But we sure were floating on puffy white clouds of excitement and swooning over all things newborn.
Susan never really got sick. As the weeks progressed, she settled into a comfort zone. She and I worked on some meditation techniques I had learned from Benny. The techniques had helped me conquer many of my gravest fears. Susan got into it.
It had been over two years since I made my first investments in 1994, and while those tentative investments were by no means huge—my initial outlay was less than $100,000—some of the stocks had split and continued to grow. I felt pretty savvy when I considered those results. But I came down to earth anytime I examined my GN’R financial statements. No matter how long I stared at them, the paperwork never made sense. A few years earlier, I would have looked at those things and fallen asleep. But there was a carrot out there I was chasing now. That carrot was knowledge. And I was now in a frame of mind to accept what a good teacher had to offer.
One day I drove down to Santa Monica Community College to register for a class on financial accounting. I immediately encountered a problem.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the registrar said, “but you have to be able to prove you graduated from high school to take a college course.”
That could be tricky. I had never graduated from high school. It wasn’t that school had been so hard for me as a kid. When I was in third and fourth grade, I was determined to become a doctor. My mom was secretly psyched—her brother was a doctor. My grandpa had been kicked out of his house in Ireland when he was fourteen and got on a boat to America, where he fought for the United States in World War I, worked in mines on the East Coast, started logging and moved out west, and then, during the Depression, worked on Ross Dam in the northern Cascade Mountains. For his child—my uncle John—to become a doctor was a perfect American success story. Uncle John even attended a Jesuit school, Seattle University, pleasing his Irish Catholic family. It seemed like the path I wanted to follow when I was an elementary school student. By junior high I was in gifted classes with all the brainiacs. It was so easy that I stopped paying attention—and I got into rock and roll and girls and drugs. Before long, school started to pass me by and I began to get into trouble. Eventually I got kicked out of my junior high for pulling a knife on someone. I was sent to another school, where I didn’t know anyone.
By high school I started playing in bands. Beginning sophomore year, I was playing out-of-town gigs. I went to my mom and said I couldn’t do both, and music was what I wanted to do. I transferred to an alternative school called Nova, which had been founded by hippies in 1971. There were no classrooms, just a lot of beanbag chairs and nerdy kids. Being in an alternative school meant I wasn’t really going to school at all. In theory, you did your work on your own. But I didn’t; I rehearsed and played gigs. You had to have somebody at least eighteen years old as an off-campus counselor who certified your work. Kim Warnick from the Fastbacks became mine.