It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [68]
They said that they were sorry. They’d picked up the wrong guy.
“Wrong guy for what?” I barked.
Apparently, there was a child molester in the area who fit my description—except he had an identifying tattoo on his back. My scars had looked like tattoos to these guys from afar, and they thought they’d found their man.
I started to scream at the assembled officers: the kids on the church lawn were probably scared shitless and now thought I was some kind of bad guy. I was indignant. The cops went from being apologetic to bristling at me again in an instant. They told me that they could still take me to jail for an open container and would be more than happy to do so. I suppressed my anger and shut my mouth. They let me go and I walked all the way back home.
Axl did finally show up in Chicago. It was too little too late. He got there, got into a fight with a girl we had befriended, and trashed the place where we were living. That happened the day Izzy showed up. Already nervous because of his court-mandated sobriety, Izzy came upstairs, took one look at all of the damage Axl had just wrought (not to mention the various powders all over the place), and hightailed it the fuck out of there. He would still send in riffs and ideas for Use Your Illusion and didn’t officially quit until 1991, but his day-to-day involvement with the band pretty much died that day.
When the dust settled, Slash, Steven, and I sat down. The three of us agreed that enough was enough. We were out of there.
I felt used and foolish about going out to Chicago for so long and in the end getting dusted by Axl. Up to then I had not wavered in how I perceived us—as a band and a family and a gang. But this trip solidified some of the flimsy walls that had begun to go up between various parties in our unit. Sure, we were young, wild, and somewhat dumb, but this ill-conceived trip cast a dark cloud over the band—and additional clouds on the horizon were soon to render things darker still.
After the doomed stint in Chicago, I had to reexamine my steadfast belief in the band. The harsh reality was that the old us-against-the-world mentality had waned this year for sure. Steven was fully strung out and babbling incoherently much of the time. Slash had one foot out of the band as a result of feeling betrayed. Izzy had all but checked out. The techs, I soon found out, were secretly looking for other gigs. And to top it all off, we had an expensive bill to pay for the rehearsal space and apartments, the plane trips back and forth, and all the destruction Axl had inflicted on the apartments. We did have the songs that would make up the more meaty, up-tempo sections of the Illusion records. But the damage was done and all forward progress stopped for quite some time.
I did, however, have one epiphany in Chicago: cocaine was a nice supplement to my drinking. On cocaine, I could now drink twice as much as I had before. Fucking brilliant.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Back in L.A. we retreated to our houses. They provided privacy for each of us to pursue his own brand of debauchery. Though things with Mandy continued to get uglier and uglier after I returned home, I pulled back a bit from the extremes of Chicago. I rode a mountain bike here and there in a token effort to be healthy. I would take our dog Chloe for walks. I tried not to drink so much and rarely did coke or took pills.
I would hang out with Slash from time to time, but things were getting dark up there at his house in Laurel Canyon. One day he pulled out a stack of Polaroid pictures he had taken around his house.
“Duff, look at these,” he said. “It’s some of those Martian bugs I was telling you about. They’re infiltrating my house and watching me all the time.”
There was, of course, nothing on these Polaroids. But he kept flipping through the stack and pointing.
“See, there’s another one—right there, in the corner!”
Steven was careening off the deep end, too. He had bought a house just three blocks from mine and as a result I was able to check