It’s So Easy

by McKagan, Duff

  “Oh,” I said, “so you’re the one.”

  He laughed.

  We started chatting and hit it off right away. We exchanged phone numbers and he said he had some downtime and that maybe we could ride sometime.

  Outside of the United States, bicycle champions are celebrities, almost as famous as our major-league heroes here. Cully was a huge star. He had won the 1992 downhill mountain-bike world championship and he earned big dough from both his winnings and his many sponsors. Not that any of this mattered to me. He was just a nice guy who welcomed me into this new world.

  About three weeks later, Cully came up to my house and we went for a ride. We swam in my pool afterward and then went to get chicken burritos at Baja Fresh. A big day out for me. In fact, the biggest day of socializing of my sober life so far. Still, as the hours ticked away, I couldn’t help wondering why Cully was able to spend so much time with me—the mountain-bike racing season didn’t end until October.

  Finally, I asked him.

  “Why aren’t you racing right now?”

  He told me. It turned out an aortic valve in Cully’s heart had burst as a result of a hard fall at the end of a recent race. Luckily for him, the race was in Phoenix and he had been rushed to a branch of the world-famous Mayo Clinic in nearby Scottsdale. The doctors there saved his life. But at the same time they told him that between the titanium replacement valve they had installed and the blood thinners he’d have to take, he would not be able to compete at a professional level anymore. Then, when Cully got back to his home in Colorado, his place was empty—his wife had left him once his career was in jeopardy. He moved to Los Angeles.

  His life was in as much disarray as mine, and he, too, was struggling to put his back together. He and I started to ride together and hang out.

  I could tell from riding with him that Cully was still faster and stronger than most of us on this planet, titanium heart valve notwithstanding. Here was a guy who had always been an athlete and who had reached the top of his sport. He had not planned for anything else in his life and never expected his career to be cut short. He remained undeterred by doctors who told him there was no alternative to the titanium valve—and that it meant no more racing. Cully refused to accept that as the last word.

  “Shit,” he told me, “racing is what I do. I don’t want to go flip burgers.”

  He’d set out to learn everything he could about the human heart and how it worked, and during the time we became friends he began to pin his hope on getting a nonmechanical replacement—either a human transplant from an organ donor or a valve from another mammal. Apparently this could be done, but the chances of failure were high. Failure in a heart operation meant death, but Cully preferred that risk to living as anything less than he was in his head and spirit.

  My social life had now expanded big-time: instead of just me, there was me and Cully. I had someone to get lunch with now. He also began to bring some of his buddies over for our rides and before I knew it, I was riding with some of the best mountain bikers in the world. These guys had no idea about drinking or doing drugs—they were pro athletes. Sometimes they would come over to my place before or after rides. Hey, wow, nice place—oh, you’re that Duff, wow. My first new friends were X Games jocks. I was starting to believe I could craft an enjoyable life without booze, without drugs, without parties.

  Adam Day caught the mountain-biking bug, too. He and I started to do a daily grinder in the brutal hills below my house. Soon Adam joined Cully and the gang as well. What was amazing for me to see with these pro bikers was just how hard they trained. It took genuine suffering to get good at this type of sport. It also struck me that self-discipline wasn’t the only byproduct of all that painful work: humility seemed to accompany it. There was always someone better, and always something you yourself could do better. The other eye-opener for me was the way they viewed food first and foremost as fuel—fuel for their bodies that should be kept as clean burning as possible.

  One Sunday morning I went out to the house of one of Cully’s friends to watch some football with a crew of professional mountain bikers. There were some empty beer bottles around.

  One of the bikers said, “Oh man, I’m so hungover.”

  “What did you guys do last night?” I asked.

  “We partied like rock stars!”

  “Huh,” I said. “What does that mean to you?”

  “I drank a six-pack by myself,” said the hungover guy.

  I chuckled.

  Cully nodded in my direction and said, “Oh, don’t fuck with this guy.”

