It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [77]
“Matt?” I called as I entered the house. “Where are you, pal?”
No answer.
I walked through the house.
In the bedroom, there was a deep walk-in closet. The door was closed, but I could hear someone in there. I opened the door tentatively and peered in, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness: there was Matt, cowering in the back of the closet with a pile of coke, just hiding from the world. He looked at me with no sign of recognition in his eyes. He was completely out of it and paranoid. I made him a very strong vodka drink to bring him down a bit from his coke high.
Matt pulled it together and nailed the last three songs. But by the time we started the process of mixing the records, something snapped inside me, too. There were so many songs to deal with. There was so much contention in the band over credits and everything else. I could tell there were subplots developing among the remaining band members, among management, among the label people. I looked around at how fame and a little bit of power and money had affected the guys I’d been in the trenches with.
Oh, really? This is how we’re going to react to it all?
I was disappointed. It was a mess and I wanted nothing to do with it.
We—was it “we” anymore?—had finally made it to the threshold of another accomplishment. A record. Actually a double record. But I was no longer sure what it represented.
Is this why I moved to L.A.—for this? Is this what “making it big” meant?
I had already attained some of the things I’d wanted to when I left Seattle for California. Far more than I’d wanted. Far more than I could even have imagined. But as I looked around now, it was more clear than ever that things hadn’t panned out the way I had expected. I wasn’t living in a utopian punk commune with Donner and the gang. Friends were dead. Fans were dead. My marriage was dead. My band had lost a member and seemed to be either dying or transforming itself into something I no longer felt connected to.
Something else nagged at me, too, as Rock in Rio edged closer and closer.
Is anyone going to show up to our gigs in Brazil?
Sure, the promoter told us the gigs would sell out, but that was just his word. We had long since learned that a promoter’s word wasn’t always a solid piece of currency. Maracaña Stadium was the biggest in the world! Frank Sinatra had played there, Paul McCartney had played there, Pope John Paul II had played there. But us? We had played fewer than a half-dozen gigs in the past two years, and our one and only proper album had come out nearly four years ago.
Headlining two nights? In South America? Really?
I started to hit the bottle harder, which meant taking more coke, which allowed me to drink harder, which meant more coke … up to that point I had always thought I would address my drinking someday. Even if it had always been a lie, it exerted an element of control—there was a horizon. Right then, after recording the Illusion records, that horizon went dark. I lost all sense of orientation.
Then, on January 17, 1991, we boarded an American Airlines jet bound for Rio. This would be one of the longest flights I’d ever taken. A plane is a metal tube with no way out, and I have always been claustrophobic. Whenever I flew home to see family and friends in Seattle, I had to pay for someone else to come with me. Because of my panic attacks, I couldn’t even contemplate heading to the airport alone. I self-medicated with whatever was available. For the flight to Rio, I took bindles of coke to snort in the airport lounge so I could stay upright and shuffle down the jetway. I was terrified. The flight, the gigs, the band. The flight, the gigs, the band. Fear. Doubt. Valium. Stewardess. Vodka. Please.
Out.
“Ladies and gentleman, this is your captain speaking.”
Huh?
I looked out the window. Nothing.
“A little news here from the cockpit. I just received word that U.S. forces have begun bombing Iraq in Operation Desert Storm. America is at war.”
What the fuck?