It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [147]
“Duff McKagan!” I heard.
It was Axl’s manager.
Okay, I guess the word was out that I was staying in the same hotel. I told him that I was in the middle of a meeting and asked him what room he was in; I would call him back.
After finishing that last interview of the day, Andy and I went over our notes and had a discussion about the three candidates we had met. Only after that did I start to think about my neighbor on the other side of the wall.
Though it had been thirteen years since we’d last spoken, I had always assumed Axl and I would one day meet again. I didn’t know how it would happen, I just held out hope of perhaps rekindling a relationship of some sort, at some time. These days our only relationship, if you could call it that, consisted of being CC’d on the same emails about various business and legal affairs. Often vitriolic, caustic, or unpleasant emails. This type of language, I’ve found, keeps the clients angry and the lawyers employed.
Now here I was, a forty-six-year-old father of two girls Axl had never met. Grace provided a real-time gauge of how long it had been since Axl and I had spoken, since my departure from GN’R coincided with her birth.
In the end I just went to the door of his hotel room. People from his entourage stopped me in the hallway.
“You can’t go in right now, man,” said one. “He’s about to get in the shower to get ready for the show tonight.”
“I’ve seen him naked before,” I said.
The door to Axl’s room opened a crack.
“I thought I heard your voice out here,” said Axl.
He wasn’t naked.
He motioned with his head and said, “Come on in.”
And so, for the first time in much too long. Axl and I finally met again face-to-face. Any doubts I had about what might happen melted instantly.
We hugged.
From then on, there was no awkwardness at all. It turned out it wasn’t a big deal for either one of us, I don’t think. It was just cool. After so much time gone and lost, we both seemed eager to mend a personal fence, to bridge a gap between us that had felt wider the longer we had gone without meeting. Time apart had done some damage in the form of the aforementioned legal wrangling, but time had also allowed me to figure out some major shit that had happened in my life. With Axl, or really anyone from my past, I tend to look at how I might handle a similar relationship now. What I did back then remains in the past. I don’t necessarily forget those things, but I only bring them out of my memory from time to time to help me better deal with things today. So was I still harboring resentment or anger? To my relief, the answer, I now knew, was a resounding no.
The O2 Arena, where Axl’s gig was that night, sits at the tip of a thumb of land at a bend in the Thames River. Rather than go there by limo, Axl had a boat ferry him to the venue, and he invited me and Susan to go along. He and I told jokes and old war stories as we cruised through central London on the river. He reminded me that I once tried to burn down Gorilla Gardens in Seattle when the club owner withheld our payment. And now Susan knew I had once tried to burn down Gorilla Gardens, too. That must have been one from the vault that I’d forgotten to tell her.
Susan just laughed.
I showed him pictures of my daughters and he had a chance to get to know Susan a little bit, now that he had helped her learn something about me.
When we arrived at the O2 Arena, everyone there made us feel welcome, and that went a long way toward making it an enjoyable experience. I had always wondered what it would be like to see this band called Guns N’ Roses from anywhere but the stage. The guys in Axl’s current band are great players and good fucking guys. I’d had a chance to hang out with a few of them in other contexts over the years. And I’d been a fan