by Duff McKagan
I miss my girls.
I’m ready to go home.
16
CHAPTER
BE THE MAN
Set a good example. Even if you’ve got to fake it. Your kids observe everything you do. And even though it may not seem like it at the time, your kids want to be like you. They want to be proud of you and brag about their dad at school and to their friends. Be observant of your own actions around them kids.
Listen to your girl. We men sometimes get frustrated when our ladies talk. We will try to actually converse when she is deep into a story about the boss being a dick, or some other friend of hers doing your girl wrong. Do not even try to fix this situation! Your sweetie just wants you to listen. Hell, you don’t even have to agree. Just listen. This is black-belt-level man stuff.
Do the dishes. Hell, take it one level further: cook the dinner and do the dishes. Doing laundry is man’s work too, as well as cleaning up after the dogs and cuddling your kids. Having a home life where you get the opportunity to be a family man and partake in all these things is a very good thing. It means that you have elevated your man thing to the very top level. Keep it up.
Don’t be a pussy. Don’t shy away from a situation just because it’s tough. If you need to protect the one you love or things are tough at work . . . pin those ears back and remember who the fuck you are.
Get smart. Educate yourself on what is going on in culture and politics. Read some books about history. Don’t be a pawn, be a scholar.
Evolve. Our dads and granddads grew up in a different time. Communication and tenderness were not necessarily components of their age groups’ makeup. You don’t have to be exactly like them. Even though we saw good examples of man stuff in them, the times, they are a-changing.
17
CHAPTER
FIND A GOOD WOMAN (OR DUDE) AND HOLD HER CLOSE
BEFORE I LEARNED HOW TO COOK, THE ONLY JOB I could find as a teenager was digging ditches and working a jackhammer. It was grueling work. Don’t get me wrong, I really like working hard. It’s a trait that runs in my family. But I hate working through the flu.
One late-autumn, rainy-as-hell week in Seattle on my construction job, I was sick with the flu and couldn’t afford to take any time off. So I went to work each day and dug the foundation for a three-car garage. By hand. Soaked to the bone with rain. I remember wanting nothing more than to get home to my bed. And that’s exactly what I did at the end of each day of hell week.
When you’re sick on tour, you don’t get to go home at the end of the night. You have to wait for your gear to get loaded. You have to drive a few hundred miles. You have to sleep in a hotel room bed—if you get a bed at all. If you get to sleep at all.
As the Walking Papers’ tour of Europe with Biffy Clyro was coming to an end, I could feel myself getting sicker and sicker. Digging ditches in the rain and cold didn’t sound so bad: at least I could go home to my own bed every night. (I also made more money digging ditches than I did on the European tour, but that’s beside the point . . .)
I practiced martial arts meditation about once an hour, trying to heal myself from within, keeping an eye out for the dark thoughts that can enter your mind when you’re tired, hungry, sick, and lonely. I’m not the guy who tries to pull other people down with them. I wasn’t broadcasting my misery. I was trying to be a productive member of the band. But my aches and fever were doing everything they could to keep me down. I had to continuously fight just to keep going.
When we made it to Brussels for the closing gig of the tour, I felt like I could see the finish line. I knew I’d be going home within the next twenty-four hours. I knew I’d be in my bed in thirty-six hours. I knew my wife and girls and farting dogs would be there waiting. Once my brain allowed those thoughts in, my body anticipated the relief that home would bring, and I had to fight extra hard.
I tried to hide it all from Susan. She thinks I work too hard as it is, and if she knew how sick I was on the road trying to break a new band, I knew it would give her fuel for a long talk about just what the hell I was doing. (I like to think that what decisions I make are always for the welfare of my family and rock and roll as a whole! And I hate trying to explain them!) Not only that, of course—I didn’t want her to worry about me. Worrying doesn’t do anyone any good.
