I was sober and honest, so the first few weeks with Susan were emotionally intense. A month together felt like a year—in a good way. Without the bullshit, we got to know each other quickly and built a solid foundation. And when Susan did finally come to my house, Chloe took an instant shine to her.
I called Cully soon after I started hanging out with Susan.
“Holy shit, I hit the lottery,” I said.
“You sound fired up, bro,” said Cully.
“Yeah, I can’t tell you how excited I am,” I told him.
It was all well and good to share this with one of my best friends, but I should be open about my feelings with Susan, too, I thought.
“I am so happy,” I told her.
This was life without regrets.
And that’s when it hit me.
Today is a good day to die.
I think I just might get it.
If something were to happen tomorrow, my last thought wouldn’t be, I wish I had told Susan how I felt about her. I’d done everything; I didn’t want to die, but I could be proud of not having left anything unsaid or undone. That’s what it meant to wake up with a clear conscience, to be honest.
Maybe that Crazy Horse quote wasn’t morbid. Maybe it wasn’t even about death. Maybe it was about life and how you live it.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
A press release went out in late 1996 announcing that Slash had officially quit Guns N’ Roses. It barely registered with me—I had long since come to grips with the fact that he was done. And anyway, it wasn’t as if Guns was active. He left behind an empty studio being paid for by an entity that itself barely existed.
Neurotic Outsiders finished its live obligations and drifted apart again. The friendships remained but we stopped playing regularly.
One afternoon I went down to the House of Champions and walked in while a class was taking place.
The sensei leading the class said, “Turn and bow.”
The students turned toward me and bowed.
This was a huge and totally unexpected rite of passage. An organic show of respect from the people who trained and taught here was the highest praise I could imagine. It held far more value for me than any belt or diploma—though I did feel as if I had somehow graduated.
In December 1996, Susan and I decided to make plans to go away together for New Year’s. We booked a room at the Hilton Waikoloa on the Big Island in Hawaii.
We were alone together and in love. Things went great. Until one morning when Susan woke up feeling sick. We called the front desk about seeing a doctor. No problem, the hotel had a doctor on-site and we could get an appointment that same day.
Its tropical decor made the doctor’s office feel unusually friendly. A nurse checked us in and then escorted us to an examination room. She asked Susan to describe her symptoms. The woman wrote everything down, smiled broadly, and gave a sort of silent-movie wink. She said the doctor would be right in, and walked out.
“What’s up with her?” I said.
The doctor came in, all chipper and whistling. He asked Susan to give him a urine sample. She did. An exaggerated grin spread across his face and he went back out.
“Weird,” Susan said.
He came in again a few minutes later.
“Well, congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. McKagan, it’s just as I suspected. After all, Hawaii is where love happens.”
“Sorry?” I said.
“You’re going to have a baby!”
I just about fainted.
Here’s the deal: we weren’t yet a Mr. and Mrs., we had been together for only a few months, and neither of us had ever before been in a situation where “congratulations” would accompany a discussion of pregnancy.
We went back to the hotel room and didn’t say much to each other. We had talked about having kids—someday—from quite early in our relationship. Now all the things we had said to each other would be put to the test.
The timing couldn’t have been better, though. Susan was done modeling, so there were no career concerns for her. Once we got over the edge of that first day, all the things we had worried about melted away.
The next step was to get the skeletons out of the closet. I told her all my sordid stories. It took a while. She told me hers.
This was not the way I planned things in my new life. But I realized my idealized notions of a perfect life were nothing more than a mishmash of unattainable images from Frank Capra movies. Those old dreams of mine were too passive. Outside forces didn’t dictate romantic success any more than they dictated the course of other parts of life. I had to take ownership, dictate the course myself—or rather, together with a partner who was also willing to work toward the same goals. Yes, we would have to work at it. Shit happens; life would always be unpredictable. It was up to me—and us—to rise to every occasion.
At long last, I felt ready for this. Those dark hours and days and weeks and years fell by the wayside there in Hawaii as Susan and I discussed our next move. We would be a team, come hell or high water, and it was going to kick some serious ass.
Confidence is knowing you can do something even before you try it.
Could I be a good father?
Yes.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
When Susan and I returned to L.A., we started to do all of the typical things an expecting couple did. We bought stacks of books on childbirth and parenting. We found a prenatal doctor. We enrolled in child-birthing classes. Of course, until you actually have a baby, there is nothing that can prepare you for having a child. It’s all sort of make-believe until the baby comes. But we sure were floating on puffy white clouds of excitement and swooning over all things newborn.
Susan never really got sick. As the weeks progressed, she settled into a comfort zone. She and I worked on some meditation techniques I had learned from Benny. The techniques had helped me conquer many of my gravest fears. Susan got into it.
