It's So Easy: And Other Lies (36 page)

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.

Of course, that confidence depended on more than being able to parry a punch. The draining workouts served as a prelude to daily attempts at meditation, with Benny teaching me to build a mental safehouse, a place where I would always be able to go to collect myself, renew myself. My progress in this department was not nearly as steady—or as easy for me to recognize as it was during the physical workouts. Benny talked me through this, but I had no idea whether I was succeeding as a student.

Benny, who is part Blackfoot Indian, also liked to quote the famous Sioux warrior Crazy Horse, who defeated George Custer’s cavalry forces at the battle of Little Bighorn in 1876: “Today is a good day to die.” The first time he said this, it sounded like a macho throwaway line expressing a sort of I-ain’t-scared-of-nothing ethos.
Gnarly,
I thought. But the more I considered it, the more I knew there must be something else to it. Benny wasn’t macho, and he never threw out vacuous lines. Despite my inability to pinpoint its meaning, I decided not to ask him about it.
This must be part of my mental training.
I’d have to figure it out.

After every workout, I would remove my gloves and Benny would take the end of the cloth wrap around my fists and have me back away from him to unravel the wrap. When the wrap had completely unraveled, I held on to my end and the two of us remained connected, Benny holding one end, me the other. As I backed up and then held the taut wrap, Benny made me recite the five rules of fighting:

1. Never move back in a straight line.

2. Never set.

3. Redirect.

4. Fight your opponent as he fights you.

5. Place your opponent where you want him.

But Benny never went in order. It was like a quiz, testing me at my most exhausted.

“Three,” Benny would say.

“Redirect,” I would answer.

“One.”

“Never move back in a straight line.”

“Four.”

“Fight your opponent as he fights you.”

“Two.”

“Never set.”

“Five.”

“Place your opponent where you want him.”

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

In my twenties, there were two things I never really had to come to grips with: taking responsibility for my actions and thinking about what I would do besides playing music. I just didn’t think that I would be around to deal with that shit. Now, as I began to figure out the first of those two things, I also had to grapple with the possibility that I’d have to solve that second question at the same time. With only Axl, Slash, and me left of the original Guns and progress toward a new record at a standstill, what if the band imploded, as was looking more and more likely?

I still struggled to fill my time, and one day when I was poking around in my basement, I found a crate filled with Guns N’ Roses financial statements. I opened the crate and pulled one out. Then another. And another. I realized I had no idea what they meant. For all I knew, I could have been getting ripped off during all those hazy years of world tours and record-breaking album sales.

My bandmates and I were streetwise, though, and we knew what a shark looked like. I still remembered telling the accountants that I wanted their home addresses. But then I had kind of lost track of the money side of things pretty quickly. Shit, there were weeks when we were out on the road that I could barely remember my own name, much less follow where all our money was going.

One of my older brothers, Mark, was a financial guy at Boeing who really knew the nuts and bolts of investments. I asked him to have a look at the financial statements.

“These are hard to follow even for me,” he said, “and I have an MBA. More than anything else, they’re misleading.”

This was not good. I needed to pay attention to this stuff. And I also needed to find places to invest some of the money I’d made. I couldn’t just leave it sitting in a checking account.

Once I got engaged in trying to figure things out and Mark and I started talking, he helped me find an investment guy in Seattle. We started going through basic public information available about companies whose stocks interested us, information like a company’s annual report. You could read how the company viewed itself and what—at the most rudimentary level—it planned to do in the future. It sounds like simple stuff, but it turned out that just reading those sorts of things and deciding whether they made sense put us ahead of most people.

I bought some forward-thinking equities. Everybody in Seattle was buying Starbucks because you could see it growing. It hadn’t turned up on every street corner yet, but it had a foothold in L.A. and San Francisco, and there might have been a couple storefronts in New York. And there were lines at their coffee shops. People were going there. We thought it might be a short-term investment, but at that time it didn’t look as if they were expanding too fast. I also bought Microsoft. A little later, I got in early on Amazon, another Seattle stock. It was cool to start investing in the 1990s and have a connection to Seattle. There was an excitement in the air about some of those companies, and they just happened to be in my hometown. They also just happened to be some of the hottest stocks of the next decade or so.

In late 1994, Axl called and we talked about plans for the band, trying to figure out what to do. The conversation went on for more than an hour. We started to talk about GN’R’s accomplishments—something that none of us had ever acknowledged or discussed together prior to this. We talked about our creative success, about our collective vision, about why that vision had resonated. We talked about how the band had represented a family, how that family had started a business, how that family business had gone global. We had come a long way from the days of Gardner Street.