  Cully knew. I had talked a lot with him since we became friends. Now I told the rest of them. I told them how much I drank, I told them about the blow, the rocks of coke I’d shove up my nose, about having no septum, about throwing up and drinking the throw-up because there was alcohol in it. The whole thing. And their faces dropped.

  “Yeah,” said the guy, “we partied like mountain bikers last night.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  I still did not go out at night. I was too scared, to be honest. Besides, nothing out there held any interest for me. Go hang out with drunk people? No thanks. Go see a band? No, I had spent the last fifteen years touring and playing live shows. Go see a movie by myself? I was much more interested in books at this point. I was living the life of a monk. I even decided to cut out sex for a while.

  How could I start a relationship if I didn’t even know who I was? There was another aspect, too: I was scared to death of the opposite sex at this point. Not because I had two failed marriages. Because I was sober for the first time in my adult life and had no experience dating sober. No, I would hold back on that for a while.

  Though I continued my daily rides on the steep hills surrounding my house, with the race at Big Bear a few weeks behind me I began searching for another challenge. I thought I had pushed myself pretty hard on my mountain bike, and the race had given me added confidence. When Cully and I did our hard rides, up steep grades, pushing the pace, I found any negative thoughts I had in my mind at the bottom of the hill disappeared by the time we reached the crest. We were so tired and so hungry at the top that we forgot about any demons that might have been plaguing us at the bottom. My system would get so taxed I’d vomit. I called it “throw-up cardio.” In fact, eating enough and keeping it down became one of my biggest problems. The new misery—burning, physical pain—helped cure me of the old.

  I wanted more. More pain. Something equally physically exhausting to add to the mix. Something that could drive so much out of me that my demons must surely follow.

  Someone suggested I try working with a weight-lifting coach named Louis, who operated out of the Gold’s Gym in North Hollywood. Once again I didn’t know what to wear. I thought Converse All-Stars were cross-training shoes. I figured all the biking had raised my cardiovascular fitness, but I soon found out that when it came to strength conditioning, I was sorely lacking. I was thirty and hadn’t done anything outside of an occasional push-up and sit-up since I was playing sports—and that ended at fourteen, more than half a lifetime ago. This was something totally new and different and taxing. I hurt every morning when I woke up, but that pain let me know that I was alive.

  I went every day except Sunday—and that was just because the place wasn’t open Sundays. Louis kept on me about a clean diet. I started to eat the same thing every day: melon for breakfast, a salad with grilled fish for lunch, and barbecued chicken with corn and beans for dinner. Simple fuel. He also taught me to drink even more water. I did not drink any water whatsoever in my twenties, thinking it a total waste of time and stomach space—time and space better devoted to vodka. I now realized the source of one of my earlier health problems: my hands had cracked from dehydration. Aha.

  I started to feel at home in the gym, and soon I confided in Louis about my still-constant dilemma: I don’t know what to do tomorrow, or even tonight after the gym closes; I don’t know what I’ll do when I get home.

  “There�
�s somebody you should meet,” he said. “You know the fighters who come in here?”

  On a few occasions I’d seen kickboxers come into the gym. These guys were usually getting ready for professional matches. In the mid-1990s, mixed martial arts and Ultimate Fighting had yet to appear—kickboxing attracted the baddest of the badassed. When I watched them work out, I was in awe. Not only were they capable of amazing physical feats, but they all seemed to share a sense of calm and confidence. It all seemed so mysterious.

  “I want to introduce you to their trainer,” Louis said. “Their sensei. His name is Benny the Jet.”

  I gasped.

  Benny Urquidez was famous in the Valley. This was the era of Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal; Benny had been the opponent in two of the most famous fight scenes in Jackie Chan’s illustrious career. But Benny was no action-star wannabe. He was a champion ring fighter. He had helped introduce full-contact fighting to the United States and had founded his own martial-arts discipline, called Ukidokan. Just months before, Benny had come out of retirement to defend his twenty-year undefeated run as a professional kickboxer against a young Japanese fighter who said he would not consider himself to hold a true world-champion title until he had beaten the legend. That is, Benny. It ended up being the fight of a lifetime: Las Vegas, fifteen complete rounds, the forty-year-old veteran versus a twenty-four-year-old champion in his absolute prime. I have since watched the match on video dozens of times. It seems impossible neither of the men was permanently damaged—or worse. Benny won, and at the time Louis suggested I meet him, so close on the heels of this epic battle, his star burned brighter than ever.

