It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [99]
Like that, biking for entire days hurt but also felt somehow positive—as if the aches might represent a moral victory of some sort. And for the first time in years, I thought I might actually have a chance at survival. I started to feel human. My kidneys no longer ached when I urinated, and my stomach hungered for actual nourishment.
Eddy came over to my house with a book on nutrition, outlining a diet suited to the reduced capabilities of my body’s digestive system in the wake of the damage to my pancreas—lots of fish and greens. He told me he had decided to go on the diet with me.
Those first few weeks out of the hospital were probably the most important in my entire life. People say things happen for a reason, and if I hadn’t been shaking so badly, I probably would never have hauled that rusty bike out of my garage. And if I had never straddled that old frame and cranked those creaky pedals, I might never have held it together in those early days—I simply had no idea what else to do.
Of course, I was still in a band that was trying to make a new record. At some point, I would have to return to Los Angeles and that thought terrified me. The only hope I had was to get a mountain bike down there. It would be the first thing I did, I told myself.
Not long after I got out of the hospital, Axl came up to Seattle to visit me. He was the only member of the band who had called me in the hospital, though McBob and Adam Day from the crew also called. I think from afar it must have sounded to Slash like just another brush with the line—and besides, he was dealing with an addiction of his own. Not that anyone owed me a call in a situation that was of my own making, but Axl’s concern still touched me.
Axl and I talked about Guns. The challenge was to figure out how we were going to make a new record and what direction we were going to go musically. Obviously the trust and understanding within our band—the sense that we had one another to rely on like a family—had been tainted, perhaps irrevocably. A lot of wedges had been driven between us. Looking back now, it is all so fucking clear. But at the time I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that people we were paying to facilitate the business side of our band seemed willing to exacerbate all the personal problems among the people who made up the band—that they could be so selfish and moneygrubbing and shortsighted.
Now, however, I was doing sober things with Axl, riding bikes and eating healthy food, and, once he returned to L.A., talking with him on the phone about productive musical directions. Maybe he, too, had changed. Maybe there was something to salvage in Guns N’ Roses. Axl and I decided we should regroup and start writing the next album.
Fucking hell, I really have to go back down to L.A.
How was I to avoid my old ways in the city where I had almost killed myself? How would I keep the drug dealers from stopping by my house? Or all the friends I partied with?
Fucking hell.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
When I got down to L.A. in June 1994, I was five weeks sober. Before even going up to my house I stopped at the Bike Shack, a cycle shop in Studio City. One of the first things I noticed in the shop was a sign-up sheet for a long-distance cross-country mountain-bike race in Big Bear, California. The race would take place in seven weeks. There was a beginners category. I had never entered a race or done