Slash

by Slash

  The next day, Doug told me that Axl would play the remaining shows as long as I apologized, onstage, to the audience, for being a junkie. That was a pretty hard pill to swallow. In retrospect, I understand why Axl singled me out rather than Steven. I am the stronger of the two of us and Axl relied on me more. My presence was important to him; he felt that I was a link in the band that couldn’t afford to be out of control. Still, I didn’t think a public gesture was necessary. When you’re high, you’re arrogant and there was no way I was going to take the blame in that way. I didn’t think that smack was causing the problems in the band and even if it was, now was not the time to make an issue of it.

  But I had to do something. So when the time came, I walked out there, and rather than apologize, I went into some banter about heroin and what it can do to you and how we’d been around the block a few times, how I’d done my time with the seductive beast. It was more amusing than anything else, because I didn’t want to bring the audience down at all. I have a way of mumbling when I talk anyway, so I think the mention of “the reality of drugs” and whatever else I said came off as an apology enough. We did a long intro to “Mr. Brownstone” as I spoke, so from an audience perspective, it seemed like an impromptu introduction to the song.

  Whatever it was and wasn’t, once Doug told Axl that I did it (because he refused to leave the dressing room until I did), Axl was pleased and the vibe of the whole band turned around as he walked out onstage and we launched into “Mr. Brownstone.” Suddenly our camaraderie returned; once those personal issues were handled, we were able to focus on the playing.

  That second show was fine, and the third was even better—we really got it all down by then. The fourth show was fucking amazing—we were at our best. Those dates were an experience, to say the least. They are renowned on the bootleg circuit and anyone that was there remembers them very well: even on the nights that we were off, they were nonetheless entertaining.

  The Stones watched us for all four nights I’ve been told, because we reminded them of themselves back in the day. Not that I spent any time hanging with them. I was too strung out. Despite whatever I’d said onstage, all I cared about was getting my fix as soon as possible once the last chord was played. I did it in the parking lot usually; I couldn’t wait to get to the hotel. As much as I was inspired by those shows, I started to look at the band and writing our album as something I’d get to “once I got clean.” It’s a famous junkie mantra.

  To get the drugs I needed during those four nights, I once had to leave the hotel to drive into Hollywood and wait for my smack, then go back downtown for the gig. You can be on such a level—playing the Coliseum—but if you’re a junkie you also exist in this scrungy reality of copping your shit in the street, grassroots style. You do it and then go back to your other reality.

  I didn’t want that to happen again, so for the third gig, I gave this dealer we’ll call “Bobby” backstage passes so that he could come down and bring me my shit…and see the show. I was backstage waiting for him to show up, and as it got close to showtime I started to feel ill. The clock was ticking and I was at the point where I was unable to play; I was full of anxiety because if he didn’t get there in time then I wouldn’t be able to go onstage. I was waiting, I was beeping him, and I was trying to keep up appearances. I was beeping him. He was not answering. Literally ten minutes before we went on, Bobby showed up. I locked myself in the bathroom in the trailer we called a dressing room and I got high and breathed a sigh of relief. It was not good. Axl had every reason to make the point he did—that kind of existence just couldn’t work at the level we were at. When you’re that caught up in heroin it’s not about the music anymore. I had forgotten that. Steven was in an equally bad place, but until I got clean again, I didn’t have any idea of what was going on with him at all.

  DRUGS STOOD BETWEEN WHERE WE’D been and where we had to go; and since the Stones shows had established a functional creative rapport within the band again, we set about tackling the issue as best we could. Doug thought that he could pull off a soft intervention with Steven by taking him on vacation to an exclusive golf resort in Arizona. Steven was excited by what the band had just done, so, at least in theory, he wanted to get his act together. He agreed that a week away from L.A. chilling by the pool, in the desert, was all that he needed.

