It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [21]
At the ER the doctors determined there was nothing physically wrong with me. They gave me Valium and walked me across the street to see a bearded psychologist. He wanted to talk about what I had gone through. Once the psychologist and I were alone, I revealed to him that I thought the episode was drug-induced—specifically from taking loads of mushrooms and acid. He said he highly doubted it. He drew me a diagram of some sort. He tried to explain.
Despite his dubiousness about my expert medical diagnosis, I cut out the drugs from then on. The timing couldn’t have been more fortuitous. In Seattle, heroin was fast becoming a staple in pretty much everyone’s diet—not just musicians. With beer in hand, I watched it take over the city. The spread of the drug seemed directly related to the recession that hit the city during Ronald Reagan’s first term as president; as jobs disappeared, smack oozed into the vacuum left in people’s lives. Up to 1982, I heard about heroin but rarely saw it. Then suddenly I began to see a lot of older kids starting to use heroin openly. As more and more of my contemporaries lost their jobs, smack spread quickly. It would be everywhere by 1983.
At the time of the panic attack I was living with my girlfriend, Stacy. When she and I had originally hooked up, I was a punk-rock outcast and she had been dating the quarterback of the high school football team. I had been playing drums in a band called the Fartz when we started hanging out together. Early on, Stacy rode her moped to a gig the Fartz played with another band called The Fags. That band’s singer, Upchuck, was a full-on queen who was one of the first people in Seattle to die of AIDS a few years later. He lived in a building with an eclectic group of gays who liked to call their collective residence the Fag House, and that’s where the gig was. There was Stacy, watching me play in the basement of a notoriously debauched punk-rock party house. The cops came to bust up the show. Stacy and I escaped together, running down the street in the rain. We fell in love. For each of us, it was our first real love. I had a loving mom and family, but now I was able to branch off on my own and show another person what I had to offer from my heart.
When Stacy and I got together, guys from her previous boyfriend’s circle began to threaten me. The jocks didn’t like the punks back then and I had on several occasions been beaten up by groups of drunken high school football players and in one case by a gang of Washington Huskies players. These guys probably looked at such encounters as the culmination of a fun night out. For me, although terrifying, these events somehow confirmed that I was into something new and threatening—and I liked the feeling that the way I looked and the music I made threatened others. Their violence toward people like me also made me understand very clearly that the world wasn’t going to be fair—these guys were always much bigger than I was and they ran in packs. Those beatings were also probably a factor in why later I would see red every time I perceived a wrong done to me or someone close to me and would fight at the drop of a dime. Justifiably or not, I saw myself as the protector, and the street-fighting skills I was forced to learn while getting my ass kicked as a teenager meant that I was not reluctant to perform that role with my fists.
I had also stopped going to the same school as Stacy pretty soon after we got together. I switched to an “alternative” high school to make it easier to spend more time playing music. To fulfill the requirements of the alternative school, I had to show up for half an hour every two weeks. It proved too great an obligation, and I got thrown out of that school. That was junior year, and that was it for me and school. Yeah, good riddance, I remember thinking—I was already crafting a new career for myself.
Actually, career may be overstating the case. I didn’t make a living playing music back then—and never thought