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
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.