  I was a more complicated animal: suggesting rehab wasn’t going to go over well, and neither was being looked after. Actually, no one could tell me shit at the time; they had to trust that I was going to get it together on my own. And I fully intended to; I thought about how to go about it over the course of many nights spent high up in the Walnut House. I had a doctor prescribe me Buprinex, which is an opiate blocker. He’d get me bottles of that and syringes. It was a very expensive treatment, but this guy was kind of a Dr. Feelgood; not the type of guy who had a real legitimate practice to speak of.

  I brought all of that with me the night that I spontaneously decided to join Doug and Steven in Arizona. It made complete sense at the time: the Arizona sun was a great place to begin scaling back my habit. I told Megan that I had some band shit to do and that I’d be back in four days. I booked my flight, I called a limo, and I called a drug dealer that I knew who was located on the way to the airport. I had it all figured out: I copped enough coke and heroin, and packed all the Buprinex to get me through a nice mellow long weekend at a golf resort.

  I hadn’t called Doug or Steven to let them know I was coming, so when I landed there that night, I was on my own. There wasn’t much going on around town, but I didn’t care.

  “Hey, how far is this place?” I asked the limo driver.

  “About forty-five minutes, sir,” he said.

  “Okay. Listen, can you stop off somewhere to get me some silverware?” I asked. “I’ve got some food back here that I really want to eat.”

  The driver drove for about twenty minutes and stopped at a Denny’s. He came out and handed me a knife and a fork, wrapped in a napkin. Great, I thought.

  “Hey,” I said. “Listen, is there anywhere else we can stop? I need a full set of silverware.”

  After another fifteen minutes we stopped again and this time I got the spoon. I promptly put up the divider between the driver and me, got my drugs out, and cooked up my meal.

  I did my fix and relaxed while we drove to the hotel. The scrappy underbrush of the Arizona landscape suddenly looked much more inviting and the tinted glass made it look even more lush.

  When we got to the resort, the Venetian, I took my one-man party into my room. It wasn’t the kind of place that I was used to, because it didn’t look like a hotel: it was a collection of bungalows along a beautifully manicured golf course…a lot like that place Doug took me to in Hawaii, come to think of it. My room was great: there were these sheer white curtains around the bed, a small adobe-style fireplace, and a bathroom with a glass-enclosed shower—it was like a well-appointed spa. It was so relaxing that I could think of no better therapy than shooting coke and smack all night to soothe my soul.

  I soon forgot that the shit I brought was meant to last me four days—I was acting as if I had something to celebrate. Within hours I was out of heroin. It’s a common problem for junkies: when you’re high, you’re in a nice contented state, everything is good and mellow, and that’s when you make your plans; that’s when you figure out how much dope you need. Then you start doing your dope and everything changes. You reposition everything as you’re going; you find reasons why you can and should do a hit right now. And once you’ve done that, you find a reason why you should just finish what you have because, hey, you won’t need it later.

  You do all of this crazy, psycho shit, because when it comes right down to it, the day you first did heroin, the time you did it and loved it, when your system was pure and unadulterated, that was the best time you will ever have doing it. You spend the rest of your using career chasing that high that you’ll never find again, so you convince yourself that you will get back there if
you just keep at it. You try all different methods of getting there, but you’re chasing a ghost. You end up needing to get high just to feel well: you want just enough to not feel bad, just enough to get you to feel fine. But when you have a nice amount of it, you still try to find your original high—and before you know it, in one night, you’ve gone through what you planned to ration yourself over four days. Your careful planning is fucked.

  That was no reason to stop the party, as far as I was concerned, since there was plenty of coke left to shoot. No matter how meticulous you are with the smack, it will always be done well before the coke. And when you start really shooting coke, the hallucinations you get are so real that you can no longer tell yourself that you’re just high and that it’s your mind playing tricks on you. It’s like being on acid, but with a whole different attitude. It’s scary and realistic, and not at all psychedelic. In my case, it got violent and terrifying. I had enjoyed that element of the drug in the past, but this time I went over the edge.