All I really remember about the last show was saying good-bye to the guys in Biffy and their crew, and saying “great tour” to my Walking Papers brethren. I was too ill for an end-of-tour dinner after the gig and went straight to the airport hotel. Our tour manager, Jay, gave me a ride in the splitter. He helped check me in, looked at me like he was glad he didn’t have what I had, and gave me a big hug good-bye. That was it. I had a 7 a.m. flight to Los Angeles via Chicago in the morning. As I got into bed, I hoped for the outside chance that I’d get better in the twenty-four hours it was going to take me to get home. It was December 15, and all I wanted was to be home with my family for Christmas—my favorite time of the year.
Then my phone rang: “Sir, it’s 4:30 a.m. This is your wake-up call.” Three hours of sleep hadn’t made me feel any better. I woke up in a small pool of sweat. I knew that whatever I had wasn’t catchable, as I’d been in close quarters with my band for the last two and a half weeks, and there wasn’t even a collateral sniffle from any of them. I knew I wouldn’t be spreading some deadly virus on the plane.
I slept off and on during the flight from Brussels to Chicago and was actually feeling somewhat OK walking through the giant terminals at O’Hare Airport. I gave Susan a call—from the States!—to check in. “We are so excited to see you,” Susan said. “I’ll be waiting in the cell lot when you get here!” OK, babe. I’m almost home. Surely I could just take some cold medicine and Advil on this last flight, and land in LA with a little pep in my step and color in my face. My plan was to fake it and quietly nurse myself back to full strength with the help of modern medicine.
My fever shot up on the flight to LA. No matter how much cold medicine I had in me, my bones and muscles continued to ache and throb. I slumped in my seat. I couldn’t fight it anymore. Something was wrong with me beyond just a severe cold, flu, or sinus infection. Getting through that flight was an awful experience, and getting through the airport to baggage claim only escalated my fever and sickness. When Susan came around to pick me up, she took one look at me and said, “You are going to the doctor!”
In two days, we’d be flying to Seattle for Christmas, and I just wanted to be with my girls. I didn’t want to go to the doctor’s office. I didn’t want to sit in a waiting room, and I didn’t want to drive there. After chest x-rays, my doctor got a serious look on his face and told me that I’d had pneumonia for at least two weeks.
“We are not catching this early,” he said. “This pneumonia has spread throughout your lungs. People die from this!” I’ve had this particular doctor for about ten years, and his bedside manner has not always been his strongest selling point. But I got his point. Rest. Antibiotics. More rest. X-rays every week. Stool sample (what does that have to do with your lungs?). Rest. Rest. Rest. More antibiotics, and then steroids. Exactly what I didn’t want to do over Christmas break with my family.
But Susan and the girls looked after me, and I finally resigned myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to be George Bailey for Christmas. I was simply just going to be a very sick Duff.
I’ve since learned not to push myself so hard. Supposedly, once a person has pneumonia, they are much more open to get it again. It’s not something I ever want to face again, as this one occurrence of the illness took me nine weeks to finally rid my body of, and another eight to ten weeks to get my fitness back to where it was. This is not a way to end a great tour like we had.
The illness taught me to slow the fuck down, to keep an eye peeled for construction gigs—and it reminded me just what a wonderful woman I had to come home to.
After fifteen years of marriage—and even longer raising kids—we’ve both changed. It’s normal. Keeping a re
lationship strong and exciting is an age-old dilemma. It starts with making the right decision about who you’re going to spend the rest of your life with. Finding Susan is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.
In finding the right person, you’ve got to have that initial gut feeling. Not the gut feeling you can convince yourself you had at some later point (we are all victims of this), but that very first feeling you have. If that initial feeling is “he/she is fucking weird/prick/ass/conceited,” but you later convince yourself that he or she is “the one,” you may very well be kicking yourself down the line for not following those initial feelings. I’ve fallen victim to this in the past. Hard.
