It’s So Easy

by McKagan, Duff

I looked at the bottle for a few minutes, then opened it and shook one of the pills out onto the palm of my hand. I swallowed a Xanax pill sitting in a hotel room because everything seemed to be coming down on my shoulders.

  Fuck.

  It wasn’t for a flight. It was for “stress.”

  This is shady.

  I was worried.

  Then the pill kicked in.

  Mmmm.

  Everything is fine.

  I had a solution to the chaos I felt encroaching on me.

  The next day, I took two pills. My high tolerance for drugs came right back.

  By the third day, I was figuring out how to get hold of more pills. Lots more pills. I called the promoters in the cities we would be visiting next and had them arrange prescriptions from local doctors. I told them I had panic attacks and needed this and that. I had a cocktail going real fast—Xanax and Soma, a muscle relaxer.

  I had forgotten I was an addict.

  Wait, was I an addict?

  Nah.

  Lie.

  Dave Kushner suspected something was wrong with me.

  “Duff, man, you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Just tired.”

  Lie.

  My workouts actually picked up steam. I would go to the gym and fool myself into thinking it wasn’t so bad. I was still on track. After all, I was still working out. Lie.

  Susan called me one afternoon.

  “You sound funny,” she said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re slurring your words. Are you sick?”

  “Maybe a little stuffed up, but I’m fine. I’m just really, really tired.”

  I’m fine.

  I am fine.

  It’s not like I’m drinking or doing coke. This shit was probably developed in a lab at fucking Harvard Med School.

  Doctors gave it to me.

  Lie.

  I thought about my wife and kids all the time and felt guilty for letting them down. That just compounded things.

  I’ll deal with this soon.

  I’ve got what it takes.

  I’ll go cold turkey as soon as I’m home.

  Soon.

  I arrived back in early July 2005, with a few weeks off before another American leg. Susan and the kids were in Seattle. It was warm—eighty-five degrees, which in Seattle feels like 100—and they were all playing in the backyard when I got home.

  I was shivering.

  “I’m tired,” I said. “I’m going upstairs to bed.”

  I was too fucked up to play with the kids. Susan had never known me fucked up, so she didn’t recognize it.

  Every bone ached, and when I went inside I threw up secretly in the downstairs bathroom.

  I went upstairs to our bedroom and called Ed.

  “Hey, man, I’m having some big problems.”

  “Oh yeah?” he said. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m strung out. I’m fucking strung out.”

  “Okay, do you want me to come get you? I can come right over,” said Ed.

  “Yeah, I need to go to a support group or something.”

  Ed said he knew a group.

  “Ed, there’s one other thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Susan doesn’t know.”

  Ed drove into the driveway less than an hour later. I was still shivering, freaking out. Together we attended a meeting of drug addicts. Afterward a friend of Ed’s came over to talk to us.

  “What’s your buddy coming off of?” he asked.

  I answered, even though the question was only indirectly posed to me.

  “Xanax, Soma,” I said.

  He asked me how much I was doing. I told him the story: started with a single pill and two weeks later I hit twenty-two pills a day.

  “Oh, man, you can’t fucking cold-turkey that. You could have a seizure.”

  I had no idea.

  “You have to go see a doctor. You have to taper it down. You should go to rehab.”

  I went home.

  Still I didn’t tell Susan.

  With my stash of pills I figured I would just taper down my intake on my own. I took a few pills.

  In the middle of the night, I woke up, ran to the bathroom, and threw up.

  I began to cry. I was so disappointed in myself.

  Susan woke up, too, and came into the bathroom, where I was slumped next to the toilet.

  “I’m strung out on prescription pills,” I said, bawling my eyes out.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  Once I’d told Susan, the first thing I did the next morning was to call my Uncle John, who was both sober and a doctor.

  It’s hard to imagine he wasn’t worried, but he calmly reassured me that I would be okay. He said he would call some doctor friends to find out what I needed to do. Soon he called me back and explained the basics of tapering down the cocktail of pills I was using. He offered to set up a meeting with one of the specialists he knew.

  I declined.

  I needed to get down to L.A. quickly. For one thing, I felt I should get back into the House of Champions. For another, Velvet Revolver had obligations to honor, including a string of Ozzfest dates.

  I tried all sorts of Chinese herbs to help with the withdrawal. I was jonesing so bad I would take anything to feel better. I was also emaciated—down to 145 pounds. As my drug intake had risen, I had just ceased to eat.

  I just wanted to get to the dojo.

  Can I beat this?

  Yes.

  Benny the Jet, it turned out, had flown to Europe. He was out of town for a few weeks.

  Another sensei, Majit, volunteered to help me.

  “Don’t worry, man, we’re going to get you better,” he said.

  Majit was straight-up martial arts. He didn’t understand drug addiction. But I knew that if I asked him not to let me leave the dojo all day, he wouldn’t let me leave. I needed pain.

  Up to this point, I had never gone to see a doctor who specialized in addiction. I never delved that deep. Besides, it wasn’t as if I was white-knuckling it. I’d been on a high from martial arts for so long. Now, back in L.A., I went to see a specialist. Dave Kushner from VR went with me.

