It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [131]
“Oh, you play in a band?” Joseph said.
“Yeah, we’re starting this new band.”
I filled him in on some of the background.
“Oh fuck, I didn’t know you were in Guns N’ Roses,” he said. He didn’t know who Stone Temple Pilots were, but it didn’t matter.
“I need to get this guy out of L.A.,” I said. “Is there a time I can bring him in so we can work out every day? I don’t want to spring some guy who’s jonesing on your dojo.”
“Tell you what,” Joseph said. “It does sound like you have a situation. I can help. Until you are ready to go back to L.A. and start with Benny.”
“Great,” I said.
“Listen,” said Joseph. “I live on top of a mountain. I live in a place where there’s no way out. If you guys stay at your place, he can get on a bus, go to an airport, and get out. Up here, there is no way out. Why don’t you just stay with me?”
Joseph had never faced the challenge of detoxing someone, but as soon as I had told him Scott had two kids, he wanted to do anything he could.
Dave Kushner was a big part of the plan, too. He actually had the most sober time of all of us and his calm, steady mind would help out immensely. He saw this as his band, too, and wanted to help Scott any way he could. Dave took me and Scott to a doctor in L.A. who specialized in helping addicts get off opiates. The doctor supplied us with detox drugs to take up to the mountain.
Honestly, this was probably the point when I first got a little cocky in my sobriety. Here I was with a backpack full of Buprenex, Soma, Xanax, and syringes, left totally in my care with a doctor’s note to get me through airport security. A year earlier, my life had been so damn normal and far removed from all of this kind of nonsense.
It’s okay. Just focus on the mission: to get Scott sober, productive, and reliable—and to help a friend be a father to his kids again.
Scott, Dave, and I flew from Burbank to Seattle and stayed the first night in my house there in the city. I got my first lesson on how to shoot up another person in the thick of their ass muscle that first night. Sexy. Scott was a trouper. He was in the throes of a brutal jones but did not waver in his determination. Before we left the next morning, I took him through a meditation that Sensei Benny had taken me through many times before. It felt good to be able to pass on to someone else something that had helped me so much, and it allayed—rightly or wrongly—some of the doubts I harbored about my ability to play the role of teacher.
During the car ride out to the mountains, Dave and I listened to music and talked and joked while Scott slept in a drug stupor in the backseat. We met Sefu Joseph in a Safeway parking lot about twenty miles from his mountaintop retreat. In Safeway, we bought healthy food, razors, soap, and little else. This was not going to be a pleasure cruise and the bare essentials would suffice.
Sefu Joseph may have been a little surprised at first about Scott’s state, but he did not show it. Tailing Joseph and his girlfriend Addy and their big black Lab named Blue, we drove toward what would serve as our home for the next month. I had no idea what to expect. I had been to Joseph’s dojo many times, but never to his house. The steep road wound through switchback after switchback and just kept going up. A beautiful lake appeared and then receded, smaller and smaller as we climbed even higher. Then we turned off the main road and onto a dirt road that burrowed farther into the wilderness.
The brake lights on Joseph’s pickup indicated we had finally arrived. I was stunned by the scenery. The setting was like a hidden Chinese monastery in an old kung fu movie—there were meditation pagodas, wooden dummies, fighting platforms, and a covered area with heavy bags. A man-made waterfall disappeared into a well-kept Zen garden. Beyond that was a tree-lined path. And to top it all off, there was an impressive wrap-around view of the surrounding Cascade Mountains and Lake Chelan far below. I suddenly had high hopes—and not just for Scott. I was here to learn and grow as well. If there was one thing