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 any sort of individual sport before. I found the thought of it a bit daunting and alien, but what the fuck? I was on my bike all the time and every day. I might as well train for an event. I figured someone at the bike shop could give me some tips. Besides, if I entered this race, it would give me a concrete reason to stay sober until a certain date—a goal.
I registered for the race.
I had never felt so alone, yet now I also felt strangely invigorated. Next I picked out a new mountain bike. Though I had been using an old no-name steel bike, I decided to splurge on what I thought was a pretty nice bike—a Diamondback. After all, this was my thing now and I wanted a good bike.
I knew I had a lot to deal with. For one thing, I had to cut it off with my wife, Linda. She was not understanding about the situation. How could I have expected her to be? Our relationship was based on getting fucked up together.
Aside from my dog, I was very much alone in Los Angeles, as I felt it prudent to throw out my black address book filled to the brim with the names and phone numbers of people I partied with—and who would probably like to keep on partying. No one likes to drink or drug alone. A fence encircled my house, and I kept the front gate shut. I didn’t drive Laurel Canyon anymore. I took different roads so I didn’t have to pass my dealer’s house and all my party buddies’ places. People tried to come around sometimes, people from the past, but word got around that I wasn’t going back to that world. For the most part, it turned out, addicts were pretty respectful—oh, he’s gotten out of the game.
I had no program, no Alcoholics Anonymous, no community around me. I had Eddy, who was sober, but he was in Seattle. Izzy was sober, too, but I’m sure he still had doubts—is Duff really sober? Ed and I continued to talk almost daily on the phone. He gave me tips on things to eat and on books to read—things to feed my mind. He flew down and stayed with me as I went through the initial divorce papers and struggled with the realization that I was a two-time loser in the marriage department. He helped me to understand that my idealized vision of love could never have been attained in the fucked-up state I had just come out of.
With the Big Bear bike race on the horizon, I spent a chunk of every day riding hard on the steep hills near my house. On one of my first rides, I went through Fryman Park, intending to cut through it to familiar trails in Wilacre Park, farther down the slope. But I ran across a trailhead in Fryman Park I’d never noticed and took it. As I rode up one section, something caught my eye in a gulch next to the trail. What the fuck is that? I stopped the bike and peered over the edge for a better look. Below sat a grotesquely misshapen heap of metal—the wreck of an old car. It turned out this was the point directly below Dead Man’s Curve. I had found my trail of choice.
Mornings I was still panic-ridden. I felt myself gasping for air after what seemed like an eternity dunked underneath a thick green film of pond muck. I was sober, but thirsty. My mind had almost atrophied from lack of stimulation. Now that my life had taken a turn for the better, I felt that I needed to read. I wanted to experience the things I had missed out on, all of the books high schoolers were required to read. It’s not as if I was nostalgic for the days of high school, but I was curious. F. Scott Fitzgerald? Shakespeare? Melville? Where do I start? Fiction, nonfiction?
Someone gave me the Ken Burns Civil War documentary on VHS. I would go to my bedroom early each night, around nine, and pop in one of those videotapes. I was enthralled. I could not get enough. So I started to read books about the war. Then other wars. I went from the Civil War to the First World War to the Second, back to the Revolution, forward to Vietnam.
When I happened upon a book by Ernest Hemingway set during the Spanish Civil War, it dawned on me that I had yet to delve into my initial plan: to plow through some of that required reading. For me, that book, For Whom the Bell Tolls, was the one that suddenly unlocked the world of literature. Hemingway’s descriptions blew me away. They were sparse but beautiful. When he wrote of hunger or pain, I felt sudden pangs of soreness and dread. And when one of his characters talked about alcohol addiction, I cringed: “Of all men the drunkard is the foulest. The thief when he is not stealing is like another. The extortioner does not practice in the home. The murderer when he is at home can wash his hands. But the drunkard stinks and vomits in his own bed and dissolves his organs in alcohol.”
I went straight from there into The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, Green Hills of Africa, and The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway’s writing woke me to the rhythms that could make a phrase or paragraph dance or saunter. I read his poems. I read his short stories. I plowed through two huge Hemingway biographies—even though one was unreadable.
In my new and lonely world of desert-island sobriety, I was at last connecting with something. If I was not yet finding my place in the world, I was at least finding places and ideas and people I could relate to, despise, or aspire to in these great books. As I moved on to other writers, working my way through literary classics alongside my steady stream of nonfiction, the authors also gave me confidence to use my own voice when speaking and to use intelligent words, as opposed to a raised voice that had really only masked fear—fear of how to deal with uncomfortable or incomprehensible situations.
The space between the covers of these books became my place of solitude. Reading continues to represent a meditative haven for me to this day. At the end of every day, whether on tour or at home with my family, I always take time alone at night to read. It has become a time to arm myself for trials to come. And with Guns N’ Roses in 1994, there were definitely trials to come—and soon.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
As the weeks leading up to the bike race passed, I cleaned up my house and bought real food at the grocery store. I had to throw out a lot of my clothing and bedding—my broken body had left bloodstains every-where.
Truck, my former bodyguard, came over one day to check in on me, and I was in the middle of doing laundry.
He opened the dryer.
“You know you have to clean out the lint trap, right?” he said.
I smiled. I knew that by now. I appreciated the fact that he was trying to look out for me.
I went to bed early every night and woke up at the crack of dawn. I read Gavan Daws’s Prisoners of the Japanese and pondered my solitary life. Though it was only two months earlier that I had landed on this deserted isle, it now seemed like a whole other lifetime ago. I was alone for the first time in a long time—except for Chloe padding around the house—and the isolation felt wholesome. It was not the type of isolation I had felt when my band was on top of the world and I was in a fishbowl, gasping for a breath of fresh air and praying for a friend to pick up the phone. Please pick up, Mom—God, I hope you’re home. Please pick up, Andy or Eddy or Brian or Matt or Joan or Claudia or Carol or Jon. That kind of isolation made it seem logical for me to give the keys to my house to a drug dealer so that someone would be there when I came home on breaks from the tour. That kind of isolation made me invite entire clubs of derelict partiers up to my house at closing time. That kind of isolation made me start suicide notes countless times, only to stop because I couldn’t do that to my mom. At least not in such a direct way.
No, I was alone by choice now, and I was dead set on starting a new life for myself based on solid ground. I was in uncharted territory and had no
idea how to do what I wanted to do. I trained hard, drank plenty of water, and watched the booze weight fall off me. I lost fifty pounds in the first three months following my acute pancreatitis. I prayed to my training hills and found deep faith in the physical suffering of the present and the mental suffering of the past.
The race had come to represent much more than a nineteen-mile bike ride. Making it through the race would mean I had successfully navigated the first stage of a totally different course, too—one out of a previous life and into another, one out of despair and into hope. Preparing for the race at Big Bear was a fight for survival and sanity and maybe, just maybe, a chance to overcome. The nineteen mile markers of the race would collectively represent the first mile marker in my sobriety.
Meanwhile Guns was trying to happen. If the band was going to work for me, it was going to have to work with me sober. We booked a rehearsal place. The first day Axl didn’t show up. The next Slash failed to show. After a week of that, I stopped going down there unless one of them called me to say he was actually walking out of his house.
Slash was beyond the heavy nodding, but he was still using heroin. Still, that posed no immediate problem for me. When I saw him ducking out to fix, I wasn’t thinking, Oh, that looks good.
Axl had demonstrated a lot of compassion over the years—and especially in the wake of my pancreatitis. That’s what also drove me crazy. He knew that I’d changed my life around, that I got up early and went to bed early, that I was doing whatever I could to stay alive. And yet, right at this point he made a big switch and became a night person.
One night he showed up at the rehearsal studio as I was packing up to leave.
“Sorry, man, but I have to go,” I told him.
“What do you mean you have to go?”
“Dude, it’s four a.m., and I’ve been here all fucking night. I’ve got to get home.”
“Fuck that, man!”
What made dealing with Axl maddening was the fact that he and I were also in agreement on a lot of things. One of the points of contention between Slash and Axl was a batch of songs Slash brought to the table. Axl thought it was Southern rock—not Guns N’ Roses material. I backed Axl.
Slash and I started trying to write new stuff with other guitar players added to the mix. This was the first time we’d written without Izzy to bounce ideas off of and to bring ideas of his own.
Zakk Wylde, who played with Ozzy Osbourne on and off for years, brought energy and enthusiasm that was lacking within Guns at the time.
“We can build on the legacy,” he said excitedly. “We can make something great. Listen to this.”
He saw a piano against the wall and sat down and elegantly played it. I had no idea he could play piano at all, much less like this. We recorded a few demos with him, but nothing panned out.
Then Axl wanted to bring in a guy named Paul Huge.
“You want to bring in your old buddy from Indiana?” Slash said incredulously.
“Look, he’ll just jam with us and maybe it’ll work out,” Axl said.
“No,” both Slash and I said.
“Yes,” said Axl.
This wasn’t some wedding band you could just bring friends into. If I wasn’t going to bend for the sake of one of my best friends—Slash, and his Southern-rock songs—I sure as hell wasn’t going to let a stranger come in and fuck around with Guns.
“Fine,” Axl said. “How’s this: you guys try him out on your own, give him a few days.”
We let him come in. Gave him a couple of days. It was hopeless.
We told Axl.
“Fuck you guys,” he said.
That was pretty much it for Slash. After that he concentrated on his solo band, Slash’s Snakepit, and eventually released a record under that name early the next year.
I started to get calls from our manager, Doug, and from Ed Rosenblatt, the president of Geffen Records, pleading with me to somehow get the band back into the studio. I suppose in their eyes they finally had a sober and clearheaded member of the band who could somehow pull everything together. But Jesus, I was only just sober, and if they knew how fragile my sobriety was at that point, maybe they would never have called. I still didn’t know if I would stay sober for the rest of my life.
