It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [75]
One solid group of people I hung out with were the guys in some of the gangsta-rap groups of L.A. I became friends with Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, and Ice Cube from N.W.A. as well as people in Ice T’s posse. I had seen the sensationalized reaction Guns got by presenting an unedited look at our lives on Appetite. And white boys in Hollywood weren’t exactly a marginalized group. The glimpse of street life presented by N.W.A. and some of the other new hip-hop acts from black Los Angeles was a true shock to the system. These guys lived hard, too, and we had some great parties up at my house.
I did still have some level of self-awareness. I must have harbored an inkling that I was in the process of jumping the rails. That summer I bought a small vacation place in Lake Arrowhead, California, to get out of Los Angeles. I hoped periodically to escape my bad drink and drug habits, and to retreat from the fishbowl effect of living a highly public life in the city.
Lake Arrowhead turned out not to be the ascetic wilderness retreat I had envisioned. Little did I know that Tommy Lee of Mötley Crüe also had a place up there. Bikers and meth ruled the whole area—the sleazy juke joint used for the Patrick Swayze movie Roadhouse was the local bar. Instead of drying out on my trips to the lake, I used its remoteness as an excuse to act more extreme. I invited my coke dealers—Mike, Josh, and Yvette—to come up with me for weekends. I bought a boat for waterskiing; parts and service for it provided a new source of fake receipts. Musician friends made road trips up to Lake Arrowhead, too, people like Lenny Kravitz and Ernie C, the guitar player from Body Count—the band that got threatened by the FBI for their song “Cop Killer.” The house quickly became an even more debauched party scene than my place above Dead Man’s Curve. Back in L.A. one day, Ernie C told me he was scared for me after seeing my intake up at the lake.
Sure, I could scare the shit out of most people who partied with me. But for the second time in my life I realized that nobody—not even me at the time—could hang with the dudes in Mötley Crüe: within two months of buying the house at Lake Arrowhead, I was throwing up blood at Tommy Lee’s cabin.
Back in L.A., Chloe broke through the fence around my yard and got pregnant. I had never had her spayed—just couldn’t bring myself to have a vet do anything to her that would cause her pain. She had a huge litter of fourteen puppies. Lucky for me, my brother Matt was doing his student teaching at a large school in a very affluent part of the city, and he helped me out by asking there if any kids wanted puppies. We found nice homes for all of them.
Chloe was different after that. She transformed from a lively young lass into a portly grandma almost overnight. Now, instead of lunging headfirst into the pool, she would just walk to the first step and wade there all day long, coming out only for meals and naps. She became a world-class napper after that.
I could have stood to sleep more myself. When I just drank and went to sleep at night, things went fine. Bad decisions would be confined to that one day or night. I might do something stupid, like hit golf balls through my picture window. I would never crash a car—or stick a needle in my arm. Or so I thought. But as I continued doing more and more coke so I could stay up longer and drink more, it began to change my thought processes.
Late one night I heard someone on the doorstep of the Edwin Drive house fumbling with keys. Cowering behind the door in my bathrobe, I tried to figure out what to do. My mind raced immediately to a dark, paranoid place. I ran and grabbed my twelve-gauge and threw open the door, the double barrels of the shotgun shoved in the face of the intruder. Only it was my brother Matt, who was trying to find the right key on his chain, his eyes now gleaming with fear, cursing once I lowered the shotgun and retreated backward into the foyer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR