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In that way I never did my “homework”; I never studied the lives of other junkies in rock and roll. But at the same time I didn’t have to: I got hip to Keith Richards and Eric Clapton and Ray Charles later on in life. I think that anyone who is a true junkie has an innate kinship with other junkies. Somehow I knew that we shared mutual interests; that addiction speaks to you. Without knowing it, you’re attracted to them.

Heroin was novel to me then, it was an adventure, it was a private hideaway in my own body and mind. After I’d been through withdrawal and gotten clean more than once, the inescapable discomfort never discouraged me. I may have realized how crippling addiction was whenever I got clean, but after I was clean awhile, I’d reminisce about how much I loved to get high.

IT HAD BEEN A WHILE AND I WAS ABOUT to discover it all again. It was 1989: We’d toured most of America, Canada, Europe, Japan, and Australia. We’d watched our album sit around and do nothing for a year before breaking the Top Ten and having a number one single; we’d shot three videos that became mainstays on MTV, a channel that helped us out, but that we didn’t care for. We performed at the American Music Awards, playing “Patience” with Don Henley on drums. We’d toured with our friends and heroes. Finally and suddenly we were the band that we’d always known we were… just better.

When we landed in L.A. at the end of the Appetite tour, each of us, one by one, set off to rediscover whatever we’d left behind: Duff went home to his girl Mandy (whom he married in 1988), Steven headed to his chick’s place (whoever she was at that point), Doug took off to San Diego, Alan returned to Redondo Beach, Axl went to Erin’s, and soon enough Izzy and I were sitting there alone at LAX, with our brand-new Halliburton luggage and no particular place to go. Each of us became a boy in a bubble at that point. We had taken home enough money from touring and now money was starting to roll in off the sales of Appetite, so that the need to survive was no longer a motivation. Everyone was, I suppose, stopping to smell the roses; I’m just not sure that any of us knew how.

Izzy made a call and we went over to a friend of Seymour Cassel’s who we’ll call “Bill.” We’d gotten a taste of smack again in Australia, so the craving was there by the time we got home. Besides, after two years of touring, subconsciously, we both felt that we deserved it. Anyway, Bill had a taste for drugs and always had plenty of every variety; he was also very generous.

When you start to get famous at all, a few typical things start happening: in Hollywood, if you’re out at a bar, everyone wants to buy you a drink, you can get into any club; whether you like it or not, you are suddenly a figure on the nightlife circuit. When that started happening to us, there was nothing less interesting that I could have imagined doing with my time. That Hollywood scene was the same old shit, and the more recognizable I was, the less I liked it. The amount of “dudes” who wanted to “party with me” had quadrupled, so I became entirely insular. Even on the rare occasion when I wanted to go out, I found that the Hollywood scene we’d known was dead: the Cathouse was closed down and there was nothing else in L.A. that I found interesting at all.

Everyone in the band needed time to decompress; looking back, it makes complete sense to me that I allowed myself to slip into that seductive heroin comfort zone. It was the one aspect of success and fame that wasn’t vapid to me; there was really nothing else. I didn’t want to go to strip clubs or look for hot chicks or otherwise exercise my newly found status. All I wanted to do was hang out at Bill’s and do drugs.

The only stability that I’d enjoyed in my life up until then was the constant traveling, which was a contradiction not lost on me. I was twenty-three and I hadn’t had a stable life or home since I was thirteen; home for me was living with girlfriends or being on a bus with the band. I lived for playing my guitar and being on the road, plain and simple.

Like I said, Bill wasn’t a real dealer, he just liked to get high casually. He always smoked heroin and he had lots of self-control about everything he did. Meanwhile I was the opposite: I had a fiendish, obsessive/compulsive attitude toward heroin and was always eager to get around it and get more of it. That first night over at Bill’s I didn’t have any gear to shoot it with, so we all smoked it. But I couldn’t wait to grab a bit and leave the next day in search of a rig. It turned out to be the start of a long and nightmarish obsession with heroin that lasted from 1989 through 1991.

BILL’S PLACE WAS ON FRANKLIN AND Western in East Hollywood way off the beaten track; he and his wife and their friends were really cool. Izzy and I hung around there on a daily basis and fit in just fine. Bill never allowed shooting up at this place, so I would smoke a little there, pocket some for later, and shoot it up at my leisure when I cut out to do my errands or go to appointments.

One of them was a photo shoot with Izzy for Guitar World with Glen La Ferman. We were both so high; we’d spent at least a week over at Bill’s. I remember that we showed up with our guitars, and that we passed out on the floor… not much else. It wasn’t on purpose; I’m not sure that were even aware that we’d done it. I just remember that afterward we went back to Bill’s.

For the record, that shoot contained the famous picture of me that is in the Rainbow, where I’m laid out with my hat on the ground and a bottle of Stoli, my guitar, and the rest of it at my side. If you have decent vision and you take a look at Izzy and me in those frames, you will easily see how out there I was. I was high off the entire success of touring and we were both in search of the kind of excitement you will never find walking around Hollywood playing rock star. I was in search of someplace dark.

Eventually Bill got arrested and was sentenced to thirty years to life for being caught three times with illegal drugs in large enough quantities that they qualified for “intent to sell.” In the end Bill served eleven years and got out. But at one point before his arrest, he was under surveillance from his phones to his home; every move was monitored. Two of the people who made regular appearances, of course, were Izzy and me, and Bill told me later that the cops were particularly curious about us. Supposedly they were willing to bargain with Bill if he dropped a dime on us because by then we were famous, to a degree. But Bill wouldn’t do that. God bless him.

EVENTUALLY I DECIDED THAT, IN LIGHT of the band’s success, I should rent a place of my own. My apartment on Larrabee was the first that I’d ever had to myself, under my own name, and I was proud of that. It was just one room, a fully furnished, perfect studio, laid out exactly like a hotel room—and that’s exactly what I liked about it. Unfortunately, like every other apartment I’d lived in before then, I was pretty quickly evicted.

I kept it up for a while; well, Ronnie Stalnaker did, actually—one of his jobs was to keep drugs and trouble away from me and me from them. He’d regularly come through and clean the place up, probably as a way to see if I was behaving. I never did; it was much too fun of a challenge to figure out how to sneak my druggie friends into the apartment without Ronnie finding out. It was always a feat because Ronnie lived right next door.

It wasn’t going to end well with Ronnie—he got a bit obsessive about his job and went a bit Single White Stalker—but at this point he’d done nothing but prove himself to be a very loyal bodyguard, despite all of my efforts to fuck with him. For example, one night, while we were on tour somewhere, I decided to end the evening by throwing my bottle of Jack into the TV set in my hotel room before I passed out. It exploded, of course, and Ronnie came in. We were a number of stories up, but Ronnie decided that we weren’t going to pay for that TV. He climbed out of my window, across the ledge of the building, and into an adjoining room, where he stole that TV and replaced it with the one I had broken. That is dedication.