  I kept shooting coke that night just to keep shooting; I’ve mentioned how I liked sticking the needle through my skin, into the vein, and feeling the drugs enter my body and take over. I also loved the ritual; the cooking, the straining, and the tying off almost as much as the high. I was pretty content with myself just going through those motions for a few hours.

  And then things got weird. I started shadowboxing monsters that I saw on the other side of the sheer curtains that framed the large king-size bed. I was bobbing and weaving, as if I were working out at a gym. This shadowboxing continued all night long until the sun came up, drowning every shadow in the room and ending my activity. Once I snapped out of that trance, I figured that I should probably head out in search of Steven and Doug.

  First, I decided to shower, to straighten up a bit. But before that, I opted for one last shot of coke. I felt great when I got under the big rain-style, luxury showerhead. And as I was there under the nice warm water, the coke hallucinations hit me harder than they had that night or ever before: full daylight was coming in through the skylight, but I watched as long shadows emerged from the corners. They crept up the floor toward me, up the glass of the shower, and took the shape of the shadow monsters I’d boxed earlier. They were right in front of me, filling the glass door, and I wasn’t going to let them get me, so I punched them as hard as I could, sending the entire pane of glass into pieces all over the floor. I stood there with a cut hand, under the water, paralyzed, paranoid, scanning the bathroom for other assailants. And that’s when my little buddies showed up.

  They always looked like the creature in Predator to me, but a fraction the size and translucent blue-gray; they were wiry and muscular with the same pointed heads and rubbery-looking dreadlocks. They’d always been a welcome, carefree distraction, but this hallucination was sinister. I could see them gathering in the doorway, there was an army of them, holding tiny machine guns and weapons that looked like harpoons.

  I was terrified; I ran across the glass on the floor and slammed the sliding-glass door to the bathroom shut. Blood began to form in a pool under me, issuing out from my feet, but I didn’t feel a thing; I watched in horror as the Predators squeezed their limbs between the door and door frame and began to slide it open. I put all my weight against it in an effort to hold it shut, but it was no use; they were winning and I was losing my balance on all of the broken glass.

  I decided to flee: I broke through the sliding-glass door, cutting myself further and spraying debris all over the room. When I ran out of the bungalow, the bright sunlight, the shocking green of the grass, and the colors of the sky were overwhelming; everything was jarring and vivid to me. Everything in my room had been so real that I was not prepared, in my condition, to be so suddenly transported from the drawn curtains into the shimmering daylight.

  I just ran…fully naked and bleeding, down the fairway, away from the army of Predators I saw over my shoulder every time I turned to look. I needed a reprieve from the harsh daylight, so I ducked through the open door of another bungalow. I hid behind the door, then behind a chair, as the Predators began to fill up the room. There was a maid in there, making the bed, and she started to scream when she saw me. She screamed louder when I tried to use her as a human shield to protect myself from the small hunters on my trail.

  I fled again, running at top speed through the resort with a translucent army at my heels; the colors and scenery only added to my dementia. I made it to the back of the main clubhouse and went through the back door and into the kitchen; all of the cooks and activity were dizzying, so I ran out of there, right into the lobby. There were guests and staff everywhere and I remember grabbing a well-dressed businessman standing there with his luggage, once again using him as a human shield. He seemed so together that I believed he could hold the Predators at bay, but I was wrong. They actually got to me at that point and started climbing up my legs, loading their little guns. The businessman didn’t want anything to do with me; he shook free so I backed into a utility closet somewhere near the kitchen. As a crowd gathered, I ran out of there again, back outside, eventually finding darkness and shelter in a shed on the fairway, where I hid behind a lawn mower, until finally, the hallucinations began to subside.

