It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [98]
That was my first challenge. But I did it; I did exactly what the prescription said. Still, I was shaking all the time. During the first few weeks, I shook so badly from alcohol withdrawal that I was afraid to drive my car. I was sure I would crash it. I found an old steel mountain bike in my garage and started riding that instead.
One of the first things I did was to go to the grocery store to buy food. It was a novel idea at the time—it had been years since I really shopped for food. Now here I was, thirty years old, an adult with a credit card, a checkbook, and an ATM card. I could buy whatever I wanted in the store, but I had no idea where to start. I thought everyone was staring at me—I was sure my shaking was freakishly visible. It had also been so long since I had been anywhere sober that I didn’t know how to act or how to deal. It was like being on LSD. The lights in the store were glaringly bright and I could swear the music was playing hidden messages. I grabbed some milk, barbecue sauce, and cigarettes, and that was all.
I looked at the girl at the cash register.
“I give you this money, right?”
My shirt was drenched in sweat and I was having a full-blown panic attack.
She nodded nervously, barely able to disguise her disgust. She gingerly took the money from my hand, trying to avoid actually touching me.
Something I failed to realize was that simply functioning in life again was going to be my biggest hurdle. I guess I always thought that avoiding bars and drug dealers and cravings would be the biggest impediments to sober progress. Yes, those things would be a challenge, but first I had to figure out things like what time to go to bed and what to do with my waking time. How do I talk to someone on the phone now? Who do I call? Should I tell people that I’m sober? Should I just go away somewhere and disappear? How are people going to view me after a crisis like this? What the fuck should I do?
Those questions reverberated until the fragile web of my existence shook. How was I going to play music again? Could I do it sober? Guns N’ Roses was a shambles, and the dynamic inside the band—if you could even call it that—had changed. Was there anything there to salvage, and if so, could I do it in a completely new and unfamiliar state of mind?
Initially I rode my heavy old mountain bike just to stave off the shakes, but I quickly realized riding made me feel better. And it was something to fill the time. Those first few days I just rode around aimlessly and only realized I’d been out for a long time when darkness gathered. Without ever thinking about it, I soon found myself riding around for eight hours a day—slowly, in flat areas, but all day long.
My muscles ached each morning. I hadn’t exercised for years. But the soreness lifted my spirit. Not spirit as in mood, but my actual spirit—my body was so wrecked from abuse that my spirit was the only thing keeping me afloat, all I had left.
After about a week of long flat rides, I began to challenge myself on the bike. Seattle is hilly and I had no trouble finding steeper and steeper climbs to test my endurance and my tolerance for pain. These increasingly hard rides came to represent a form of self-flagellation, a way to punish myself for all the damage I had done to myself and others. I could feel this healthy new kind of pain searing every muscle fiber and neuron in my body. I was on fucking fire—and I liked it.
As the weeks passed, my endurance started to increase and my mind started to clear. It was like I hadn’t been alive for a long, long time. I was smelling the grass and trees for the first time in years. Smell is the strongest sense we have, and my long-dormant olfactory system was triggering memories that I had thought lost. The whiff of newsprint reminded me of riding in the backseat of my sister Joan’s car, delivering newspapers along my paper route one morning in middle school when she saved me from doing it on my bike in the rain.
The smell of Lake Washington evoked memories of swimming and fishing with my brother Matt. Rain on fresh-cut lawns