Slash

by Slash

  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. T
hen 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.

  It wasn’t a problem; I called down to the front desk.

  “Um, hi, is this the front desk?”

  “Yes, sir, it is, how can we help you?”

  “I have a bit of an emergency situation going on here. I am the guitarist for Great White and I am a diabetic and my insulin syringes were in a bag of mine that was stolen. I need to be onstage in an hour and I need to take my medication beforehand. Is there a pharmacy close by that you could send someone to for me?”

  “Yes, sir, I’m sorry to hear that. I can most certainly manage that.”

  “Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.”

  When the syringes appeared at my door, I was blown away. A junkie can be very persuasive and manipulative when it comes to dope and getting it done. In any case, I was back in business in no time, having a blast in my hotel room all by myself. Over the course of that night I’m not sure if I actually lost one of my heroin balloons, but I took that hotel room apart as if I had. I turned everything over, I looked under every surface; basically it looked like some kid had built a very ambitious fort with all of the available furniture.

  I had such a party that night and made such a mess that we didn’t get to Pittsburgh on time. I’d shot most of my stuff the night before, but I needed a fix so bad once we got there that I told Alan to let me have a nap before the show. I fixed and passed out and slept through the entire Stones gig. Alan and Doug called me numerous times but I never heard the phone. The two of them saw the show and the next morning told me how great it was.

  Alan looked me square in the eye. “Slasher, I’m going to turn this down,” he said. “There is no way you can open for these guys. You are in no shape at all to do this.”

  “We can do this, I promise you,” I said. “Just book the gig.”

  Despite his reservations, he did.

  I was a fiend, though other people seemed more concerned about it than I was. Most of my dealers had started avoiding me. The few that would sell to me were cool, but they never wanted me around them; they’d only drop shit off at the back door of the Walnut House and never come inside.

  Around this time, I saw my mom and even she was worried. She suggested that I get on the phone with David Bowie, because Mom thought that his advice would help more than forcing me into rehab.

  David was engaging, and wise in the ways of chemical abuse. He asked me about what I was doing drugwise and what I was going through emotionally, psychically, and with the band. I rambled on for a while, but once I started talking about my little translucent friends, David interrupted me. The conversation as a whole was way too involved to have with someone that he hadn’t seen since they were eight years old, but he’d heard enough.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “You are not in a good way. If you are seeing things every day, what you are doing to yourself is not good at all. You are at a very spiritual low point when that begins to happen.” He paused for a moment. “You are exposing yourself to the darker realms of your subconscious being. You are making yourself vulnerable to all kinds of negative energy.”

  I was so far gone that I didn’t agree: I thought of my hallucinations as my good-time entertainment.

  “Okay, that’s cool.” I said. “Yeah, I suppose that’s bad…Duly noted.”

  ONCE THE STONES GIGS WERE BOOKED, everybody became duly responsible about getting to rehearsal on time and it seemed like we had our incentive once again. At this time Duff was our most responsible member: he’d pick Steven up every day, after waiting for him to do however many lines he needed to do to get straight; then he’d pick me up. I made them both wait outside while I did my prerehearsal shot.

  The day before the Stones gigs we did a warm-up show at the Cathouse and it was killer. It was the first time we’d played in a while, and we had so much energy to get out; we
sounded amazing and it was a classic Guns show. It wasn’t without its unpleasantness, though, because Axl insulted David Bowie so much from the stage that Bowie left in the middle of the set.

  David was there with my mom, sitting at a table near the front, and apparently Axl was convinced that backstage before the gig, David had been hitting on Erin Everly. It was such a ridiculous notion that afterward my mom asked me what the fuck was wrong with Axl. It was an uncomfortable situation, but I just blew it off and tried to focus on the positive. That evening was captured for posterity in the video for “It’s So Easy,” which was never accepted by MTV or aired in the States because we refused to edit out the profanity in the song.

  We were booked into the Hotel Bonaventure for the four nights of the Stones shows and that’s where I was the morning before the first one when I got the call that Axl wasn’t going to do the gigs. His reasoning was that Steven and I were on smack. We were…but that was beside the point; we were opening for The Stones. Somehow we coerced him into doing the first show, and it was a disaster.

  “Enjoy the show,” Axl said when we took the stage, “because it’s going to be our last one. There are too many of us dancing with Mr. Brownstone.”

  I was so pissed off about that and he was so pissed at me for being a junkie that I spent the better half of the show facing my amps. Nothing was together that night, the band sounded horrible. In my state of mind I walked offstage, got right into my limo, and went to get high in my room.