It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [20]
—Turn off hot plate and stir in powdered flavor packet from the ramen noodles.
Another discovery: for an occasional break from ramen, the low-rent hotel on my block offered a happy hour buffet. If you bought a beer, you could gorge yourself on pig-in-the-blankets, fried mozzarella sticks, and french fries.
In front of the hotel was a pay phone. One evening, walking out with my belly filled with its meal of the day, I saw a guy doing business on the phone—a guy dressed like Johnny Thunders. Taking a second glance, I recognized the guy. It was Izzy Stradlin. We had met a few weeks prior, when we both turned up at the same girl’s place on the same night. It could have been awkward, but we both shrugged it off and started talking about music. Izzy was into Thunders, Hanoi Rocks, Fear—the rough “street” acts I also preferred to the technical polish of metal. He reminded me of some of the cooler figures I had known back home, and I ended up giving him a ride to some other girl’s house later that night. We exchanged phone numbers and that was it. Now here he was on my block.
It turned out Izzy had just moved in across the street. I knew the alley behind Izzy’s place was really bad—full of hookers and drug dealers. Shit went down there all the time. What I didn’t realize was that Izzy’s place was in the back of the building and that he sold heroin out his back window.
Izzy was pretty much strung out the whole time. But he wasn’t sloppy, not nodding out. He was a “maintenance guy,” meaning he did just enough heroin to stave off withdrawal. As we got to know each other, for some reason I was able to look past his smack habit. In part it was because he handled himself well. In part it was because we bonded over a mutual love of Johnny Thunders—alone in L.A., musical touchstones, it seemed, could trump something that months before in a different setting would likely have snuffed out any budding friendship. In part it had to do with his drive and determination.
Generally, I looked at heroin users as a rung below. I was bitter about dope because of the friendships and relationships it had cost me back in Seattle. I saw what the drug did to people and saw that nobody ever got off it. But for some reason I wasn’t bitter toward Izzy. He was different somehow.
During those early months I sometimes had to pawn things to make rent while waiting to get paid. One day I heard a knock at my apartment door. When I opened it, I found two cops.
“Do you own a black B.C. Rich Seagull guitar?” They read out the serial number.
I answered in the affirmative. I had gotten it back in Seattle from Kurt Bloch of the Fastbacks—traded him for it in exchange for another guitar.
“And you pawned it?” They said the name of the shop I regularly used.
Yes, I had.
They then informed me this guitar had been stolen from a music store five years earlier. Pawnshops have to report every item they take in, and my guitar—again, the one I got in Seattle—had raised a red flag.
They began to question me as if I had been the initial burglar. It must have been easy to read from my reaction that I was just the guy left holding the bag. They didn’t arrest me. But they took the B.C. Rich. Great, I had just recovered a piece of stolen gear and transported it back to Los Angeles for them. I felt pretty down that day.
I already had no money and now I also had no guitar.
CHAPTER EIGHT
My childhood experimentation with drugs—speed, coke, LSD, mushrooms—had come to a screeching halt the day in 1981 when I had my first panic attack. I was sixteen.
It came out of nowhere.
Though I had already moved out, I was visiting my mom’s house and taking a shower. Suddenly the floor of the bathtub seemed to drop two feet. I fell.
What’s happening?
Now I could barely breathe.
I think I just went crazy.
Something had broken inside me and I knew it.
I crawled out of the shower, soaking wet. I didn’t want my mom to see me naked, but I needed help. I was terrified.
“Mom! Help!”
My mom came running into the bathroom. She wrapped me in a towel. She managed to