It's So Easy: And Other Lies (4 page)

The morning of May 10, I woke up in my new bed with sharp pains in my stomach. Pain was nothing new to me, nor was the sickening feeling of things going wrong with my body. But this was different. This pain was unimaginable—like someone taking a dull knife and twisting it in my guts. The pain was so intense I couldn’t even make it to the edge of the bed to dial 911. I was frozen in pain and fear, whimpering.

There I was, naked on my bed in my dream home, a home I had bought with the hopes of one day having a family of my own to fill it.

I lay there for what felt like an eternity. The silence of the empty house seemed as loud as my raspy, muffled moans. Never before in my life had I wanted someone to kill me, but I was in such pain I just hoped to be put out of my misery.

Then I heard Andy, my best friend from childhood, come in the back door. He called, “Hey, what’s up,” just as he had ever since we were kids.
Andy, I’m upstairs,
I wanted to answer. But I wasn’t able to. I could only silently sob. I heard him start up the stairs—he must have seen my wallet in the kitchen. He made it upstairs and came down the hall.

“Oh, shit, it’s finally happened,” he said when he reached my room.

I was thankful to have my friend there. It was comforting to think that I would die in front of Andy. But he had other ideas. He pulled some sweats on me and began to try to move me. He must have felt a jolt of adrenaline—otherwise there is no way Andy could have carried the two hundred pounds of dead weight of my bloated body. As he carried me down the stairs and out to his car, the searing, stabbing pain in my intestines spread farther down to my quadriceps and around to my lower back. I wanted to die.

The doctor I’d had since I was a kid lived just two blocks away, so Andy took me there. Though Dr. Brad Thomas was my longtime physician, I hadn’t let him see me very often once I descended into full-blown alcoholism. Together, Andy and Dr. Thomas carried me to his first-floor office. I heard my condition being discussed and I felt the prick of a needle in my ass. Demerol. Nothing. Another shot of Demerol in my ass and again nothing, no relief whatsoever. One more shot. Again nothing. The pain kept on spreading and I was starting to panic. I whimpered as my spirit began to blacken and fade.

They decided to rush me to the emergency room at Northwest Hospital. Dr. Thomas told Andy to drive me, as it would be faster than waiting for an ambulance. He said he would meet us there. Andy drove as fast as he could without jerking the car too much—every little movement made me moan and cry.

As they put an IV drip of morphine into my left arm at the hospital, the staff asked me questions I could not answer.

“Name? Address?”

Andy answered those.

“How much do you drink on a daily basis?”

“Are you on drugs right now?”

I just whimpered.

I was mute from pain. The morphine wasn’t working as I knew it should. I knew a thing or two about opiates by that stage in my life. I knew the warm rush they offered, yet I was getting none of it.

They wheeled me into a room next to another guy on a gurney. The motion made me writhe in agony.

“Dude, I broke my back,” said the guy in the other bed. “And I’m glad I don’t have whatever you have.”

Dr. Thomas and an ultrasound technician ran a scanner over my organs and I saw my doctor’s face go white. My pancreas, apparently swollen to the size of a football from all the booze, had burst. I had third-degree burns all over the inside of my body from the digestive enzymes released by the damaged pancreas. Only a few parts of the inside of your digestive tract can handle the enzymes, and the outsides of your organs and your stomach muscles are definitely not among them—it just burns all that tissue.

A surgeon with thick glasses explained the surgery. They had to take out the top part of the pancreas—cut it off. Sew me back up. And then I’d have to be on dialysis for the rest of my life.

Suddenly I understood the pleading mouthed by miserable souls back to antiquity, those left breathing after being run through with a rusty sword or scalded with hot oil. I was there.

I summoned all my power to whisper to the ER doctor.

“Kill me.”

I begged over and over.

“Please, kill me. Just kill me. Kill me. Please.”

CHAPTER TWO

It happens in a flash, life does. Only the ever-deepening lines on my face tell me that I have been alive for a while. I don’t feel any different. I still have geeky and adolescent thoughts. I still tell the same dumb jokes. I look up at that cedar-shake roof on the house in Seattle—now looking a bit the worse for wear—and think,
Hang on, didn’t I just have that redone?

But then again, the real question is different: How did I manage to outlast that roof? To put it another way, how did I get here from there? And how did I find myself there in the first place? That’s what I’ve tried to figure out through the process of writing this book. Because it certainly wasn’t a given that my story would amount to anything more than a lurid cautionary tale. It had all the elements: sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and fame, fortune, and a fall. But instead, the story became—well, it became something
else.

Here’s what I do know, as I set out to answer those questions. I let myself lose track of what I thought was meaningful in life even as Guns N’ Roses began to become meaningful to others. Back then—on the few occasions that I thought about it at all—I could think of a million excuses for going off the rails. But in the end it seems to have hinged on a failure to grapple with a few basic definitions—of what it meant to be successful, of what it meant to be an adult, of what it meant to be a man. The way I liked to define myself diverged from the actions that
actually
defined me. And this disconnect proved a nearly fatal level of self-deception.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’m afraid this is one of those stories that takes a long time to unfold. There have never been any easy epiphanies for me; it took a lifetime to start to understand even the slightest goddamn thing. So I’ll just have to start at the start.

My dad was a World War II vet who began having children with my mother when he was eighteen and didn’t stop until he was thirty-eight. He went straight from the war to working for the Seattle Fire Department, desperately trying to provide for what would become a family of eight children by the time I arrived, born Michael McKagan on February 5, 1964.

