It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [41]
I had another run-in with the police on my way to work at six o’clock one morning. The brakes went out on the Maverick. I drifted into the intersection of Hollywood and Highland and caused a six-car pileup. The name tag on the cop who pulled up read O’Malley; I happened to be wearing a green sweatshirt one of my brothers had sent me—it read ireland across the chest. The drivers of the other cars—all Mexicans—were irate. Officer O’Malley looked at my sweatshirt, then at the other drivers.
“Ah, your brakes went out, what are you going to do? It’s not your fault.”
He let me walk.
After I totaled my car, I had to walk everywhere. Hollywood’s system of alleyways offered places to seal shady business deals, to hide out, or to pass out—and a lot of places for skeezy motherfuckers to come out of. Of course, now that we had our back-alley headquarters, we felt as though we were those motherfuckers. What could be skeezier than living in a storage space behind the Guitar Center? Well, I guess the food chain in Hollywood at the time was more limited than I realized, because I got jumped by four dudes while walking from work to the space one day. They had knives and wallet chains—before wallet chains were a cool accessory.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In 1985, AIDS was definitely starting to enter the national dialogue, but it didn’t yet occupy a prominent place in the heterosexual psyche. I never used a condom, not once. I was lucky. The scene in Hollywood was an orgy of shared needles, and shared girlfriends and boyfriends. Perhaps there has been no other time in recent history when the doors were so wide open. Everyone seemed to be living in and for the moment, and it seemed as if nothing was off-limits. Our Gardner storage space was at the epicenter of all that, the place where the members of Guns N’ Roses lived our reckless lives.
Three of my bandmates were using heroin at least occasionally by this point and Izzy was continuing to deal, but everybody put in the work. Even then, though, the singer’s personal issues were beginning to affect the band in a way that drug habits were not (at least not yet). Axl had intense emotional swings marked by periods of incredible energy followed by days on end when he would be overtaken by black moods and disappear—and miss rehearsals. Since I had suffered from panic attacks since I was seventeen, I knew all too well how crippling things like that could be. Axl and I talked together about it once in a while, and I told him about my panic attacks. I quickly realized that while each of us in the band had his own things to deal with, Axl’s was closest to mine—a sort of chemical imbalance that he had no more control over than I did over my panic attacks. After that, we had an understanding. Which made me much more comfortable with the situation: between growing up in a big family and playing team sports as a kid, I had found it important to come to understandings with the people around me.
Axl’s unpredictable mood swings also electrified him—a sense of impending danger hung in the air around him. I loved that trait in him. Artists are always trying to create a spark, but Axl was totally punk rock in my eyes because his fire could not be controlled. One minute the audience might be comfortably watching him light up the stage; the next instant he became a terrifying wildfire threatening to burn down not just the venue but the entire city. He was brazen and unapologetic and his edge helped sharpen the band’s identity and separate us from the pack.
We rehearsed at the space twice a day regardless of anything else going on in any of our lives. Many of the songs that made up Appetite and Lies—as well as more than a few from Use Your Illusion—came together in this