  The doctor explained the process of tapering down and assembled a kit. He also prescribed an anti-seizure medication.

  “I’d really like to see you go to rehab,” he said.

  “I’m not going to rehab. I have to go on tour.”

  “It’s not a good idea for you to have all of these,” he said, motioning to the drug supplies meant to be used to taper down my usage.

  Dave stepped in and agreed to hold the supplies and taper me down himself. The whole thing would take a month.

  The first week of August 2005, Velvet Revolver hit the road again for the final month of full-time touring. Dave doled out my taper-down drugs. Susan came out to see me at several stops along the way. It was a group effort and it worked.

  When the tour ended I found myself doing a lot of thinking. In hindsight, I could see a number of missteps. But the key mistake was succumbing to a smug sort of complacency about my sobriety. I had overstepped self-assuredness. I had gotten to the point of thinking I was no longer an addict. Relapsing really woke me up.

  I am a fucking addict and always will be.

  In all the time I had been sober, I had never gone to a support group for alcoholics or to a rehab facility to find out about the biochemical side of addiction. I weighed the idea of trying rehab. I talked to Susan and to Benny. They both thought it would be useful.

  Benny revealed that he, too, had faced a drug problem in the past. I had never known. He told me some other guys in the dojo had been through treatment programs, too. I had no idea.

  Yes, confidence was knowing I could do anything. But, I realized, confidence must always be rooted in work. In sweat. In pain—good pain. And in honesty.

  Right now that meant facing reality, and it meant taking advantage of a new level of self-awareness I might be able to ge
t from rehab. I decided to check into a monthlong program. But before I cloistered myself away for a month at rehab, I flew up to Seattle to see Uncle John, who had been diagnosed with cancer and was not doing well.

  “Stay sober, Duff,” he said.

  Those would be the last words he ever said to me.

  In the middle of the monthlong rehab program, Uncle John died. The administrators let me leave to fly up for his funeral—I think they figured it might help in my recovery. I think they also realized I would have just walked out if they had tried to hinder me.

  Uncle John had the same knack that my mom had: he could make you feel like you were the most important person in the world. In the first years after Mom’s death, I had felt sorry for everyone else in the family, as I was sure that Uncle John spent an inordinate amount of time talking with me on the phone. I soon realized, though, that he made each of us feel that same way—and all told, there were about fifty or sixty of us by this point.

  Remembrances of Uncle John had broad significance in his community in eastern Washington, as he had delivered 15,000 babies over the decades of his medical practice. But despite the crowds at the wake, my uncle once again seemed to be speaking directly to me—now through his eldest son, Tim, who read an Irish prayer John had picked out in advance for the occasion:

  Life is not a journey to the grave

  With the intention of arriving safely in a well-preserved body,

  But rather to skid in sideways

  Thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming:

  “Wow, what a ride!”

  PART EIGHT

  YOU CAN’T PUT YOUR ARMS AROUND A MEMORY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  When my daughter Grace was in the third grade, she came up to me one day and said, “Dad, how come you don’t drink wine when all of the other grown-ups do?”

  This was a really good question. She had realized that when guests came over or when we all went out to dinner, other people—including Susan, of course—had drinks. People had asked me how I was going to tell my kids about my past drug and alcohol use. Grace’s question gave me an opportunity to tell her a little bit.

  “Well, honey, that is a very good question and I am glad you asked. You see, I have an allergic reaction to that stuff. If I were to have just one glass, I would then have to have another. Two glasses would turn into four, and my allergy would make me want to drink all of the stuff that we have in the house. I would then have to go to the grocery store to buy everything that they had there, and I would drink all of that. I would probably start to get really crazy, and I wouldn’t be like your dad for a while.”

  “Oh,” she said. “You’d better not have a glass of wine, then!”

  “That is what I am thinking, too, honey.”

  Back home in late 2005, I found that two little girls put a rather pink hue on my world. Three exclamations dominated our household:

  “Cute!”

  “OMG!”

  “Awwww!”

  I had given up my hopes of them becoming die-hard Mariners fans or backcountry hiking enthusiasts. And so far they showed no interest in the guitar. But I loved that they always seemed to need something from me, even if it was just a simple cuddle. Looking around, I realized I was living the life I had always dreamed of—the life I had given up on as unattainable while in the throes of addiction. Here I was, white picket fence and all. Well, okay, it was actually black wrought iron. But still.

  The girls had been asking for a new dog for several years, and up to now Susan and I had always shaken our heads no. We decided the time might finally be right that Christmas. Still, we traveled a ton as a family, and split time between L.A. and Seattle. I had crated Chloe on flights enough times to know that flying was no fun for a pet. If we were to get our kids a dog, we would have to get one that could fly with us in the cabin. Of course, this brought with it another dilemma—I am not the biggest fan of little yip-yap dogs.

  We started to pore through dog breed books, feeling ourselves getting excited again about the prospect of a new little guy in the house. (We decided we would get a boy dog to even out the estrogen/testosterone ratio in Casa McKagan.) Every small breed we ran across, however, carried a warning about the way the breed interacted with small children. That is, until we found a picture of a breed that we fell instantly in love with: the Cavalier King Charles spaniel. They were reportedly great with kids—and they didn’t yip. Sold.