My wife and I have survived eighteen years together because we do love each other. But that is not always enough. After the first two years of setting boundaries and expectations with your partner (“I WATCH FOOTBALL ON SUNDAYS!” or “YOU WILL GO TO THE FARMERS MARKET WITH ME ON SUNDAYS!”) and after all of the control stuff settles down and you realize that you two aren’t trying to change each other, then you will experience a calm. Don’t let the calm trick you into thinking that there won’t be any scrapes in your marriage. Fights will come, but it is so very important to figure out what the fight is really about, and not hold on to resentment. Sometimes fights simply occur because one of you is simply just tired or hungry. Just like resentments anywhere else in your life, holding on to them can destroy everything.
And there will be disagreements and differences of opinion.
For example, I like to think that I’m sooooo punk rock. I instinctively gravitate toward things that fit between the boundaries of what I think is punk-rock righteous. But when you’re married and raising girls, those boundaries can get fuzzied in a hurry. Throw pillows are not punk rock. These little dog beds are not punk rock. This basket of shoes is not punk rock. This “Mi Casa es Tu Casa” sign is not punk rock.
That’s OK. My wife and daughters do things differently than I do. In fact, I think the punk-rock ethic I come from cozies up quite nicely with being a husband, father, and dude who knows how to set a table.
My wife is a great woman. High morals, smart, and an incredible mother. She’s also changed a lot since the day we met. She changes the things she’s into about every two years. Men seem to hold on to their hobbies and habits longer and easier than women do, and keeping up with the churn of a lady’s life can drive a guy crazy. I’m not trying to be sexist at all here, and, again, we have spent a lot of our time in Los Angeles, where all things are more transient. But this aforementioned dilemma seems to be a common experience with me and a ton of my dude friends. We just kind of watch and scratch our heads.
But as my wife’s husband, I’ve had to go along on this ride with her, and I often am not in the loop to the “what’s in, what’s out” merry-go-round. I’ve stumbled into a few good walls with this lack of knowledge. “Hey, babe, let’s go have dinner with so and so . . .” BOINK. No? Oh, she said something shitty on, uh, Instagram? Oh. Didn’t you guys just go bike riding last weekend? Oh. OK. I see. Right. Because you went to dinner with so and so, she isn’t talking to you? Right.
Punk-rock dudes like me and my dude friends just don’t go through this kind of stuff. It’s actually pretty much totally incomprehensible. But I have to have her back in all of this and hug her when she gets hurt by this kind of stuff. It hurts her. I can’t chuckle like I used to (thinking it was all sort of silly). Hurt is real, and that is what I, as her husband, have to understand.
I know my wife has my back through everything, and she knows that I have hers. This simple understanding is stronger than anything else in a marriage. Your mate has to believe in you. Period. My career and life have had a few exceptional ups and downs (like everyone’s), and so has my wife’s. It’s the belief in each other, unquestioning and without judgment, that sends a good marriage into the upper echelons of a great marriage.
Keeping things nasty and kick-ass in the boudoir is key, too. Keep that shit high and tight, gentlemen. Make time and plan special events so that the two of you can have some alone time. Hell, I love the idea of making appointments. It’s kinda dirty. Done right, it gives you both something to look forward to. Being together for some good sexy time has a way of alleviating all kinds of crap that can muddy a marriage.
Breathe. Take a walk. Spend time apart. Try to make those times that you are together special and full of life. Your marriage should be the break from the noise of your work life. Above all, keep working on your marriage. There’s always work to be done.
A few weeks before our fifteenth wedding anniversary, the girls went away for six days, and the fray and fun chaos that is our family life suddenly came to an abrupt stop. It was just Susan and me alone in the house.
After seventeen years of sheer madness, the sudden recognition that this was the way it was gonna be in no time at all hit us hard. The girls are going to be off to college before we blink. What do we have in common now without the kids? The both of us had changed to a certain degree since we were last alone together some eighteen years prior. What now? What are WE going to do?
This is what was on our minds when we flew to Hawaii to celebrate our anniversary. We were both mentally overreacting to what kind of life the two of us were going to have once the girls were gone.