  It turned out Benny’s House of Champions was just down the road from Gold’s Gym. It occupied a storefront on Laurel Canyon near the corner of Oxnard—part of a row of nondescript buildings probably thrown up in the 1960s as suburban sprawl pushed out across the Valley. But there was no entrance onto the street, and you wouldn’t realize it was there unless someone pointed it out. They weren’t seeking foot traffic. It wasn’t that type of place.

  I will never forget the first day I entered the House of Champions. It was a hot Indian-summer day in September 1994. Louis took me into an alleyway and in a back door. I steeled my nerves. I took a deep breath. And we walked in—to a tanning spa. Aha. Running a dojo is not a lucrative business, it turned out, and House of Champions sublet part of its space.

  Then we walked down a hallway and into the high-ceilinged gym. The front wall was the storefront. One sidewall was bare cinder block. The other was Sheetrock. And the back wall was covered with mirrors. The place was completely bare-bones: an open area with floor mats, a couple punching bags, a ring, and a section with wood flooring where people could jump rope. There was a desk at one end where they sold hand wraps and gloves and other odds and ends.

  And there stood Benny the Jet.

  Benny was about five foot five, with brown hair and intense, deep-set eyes. If other fighters I’d seen seemed coolly confident, this guy was a glacier. As he made his way over to us, I noticed that he walked absolutely silently. Like a ninja. If I wasn’t already humbled by my stay in the hospital, I most certainly was now as Louis introduced me and I went to shake Benny’s hand.

  Benny looked me straight in the eyes and smiled.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” he said.

  It wasn’t the words that really mattered, and in fact Sensei Benny spoke only when altogether necessary. There was something else about him that made the moment so memorable—you might call it an aura. He didn’t create this presence with any trappings or regalia; he was wearing ordinary gym shorts, tennis shoes, and a T-shirt. I wasn’t really sure what it was about him that struck me so, but I immediately knew I wanted to receive whatever wisdom and mentorship Sensei Benny was willing to offer me. My band wasn’t doing much of anything at this point, so I had the time to fully commit myself to something new.

  There were still a lot of toxins in my body. Stuff had been oozing out of me ever since I started flinging myself at hills on my bike; boils crusted my skin. As far as I was concerned, only brutal physical exertion could rid the system of that shit. I suppose time might accomplish the same thing, but I was type A about it and wanted it out now.

  I also knew by now that if I were to remain sober, I would have to do some deeper and much more serious work—work on my soul and on my psyche. The demons that lay hidden just beneath my skin were still alive and kicking and so far I was only just tamping them down. To survive, I would have to make this my way of life. Little did I know just then that the word ukidokan—the name of Benny’s discipline—was Japanese for “a way of life.”

  Benny took one look at me and knew how to set the course. I could just tell. And I could tell one other thing: all the work I had put in on those hills and at the gym was about to be rendered mere child’s play. You’ve got to go to hell if you want to face the devil, and Benny was going to be by my side all the way there and back.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Sensei Benny knew without my telling him that the first order of business was to exorcise my body and soul of the dark and sticky drug remnants in my system. The first phase of training with him was pretty much boot camp. I was in the dojo twice a day, six days a week. And in the middle of the day when I wasn’t at the dojo, I rode my bike.

  None of my fellow students knew I was some dude from GN’R. I had cut my hair short and I trained all day and every day—how could I be in a working band? The guys training at the House of Champions treated me as an equal—a position I earned by working hard, showing respect for the dojo, and keeping my mouth shut.

