I'm the Man: The Story of That Guy from Anthrax

by Scott Ian

  “Can’t we just do something really quickly for ‘Room for One More’ in the meantime,” I asked, “just so we have something out there in the interim?”

  They wouldn’t go for that, and within weeks everything ground to a halt and there was nothing out there to help us build back our momentum. “Only” had already been out there for three months, and it was done, dropped, finished. We needed something new and we had nothing to offer. Pellington finally made the video for “Black Lodge.” It came out in the fall and didn’t impact. We weren’t even in the video except for these quick, weird flashes of our faces. I love the video. It’s conceptual and artistic. I think it’s the best video we’ve ever made visually, but it had nothing at all to do with Anthrax and it didn’t connect with the millions of people who were listening to Pearl Jam and loved the “Jeremy” video. They didn’t see it and rush out to buy Sound of White Noise.

  We were stuck. We had 600,000 records sold, and we could sense Elektra starting to panic because of the amount of money they had invested in us. We kept a good attitude. We felt like we could still do our thing and tour and we’d still draw crowds and build back up organically. Then we’d go out with “Room for One More,” and Elektra would realize they should have listened to us in the first place. Before they convinced us that they should go with “Black Lodge,” they said they could see five singles coming from the album, so we figured we still had time to turn Sound of White Noise into at least a platinum album.

  Chapter 22

  We Thought You

  Were Dead!

  Some strange shit happened during the Sound of White Noise cycle. It seemed like a giant ball of rope had started to unravel, and the psychic debris that resulted from that was taking its toll on my life. We did a great tour of Japan in October of 1993, and after the last show we had to fly from Tokyo to LA and then from LA to Dallas and connect to a flight for Tampa, where we were finally shooting the video for “Room for One More” with George Dougherty.

  That’s a crazy amount of flying. I had already been up almost two days straight in Japan, then I was traveling for twenty-two hours between Tokyo and Tampa. By the time we got there, all I wanted to do was grab a cheeseburger and go to bed. Then I found out a bunch of my friends from Huntington Beach were flying in to be in the video and hang out for a couple of days. I met them in Tampa and told them I was fried and wanted to crash.

  Apparently, that wasn’t an option. Cypress Hill and House of Pain were playing right down the street, and everyone was going. I’m friends with all those guys, so I agreed to go as well. My plan was to be out of there by 11 p.m. so I could get some sleep before our shoot. My friends Bobby, Billy, and Rich went with me to the venue, found House of Pain’s tour bus, and knocked on the door. They let us in and we hung out for a few minutes.

  All of a sudden a six-foot-long bong appeared, as you might expect on a House of Pain bus. My friends were all taking hits off it, and so were the guys in the band. It smelled good, and I was really wired because the only thing that had been keeping me awake for the past day was cup after cup of coffee. I thought a hit of weed might calm me down and perk up my appetite before we went out for dinner. Then I’d be able to sleep without being hungry.

  I climbed up to the bong, which I had to hold like a cello. Another guy loaded it from the bottom while I braced it from the top. I breathed out, put my mouth over the top lip, and inhaled with all my might. About three inches of smoke rose up the bong. I had to take another huge breath, inhale, and then cap it with my hand and try again. The smoke moved maybe another two inches. Everyone else was able to pull the smoke all the way to the top in one shot. Old iron-lung Ian had to repeat this process five times, until finally the smoke got to where my mouth was. I took a tiny little hit because I knew that I was dealing with straight-up Hulk weed, not some Bruce Banner shit. I had never smoked weed like this before. It was West Coast chronic, the same shit Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, and all those big-time rappers were smoking. Instantly I realized my mistake.

  I sat down in the booth in the front of the bus. I was instantly bathed in cold sweat, and the walls in my skull started to close in on my brain again. That fucking Dianoga was coming back. I looked around and said, “I’m going to pass out, and I might even have a seizure because this has happened to me twice before now.”

  I may not be a fucking genius, but I put two and two together and finally realized that maybe I didn’t have bad shrimp or dehydration the last two times I passed out smoking. Maybe it was the weed. Meanwhile, everyone was high as fuck in the bus. House of Pain rapper Everlast told me just to relax and I’d be fine.