It had been over two years since I made my first investments in 1994, and while those tentative investments were by no means huge—my initial outlay was less than $100,000—some of the stocks had split and continued to grow. I felt pretty savvy when I considered those results. But I came down to earth anytime I examined my GN’R financial statements. No matter how long I stared at them, the paperwork never made sense. A few years earlier, I would have looked at those things and fallen asleep. But there was a carrot out there I was chasing now. That carrot was knowledge. And I was now in a frame of mind to accept what a good teacher had to offer.
One day I drove down to Santa Monica Community College to register for a class on financial accounting. I immediately encountered a problem.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the registrar said, “but you have to be able to prove you graduated from high school to take a college course.”
That could be tricky. I had never graduated from high school. It wasn’t that school had been so hard for me as a kid. When I was in third and fourth grade, I was determined to become a doctor. My mom was secretly psyched—her brother was a doctor. My grandpa had been kicked out of his house in Ireland when he was fourteen and got on a boat to America, where he fought for the United States in World War I, worked in mines on the East Coast, started logging and moved out west, and then, during the Depression, worked on Ross Dam in the northern Cascade Mountains. For his child—my uncle John—to become a doctor was a perfect American success story. Uncle John even attended a Jesuit school, Seattle University, pleasing his Irish Catholic family. It seemed like the path I wanted to follow when I was an elementary school student. By junior high I was in gifted classes with all the brainiacs. It was so easy that I stopped paying attention—and I got into rock and roll and girls and drugs. Before long, school started to pass me by and I began to get into trouble. Eventually I got kicked out of my junior high for pulling a knife on someone. I was sent to another school, where I didn’t know anyone.
By high school I started playing in bands. Beginning sophomore year, I was playing out-of-
town gigs. I went to my mom and said I couldn’t do both, and music was what I wanted to do. I transferred to an alternative school called Nova, which had been founded by hippies in 1971. There were no classrooms, just a lot of beanbag chairs and nerdy kids. Being in an alternative school meant I wasn’t really going to school at all. In theory, you did your work on your own. But I didn’t; I rehearsed and played gigs. You had to have somebody at least eighteen years old as an off-campus counselor who certified your work. Kim Warnick from the Fastbacks became mine. The only other requirement at Nova was to show up at school for half an hour every two weeks. After a while I didn’t manage to make those appearances and got thrown out. That was the end of my school career. It was 1982.
Now, fifteen years after my last classroom—or even beanbag—experience, I wanted to head back to school. Fortunately at eighteen I had taken a GED test. I did well—scored a 97. I even received a letter of commendation from the governor. My mom had kept that along with the paperwork from my various schools and a copy of my GED. I returned with copies of all of that and Santa Monica Community College gave me the all clear to take a class in the summer term. But that turned out to be just the first hurdle.
For my first class, I purposely dressed low-key. My hair was still short. But people still knew who I was immediately—this was L.A. After that first class, people were hanging out in the parking lot to ask me for my autograph. From then on, though, it was fine. After that, I had only to deal with class.
The professor was cool. He’d had a hand in bringing the Power Rangers TV show to the United States. He taught because he loved to, not because he needed to work. Things he covered in class quickly became clearer, but I found I didn’t know how to study on my own. I would call my brother Matt and ask for help. Eventually I hired a tutor—an assistant professor from USC. We met at a library. Before I could pose any questions about the classwork, the guy had questions for me.
“Tell me about the chicks,” he said. “How many girls have you had?”
What? We’re in a library, and I’m looking for help with my class.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s talk numbers.”
Still, I made it through the class, and by the end I was able to see GN’R hadn’t gotten ripped off. Hallelujah. Guess all those threats about wanting to know the accountants’ home addresses had paid off.
From my experience, once you were pegged as a rock guy, people just assumed that you were either brain-dead or off high-flying on a private jet with hookers and cocaine. (Or both.) While I had definitely been guilty of both of the aforementioned clichés, in that classroom I found—don’t laugh—a love of academia.
I earned an A in that first course.
And I was totally hooked.
CHAPTER FIFTY
West Arkeen suddenly stopped coming to the dojo. Sensei Anthony called him and drove to his house on multiple occasions—but was unable to make contact. I called West once or twice, but then my old defense mechanisms quickly went up when I figured he must be using again.
You fucked me, man!
I was filled with a searing black anger I hadn’t felt in a while.
West started to call my house again. I sat idly by, listening to his voice messages and not picking up the phone. He wanted help.
Yeah, I gave you help and you fucked me. You can forget it now.
I had yet to learn the art of forgiveness. I couldn’t yet feel compassion when someone like West didn’t follow through.
Then, at the end of May 1997, West Arkeen was found dead in his apartment, his body badly burned from a crack torch and riddled with track marks and bruises. His drug buddies had robbed his apartment and made off with all his musical equipment while he lay dead nearby. They also stole tapes with demos of all the songs he had written.
I felt I had let West down. Maybe there was something more I could have done. Maybe I could have at least been there at his apartment in his last minute—if for no other reason than to let him rest his head on a friend.
I loved you like a brother from the day we met and started playing guitars together and telling jokes. I am sorry, West.
