Slash

We ended up at their friend Chosei Funahara’s place; he was the bass player for the Plasmatics. I shook his hand but I never really got a chance to talk to him because Todd was so desperate to get high that we went directly into the bathroom within the first two minutes of being in his apartment. I was wary about this stuff, because you never know what you’re getting when you buy shit off the street—you always have to be careful. I didn’t really want to do it, but I sampled a little bit and since I could tell that it wasn’t strong at all, I cooked up a little shot for me and Todd.

We hung out there for a while and we made plans for our friends to meet us later at my hotel room, before Todd and I made our exit. The sun was starting to set by the time we got to Times Square, and as we walked along the rows of movie theaters, I decided, as I stared at the marquee, that I really wanted to see Jaws 3- D. Todd agreed; all he really wanted to do was drink anyway. We bought a case of beer and snuck it into the theater, which might sound odd by today’s standards, but in 1987, New York’s Times Square was still gritty enough that the odd movie house that wasn’t showing porn 24/7 wasn’t going to eject two guys who’d brought their own beer.

Jaws 3-D wasn’t that great; and neither was that shot of heroin. I noticed, halfway through the film, that I wasn’t high and that I’d drunk about two or three of those beers, while Todd had downed the rest, one after the other, just pounding them. Then he suddenly left the theater to call Girl. He was gone for a really long time, and I hoped that was a good sign—maybe they were patching things up. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case: when the show was over I found Todd slumped on the floor by the pay phone completely beside himself because Girl had rejected him, apparently in an extremely harsh manner.

I steered Todd back to my hotel doing what I could to sort him out, hoping to get him settled down. He was completely distraught, but after a while, I managed to get him relaxed, lying down in bed, slowly edging toward sleep. And that was precisely when our “friends” from earlier in the day knocked on the door. They were all set to shoot dope and hang out and Todd suddenly perked up and was eager to join in. It was another losing battle, so I got on board, I shot almost all of my dope because this stuff still had yet to kick in. At the same time I was monitoring Todd to be sure that he didn’t have too much, because he had been drinking heavily for about eighteen hours. I can’t say what happened for sure, but I’m almost positive that he got a shot from someone else who was there that night when I wasn’t looking. What I gave him wasn’t strong enough to cause what happened.

Maybe an hour after everyone showed up, Todd stood up in the middle of the room, kind of leaning to one side, then suddenly collapsed. His breathing was slow, he wasn’t responding, so I got him into the bathtub and doused him with freezing-cold water. I shook him, I slapped him, I did everything I could to wake him up. All while our “friends” gathered themselves and fucking split without so much as a word.

There I was with my best friend, Todd, in my arms in the bathtub. I was freaking out; I’d OD’d before but I’d never dealt with anyone else OD’ing on me. I did everything I could to keep him conscious. I was confused because I did, as far as I knew, twice the amount that Todd had done and I wasn’t even high. I started to wonder what else he had in his system that I didn’t know about. I didn’t know what the fuck to do. Suddenly Todd came around: he was semiconscious, he was breathing, and for a few fleeting moments his eyes seemed to focus on me and the room around him. His breathing became regular and finally I felt comfortable. I dried him off and got him into bed.

I sat there next to him, watching his breathing, and called our mutual friends to tell them what was going on in an effort to calm myself down a bit. I also called the only person that I knew in New York well enough to confide in—a girl named Shelley who worked at ICM, with Bill Elson. I was speaking with Shelley, watching Todd carefully, when all of a sudden, his breathing stopped. I dropped the phone and shook him, and slapped him, while holding him up. I beat on his chest in desperation but he wouldn’t come around. I called 911, then threw water on him, but nothing worked. I couldn’t save him—Todd, all of twenty-one years old, died in my arms. I was flooded with every emotion, fear, panic, anxiety… and where the fuck were the paramedics?

When they finally arrived, they were complete assholes. It had taken them nearly forty minutes. They came in the room and stared at Todd as if he were a bag of garbage.

“Oh shit,” one of them said, a bit too loud for my taste. “What is this, now?”

“I know,” the other one said. “This is stupid, he’s long gone.”

“I don’t know why we even bothered…. Glad we didn’t rush!”

They took the body away and left me there in the room with Todd’s wallet, cowboy boots, and his other belongings. I had barely begun to grasp what had happened when the police arrived. They gave me the whole good cop/bad cop interrogation, asking if I knew where he got the dope, asking me where the syringe was. They set themselves up in two separate rooms in the hotel and they sent me from one to the other for about three hours. Once they were done and satisfied, they split and told me that I’d need to be at the station at eight a.m. the next day to sign papers confirming “receipt of the body.”

That statement alone was way too much for me; once they left I went down to the street, sat on the sidewalk with my back against the wall of the hotel, and tried to figure out what had happened. I saw the sun come up and before I had any kind of answer, it was time to scrape myself off the pavement and get down to the precinct. I’ve never been so disoriented in my entire life.

That place was as ramshackle as Barney Miller and I signed whatever it was that I needed to sign—which was as impersonal as filling out a form for lost luggage. I returned to the hotel in a daze. Lois had yet to return from the night before. I was lying in the bed when I heard an inhospitable knock on the door. It wasn’t housekeeping—it was serious. The manager and a security guard stood there, telling me that Lois had not only not come home but she’d bailed on her bill, and the hotel had no intention of granting me a late check- out.

I returned to my perch on the sidewalk, and after a while, not knowing who else to call, I called Alan. He arranged for me to go to Shelley’s place and get some rest. Once I did I just passed out from the exhaustion. The next thing I knew Alan was there; he’d flown in to make sure I got back to L.A. in one piece. I’m glad he did, because I was numb and paralyzed.

That was the worst thing that had happened to me up until then—or since. Todd was my best friend and he was gone. It didn’t end there. When we went up to San Francisco for the funeral, I had to deal with finger-pointing from Todd’s obviously distraught family and the guys in his band—everyone thought that his death was my fault. Todd’s stepbrother was friends with Del James—he knew me and even he thought I was to blame. It got very ugly. Todd’s family even hired a private investigator to check me out for a while; so on top of the mourning, an unjust black cloud of accusation followed me around, while I’d been the one in the end who had done everything possible to keep Todd alive.

It was a hell of a wake-up call: not only had I come face-to-face with the realities of the voracious lifestyle I lived, but I also learned that by living so overtly I would always be an easy target—even to those I trusted—those who knew me the best of all.

8. Off to the Races

I can say one thing about the “musical highlights” of 1987, it’s that they were more stereotypically eighties to me than the entire decade put together. In 1987, Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” spent February 14 through March 7 at number one—more weeks than any other single that year. In 1987, Whitney Houston became the first female solo artist to have an album debut at number one. Robert Palmer took home the Grammy for Best Rock Vocal Performance for “Addicted to Love” and the Eurythmics took home the Grammy for Best Rock Performance by a Group for “Missionary Man.”

Dirty Dancing and Three Men and a Baby were the big movies of that year and every song that came on the radio was saccharine and over-produced: Madonna’s “Who’s That Girl?,” Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time,” Steve Winwood’s “Back in the High Life Again.” The music industry was full of other bad ideas in 1987: compact discs were already out, but the powers that be decided that “cassette singles” were the future—and launched that format with a Bryan Adams track called “Heat of the Night” that withstood the test of time just about as well as cassette singles did.

As for straight-ahead hard rock in 1987, Aerosmith made their comeback with Permanent