  The solid wall in my brain kept sliding toward my face. “I’m going to pass out! I think I have a problem with the weed and I feel like I’m about to lose consciousness,” I said louder.

  Everlast gave me a bottle of water and told me that the weed was really strong and I didn’t have anything to worry about. He told me I should sit down and just chill out.

  Nobody was listening to me, and the wall was turning my brain to soup faster than ever, probably because the weed was more potent. I found my friend Rich, who used to do security for Anthrax, and I convinced him to find a paramedic right away.

  As he ran off the bus, I pictured my brain exploding and my body collapsing dead in a pile on the dirty floor of the House of Pain tour bus. I imagined two metal Beavis and Butthead–type dudes having a conversation in the future: “Hey, whatever happened to that Scott Ian guy from Anthrax?”

  “Oh, didn’t you hear?” answered his friend. “He was smoking chronic with House of Pain and died on their bus.” Yep, that’s what happened to me. So fucking lame.

  The last thing I remember was standing up and being face-to-face with Everlast. Then I woke up on the floor of the bus, and my friend Bobby was leaning over me, pounding on my chest. I looked up at him.

  “Ow, ow, ow! What the fuck are you doing?!?”

  “We thought you were dead!” he blurted. “We thought your heart stopped.”

  I got up and sat on the couch, favoring my bruised ribs.

  Everlast explained, “You stood up, and next thing I knew, you just dropped, and I caught you before you hit the floor. Then you started shaking. You had a full-on seizure. Your eyes rolled back in your head and everything.”

  After I had been shaking for about thirty seconds, they put me on the floor. Then they placed me on the couch. Then back on the floor. They were all high as fuck and didn’t know what to do. That’s when Bobby put his ear up to my mouth to see if I was breathing. He didn’t think I was, so he started pounding the shit out of me. Right then, Rich showed up with paramedics, and they took me away in an ambulance. Thank you, good night.

  We started toward the hospital. My blood sugar was insanely low, so they gave me a tube of some gel to squeeze under my tongue, and I popped up like Popeye after a can of spinach. I asked the paramedic, “What the hell was that? I feel great! Can I get a prescription for that stuff? I’ll take it before every Anthrax show!” He looked at me like I was the dumbest person on the planet and said, “It’s glucose. You can get it at any drugstore. We were just boosting your blood sugar. You could have gotten the same effect from eating an Oreo.” They dropped me in the emergency room, and after a couple hours one of the doctors saw me. He took my temperature and my blood pressure. Everything seemed normal. I told him I had been traveling and I hadn’t slept—oh, and that I was smoking weed.

  He told me I was dehydrated and exhausted, so my blood pressure dropped, which was why I passed out. He told me to go back to the hotel, eat some dinner, and then go to sleep, which I did. I felt better in the morning and we made the “Room for One More” video. When I got back to LA, I saw my doctor and told him about my experiences with weed and seizures.

  “There’s something going on there,” he deduced with the acumen of Sherlock Holmes. “Weed is the only common denominator in this equation.” Over
the next week he took a bunch of blood and ran tests. They even tested me for epilepsy. I had to sit in a dark room with a strobe light in my face. It sped up, slowed down, and sped up again over the course of about twenty minutes. I asked my doctor if they could at least put some Maiden on while I sat there in front of the strobe so I could feel like I was at a concert. I’m surprised my insurance picked up the cost for that one because, clearly, having been in a metal band for ten years at that point and having strobes flashed in my face every night, epilepsy wasn’t the problem.

  About four days later, they still hadn’t called with my test results, and I was extremely nervous. I was worried they were going to tell me I had a tumor or an embolism. At the very least they’d say I somehow had a giant pothead tapeworm wrapped around my cerebellum, and it went wild every time it was exposed to weed. I was sweating this big time.

  Finally my doctor called me. I went to his office and he said, “Scott, I have good news and bad news.” I thought, “Fuck, that’s what they tell you right before you find out you have a terminal disease that’s going to take more than a year to kill you so you still have a little ‘quality time’ left.”

