It's So Easy: And Other Lies (48 page)

They both gave me a look.

“Oh, my god—what if a
boy
sees us?”

As we were climbing the first hill, I noticed that Grace had her purse with her. I didn’t understand why a young girl needed a purse at all, much less out here in the park. When I asked her why she had brought it along on a wooded and not-so-easy hike, she replied, “Lip gloss! Duh!”

Duh indeed. Sometimes it was best just to keep my mouth shut and trudge on. And sometimes I just had to run up the white flag of surrender. I just wasn’t going to understand it all.

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

With Velvet Revolver on ice, I spent the rest of 2008 playing rhythm guitar with Loaded—lead guitarist Mike Squires, bassist Jeff Rouse, and on drums first Geoff Redding and then Isaac Carpenter. While we were in the studio one day recording some demos, I counted in a song we were working on. Later that afternoon, we were listening to some of the songs. That one came on.

“One … two … one, two, three, four …”

The other guys all looked at one another.

“What?” I said.

“That sounds just like the beginning of ‘Patience.’ That’s you counting in ‘Patience,’ right?”

“Yeah. So?”

“Dude,” said Squires, “you could walk into the trendiest restaurant in the world, a place with a six-month waiting list for a reservation, and when the snooty maître d’ came up, dripping with disdain, and said, ‘May I help you, sir?,’ all you’d have to do is go, ‘Uh, yes, my good man, actually you can help me: one … two … one, two, three, four,’ and he would escort your ass straight to the best table in the house. That can open
any
door.”

This became a running joke in Loaded, and I was expected to magically whisk us through any sticky situations with that incantation.

We released our album
Sick
in early 2009 and spent much of the year touring. We launched the U.S. tour at the legendary Crocodile Café in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood. The Croc had folded a few years prior and had just been reopened by a group of people including Sean Kinney from Alice in Chains. My old friend Kurt Bloch, from the Fastbacks, got up and played a few songs with us, including “Purple Rain.” It almost felt as though the punk-rock commune I’d wished for long ago had come together—at least for a night.

I spent much of the
Sick
tour actually sick. I even came down with pneumonia at one stage. The success of my sinus surgery was a thing of the past. This time, however, I refused to let the recurring infections hinder my training, and, if anything, continuing to work out helped subdue the aches and pains and throbbing ear infections. Another reason my renewed sinus problems didn’t bother me too much was because being on the road with Loaded was totally devoid of drama. When you toured with nine guys—band plus crew—on a bus, playing night after night, all expectations of space and privacy were left at the curb. There was literally no room for bullshit. We washed our laundry in the backstage sink at whatever venue we played that night and hung it to dry in the bus; we only booked one night per week in a hotel—and even then we all crammed into just two rooms at the cheapest place around.

The way we dealt with close quarters was with humor. Tons of it. There was the warning call we used when two of us approached each other in the narrow aisle between the onboard bunk beds:
ass to ass.
The call had entered our lexicon a few years back when a huge security guy got ruffled after a band member passed him crotch to ass in a space about the same width as the aisle on a budget airline. This security guy did not exactly dig the fact that his manhood might have been compromised in that fleeting instant. He dressed down the young rocker right then and there: “Man, it’s always ass to ass, dog …
ass to ass
!”

The incident became part of Loaded folklore and we practiced the ass-to-ass program on our bus—unless someone felt a bit frisky. In that case, you could surprise your fellow band member with a “junk drag,” a quick spin just as you met your bandmate in the aisle to create a crotch-to-ass passage. I had a college education at this point and was a responsible father and husband, but, hey, you just can’t beat juvenile fun sometimes.

A tour diet is never very wholesome. In fact, it’s often downright gross. We ate dinner after we played, and at 1 a.m. we were lucky to find pizza or schawarma. In the UK, we lapped up cheap, spicy Indian food. Nine guys, one bus, mutton vindaloo, few rest stops—it was a recipe for a lot of flatulence. One of our guitar techs, the hilarious “Evil” Dave, from Sheffield, England, suggested we start a contest: who could come up with a word that most sounded like any given burst of gas. Some sounded like, say, “teapot.” A more throaty one might become “streeeetpost.” This not only passed the time, but also broadened our vocabularies; racking our brains for a winning word was almost like playing Scrabble.

When I returned from the various tour legs—in addition to dates here and in Europe, we crisscrossed South America and hit the festival circuit—I didn’t have anyone to play Name That Fart with. My daughters ran from me when I so much as brought it up. And anyway, my diet also returned to normal.

The new words in my quiver came in handy, however, as during the same time period I kicked off a writing career with a column in the
Seattle Weekly
and a series of pieces on finance for
Playboy.
One … two … one, two, three, four: doors really were opening for me now.

