It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [85]
Axl arrived on time.
We played spectacularly well, as fierce and inspired and together as ever before. If not for the additional people and gear onstage, it could have been mistaken for one of our club shows.
When the show was over, we limped back to L.A. and had about three months off before we had to set out on the next leg. My brother had since moved out to a life and family of his own and nobody from the band wanted to see the other members. I was alone.
I needed a tumbler of vodka and two lines of coke just to get off the mattress when I woke up. Alcohol and drugs I now bought in bulk. I wanted to have a sure supply around all the time. I was alone in my house and had no one and nothing to stop me from ingesting bad stuff whenever I wished. Panic attacks had been coming daily at this point, and they didn’t stop once I arrived home. I always took a bottle of vodka with me if I was going anywhere outside of my comfort zone, which is to say anywhere outside a ten-block radius of my house.
In late September, Use Your Illusion I and II finally came out and went to one and two on the album charts. In October, ousted drummer Steven Adler initiated a lawsuit against the band. In November, Izzy officially quit.
Ever since I was very young, I would just shut down sometimes. As if I were in a trance, sitting silently. Despite growing up in a huge and social family, I never knew how to talk things through with others very well. I probably thought it was a sign of weakness, a transgression against a false concept of manliness I held. Manliness was something I obsessed over after my dad took off. Now I was trying to deal with so many things without talking to anyone about any of it. I was also letting what I did define who I was as a person. I am the punk-rock torch carrier! I wear the Sid Vicious chain! I am in the biggest, baddest band in the world! I am a party animal celebrating all my good fortune!
One morning, I found myself in my walk-in closet with a loaded shotgun. I had the barrel in my mouth and my right thumb on the trigger.
As I sat in my darkened closet with the twelve-gauge in my mouth, I thought about my waterskiing accident and the glimpse I’d had of the other side—the warm embrace, the blissful calm. How peaceful death seemed, a simple and beautiful way out. Take me down. Take me home. Paradise …
My surroundings came flooding back in—the closet, the house, the hilltop, the buildings and beings sprawling out in every direction. And a thousand miles away on the distant horizon, my mom. I pulled the gun out of my mouth.
What has happened to my life?
CHAPTER THIRTY
We had only a few weeks to find a rhythm guitar player for the next leg of the tour, which started the first week of December 1991. We hired Kill For Thrills guitarist Gilby Clarke to replace Izzy. Billy Nasty took good care of my dog, Chloe, when I was away, but she still looked sad when I packed my bags to head out on the next leg.
After two shows in Massachusetts, we played three nights at Madison Square Garden. The first night, Axl showed up late. I hated listening to the crowd chanting “bullshit” after the first hour’s delay. We had three more hours of that. I drank more and more to deaden the angry sounds. I was fucking wasted.
By this point, the security guys were supposed to keep me from getting cocaine. They didn’t care about my drinking, it was the drugs they worried about. Actually, the problem wasn’t really the drugs, but procuring them: management wanted these security agents to keep me from getting arrested on some dumb-ass attempted drug score, as GN’R was their golden goose and they needed to keep us on the road. Truck, the security agent assigned to me, was charged with keeping things around me to a dull roar. Axl’s guy, Earl, also spent most of his efforts on me, too, as Axl wasn’t making drug runs. These guys were very good at their jobs, but the