  “The good news is you’re not dying. Your brain is fine, your blood is fine, and you’re not allergic to anything except for one thing—THC.”

  I asked him why I never passed out when I was a kid and smoked weed. He said I probably had a minor allergy to it back then, if any, but that I developed a severe allergy over time. He explained how some people eat shellfish their whole lives, and then suddenly they have lobster and they go into anaphylactic shock. He said I had two choices: I could either stop smoking pot or I could do it again and risk another seizure or maybe even a brain hemorrhage. Maybe even death could show up at the party next time. I decided to stop smoking weed.

  But that didn’t stop me from trying psychedelic mushrooms. I was in New York City hanging around with some girl John Bush was dating, her sister, and some of their friends. After hitting a couple bars, there were four or five of us hanging at someone’s apartment in the West Village. I was planning to meet my friend Dominick, who was deejaying old metal songs that night at L’Amour in Brooklyn. We had a couple more drinks then someone took out a bag of mushrooms. I knew about mushrooms, but I had never done them before. I was curious because mushrooms grow out of the ground. They’re not man-made, so how bad could they be? I asked, “What do they do? What is a mushroom trip like?”

  One of the girls said, “It’s fun. It’s mellow. You may feel a little sick at first. You may even throw up, but generally it’s a pretty mellow thing, depending on how much you eat.”

  I said, “Fuck it,” which was so out of character for me. I’m never the guy that says fuck it, but I was intrigued by these weird-looking things. I took a couple of pieces of mushrooms and chewed them. They tasted like bitter metal mixed with dried turds. “No wonder people throw up,” I thought. I washed the ’shrooms down with a beer. Ten minutes passed. Twenty. Thirty. Nothing. I took another two little pieces, and fifteen minutes later the drug started to hit me. I was sitting there watching other people tripping, and I didn’t realize I was also high at first because the logical part of my brain was still there and I started having an inner monologue with myself.

  Then it got really intense. I started receiving the answers to all the questions that mankind has ever asked about God and the universe. It was like a window had opened and everything was so obvious. All this stuff was flooding in. I was sitting in a chair with a broad smile, and I was cracking up laughing. I thought, “Man, I have to write all this stuff down so I remember it afterward. Everyone’s problems will be solved and I’ll be a hero!” Of course, I was fucking high and in no condition to answer even simple questions like “Where do you live?” or “What’s your favorite color?” let alone write down the answers to all the world’s problems. The “logical” part of my brain kept bothering me to get up and find a pen and paper, but I was having too much fun laughing at all the lesser beings around me to get up. At some point, I wandered out on the fire escape on the second story of this West Village apartment right across from John’s Pizza on Bleeker Street. I sat there laughing at people in the street. Then it dawned on me that not only did I know everything there was to know but I could fly.

  I yelled at people that I was going to swoop down like the Human Torch and pick them up and take them for a ride. Someone at the party saw what I was doing and convinced someone else to drag me back inside before I jumped. What a cliché I had become.

  Suddenly I blurted out, “Brooklyn! L’Amour!! We’ve got to see Dominick. It’s going to be the greatest thing of all time. Wait until we get there!!!”

  Of course, it was just my friend Dominick spinning metal records in a club, but in my head it seemed really important to go. Somehow I called a limo. No idea how I did that. I had never called a limo before, nor did I have the number of a limo company. Mushrooms may not give you the power of flight, but apparently they do enable you to call a limo.

  Everyone else was tripping as well, so they were excited. At that point I was thinking mushrooms were the greatest thing ever—way better than weed. The car came, and six of us got in, four girls, one other dude, and me. As soon as the driver hit the gas, I started to feel like a character in a mob film who’s asked to get into a car and “take a ride.” Something was way wrong. Two of the girls were looking at me and whispering to each other. It was dark and lights from outside were splashing into the car and then disappearing. I started feeling paranoid even before one of the girls across from me coughed and then slumped over, dead.

  I started freaking out and yelling at everybody. “What the fuck? She’s dead, she’s dead!!!”