A decade prior, I’d been unsure how to begin an admissions essay and now I was writing on a regular basis in a public forum. Of course, I was always looking for new hurdles, the more difficult or seemingly incongruous, the better. These latest seemingly monumental challenges didn’t elicit any physical pain (well, maybe just a little—I’m still a crap typist). But I found them taxing in a different—and equally thrilling—way. I also loved the interactivity permitted by new media. When my pieces were posted online, I was able to engage in a genuine and substantive back-and-forth with readers. It may sound like a bit of a stretch, but it struck me as very punk rock—breaking down the barrier between artist and audience; bringing me and the readers face-to-face, if only virtually; turning readers into writers by allowing comments. I even made sure to invite my harshest critics (at least those brave enough to post their whereabouts) to come shake hands whenever I passed through their towns with Loaded.

Writing about financial strategies in the midst of a recession made me reconsider some of the implicit lessons I was teaching at home. I remember telling Mae a bedtime story one night. Usually these consisted of made-up tales about Buckley, the family dog—he was a superhero at night, which explained why he slept all day. But this night, I decided to tell her one of the stories my mother had told me about growing up during the Depression. My mom’s stories haunted every major financial decision I made in adulthood. It dawned on me that maybe it was time for me to teach my girls more of the values I was taught growing up in a large family with working-class parents.

I maintained an idealized Norman Rockwell–like picture in my mind of how our home life should look. Ah, but things seldom happen according to plan when you have kids. I tried to teach my daughters to play guitar many times over the years. Or at least to get them interested in it. It seemed logical. I’m a musician, and my girls would probably take after their old dad, right? Wrong. The reality was that they thought I was a dork, and that all the things I did were somewhat dorky—including playing in a rock band. Okay, I got it: my girls would never start the new Runaways or L7. Fine. I had let that dream fade years ago. My girls would blaze their own trails.

But then my wife and I took the girls to see Taylor Swift. Before anyone chastises me for my taste in music, let me just say that I completely backed my girls’ enthusiasm about Taylor Swift. Raising kids was hard enough—if my kids happened to be into an artist with a sweet and innocent message, well, more power to them. And maybe, just maybe, it showed they weren’t in such a rush to grow up after all.

The day after the Taylor Swift concert, my wife asked me if I could show her a few chords on the acoustic guitar.

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

I muttered that I was a crappy teacher, but that I would do my best.

To my surprise, Susan locked right into it and played the chords I showed her for the rest of the day.

The next morning, Grace asked me if I could show
her
a few chords on the guitar, and if I could teach her an MGMT song.

“Um … sure!”

Grace and Susan ended up playing all that day. The next two days after that, Grace went straight to the guitar when she got home from school. Susan stuck with it, too.

Then, on the day after that, Mae came into the living room—where I have DirecTV’s baseball package so I can watch my Mariners when I am down in L.A.—and asked if she, too, could learn a few chords.

“I want to play with my sister,” she said.

There I was with all three of my girls asking me guitar questions. They were all playing different chords at the same time. Buckley the dog was snoring something fierce. Ken Griffey Jr. was at the plate, and we had a chance to go up by two in the eighth inning.

“Why do you have such an old guitar?” asked Grace.

The guitar in question was a Sears-made Buck Owens American acoustic that I treasure. I started to get flustered, until I suddenly realized that right there, right then, I had everything I’d always wanted. A family that needed me. Kids who were excited about something I could actually help them with. Two dumb dogs (we had added an unruly pug somewhere along the way) who were finally semi-house-trained. And my baseball team on the TV.

If only Norman Rockwell had been there to paint the scene.

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

In the summer of 2010, I had to be in L.A. for a few weeks to work on the next Loaded record while my wife and kids were in Seattle for summer vacation. But that was okay. It was cool to be a lone wolf once in a while, to range free and howl at the moon—as long as I was home by 11:30 so I could call my wife before she went to bed. And yes, uh, well, my dogs got lonely when I was gone too long.

Once while Susan and the girls were gone, I was invited to a friend’s birthday party at an ultrachic Hollywood lounge. I was too afraid of blowing my cover to ask for the address. Cool people were just expected to know where this place was. If you didn’t know, you didn’t belong anyway. There I was, the guy calling 411 to ask for an address. I had to try about four different spellings of the name—
is it French?
—before I got it right.

As I walked up to the doorman, my phone rang. It was my wife making sure I had fed the dogs and was wearing a coat and had taken my vitamins and drunk enough water. She loved me. I told her I had to get off the phone. I didn’t want to look like
that guy:
the douche bag on his phone heading to the door of a cool club.

“Yes, you are my monkey,” I whispered. “Yes, dear, the girls are our monkey babies. Yes, okay … I love you, too.”

In October, Susan and I took a trip to London. For about a year, I had been working on starting a wealth management company—called Meridian Rock—together with a British finance partner named Andy Bottomley. And now we had reached a key moment: hiring a fund manager. We planned to spend a week taking meetings with the final candidates and then making some company decisions. This was serious stuff. But it was also the final hurdle of another challenge I’d set for myself, to create a company of my own to help others with the nuts and bolts of finance and investing.

Our British Airways flight touched down at Heathrow Airport on the morning of October 14 at about quarter to noon. My meeting schedule that day was fierce, and kicked off only two hours after we landed. We collected our bags, went through customs, met our car at the curb, and drove to the Metropolitan Hotel in central London for a quick shower before the first of three meetings, staggered at two-hour intervals until dinnertime.