It turned out to be the perfect time to start figuring it out. Our anniversary trip was magical. And although neither of us verbalized it, we both were relieved to discover that, yes, we are still into each other very much. We had a ton of fun, just the two of us, and started talking about future adventures we could set out upon.
I made the case for climbing in the Himalayas and seeing the Buzzcocks in Manchester. She has her heart set on leisurely strolls in tropical climates and seeing a reunited Duran Duran.
We’ll sort it out.
18
CHAPTER
PARENT. EVEN IF IT’S VIA SKYPE
IT’S A FAMILY TRADITION TO GET OUR CHRISTMAS tree together from our favorite lot in Seattle. I was sick, my girls knew it, and it took a bit of the fun out of the anticipation of the moment. But I love Christmas. And I was determined to soldier on. I got out of bed, took some cold medicine, popped some Advil, wrapped myself up in a bunch of warm clothes, and threw on my raincoat. We weren’t coming back without a tree. When we got to the lot, it was so blustery and cold that my girls knew I shouldn’t venture out into the elements. I decided to stay in the car, and Mae went and picked out our tree. “Dad,” she said, “you just stay warm, and I’ll find the right one.”
It was the first time that the role of caretaker had reversed. This show of concern from my daughter took my breath away. It told me that she loved me and wanted me to get better. It showed me that I was right to have that hurt when I was away, and that our parenting helped make Mae the young woman she has become. I felt comforted and feel comfort now as I write this. I can go out again on the road and feel that pain again, the pain that reminds me of how lucky I am to have what I have.
As a dad who works on the road, I know that I have missed a ton of cool and important things in my kids’ childhood. That’s why I cling to moments such as this. It is a tough deal to be a touring musician and love your kids as much as I do. Saying all of that, I hope I never find a way to turn off the hurt when I am gone. That hurt is a by-product of the love I have for my family. Coming home is always exciting, even when the teenagers barely say “s’up” and go straight to their rooms and shut the doors.
When it comes to teenagers, a parent’s role is more like that of a guidance counselor. I once saw Collin Cowherd put it well on ESPN’s The Herd one morning, talking about a conversation he had with his fourteen-year-old daughter regarding the poor behavior of some pro athlete. He made the comment that he tutors her to make good decisions, but that he is more of a consultant to her at this point than a parent. He was right on.
We parented a ton to these kids when they were smaller and around us all of the time. But now that they are with their friends
and schoolmates, your job has largely been done. Now you hope they will make good decisions about whose car they get into after school or how they behave in public and on social media. You hope they make the right decisions based on examples laid down by us parents. Susan and I will guide them from the sidelines here at home, but we don’t get to play in the games so much anymore. We’re more like consultants. And ringmasters. Times like that day at the Christmas tree lot, it feels good to see that we’ve done a little bit of something right.
I learned a lot about parenting from watching my parents—both good and bad.
I had a great childhood because I had a great mom. Sure, things weren’t always rosy between her and me (as no parent/child relationship is without some testing by the child), and I was a complete ass to her in my early teens. But her steely reserve, smarts, and kind nature always made me think twice before I pulled an asshole move. She was fantastic.
There were eight of us kids, and by the time I came around (as the last born), my mom had her wisdom on point. She never made snap judgments or tried to prove a point by yelling. If I got frustrated trying to do something, she’d instruct me to “just breathe and relax” before I tried again whatever it was that was giving me trouble. She had an arsenal of powerful little idioms for every occasion that she exuded in spades. I’ve drawn on them in times of need for my entire life, long past the end of hers.
After Susan and I brought Grace home from the hospital, I started to wonder exactly how I was going to be able to care for our baby. I hadn’t had any real sleep in more than a week and was beyond frustrated. I called my mom for some advice. “Mom, just how in the hell did you do this? You had EIGHT kids, and I don’t even know how to deal with one!” Her voice was calm and Zen in her reply: “Just breathe, honey. You will get this thing. Those babies survive anything, and you will sleep sometime soon.”