  They tried to calm me down and convince me that she just fell asleep because she was stoned and tired.

  “No, she’s dead, you fucking maniacs!” I screamed. “You killed her and now you’re trying to kill me, too!” The mushrooms had definitely turned on me, and everything that was great about the drug contorted into a horrible nightmare. I started throwing up. I didn’t just puke; I projectile vomited on everyone across from me. Then I started screaming because I was still sure I was the victim of a sinister murder plot. The barrier between the front seat and the back was all the way up so the driver had no idea what was going on. He kept going. “He must have heard me,” I thought. I wondered if he was in on the plot. By this time we were in Brooklyn, and I was still yelling, “There’s a dead girl in the fucking car! What are we going to do with her body? I’m not going to jail for you motherfuckers!” In my mind the dead girl had now come back as a zombie and was going to try and turn me, too. I tried to roll down the window to jump out of the car, but they pulled me back in.

  Then I remembered I had called the car so the driver had to do what I wanted. I was still convinced there was a hit on me. I was sure the girl across from me was a zombie. But at least I had a plan that would allow me to escape unharmed. I tried to placate the killers the way doctors talk to a psychotic mental patient.

  “Okay, fine, she’s not dead, and you’re not trying to kill me. I get it. I’m okay. But I feel really bad. I think I’m in trouble, so I’m going to have the driver drop me off at a hospital in Brooklyn, then he’ll take you all back to Manhattan and drop you off wherever you want to go.”

  “Scott, you don’t need to go to a hospital,” one of the girls said. “It’s just the mushrooms messing with your head. You took too many. Now relax and . . .”

  I wasn’t about to fall for that. “Don’t tell me. . . . It’s because you’re trying to kill me!”

  I rolled down the barrier and screamed to the driver, “Take me to the nearest hospital. I’m sick!”

  We were five minutes from Prospect Park Hospital, and it was 1:30 in the morning. The driver dropped me off and left. I was safe! But I was still tripping hard, and by the time I had walked ten feet I couldn’t remember where the fuck I was. I wander
ed in circles around the hospital parking lot until an EMT saw that I was dazed and had puked on myself. She figured I had been in a car accident and led me to the emergency room. She helped me check in. When they asked me what was wrong, I wanted to shout that a girl was dead and she was a zombie and we all might be next, but I stifled the urge because a tiny voice in the back of my head told me that maybe that’s not what was happening at all.

  “I’m sick. I’ve been throwing up,” I told the woman at the check-in desk. Prospect Park Hospital in Brooklyn is much different today than it was back then. There were crazies screaming, babies crying, people coming in with stab wounds. It wasn’t the best place to be tripping on mushrooms. I sat on a chair in a tight fetal position for a solid three hours. During that time I had an epiphany. I had eaten poison mushrooms and died in the hospital, and now I was in hell. I was surrounded by bleeding people and elderly ladies coughing and some dude who had collapsed on the floor and was shaking. There was evil laughter in my head. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Pinhead from Hellraiser walked through the wall and chains with hooks at the end shot out of the ceiling and into my flesh.

  I was shaking uncontrollably, too. Then I snapped out of my imagination and back into my head. I realized I was in a hospital emergency room and I wasn’t dead. I knew I took mushrooms and had a really bad trip, but I was finally coming down. It was 5:00 a.m., so I got up and started to walk out when they called my name. I saw a doctor and told him I had eaten mushrooms. He laughed and then examined me quickly and told me I was fine. He asked if I had health insurance, and I said, “Yes, I do. Here’s my card.” He told me that Blue Cross probably wouldn’t cover an ER visit for eating psilocybin, so he wrote up the diagnosis saying I had gotten food poisoning from bad mushrooms. Thanks Doc!

  I walked out of the hospital into the early Brooklyn morning, and all I wanted to do was get some food and go to bed. I was supposed to go to Long Island and hang out with my dad and see my brother Sean (born from my dad’s second marriage) play soccer. I must not have been completely lucid because I made another great decision. I walked to the nearest pay phone, called my dad, woke him up, and asked him to get me.