  I’d caused quite a bit of a commotion by then; the cops had arrived and, along with a crowd of onlookers, they confronted me in my hiding place. I wasn’t seeing the Predators anymore, but when I gave the cops my testimony, it involved a detailed re-creation of how they’d chased me all over the resort trying to kill me. I was still high enough that I told the story without a shred of self-consciousness. Everything around me still looked pretty bizarre; even when Steven broke through the crowd and handed me a pair of sweat-pants. The cops took me back to my room and found a bag full of syringes, but no drugs; and since I had a prescription for Buprinex, (which did not get you high,) I was allowed to have syringes and nothing seemed amiss.

  Still, the Arizona police weren’t buying it: at some point they left me in the room to discuss among themselves what to do with me. I was still convinced that everything I told them had happened, which didn’t help exonerate me at all. They kept staring at me, like, “okay.” They eventually took me in, once they found coke residue in the spoon on the floor. But Doug stepped in; he called Danny Zelisko, this high-powered promoter in Phoenix, who managed to keep me out of jail. Doug and Danny hustled me out of there, minus one shoe, because one of my feet was far too injured to wear one. They got me on a private jet and flew me the fuck out of there. Without Danny’s help, I was looking at serious jail time. Thank you again.

  WHEN I LANDED IN L.A., I WAS PICKED up and snuck into a suite at the Sunset Marquis. My speedball rally at the golf course had left me exhausted, so I went straight to sleep.

  I woke up to Duff standing over the bed. “Hey man…you awake?”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to figure out exactly where I was.

  “Get some clothes on, I’m going to wait for you in the other room,” he said. “I have to talk to you about something.”

  “Okay, cool.”

  I walked into the living room and every seat in the place was full: my managers, my mom, my bandmates (except for Izzy and Axl)—aside from my drug dealer, almost everyone I knew was there. It was an official intervention. I was still getting my bearings, but I immediately thought that it was ridiculous that Steven was there because he needed rehab as much as I did, if not more. I stared at him, just thinking, Hypocrite. Everyone else’s attendance meant something to me. I’m not quite sure what, but definitely something. Almost everyone there also had something to say.

  My security guard Earl said, “Slash, you were vibrant and alive in Chicago. In Chicago you were so strong. I can’t stand to see you like this, in this weak condition.”

  My mom was stupefied. She sat there in silence for the most part.

  Alan Niven was typically bombastic. “Slash, you have to go to rehab,” he said. “It’s all been arranged.”

  They all said tha
t they loved me, and God bless their hearts, I’m sure they meant it, but being confronted that way was so heavy that it lost something in translation. I was completely cornered, so my usual bullshit lines about being fine were not going to work. I was stuck with no defense, I was guilty without a trial, and there was nothing I could do. Like anyone in that situation, my lying had come into harsh focus.

  I never blamed my mom for any of this, I never for a moment thought that this was her idea; she looked as confused as I did that day. The rest of them were scheming motherfuckers as far as I was concerned. Regardless, if I was going to make it right with the band, I’d have to go to some clinic in Tucson called Sierra Tucson, and so I entered rehab for the first time.

  The thing about rehab is that you have to want it. When you do, it works wonders—but when you don’t, it may clean out your body, but it won’t change your mind. That is precisely what happened to me my first time: I went through detox, in a very secure, sterile environment, but there was no way in hell that I intended to take part in any aspect of the clean-living community that is phase two of rehabilitation.

  But before I even got there, I did what every dedicated junkie does: I told everyone at my intervention that I agreed with them, that I intended to go along with their plan for me, so long as I could spend one last night in my own bed before I set off to clean up in the morning. They said okay, because my shenanigans had run their course as far as they were concerned.

  I went back to my house, retrieved my stash, did my fix, and hung out with Megan—who was completely unaware of this entire event going down. I told her that I’d be away for a while on band business, and in the morning, I got up bright and early, fixed again, and got into the limo with Doug to go to Tucson. This place was in the middle of the desert in every way: there were no markets, housing developments, strip malls…nothing civilized was within miles. It was a little sober oasis.