  At the start, though, I was still self-conscious. Benny understood. He led me up a set of stairs at the back of the main gym. In a brutally hot loft with no a/c was an empty room with a few punching bags. There might be one other person training up there at any given time, but it was out of the way. During the first few weeks, it got as hot as 115 degrees upstairs, and I found the heat cleansing. Benny did know me. This space became my temple.

  For the first few months, I worked upstairs with Benny, just one-on-one. Before learning any of the fighting techniques, I had to improve my basic fitness and work on some essential skills. The movements of Ukidokan are smaller than the big kicks of Tae Kwon Do and not as flashy as kung fu, but they are very demanding—especially for a gangly guy like me (I’m six foot three), starting from scratch. I needed to improve my sense of balance, for one thing, and my footwork was awful—I constantly tripped over my own feet. First I learned to jump rope, which was pretty comical. I was that guy with two left feet. At least that is what I let my head tell me.

  A typical workout would start with a series of three-minute sessions of jumping rope. Instead of allowing me to rest between rounds of jumping rope, Benny sent me to the bottom of the staircase and had me leapfrog back up. Sometimes he would have me carry another fighter up the stairs. Then I’d do push-ups. Then back to jumping rope. I threw up in the corner of the room a lot, especially during those unseasonably hot weeks in September when I started.

  After jumping rope, there was a heavy stretch. I would be shaking by this point. Benny would stretch me—and sometimes that would be the rest of the workout. He could tell when my body had been pushed far enough. He could also pick up on stress during the stretching sessions. He looked in my eyes and gauged the tension in my muscles and could tell what was going on inside me. That was how it must have been, because I never said a word about anything happening then in my life. In fact, I typically never said anything beyond “yes, sensei!” when I worked out with Benny. He talked to me when he sensed I was receptive to his lessons, but it wasn’t a conversation. I remember during one of the first weeks I had to deal with a lawyer about what was turning out to be a protracted divorce process. Still stretching me, Benny began to talk.

  “Sometimes we have to face things, face people, face situations in life that we don’t like to deal with,” he said. “It can feel like everybody is out
to get you. That’s when you have to refuse to succumb, make people realize you are a force—but you also have to give and take in these situations.”

  I felt like crying.

  Other times he would simply intensify the workout when he picked up on stress. That worked well for me, too.

  After the stretching, the workout would continue. We would do kicks without holding a bar, kicks with my fists not moving off my jaw, low kicks, mid kicks, high kicks, all without putting my feet down between sets. Then I’d hit the punching bag—close the gap, kick, and hit. Then handstand push-ups. Then various types of sit-ups.

  Often at the end of these workouts, Benny would bring out a device he had invented to aid his training regime. It consisted of a waistband with rubber straps attached to it. Two straps went under your gloves and around your hands. Another pair went around your feet. He could swap in straps of varying tension—thick bands, thinner bands. I then had to kick and punch through these restraints. By the end of a workout, I’d be empty and just dry-heave.

  “Place pain in a steel box and let it float away,” Benny would say. “Pain will always be there—it’s how you deal with it that matters.”

  Benny pushed me to do things that I would previously have thought physically impossible for me to do. But in order to move on to Ukidokan kickboxing—and to advance within the discipline—I simply had to do these things. I quickly realized my body wasn’t going to break from the stretching or from those last few reps of whatever we were doing that day. It was just pain. I could feel the value of this pain, its transformative power.

  My fight training started with learning all of the defensive moves and blocks and parries. Anyone can throw a punch and hurt someone else. That is the easy part. But defense is particularly important, especially in the ring. Benny drilled that into me day in and day out. He still does, for that matter—I guess I’m a slow learner. A lot of moves in Ukidokan looked pretty daunting when I first saw them demonstrated. But I slowly began to trust my body and my strength. One of the best and most simple edicts in Benny’s teachings was his definition of confidence: “Knowing you can do something even before you try it.” Imagine that. Imagine being asked whether you can run a marathon and answering yes even though you have never done it. Ukidokan was about having full confidence that you were capable of anything.