I began to think more and more about getting the hell out of L.A.
Susan and I went for a drive one day to look for a lake I’d heard about in Malibu. I still had a waterskiing boat up at my cabin on Lake Arrowhead, but it was so far away that I rarely used it anymore. I thought instead of having a place right in town and one far, far away, maybe we could find a house to live in full-time where we’d be close enough to town for work but could also use the boat.
Though I’d ostensibly lived in L.A. for more than ten years at this point, I wasn’t around for much of that time and had never gotten to know the surrounding areas very well. We drove around aimlessly until I saw a pickup hitched to a boat on a trailer. The rig was stopped on the shoulder of the road. I pulled over.
“How’s it going?” I said. “Hey, we’re looking for the lake around here. You on your way there?”
“Uh, no,” he said. “I’m on my way up to Lake Arrowhead. I was just fixing a flat.”
“Do you know where the lake around here is?”
“There’s something called Malibu Lake just a couple miles up the road,” he said, “but it’s nothing more than a pond.”
He hopped back into his truck and pulled away with a wave. We kept driving on Mulholland—the same road that runs along the top of the ridge through the Hollywood Hills—and came to a narrow body of water that had to be Malibu Lake. The guy was right about it. Still, I pulled over, we climbed out, and I scanned the surroundings. As I looked across the street I saw a sign: for sale. Up a hill, set back off the road, was a house—or rather a mansion. A huge place. There was a phone number on the sign. For some reason I called it.
After our initial conversation, the voice on the other end said the place was in foreclosure, owned by the bank.
“Make an offer,” said the voice.
We chatted a little more and I arranged to take a tour of the house. I was curious what a place like that looked like on the inside; Susan and I could have some fun and take a peek.
At the top of the hill, the driveway circled a grand fountain. Outside were an Olympic-size pool and a tennis court, and inside eight bedrooms, seven bathrooms, and 7,500 square feet of living space. The place was straight out of a hip-hop video. But it wasn’t in what you would call move-in condition. The couple who owned it had gone through an ugly divorce. The man moved out and the woman had trashed the place.
Waterskiing in the nearby lake was out of the question, but on a lark I put in an offer on the house for significantly less than a million dollars. For a place this size, my offer would have been a steal in Fargo, North Dakota. This, of course, was Malibu.
The next day my phone rang: offer accepted.
What? No way!
Susan and I decided to rent out the place above Dead Man’s Curve and move into this new place as soon as we had it repaired. It turned out the damage was just superficial and the house was soon ready.
Moving out of the cliff-side house on Edwin proved more emotional than I had expected. But I reminded myself of the best rationale for moving out: Where could a little kid play there?
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
As the August due date for the baby drew nearer, I began to think I needed to move on from GN’R, or what was left of it. Guns had been paying rent on studios for three years now—from 1994 to 1997—and still did not have a single song. The whole operation was so erratic that it didn’t seem to fit with my hopes for parenthood, for stability.
I told Susan I wanted to quit.
“Don’t leave Guns because of me!” she exclaimed. “I don’t want that ever to come between us.”
“I’m not, and it won’t,” I said. “Trust me.”
As far as I was concerned, the truly amazing time for the band was from 1985 to 1988, a three-year period that had ended almost a decade before that conversation with Susan in August 1997. It didn’t g
et more important the bigger we got, it just got bigger—and more bloated. A lot of people in GN’R’s extended social circle had never moved on in their lives. Maybe they didn’t even want to. I knew now that I could move on. And I wanted to.
I called Axl when my mind was made up. We went to dinner and I told Axl, my good friend and business partner, that I was done. We shook hands and that was that.
Despite the anger I felt after the late gigs, there was another side to my relationship with Axl that trumped all of the unpleasantness, and that is the side I choose to remember and hold dear. Axl can be the most tender and thoughtful of friends. Was he the ideal bandmate and business partner? Actually, no. He was stubborn, moody, arrogant, and greedy. But to be fair, was I any better? Instead of stepping up some time in 1991 or 1992, I fell deeper and deeper into my stupor. I am sure I was arrogant and moody and difficult myself then. Make no mistake, Axl pushed my trust and friendship to the brink many times with his reckless disregard for others. When, through Doug Goldstein, he demanded ownership of the Guns N’ Roses name, I probably should have written off all of the sacred moments of friendship we had shared to that point.
Still, when it came to leaving the band, it wasn’t about Axl. I just had new challenges on my mind.
Unfortunately for both me and Axl, more than a decade passed before we ever spoke a single word again. It’s sad, but the history of GN’R is so fraught with barbs and accusatory hand grenades that complete separation seemed to be the one and only answer for a while—for such a long while, in fact, that it seemed we might never meet again. I was just too damn exhausted from living on a razor’s edge for so many years. I didn’t regret the choice I made, but I eventually did wish we could still have been friends and have gotten together once in a while.
It’s So Easy Page 27