There were several Michaels on my block—including one of the kids immediately next door. The Michael next door had a grandfather from Ireland living with him, and his grandpa apparently gave me the nickname Duff to simplify things on our street. Later, once Guns N’ Roses took off, my dad liked to claim credit for the name, too. He said he used to call me McDuff. Either way, I was called Duff from before I can remember.

I’m not sure a little boy could ask for much more than having a father whose vocation happens to be working as a fireman. If at times during grade school I was embarrassed that my mom and dad were much older than my friends’ and classmates’ parents, at least I could find comfort in the fact that my pop was a heroic older guy.

Both my parents had come of age during the Depression, and that experience colored their thinking on money, on work, on life. I remember my mom telling me stories of what it was like growing up in the Depression. Stories of not having enough money to heat the house in the winter, of having to wear sweaters and coats all of the time. Stories of how her mother would fix a broken roller skate or doll and that would be her sole Christmas present.

If you are at any McKagan family gathering (a large crowd to be sure), try muttering “FHB” and see what happens. Well, I’ll tell you what will happen: you will suddenly see the eight brothers and sisters each take a minuscule portion at the pot-luck buffet table. “Family Hold Back” is a saying that comes from years of too many kids and not enough to feed us all of the time. One of us would almost always have a friend over for dinner and this is when the secret code of FHB started: make sure the guest had enough to eat, take a small portion, don’t say anything. We kids were taught lessons of frugality and thrift by example.

The old man also had a house-painting business on the side, and I’ll never forget how happy I felt when I was finally old enough to climb up onto scaffolds and scrape and paint with my older brothers and other firemen who needed extra work.

With the Cascade mountain range practically in our backyard, my dad would take my brother Matt and me—along with our trusted dog, Moo—on backpacking trips up in the Alpine Lakes region to fish and camp under the stars with the bears and the deer. In that setting my dad seemed all-knowing and all-capable. But I started to notice that things around the house were tense when we would come back from a weekend of house painting or camping.

It was becoming painfully apparent to me even at that young age that my parents’ marriage was an unhappy one. My dad always seemed agitated. I started to resent his anger and short temper. My mother was a saint in my eyes, and when I recognized pain in hers, I would become enraged.

My dad retired from the fire department when I was seven and soon found work as a fire inspector for an insurance company, a job that frequently sent him on the road. Or so the story went. I just remember being relieved when he was away. Our household returned to normal. All of us kids could stop walking on eggshells and could laugh and joke and play music.

Soon after my dad retired, my mom decided to take some vocational training at North Seattle Community College so that at the age of forty-five and after raising eight kids, she could finally join the workforce outside of the home.

Mom started working when I was nine. One of the first days she was at her new job, I came home from school and found my father—who was home that week—in bed with our next-door neighbor’s wife. The mother of my best friend. Oh sure, they pretended nothing unusual was going on, and I am sure they thought I was too young to figure out what was happening. But I figured it out all right: all at once, in that very instant, I understood what sex was, what cheating was, I understood that my dad’s seemingly heroic life was a deception, and I understood that I would have to hide all of this from my mom so that she would not get hurt. It was a harsh introduction to grown-up life.

From that day on I stopped talking to my dad. Not a word. Soon he and the woman next-door both left their spouses and moved into an apartment together. My parents got divorced. My best friend and I were put into the strangest of predicaments—was it his mom or my dad’s fault that both of our homes were now broken? We began to fight and he began to act out at home. For his father’s birthday a few years later, he presented his dad with the severed head of the family cat as a present. Gift-wrapped. He also took an axe to the outside wall of my bedroom one night while I was on the other side in my bed. All of this because my dad couldn’t keep his dick in his pants.

At that age I figured I must have had something to do with the problem. That is what we do when we aren’t old enough to see the bigger picture. Many of the things I soon grabbed onto in order to muddle through—things I’d call coping mechanisms now—would come back to bite me in the ass. When, a few years later, I started to get acute panic attacks, I learned to self-medicate with alcohol and drugs. Of course, we all have shitty stuff we have to deal with growing up. I cannot with a straight face blame my childhood for the drugs and alcohol that I would ingest later in life. More accurate, perhaps, would be to say that a perfect storm of factors began to whirl around me before I had a chance to address any of them: a predisposition to alcoholism, a family history of panic disorders, the need to hide a secret and protect my mom, and coming of age at a time when experimenting with drugs was much less frowned upon than it is today.

My mom was pretty much left to provide for the household on her own. This meant that she had no choice but to leave me with a lot of responsibility, and I just didn’t rise to the occasion right away. I wish I could’ve been a better son in those difficult transition years for my mother. I still kick myself for some of the hell that I put her through. I was trying to figure out my place in the world without a father to rely on as a role model.

After my dad left, my mom’s brother—a doctor—would let us spend summer vacations at a cabin he owned on a lake up in the mountains east of Seattle. While up there, one time between sixth and seventh grade, I went waterskiing with my brother Matt—out of the eight kids, he was closest to me in age, just two and a half years older—and a couple of other kids. Matt and a friend of his were driving the boat, and another kid and I were skiing behind it on a double rope. As we sped along, I lost my balance and the belt attached to the towrope came whipping off.

In the instant I fell forward, the slack in the rope formed a loop in the water and my arm went through it. Then I heard it go
zip
, snapping taut again.

Searing pain jolted my upper arm at the same moment the rope started dragging me.