It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [136]
I had forgotten I was an addict.
Wait, was I an addict?
Nah.
Lie.
Dave Kushner suspected something was wrong with me.
“Duff, man, you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just tired.”
Lie.
My workouts actually picked up steam. I would go to the gym and fool myself into thinking it wasn’t so bad. I was still on track. After all, I was still working out. Lie.
Susan called me one afternoon.
“You sound funny,” she said.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re slurring your words. Are you sick?”
“Maybe a little stuffed up, but I’m fine. I’m just really, really tired.”
I’m fine.
I am fine.
It’s not like I’m drinking or doing coke. This shit was probably developed in a lab at fucking Harvard Med School.
Doctors gave it to me.
Lie.
I thought about my wife and kids all the time and felt guilty for letting them down. That just compounded things.
I’ll deal with this soon.
I’ve got what it takes.
I’ll go cold turkey as soon as I’m home.
Soon.
I arrived back in early July 2005, with a few weeks off before another American leg. Susan and the kids were in Seattle. It was warm—eighty-five degrees, which in Seattle feels like 100—and they were all playing in the backyard when I got home.
I was shivering.
“I’m tired,” I said. “I’m going upstairs to bed.”
I was too fucked up to play with the kids. Susan had never known me fucked up, so she didn’t recognize it.
Every bone ached, and when I went inside I threw up secretly in the downstairs bathroom.
I went upstairs to our bedroom and called Ed.
“Hey, man, I’m having some big problems.”
“Oh yeah?” he said. “What’s going on?”
“I’m strung out. I’m fucking strung out.”
“Okay, do you want me to come get you? I can come right over,” said Ed.
“Yeah, I need to go to a support group or something.”
Ed said he knew a group.
“Ed, there’s one other thing.”
“Yeah?”
“Susan doesn’t know.”
Ed drove into the driveway less than an hour later. I was still shivering, freaking out. Together we attended a meeting of drug addicts. Afterward a friend of Ed’s came over to talk to us.
“What’s your buddy coming off of?” he asked.
I answered, even though the question was only indirectly posed to me.
“Xanax, Soma,” I said.
He asked me how much I was doing. I told him the story: started with a single pill and two weeks later I hit twenty-two pills a day.
“Oh, man, you can’t fucking cold-turkey that. You could have a seizure.”
I had no idea.
“You have to go see a doctor. You have to taper it down. You should go to rehab.”
I went home.
Still I didn’t tell Susan.
With my stash of pills I figured I would just taper down my intake on my own. I took a few pills.
In the middle of the night, I woke up, ran to the bathroom, and threw up.
I began to cry. I was so disappointed in myself.
Susan woke up, too, and came into the bathroom, where I was slumped next to the toilet.
“I’m strung out on prescription pills,” I said, bawling my eyes out.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
Once I’d told Susan, the first thing I did the next morning was to call my Uncle John, who was both sober and a doctor.
It’s hard to imagine he wasn’t worried, but he calmly reassured me that I would be okay. He said he would call some doctor friends to find out what I needed to do. Soon he called me back and explained the basics of tapering down the cocktail of pills I was using. He offered to set up a meeting with one of the specialists he knew.
I declined.
I needed to get down to L.A. quickly. For one thing, I felt I should get back into the House of Champions. For another, Velvet Revolver had obligations to honor, including a string of Ozzfest dates.
I tried all sorts of Chinese herbs to help with the withdrawal. I was jonesing so bad I would take anything to feel better. I was also emaciated—down to 145 pounds. As my drug intake had risen, I had just ceased to eat.
I just wanted to get to the