It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [137]
Can I beat this?
Yes.
Benny the Jet, it turned out, had flown to Europe. He was out of town for a few weeks.
Another sensei, Majit, volunteered to help me.
“Don’t worry, man, we’re going to get you better,” he said.
Majit was straight-up martial arts. He didn’t understand drug addiction. But I knew that if I asked him not to let me leave the dojo all day, he wouldn’t let me leave. I needed pain.
Up to this point, I had never gone to see a doctor who specialized in addiction. I never delved that deep. Besides, it wasn’t as if I was white-knuckling it. I’d been on a high from martial arts for so long. Now, back in L.A., I went to see a specialist. Dave Kushner from VR went with me.
The doctor explained the process of tapering down and assembled a kit. He also prescribed an anti-seizure medication.
“I’d really like to see you go to rehab,” he said.
“I’m not going to rehab. I have to go on tour.”
“It’s not a good idea for you to have all of these,” he said, motioning to the drug supplies meant to be used to taper down my usage.
Dave stepped in and agreed to hold the supplies and taper me down himself. The whole thing would take a month.
The first week of August 2005, Velvet Revolver hit the road again for the final month of full-time touring. Dave doled out my taper-down drugs. Susan came out to see me at several stops along the way. It was a group effort and it worked.
When the tour ended I found myself doing a lot of thinking. In hindsight, I could see a number of missteps. But the key mistake was succumbing to a smug sort of complacency about my sobriety. I had overstepped self-assuredness. I had gotten to the point of thinking I was no longer an addict. Relapsing really woke me up.
I am a fucking addict and always will be.
In all the time I had been sober, I had never gone to a support group for alcoholics or to a rehab facility to find out about the biochemical side of addiction. I weighed the idea of trying rehab. I talked to Susan and to Benny. They both thought it would be useful.
Benny revealed that he, too, had faced a drug problem in the past. I had never known. He told me some other guys in the dojo had been through treatment programs, too. I had no idea.
Yes, confidence was knowing I could do anything. But, I realized, confidence must always be rooted in work. In sweat. In pain—good pain. And in honesty.
Right now that meant facing reality, and it meant taking advantage of a new level of self-awareness I might be able to get from rehab. I decided to check into a monthlong program. But before I cloistered myself away for a month at rehab, I flew up to Seattle to see Uncle John, who had been diagnosed with cancer and was not doing well.
“Stay sober, Duff,” he said.
Those would be the last words he ever said to me.
In the middle of the monthlong rehab program, Uncle John died. The administrators let me leave to fly up for his funeral—I think they figured it might help in my recovery. I think they also realized I would have just walked out if they had tried to hinder me.
Uncle John had the same knack that my mom had: he could make you feel like you were the most important person in the world. In the first years after Mom’s death, I had felt sorry for everyone else in the family, as I was sure that Uncle John spent an inordinate amount of time talking with me on the phone. I soon realized, though, that he made each of us feel that same way—and all told, there were about fifty or sixty of us by this point.
Remembrances of Uncle John had broad significance in his community in eastern Washington, as he had delivered 15,000 babies over the decades of his medical practice. But despite the crowds at the wake, my uncle once again seemed to be speaking directly to me—now through his eldest son, Tim, who read an Irish prayer John had picked out in advance for the occasion:
Life is not a journey to the grave
With the intention of arriving safely in a well-preserved body,
But rather to skid in sideways
Thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming:
“Wow, what a ride!”