It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [43]
I hadn’t been in L.A. for even a year yet, and I was still very conscious of being away from home, away from my family and from my boyhood friends. It is difficult to describe how much this early friendship with Todd—which almost immediately became a hang-out-all-of-the-time kind of friendship—meant to me. Todd, together with the guys within Guns, formed part of a new foundation for me, like a family. And fuck, we had fun. Todd was a heavy drinker, often passing out at the most inopportune times. Clubs, apartments hallways, sidewalks … whatever.
It’s also difficult to express the level of excitement I felt as I saw the number of people who were into our music explode. Within a few months we went from playing to a handful of people to packing some of the coolest venues in town. When things are working and you’re seeing progress, it kicks major fucking ass. Especially since that progress was largely based on new songs we continued to write together.
The next time my brother Matt played with us—a few months after the time he looked out and saw an empty club—people knew the songs and were singing along. I could see the relief in Matt’s face.
Not that it was a completely steady upward trajectory. We still played a lot of random gigs. Shit, the night after we unveiled “Jungle” at the Troubadour, we played a UCLA frat house. We got $35 and free beer for that show. It was one of those spontaneous gigs—it was set up the same day we played. The students at the frat party weren’t sure what to make of us and hung back a little. Axl’s assless chaps may have had something to do with our tepid reception, too. Still, free beer.
Obviously we still had to work other jobs. Steven was the only one of us who was not working. He had been kicked out of his house when he was twelve and learned early how to make his way on the streets. But he was completely unselfish. If he scrounged up the money for a hamburger or a bag of Cheetos, he would share it with me or any of the other guys—no matter how hungry he was.
Slash worked at a newsstand at the corner of Melrose and Fairfax called Centerfold News. Lucky for us, the stand had a phone. Slash routinely left Centerfold’s phone number with bookers and club promoters. He would sometimes be on the phone his entire shift trying to get us gigs, calling people on the mailing list to sell tickets, spreading the word about shows. Slash was a natural-born salesman when it came to getting people to buy tickets to our shows. Eventually he got fired from the newsstand because he was on the phone so much.
I was still working for the mobsters of indeterminate East European origin transporting “office supplies.” At first, I found the guys who ran the company pretty intimidating. They were right out of central casting: heavy-looking features, unidentifiable accents and a clipped way of talking, tracksuits with pistols in the waists of their pants. The whole situation made me wary. But they were really cool to me, it was steady work, and after I’d been there for half a year I felt like part of the team.
Maybe that’s why I tried to get Izzy a job at the same company. He ended up in the one room where they really did sell office supplies over the phone. He came in late his third day, and one of the bosses took me aside.
“Mikey”—even my mom had called me Duff, but these guys used the name on my driver’s license, Michael—“Mikey, your friend … he no good. Your friend—he on drugs.”
Another guy who worked there with me was a white guy named Black Randy, who was in the L.A. punk band Black Randy and the Metro Squad. He was insane—shot speedballs all day at work. But somehow the bosses liked him enough to keep