It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [146]
Once while Susan and the girls were gone, I was invited to a friend’s birthday party at an ultrachic Hollywood lounge. I was too afraid of blowing my cover to ask for the address. Cool people were just expected to know where this place was. If you didn’t know, you didn’t belong anyway. There I was, the guy calling 411 to ask for an address. I had to try about four different spellings of the name—is it French?—before I got it right.
As I walked up to the doorman, my phone rang. It was my wife making sure I had fed the dogs and was wearing a coat and had taken my vitamins and drunk enough water. She loved me. I told her I had to get off the phone. I didn’t want to look like that guy: the douche bag on his phone heading to the door of a cool club.
“Yes, you are my monkey,” I whispered. “Yes, dear, the girls are our monkey babies. Yes, okay … I love you, too.”
In October, Susan and I took a trip to London. For about a year, I had been working on starting a wealth management company—called Meridian Rock—together with a British finance partner named Andy Bottomley. And now we had reached a key moment: hiring a fund manager. We planned to spend a week taking meetings with the final candidates and then making some company decisions. This was serious stuff. But it was also the final hurdle of another challenge I’d set for myself, to create a company of my own to help others with the nuts and bolts of finance and investing.
Our British Airways flight touched down at Heathrow Airport on the morning of October 14 at about quarter to noon. My meeting schedule that day was fierce, and kicked off only two hours after we landed. We collected our bags, went through customs, met our car at the curb, and drove to the Metropolitan Hotel in central London for a quick shower before the first of three meetings, staggered at two-hour intervals until dinnertime.
As we walked into the hotel lobby, the manager met us to ask how our trip had gone. Exceptional service is one of the reasons I stay at this hotel whenever I come to London, I thought to myself, but they’ve really outdone themselves this time. But then I remembered: Susan and I were staying in an unusually big room, a suite—in fact, the hotel’s biggest suite. I’m by no means in the habit of staying in extravagant hotel rooms, however, and there was a simple explanation behind our staying in one now. My financial partner had booked the suite, which would also serve as headquarters and conference room for the week’s business and was being paid for accordingly. Since it was such a lavish space, it seemed perfectly normal when the manager offered to personally escort us up to the room.
As we glided upward in the elevator, the manager said to me, “So, sir, you are playing a concert this evening?”
“No, no, I’m not here for a concert this time. I’m here on other business.”
“Are you quite sure you’re not playing this evening, sir?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m not playing at all this entire trip.”
A slightly pained look flashed across his face.
“Well, sir, in that case I feel compelled to tell you that a Mr. Axl Rose is staying in the room adjoining yours. But I’m sure you are already aware.”
“Uh, no … I can’t say that I was aware of that. But thanks.”
Though it wasn’t something that gnawed at me over the years, I realized as soon as the hotel manager said Axl’s name that I did have this one last unresolved connection to the past. Thirteen years is a long time not to talk to someone with whom you went through a formative phase of your life. And if I’m completely honest with myself, there was an element of personal doubt involved in it—I guess I wondered whether lingering resentment or just plain anger would emerge from somewhere deep inside of me when I finally, inevitably, saw Axl again.
Time was a luxury I was short on that day, however, so I didn’t have a chance to dwell on this strange coincidence or mull the situation over just then. I had to shower fast and have a final brushup with Andy before we started our interview sessions—Andy and I had worked for a year