  The next step was to go online and find some breeders up near where Santa lived. I quickly realized breeders of small dogs were a freaky lot. I received, for instance, a picture of a prospective puppy dressed in a pink dress that matched its owner’s. One breeder didn’t have a computer and didn’t know anybody who did, but said I was more than welcome to meet her at the Kmart just outside of some dinky eastern Washington town and follow her sixty miles back to her farm.

  Listen, lady, I saw Deliverance.

  Luckily for us, Santa came through on Christmas morning. The girls went wild with excitement. They quickly agreed on a name for the new dog. The day before, they had gone to NORAD’s Santa Tracker Web site and ended up trading emails with an “elf” named Buckley. So Buckley it was. (And yes, the site really exists.)

  I still wanted to address the chronic sinus infections that had kept me under the weather for much of the last few years. I had a CT scan done at an ear, nose, and throat specialist in L.A. It turned out my sinuses were totally fucked up—completely closed in some areas, burned through elsewhere, and in no shape to rid themselves of infection. That would explain the constant prescriptions for antibiotics I’d gotten over the last few years when I came down sick time and time again. The doctor proposed laser surgery to cut out the scar tissue in my head, the remnants of all that coke use a lifetime ago. I was ready to try anything that might help me avoid getting sick and having to miss workouts. And the one thing that might have given me pause—getting addicted to whatever medication they gave me—actually did not. At one time or another, I had tried virtually every kind of drug, and, somewhat miraculously, there was a type I disliked: painkillers.

  The surgery itself took only about two hours—though I was knocked out for it, of course, and it took me an hour or so to come out of the fog of general anesthesia. They had packed cotton all the way back inside my head to stanch the bleeding. For three days I had long strings hanging out of my nose—the only means of pulling the cotton plugs back out. There was simply no way to breathe comfortably through my nose. This was something I had not figured on, and it triggered my claustrophobia. I nearly had a panic attack.

  When the day came to pull the cotton out, I was relieved.

  Then the doctor attempted his first pull.

  FUCK!

  I jumped so high I nearly hit my head on the ceiling. That first tug at all the scabbing inside my head felt like a knife being jabbed into my brain. I nearly shit myself. Literally. Poo.

  Not long after I finished surgery, I received a call from Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains to see whether I would be interested in playing rhythm guitar for a few reunion shows. I had remained good friends with the guys in the band since they partied at my place after their first L.A. concert in 1990. I knew firsthand the utter heartbreak these men had gone through (and continue to feel) at the loss of their singer and brother, Layne Staley, to an overdose. Layne had been a lion of a man with a gentle soul and a wicked sense of humor—like Andy Wood, like Big Jim, like Todd Crew, like West Arkeen.

  The band was struggling with self-doubt about going forward after Layne’s death. The remaining members were hyperconscious that some longtime fans thought continuing without Layne would be somehow sacrilegious. While his death was sad and needless, I for one did not think it meant the door should be shut on a band that had changed the landscape of modern rock. My opinion may not have been a popular one, especially in Seattle. But for me, the choice was clear: these guys had to move on because they still had way too much to offer the rock-and-roll worl
d. In an age of paint-by-numbers corporate rock, we fucking needed Alice in Chains.

  I dove headfirst into the Alice in Chains catalogue. My critical peek inside these songs, riff by riff, opened my eyes to what truly amazing song craftsmanship went into them. I began to feel truly honored to be connected in any way to this musical history. Playing the songs live with them that spring of 2006 ranks as one of the most treasured moments I have experienced as an artist, period. As the band’s confidence grew with permanent new member William DuVall, I could almost see the new life being breathed into the music. This minitour settled any questions about why or how. It was a truly moving sight to see, gig after gig.

  Jerry summed up his thoughts in an interview a few years later: “Here’s what I believe. Shit fucking happens. That’s rule one. Everybody walking the planet knows that. Rule two: things rarely turn out the way you planned. Three: everybody gets knocked down. Four, and most important of all: after you take those shots, it’s time to stand up and walk on—to continue to live.”

  Around the same time, I decided I needed another source of physical suffering, of good pain. I had run a marathon. Where could I push things from there? Well, books about exploration and mountain climbing had become a real passion of late—I’d read Into Thin Air, of course, but also Touching the Void by Joe Simpson, and Alfred Lansing’s classic Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage. Suddenly a natural next step occurred to me: to test myself against mountains. Richard and Laurie Stark—our family friends who ran Chrome Hearts—had become friends with an aspiring high-altitude climber named Tim Medvetz, who had already summited Mount Everest. One night at a party, they introduced me to him and an unlikely climbing duo was born. Tim—better known as “Biker Tim” from the Discovery Channel’s Everest series—became my mentor, and we soon climbed some of the local peaks in Southern California, starting with 10,500-foot Mount Baldy and 11,500-foot Alta Peak. Seattle’s Mount Rainier became a long-term goal for me as I started to learn how to use crampons and ropes, practiced high-altitude survival methods, and grew accustomed to cuddling with Tim in a tiny high-camp tent.