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I kicked at Yvonne’s that time for a whole week, and despite the potential fiasco surrounding the gig, no one knew about it for better or for worse. Everyone in the band was on such a high after that show; I only regret that I didn’t meet Ted Nugent that night, because he’d been such a huge influence on me when I was young.

Danny eventually admitted to Izzy and me that he’d done all of that dope I’d stashed, and I’ve never forgiven him for it. It was a cold-blooded thing to do that nearly ruined Izzy and me in the eyes of our bandmates. If it had all gone wrong, it would have caused our band untold professional embarrassment at a very crucial point for us. But that’s the thing about smack—it’s the devil. It is so alluring and seductive that it turns you into a dishonest, backstabbing demon. Being a junkie is akin to what we imagine vampires are: it has an enticing aura at first but it becomes a hunger that must be fed at all costs. It completely takes over, and it reels you in. It starts with a taste here and a taste there and then you’re doing it all the time. You think it’s your choice, but it’s not that way—soon you need to do it all the time. Then you’re hooked into a really vicious cycle before you’re even aware that you’ve become just another statistic.

IN TRUE GUNS FASHION, I DON’T THINK we ever formally informed Stiefel and company that we weren’t going to sign with them—we just deserted the house, leaving a sea of trash and property damage in our wake that Tom Zutaut had to deal with. Alan was our manager and that was that.

Releasing the Live Like a Suicide EP afforded a small advance, so Izzy and Steven rented a small apartment just south of Sunset right near the Rock ’n’ Roll Ralph’s—the supermarket in West Hollywood where every local musician buys beer and whatever else they subsist on. Duff was where he always was, living with Katerina, and Axl lived with Erin. I was the only blatantly vagrant member of the band, shacking up with Yvonne or other girls or crashing on whichever floor I found at the end of the night.

At this point in time, there were many strippers in our midst. All I can say is God bless them all. Many a band before and after us have had this connection. Strippers who hang together are virtually like a band themselves, and we related to one another. They were generous and thought we were cute or dark, mysterious musicians, or just lost puppies that they had to tend to and found attractive. And maybe they felt protected around us, too. The fact that they usually had this uninhibited sexual energy didn’t hurt. All in all, they were entirely appropriate for guys like myself.

There was one named Christina who had a roommate, and I’d shack with either one of them on any given night. I lived there for a while and would sleep in one or the other’s room, or with them both, depending on how things went. Those girls lived down the street from Izzy and Steven in an apartment building full of strippers on La Cienega. I was hooked up over there, you could say, and called that place home as the band proceeded through another waiting period, which, as usual, spelled nothing but trouble.

Steven, Izzy, and I had a lot of fun over at Christina’s: dope was more readily available now that we were all back in Hollywood, though still nowhere near as plentiful as it had been when we’d lived there last. After I got clean, though, I did my best to stay off it. I remember one night I was hanging out with Axl and Izzy over at the stripper house and trying my best to abstain. I didn’t have any money on me that night: dope was scarce enough that it could be found but not easily enough that people were willing to share for free. I thought I could just hang out and not do it, but I couldn’t—I had to get out of there. Not long after that, I was back on it—it was no use.

I crashed wherever I could, and did whatever came to mind, and there was a point in there when I hooked up with Dave Mustaine of Megadeth. We became friends; he was strung out on smack and crack and he lived in the same neighborhood, so we hung out and wrote songs. He was a true, complete fucking maniac and a genius riff writer. We’d hang out, smoke crack, and come up with major heavy metal riffs, just fucking dark and heavy as hell. Sometimes Dave Ellefson would join us; we got along great, we wrote some great shit. It got to the point, in our drug-fueled creative zone, that we started seriously entertaining the idea of my joining Megadeth. Guns was in a holding pattern, after all, and I was high enough to consider all kinds of bad decisions. Dave Mustaine is still one of the most genius musicians I have ever jammed with, but still, in my heart of hearts, I knew I couldn’t leave Guns.

Another place I frequented, as did many of us, was Hell House, a pit that embodied our collective mind at the time. It was a very obvious Rorschach test for anyone who might consider working with us or knowing us at all. Hell House was a West Arkeen production; it was a place—in theory, a “home”—that he’d rented with a few of his Harley-Davidson biker friends who had relocated from the East Coast.

The house was a ranch with three bedrooms along one end from front to back. The rear bedroom was occupied by Red Ed and his girlfriend/wife. Their room was off-limits to all because Ed was the biggest biker in residence and his girl was an even more formidable threat—you knew on sight not to fuck with her—but they were both sweet as could be. No one ever disturbed their room; in fact I don’t think anyone had ever even been in it. The middle bedroom was where these other bikers, Paul and Del James, lived. Their place was set up to be a small home recording studio, and West had the bedroom in the front, which was such a pigsty that no one wanted to go in there. All you could do was lie down on the bed; it was such a mess you couldn’t stand in there and you couldn’t sit down.

I hear that there was a backyard at Hell House… I’d love to know what it looked like. During all of the time that I spent there, including my time as a resident, I never made it past the kitchen. That was one of the areas, along with the living room, where transient members like me gathered and left the formidable bikers and their girlfriends well enough alone in their rooms. Visitors were allowed in the living room, the kitchen, and that other room… I guess it was the “den.” There was also the pantry, where West often chose to pass out. As chaotic as it was, some kind of unspoken law applied where no one disturbed the legal residents, while every common area was a free-for-all war zone where everything in sight could be broken or lit on fire no problem.

I can’t imagine who decided to rent those fuckups their property because they turned it into a communal crash pad more gruesome than anything else I’ve ever seen in a first-world country. It was the second-to-last structure on the block; it was surrounded by apartment buildings, and the front lawn sloped up so that it looked like it was on a hill. It was just south of Sunset on Poinsettia, and as you came down the block, it stuck out like the house in Psycho . There were a few things that only spending a night there could teach you, the most important being that if you lay down anywhere there was a two-to-one chance that you’d leave with crabs. I’m still not sure why the lot of us weren’t just hauled in by the cops every single night. There were always cars and bikes on the lawn and trash all over the place; there were always people coming and going and loud music at all hours of the night. Hell House was so raucous that from a distance it appeared to be vibrating.

One of the regulars to be found at Hell House was Del James, a true oxymoron: he was a biker guy with tattoos and the whole thing, but he was a writer. Del was tight with all of us at one point but he became tighter with Axl as time went on. Axl really took to him, responding to his intellect and how Del patiently listened to Axl express himself deeply. They did a lot of writing together and I think they still do. Del ended up writing treatments for some of our videos, as well as having written the short story that inspired Axl to write “November Rain.”