Sure, I could say I was done. But I still had urges. The urge to grab a bottle of vodka and take the edge off when these motherfuckers called me, for instance. Goddamn it, I can’t have a glass of wine to take the edge off? Maybe urge is the wrong word. Perhaps it was more a sense of disappointment: disappointment that I had used up all my chits. Really, fucking never?
Then again, maybe they would have called even if they thought it might imperil my sobriety. If anyone entrusted with the care of the band had actually given a fuck about the health of any of us, Guns would have been pulled off the road and put into therapy years ago. This was not lost on me as the phone calls became more and more frequent. These trusted professionals were after the gold and I was only a means to an end. They could all go fuck themselves. Hey, band manager, why don’t you stick your neck out and actually manage the fucking band instead of worrying if you’ll get fired for saying what needs to be said? There will be no band to manage if you keep on being a pussy and passing the buck!
If I was going to “save” my band, it would be for us, not for them. We had already made a lot of money—and I had reached the seemingly unattainable dream of making a living from playing music. But for the people calling me now, their lone concern was making even more money, regardless of how. Money hadn’t been my motivation to get into music in the first place, and money wasn’t now going to motivate me to get dragged back into a situation that I hadn’t yet figured out how to fix—or even whether I wanted to try to fix.
Besides, I had a bike race to ride.
CHAPTER FORTY
From my days up at Lake Arrowhead, I knew altitude adjustment could take a couple of days. The Big Bear race course started at 7,000 feet and climbed to 8,500 feet. I found a bed-and-breakfast up on Big Bear Mountain and stayed there for a few nights prior to the race.
Slash’s guitar tech, Adam Day, had started riding with me in the run-up to the race, and on race day he showed up to cheer me on, a sign of friendship I will never forget. As I took my bike off the rack on the back of my truck, I had to laugh at myself. I suddenly realized just what a neophyte I was. Of the thousands of people I saw getting ready, I was the only one wearing high-top sneakers, cutoffs, and a backward baseball cap. Everyone else had on proper bike shorts, click-in riding shoes, and aerodynamic crash helmets. The bikes themselves were slick, light racing machines made of titanium or carbon fiber with front and back shocks. My Diamondback had no suspension whatsoever. I looked like a hick. My teeth started to chatter audibly. Oh well. I had trained for this and I was not going to back down now. I consoled myself with how far I had come in such a short time.
When the starting gun blasted, a mad rush of bikes crushed me, knocking me over, and I scrambled to get back on my bike and back into the race. The first part of the course climbed a brutally steep incline. This was my zone. Hill climbs were my chosen place to suffer; suffering was my gateway to serenity. I dug in and started my climb, my race. I was soon passing the guys who had knocked me down in their fancy costumes on their fancy bikes. I rode and I climbed and I passed even more riders.
My mind cleared and I even started to enjoy the scenery. I realized I was lucky to be here. The race was becoming fun and relaxing, and after fifteen miles, I had spaces of open fire road all to myself and could spot the finish line a few miles down the mountain.
I smelled the baked earth and aromatic shrubs. The sun-saturated air itself seemed to have a scent. Maybe the stifled feeling of being inside a fishbowl had been only partly imposed from without—maybe all along part of my disconnect from the full spectrum of life had been the result of my dulled senses. Now I heard birds screech, dried leaves rustle, pebbles skid out from under my tires. And even though my pulse was racing with the exert
ion, the pounding in my chest didn’t fill me with dread and paranoia the way it had when my whole being seemed to shudder sickeningly with every frenetic beat of a coke-fueled heart.
The course veered from the crest of the ridge, and as the last few downhill miles clicked away, I realized I would finish this race. There is no way I can express how exultant I was at that moment. I knew my life was truly in my own hands, that I could dictate its course, and that whatever crazy way I had figured this thing out without the help of a treatment center or rehab, it was working—for now. I finished the race in fifty-ninth place out of the three hundred riders in the beginner class. A fucking miracle.
Once I finished the race, I milled around at the stands set up to cater to riders and spectators. Bike manufacturers had brought in their sponsored pros to man their displays. People could get autographs. But I didn’t know who the pros were.
Then a guy said to me, “Hey, dude?”
“Yeah?”
“Hey, you Duff?”
“Yeah.”
“All right, man, I’m Cully.”
I realized the posters behind him had his face on them. Cully turned out to be a former world champion named Dave Cullinan. He was drawing wide-eyed stares. I was new to the game and hence had no idea at first of the magnitude of his accomplishments. Of course, I did notice he was drawing a lot of attention, so I played it cool and sort of pretended like I knew the score.
Cully was a music fan. He had recognized me in the crowd. Sure, I had long hair and a few tattoos, but I am sure the dumb shorts and high-top Chucks must have made me stick out much more than the ink. None of which, of course, was my intent. In fact, I was so damned scared just to enter the race that sticking out was the last thing I wanted to do up there.
“I was in Japan earlier this year for a race,” Cully said, “and I bought a copy of your solo album.”
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