It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [22]
After some odd jobs I had landed a full-time slot at Schumacher’s Bakery. The place took its name from Billy Schumacher, a local celebrity known as a pioneer in the sport of hydroplane racing. In Seattle, hydroplanes were considered godlike chariots, carrying our heroes at ridiculously high speeds across Lake Washington. This particular hero turned out to be an asshole. I was hired to wash dishes. Scraping out cake pans and muffin tins is hard physical work, which was fine. Except that on top of it Schumacher made me wash his cars, dig a drainage ditch, and clean up his dog’s shit. He also treated me—and all the other employees—like garbage. But I couldn’t quit. There weren’t any other jobs out there. And I had to make rent.
Not long after the panic attack I went away for a week with my family. Stacy was still in school, so when I got home I went to meet her after her classes. She came running up and jumped on me, practically tackling me as she told how much she had missed me. There were tears in her eyes. She did this in front of the entire student body as they spilled out at the end of the school day.
Wow, this is quite a reaction.
I am one lucky guy.
My friends emerged from the building and started whispering to one another just out of earshot. I could tell something was going on. Did they have a surprise for me? Did something happen while I was gone? Then my girlfriend began to cry and told me she had gotten drunk and slept with another guy while I was gone. Right then and there I said we were finished. It wasn’t even an issue, not a subject for discussion.
But I couldn’t understand the situation.
Is there something wrong with me?
I know she loves me—so how could she do this?
I was destroyed. First my panic attack, now this? I just couldn’t understand why Stacy would do this to me. My only understanding of such things was based on what I had witnessed with my dad. I retreated into a weird place.
Stacy was completely distraught, too. And she seemed genuinely contrite. She started calling my mom, my brothers and sisters, and my friends. People said, Dude you have to give her another chance. The guy who slept with her apologized, saying it was just a drunken mistake. But I didn’t know if I could go back to her after that.
I talked to my mom about the whole thing. She said people just make mistakes sometimes. She said it was obvious Stacy had made a mistake and was devastated because of it.
“I know you love her,” my mom said. “You have to find it in your heart to forgive her.”
So Stacy and I were back on. It’s the only time I’ve ever gone back to someone after something like that. Things went great for about a year. I even heard about a job opening at Lake Union Café’s patisserie that could get me out of Schumacher’s Bakery. My hair was dyed different colors all the time, so jobs that put me in the public eye were out of the question. Fortunately the opening was for a dishwasher. And as it turned out, the head pastry chef was an oversized and extremely flamboyant homosexual who didn’t look twice when he saw my hair at the interview. He actually liked the fact that I was a musician. I suspect he may have taken me for gay. I got the job.
Then, in 1983, my band Ten Minute Warning got the opening slot on a tour of the Northwest with the big Vancouver punk band D.O.A. When I came back home from a week or so on the road, I walked into our place to find Stacy hanging out with a guy I knew was