It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [130]
Then Scott just disappeared. His wife was down in San Diego taking care of their two small children and Scott, it turned out, had holed up alone in their apartment in L.A. and gone on a run for the ages. He was in the depths of heroin and crack addiction. Just months before, Scott, Mary, Susan, and I were having nice conversations at family picnics and Susan and I had even contemplated renting the apartment below theirs as a pied-à-terre in L.A. Now things had gone off the rails for Scott and for his relationship with Mary and his family. It was a mess.
I found myself dealing with a raging addict and all the drama that entailed. I thought I was strong enough to deal with it. In fact, at this point I thought of myself as bulletproof. That turned out to be a major mistake. All of us in the band had been through this crap before—rhythm guitarist Dave Kushner had been sober for about twelve years—so we figured we were the perfect group of dudes to get Scott through this. We tried hard to help. But he had been through rehab a dozen times already. Even we were tiring of his lack of progress as work on the rest of the songs ground to a halt for weeks on end. Finally he decided to go back into a drug rehab center one more time. Okay, this was a step in the right direction.
We all knew it wouldn’t be easy for him. We had all been there. Even so, when I heard Scott had bailed on the rehab center to go down to see his family in San Diego, I was pissed. I knew he wasn’t going there. I knew this was an excuse to go score and go on another run. I heard that he was back at his apartment in L.A. and I went there with the intention of telling him he’d worn out my patience—and maybe not in such measured words. I’m not sure how or why, but when I entered the apartment screaming and yelling Dave was already there. I tried to calm down, but I couldn’t contain my anger. I threw off my coat and was ready for anything—even kind of hoping something would happen so that I could further vent my rage. I had seen how hard everyone had tried to help Scott. I had exposed my family to the dark side, too, and all of that boiled up inside me as I stood there yelling at Scott.
But he wasn’t combative at all. Instead he asked me to help him one last time. He asked whether I would show him how I got sober through martial arts. He said traditional rehab techniques obviously weren’t working for him. He needed a different way. He pleaded.
I regained my composure. This guy’s a dad, I thought. In fact, I had originally become friends with Scott because we had that in common: we were fathers.
I agreed to help.
Immediately I had to come up with a plan.
Trying to accomplish anything in L.A. seemed like a bad idea. A few years prior, Susan and I had bought a cabin in the mountains about 150 miles east of Seattle—a getaway now that we had relocated full-time to the Northwest. I had found a dojo in a nearby town run by a kung fu teacher—or sefu—named Joseph. He was a completely different type of guy from Benny, but he knew Benny—everyone in the martial arts world seemed to know Benny—and let me work out in his dojo. Over the years I had learned that Joseph was a solid guy and a very respected martial artist. My first thought was to take Scott up to my cabin and have him go to Joseph’s dojo every day, and also work out, hike in the mountains, go waterskiing. Just do normal shit while he detoxed. The cabin was pretty far off the beaten path and it would be hard for Scott to leave and find drugs.
I called Joseph about my plan. I didn’t want to just show up one day at his facility with a raging drug addict.
“Joseph,” I said, “I have a situation. I play music, I’m in a band, and the new singer wants