Slash (33 page)

We continued a very sweet, very twisted, almost 1950s kind of relationship. She would tend to the house, then head to bed at ten or eleven p.m. and I’d stay up all night, downstairs in the living room, shooting up every few hours in the black bathroom. Some nights I’d write songs on the couch, some nights I’d just stare at the snakes. Before I noticed, it would be morning and Megan was up and we’d hang out and have a great time until I got tired. She never asked questions and we got along that way for a while, very happily. We had pet names for everything. Everything to her was either “cute” or “sweet,” and I was usually “sweetie.” Looking back on it, Megan sounded a lot like Jennifer Tilly.

Megan was also, as I mentioned, really domestic. She fixed the place up, especially the kitchen, and made it all entirely livable. She liked to have people over for dinner, if the occasion presented itself. I remember that I had Mark Mansfield come by once, more to get high and catch up than have any kind of meal, but Megan made us a feast: she served us some variety of chicken with several side dishes, garlic bread, and a nice salad, all served on place mats—the whole thing. She was really pleased, and didn’t seem to notice at all how dark a state both Mark and I were in. We were so stoned that we just kind of played with the food. It didn’t matter; at the end of the night, Megan told me that she thought Mark was
charming
. Megan was interesting in other ways: more often than not, rather than screw, she liked to just jerk me off and watch it…I guess we did have a pretty strange relationship.

The act of shooting up always turned me on.

AXL’S TENDENCY TO COMMUNICATE
through management continued when he got back from Chicago through to my last days in the band. But the start of it maybe woke Alan and Doug up a bit, because suddenly they seemed desperate to get us in the same room regularly again. The success of
G N’ R Lies
had created a huge demand and we hadn’t released anything since. We could have sold out a worldwide tour on the basis of a debut record that was three years old, plus an EP with just four new songs. I suppose most other bands don’t enjoy that kind of demand, but we weren’t going to rush the next record, probably because we couldn’t settle down to write any of it.

For my part, I got darker than ever; I started speedballing heavily and really enjoyed the unique brand of hallucinatory paranoia that comes with it. No one had taught me to speedball; I just thought it would be like a narcotic Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Coke and heroin were two great tastes that I knew would go great together.

It took me some time to figure out how much of each resulted in the effect I desired at the time, and it was endless fun experimenting. I had a few different techniques, but usually I’d shoot my coke first and then follow it up with a shot of heroin. Mixing the two was also a good time, but I often did them separately because I loved the ritual of the needle; the act of shooting up always turned me on.

Speedballing was the greatest roller coaster I’ve ever ridden: the rush of the coke would send me up and then the dope would kick in and the trip would take a wonderful turn; and the two would weave in and out of each other from there on out. I’d always end up shooting all of the heroin before I’d mowed through the coke, so usually I’d get wired to the point of an impending heart attack. At the end of those nights, I was also often left
with the distinct feeling that I was being watched, so I started to think that walking around my house armed to the teeth was a good idea.

I bought a bunch of guns: a shotgun, a .38 Special, a .44 Magnum, and a few revolvers. I used to keep my .38 in the back of my pants, and after Megan went to sleep, and after I’d shot up enough coke and heroin, I’d walk around the house thinking about things while watching the little hallucinatory figures that started to pop up in the corners of my vision. I’d see them dive and roll off the top of the curtain rods or run along the baseboards in my peripheral vision, but every time I tried to look at them head-on, they’d disappear. Around then I stopped talking to everyone I knew and started doing a great deal of drawing. Throughout my life, my drawings have always reflected what I was into at the time. During this period, I drew nothing but dinosaurs and assorted graphic designs and logos.

I should have been drawing the little demon men that I could never quite see or seem to capture on film—believe me, I tried. As soon as I started to speedball regularly, those little guys were everywhere. They were small, wiry, translucent characters that I saw from afar until eventually they’d crawl up my jacket whenever I got high. I wanted to get to know them in a way; as I lay on the floor, waiting for my heart rate to relax, I’d watch the little Cirque du Soleil show that those guys would put on all over the room. I often thought about waking Megan up so that she could check it out. I even took pictures of them in the mirror when I found them perched on my shoulder and in my hair. I started to talk about them and see them so clearly that I even freaked out my drug dealer. On the rare occasion when I’d leave the house to score my drugs, I’d usually shoot up right away at his place and then start seeing those little guys crawling up my arm.

