Array Slash - Slash

It was well into the next morning when we hit the road, but we knew that, at the very least, I had a bunch of shit stashed back at the house. All was well, we were making good time… until we ran out of gas. We lost a good hour there what with hitching to the gas station and back. Once we got on our way again, speeding to make up for lost time, as the itchiness stalked us, we got a flat tire. Changing a tire is never fun, but when your internal clock is counting down the seconds to your demise, it’s something else altogether.

We finally got home that night, thinking that we were cool and all was well. There’s a dope camaraderie that kicks in between junkies who are about to get high together, and as Izzy and I headed into the house, we were the greatest friends, just as tight as can be; all arm in arm and laughing about everything we’d just been through getting there. We went into my room, I opened up my stash drawer… and discovered that all my shit was gone.

Then I called Danny.

“Hey,” I said. “Didn’t I stash my shit in my lighter?”

“Yeah,” he said innocently.

“It’s gone.”

“No way.”

“I can’t find it.”

“That really sucks.”

“Get over here and help me!”

Izzy and Danny and I proceeded to tear the bedroom apart, then the rest of the house. I knew that I had put it there and I knew that Danny was the only one there with me when I did, but I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

“Man, you know what?” Danny said after we’d exhausted every possible stash spot. He shook his head. “I hid it. I hid it when I was high. I’m going to try to remember where… let me think.”

After Danny thought about it long and hard, he came up with a few corners we hadn’t checked; a few wild goose chases. Then he went home again, leaving Izzy and me with the impossible task of trying to hook up with Sammy, our Persian dealer—our only dealer at the time. It was not looking good: we beeped Sammy every ten minutes and he never called back.

The next morning, Izzy’s girlfriend Dezi came over and she could tell that the situation was dire: we’d been up all night, we’d driven from San Francisco, we’d been paging dealers unsuccessfully all day, and we had to open for Ted Nugent in a few hours. Izzy and I were tripping out, nothing was happening, we had no one else to call, and we were wrecked. We were starting to jones pretty hard; we were like vampires out of Blackula, just rolling around on the ground and going to the bathroom to puke every five minutes.

Our show with Ted Nugent was all the way down in Santa Monica, at seven-thirty p.m. Sammy was not calling us back, so we had to figure out how we were going to get something in our system—anything at all—to make us human enough to make the show. We were in no condition to perform, let alone even drive ourselves to the gig. In desperation, Dezi called her friend Melissa, who lived up in Hollywood, in Izzy’s old apartment. She had heard from Sammy and was going to meet him shortly.

That was enough to motivate us: we drove over there somehow and hung out waiting for Melissa to return with our drugs. It looked like we might have taken care of one problem, but at the same time, it was around five p.m. and we were about an hour from the gig. Finally she returned, Izzy and I got our shit, we did all that, and what a relief that was. Fuck! We were once again functional. We had barely enough time to join our band, who were waiting for us so that we could play our first arena, to a sold-out crowd of three thousand.

We hightailed it over there. We had no artists or parking lot passes on us, and after the night we’d had, we looked like scabs off the street. We left Dezi to park the car and climbed the fence at the back of the arena for lack of a better plan. In the process I got caught on the chain links and the button of my jeans popped off, so I spent the rest of the night making sure my zipper didn’t go all the way down leaving me hanging out there, because I’ve never been the type to wear underwear.

Izzy and I somehow snuck into the loading area and made it up to the backstage area, and as we started down the hallway toward the stage I saw Gene Simmons. He was standing at the other end giving us a foreboding stare, which is something he is very good at doing. I had no idea why he was there, but it added to the surreal quality of the last twenty-four hours. Izzy and I got to the dressing room with less than ten minutes to spare. The guys may have been annoyed at first, but they were soon relieved. Disaster averted… we took one look in the mirror and headed to the stage.

And that was the first time we ever played “Sweet Child o’ Mine” live. I hadn’t at all mastered the signature riff to the degree that I could execute it on a whim, but I pulled it off anyway and the band as a whole played it really well. The whole set was good, and we had a collection of friends there: Yvonne, Marc Canter, and a few more of my “normal” friends. Even better, right after we got offstage, Izzy got beeped back from Sammy, who was going to meet us at the Stiefel house. Yvonne and her friends were there backstage, and at the time she and I were together again and the whole intervention incident was bygones. She didn’t know exactly where I was in terms of drugs—and I didn’t feel the need to tell her.

She was just there being a very supportive girlfriend, cheering her boyfriend on at his first big gig at a live arena. All things considered, she was letting me do my thing. Of course she wanted to celebrate afterward, which was a problem. I couldn’t wait to get out of there and get home to do drugs, but I didn’t want her to know so I tried to tell her that I’d call her and we’d meet up after we dropped off our guitars, but she wasn’t having it—she and her friends were going to meet us up at the house.

Izzy and Danny and I couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate our show than with some smack, so we flew back toward Griffith Park to score. It was so early that it wasn’t even dark out yet, so as we cruised up Fairfax and stopped for a red light at Fountain, it was easy to see our dealer Sammy’s car in the lane beside us. It added to the elated, epic mood of the day—and cut Sammy’s commute in half. At this point, I felt like I stood a chance of getting high at the house before Yvonne arrived.

We scored from Sammy, sped up to the house, and ran inside like lunatics: Izzy ducked into our room and slammed the door and I locked myself in Steven’s bathroom, which was lit by a red bulb he’d installed. I was in there trying to navigate my fix, all while shaking and huffing and puffing from nerves in this unnatural red light, when suddenly there’s a knock at the door.

“Hey, babe,” Yvonne said. “Are you in there?”

“Oh, yeah, I am!” I said…. “Yes I am. But I’m taking a shower. I’m all sweaty from the show.” Then I turned on the water.

“Let me in, babe,” she said.

“I’m in the shower,” I said. “I’ll be right out.”

I finished what I needed to do, I threw some water on myself, and I went outside. I’m pretty sure she knew about it. Yvonne didn’t want to stay over at our house—I can’t imagine why—so I agreed to go back to her place with her. And that was the night that I decided fuck it, I’ll just kick. I’d fixed in the early evening, so it wore off at about one a.m. and for the next few days I did a cold turkey there in Yvonne’s bed. It wasn’t the last time I’d do so before we all got it together to record Appetite, but each time I did, I never told her what was really going on. I acted like I had the flu and played down how terrible I felt. Yvonne was busy; she was in school, so most of those days I was on my own in bed, in hell. The truth was, she was happy enough that when she left I was there and when she came back I was there, even if I was just a shadow of myself on my back, in her bed.