“Hey, do you
see
that?” I’d ask, extending my arm. “You
see
that little guy, right? He’s right
there
.”

My dealer would just stare at me expressionless. This guy was a drug dealer who was pretty used to strange junkie behavior. “You’d better go, man,” he’d say. “You’re
way
too out there. You should go home.” Apparently I was bad for business.

One night I was patrolling the house with my shotgun and came down
the bedroom stairs into the living room. Then I went up the stairs to the bedroom landing and up to the loft, where Megan was asleep. As I got up there, the gun went off and blasted through the ceiling opposite the loft. Megan didn’t even wake up, which is amazing.

I was still awake when the fire trucks came. I was lying there pretty rattled as I heard the sirens. I just lay still and thought, “Oh, boy.”

My house was cut into a steep hill, so the small, square, second-floor bedroom window was actually just above street level. I heard the commotion and figured someone was coming for me, so I tucked my .45 in the back of my pants and ran upstairs to the window, pulled the shade aside, and stared at the firemen preparing to break down my door. I asked them what the problem was and they told me that my fire alarm had been ringing for thirty minutes.

I averted that situation; I assured them that there was no fire, and Megan was none the wiser. Another time that she might have caught on to my nocturnal activities but didn’t was the morning that she woke me up on the couch in the living room. Apparently I’d nodded out with the needle right there next to me.

“Sweetie,” she said. “I think the cat is playing with something.”

I looked down to see one of my cats smacking my needle around like it was a mouse.

Not too long after that, Duff started stopping by because he was worried about me. I’m not sure why; all of the conversations we’d had while I leaned out of my bedroom window and he stood in the cul-de-sac were pleasant enough. I always had a gun in my belt and never invited him in, of course, but it was cool because he never seemed to want to come in either.

“Hey man, how you doing?” I’d ask.

“Fine,” he’d say. “Hey, what’s up?”

“Not much.”

“Okay, then,” Duff would say, kind of sizing me up. “See you later.”

“Hey, you want to come in?”

“No.”

“Okay, that’s cool. See you later.”

MY GRANDMOTHER HAD BEEN ILL WITH
heart trouble my whole life up until she died. When she passed, I was utterly distraught. I never thought that she would die so young; she was only in her late sixties. I saw her in her final moments at the hospital; it was the only time I can really remember breaking down.

The night after I saw her dead in her hospital bed, I went to the Rainbow Bar and Grill and I borrowed a couple hundred dollars from Mario, who owns the establishment. Even though I had money, I never had any cash on me; my business manager was reluctant to give me any for obvious reasons. Mario had no idea what the money was for and it was the first time I’d ever asked for any. I went down to East L.A. to cop some dope, then came back to Hollywood and fixed in the front seat of my car on a side street. For some reason I called Izzy; he had recently rented an apartment in Santa Monica, and I asked if I could crash at his place. He said it was cool so I drove my little Honda CRX down the Pacific Coast Highway high out of my mind. Before I went to Izzy’s, I spent a few hours speeding around some Santa Monica side streets like a maniac. I remember actually jumping my car off dirt mounds on a construction site. How the car survived, I don’t know. I was literally out of my mind…. I don’t know how I didn’t get busted either. When I finally got to Izzy’s, he set me up on the couch for the remainder of the night. I remember that while he slept I watched the movie
Performance,
which he had rented…. Then I passed out.

Now, at this point in 1990, Izzy was on probation for having an altercation with a stewardess on a commercial flight, which is a federal offense, so he was keeping his nose very clean, so to speak. He had an appointment with his probation officer early the next morning, and left me at the apartment. I got off the couch with the apartment to myself, and proceeded to the bathroom to take a shower because my grandmother’s wake was later that morning.

After my shower I tried to do my fix, still high from the night before but believing it was entirely necessary. I couldn’t find a vein; I got blood all over the bathroom, the towels, the walls, the sink—you name it. I kept at it until I hit an artery. Then I hid my works in Izzy’s living-room closet and headed out to my grandmother’s wake, leaving Izzy’s apartment in blood-stained shambles.

When I arrived at the wake I was a junkie mess. I greeted my mom and brother, but for some reason I was not prepared to see the rest of my family on my mom’s side and made it known. I paid my respects to my grandmother and then went into the bathroom to fix again—it was all too much. That’s what kind of fiend I was. When I emerged, my mother realized that I was unfit to be out in public, so she suggested I go home. I went home with my old girlfriend Yvonne, who was at the wake. I hung out at Yvonne’s for the better part of the afternoon, but I was too out of my head for her to put up with. I took a cab home only to be greeted by a message on my answering machine from an extremely pissed off Izzy Stradlin. Izzy had found all the syringes and the spoon I had hid in his closet, and was none too happy about it. Seeing that he was on probation and could be searched by his probation officer at any time without warning, he had every reason to be angry.

Looking back on these events, I realize how insane and self-destructive I was, but I didn’t know it then. Now it seems shocking, but back then it was no big deal—to me at least.

My grandmother was the most unselfish, giving person I’ve ever known. She’d give you her last nickel no matter how strongly you’d protest. She was also very supportive of me in all that I did, but especially with music. She had had classical piano training when she was young and she was musically inclined. I got the feeling that she was relieved when I picked up the guitar; she financed my first pieces of gear. She probably figured that music was safer and more sophisticated than terrorizing innocent people on a BMX bike. Little did she know how wrong she was. Her son, my uncle Jaques, lived with her and was about twelve years older than I. He had Down’s syndrome. He was big into music as well, and his taste was pretty eclectic because he was a pretty childlike, animated individual. He listened to the Village People, ABBA, the Partridge Family, but he turned me on to James Brown and The Runaways—go figure.

My grandmother passed away of heart complications in 1990 and left my mother to take care of Jaques, but before she left us, she was very proud that I had made a career out of playing music. My uncle Jaques passed in 2004.

IT’S QUITE POSSIBLE THAT INERTIA WOULD
have killed Guns off before we even got going if it weren’t for the Rolling Stones. At the height of this period, when I was speedballing like Belushi, we needed a reason to rally more than we did when we had nothing but determination and nowhere to go. I remember the day I got the call.

“Hey Slasher, we got a call from the Stones, they want you to open for them.” It was Alan. “It would consist of four shows at the L.A. Coliseum.”

“Really?” I said. “That sounds like a good idea.”

“They’re starting their tour soon and they’re doing production rehearsals in Pittsburgh.”

“Well, let’s go out there,” I said.

They booked our flights and Alan, Doug, and I headed out there to see the Stones rehearse. I packed up a few syringes, enough dope to get me through a few days, and I was ready. I hadn’t counted on one problem, which had been a problem for our band from the start: on the way to Pittsburgh, Alan had booked a stopover in Ohio to check in on Great White. Great White…there really wasn’t a band other than Poison that stood for everything we hated more than Great White, and our manager, Alan Niven, managed them. This enraged Axl on a daily basis, particularly after Alan forced Guns to fill in for them at the Ritz in New York at an MTV concert in 1988; an appearance they couldn’t make for some reason. Once we took off and Alan started piggybacking off our popularity to further
their
career, it became a huge issue with us, so stopping off to see a Great White show on the way to the Stones was a stupid move on Alan’s part.

I had no interest in seeing them play, so I stayed behind in my room to shoot drugs until our flight in the morning. I was pretty good at hiding syringes and dope by then; the lining of my jacket was always good, and the inside of a pen was an easy cover for a dope balloon. There were various other techniques, too, but those must remain secret. On this trip I was sloppy, though, and I’d somehow broken my syringe.