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When the work was done and I finally moved into the Walnut House, I commemorated it by getting really high. I had this great round Oriental wooden table with intricate carvings and a glass top in the den. It was to be the centerpiece for all kinds of cutting over the years, but that first night, Izzy and I sat there with one lightbulb on, on this dark red velvet couch. Needless to say, I didn’t clean up right away.

Not long after I moved in there, I saw my ex-girlfriend Sally again. My bed in that house was a loft, on the second floor, in a room that was pretty pitch-black aside from the light cast by a lamp next to the pillow. I had these boxes around the end of the bed that were full of magazines and had remote controls mounted on the inside of them for the TV that rose from a cabinet at the foot of the bed. That bedside lamp was an antique with a salmon-colored glass lampshade that threw off the softest light; I loved it. Anyway, I remember that night very well. I’d gone to sleep earlier than usual and suddenly woke up with a strange premonition. I turned on the lamp to get my bearings and there she was. Sally was towering over the end of the bed; just this silhouette on the ceiling and wall—at first I didn’t know who it was. It was pretty scary. At that point in my life I had guns, but I didn’t have them with me and I’m glad; if I did, it’s possible that I could have shot her, she’d scared me so.

Getting inside wasn’t easy; she’d had to jump a fence, walk down a steep set of stairs, and she’d been lucky enough to find my extra key under the doormat—which, of course, was forever removed from there afterward. She was not in a good way, so I let her sleep over that night, and in the morning I drove her down Laurel Canyon and dropped her at the corner of Sunset. It wasn’t the last time I saw her, but it was the last time she ever got inside my house like that. From what I heard, she hung around L.A., and got into trouble. The very last time I saw her was in New York, where she was hanging around with Michael Alig and the notorious Limelight crowd; after that I heard she went back to England. And is much happier now.

It’s tough to be the kind of person who hangs around the edgier fringes of society if you’re not a musician or someone who has a purpose being there. Everyone else is a disposable player out there in the void on the scene. Most of the girls who dated us back then were these innocent chicks whose lives were changed forever after one of us came into it for however long it lasted. We were like a vacuum back then that sucked people up and spit them out; a ton of people around us fell by the wayside that way. Some people died, not because of anything we did to them, but as a side effect of being too close to the flame. People would get attracted to our fucked-up weird life and just get it wrong and drown in our riptide.

STEVEN AND DUFF PURCHASED HOMES close to my new place, just over Mulholland Drive, on the Valley side of Laurel Canyon. They were on opposite ends of the same street. As I mentioned, Steven was building his version of domesticity with some chick, and Duff and his future wife, Mandy, were settling into their home life together. Duff was always very good at maintaining a household; he never fell into the transient kind of lifestyle that I did. I might have lived less than two miles from those guys, but I didn’t see them too often; if they’d been drug dealers, I’m sure that I would have.

All things considered, I realized that I had to clean up a bit before we’d be able to get rehearsing again. Duff didn’t want to write with me when I was high and I couldn’t blame him for that. When there was a bit of a drug drought in L.A., and it became a huge pain in the ass, my subconscious trigger of needing to play superseded my drug craving. I just locked myself up in my house and with the help of Dr. Stoli and his assistants I got through my withdrawal.

Once I got off the smack, Duff and I got reacquainted and we scheduled rehearsals. At that point we did so without any confirmation from Axl.

The only messages I got from him came officially through management via Doug Goldstein, who spoke with Axl on a regular basis.

It didn’t matter that we weren’t all there; Steven and Duff and I started jamming at Mates, our go-to spot. Izzy wasn’t quite up to joining us: he’d spent a bit too much time around Bill’s house and was on a path as dark as mine. He came to rehearsal every so often, but we never waited for him. At least we were trying to be productive; I have no idea what Axl was up to at the time because we didn’t speak, probably because a few of us were chemically out of control.

Drinking excessively became the thing again for me. I would drive home from rehearsal totally plastered, passing people on the wrong side while going up Laurel Canyon. I’d be doing ninety miles an hour in my little Honda CRX; I would have died easily if I’d hit anything. I’m thankful that I didn’t hurt anybody, get arrested, or die—someone is watching out for me, given how often I’ve come close to death and made it back alive.

One particularly outstanding night I turned off Laurel Canyon onto Kirkwood, the street that led to my street, Walnut Drive. There was a guy stopped at the corner of Walnut who was preparing to make a left onto Kirkwood. He was way too far over, in my lane; and in my mind he was in my way . Rather than stop or slow down, I just plowed into his car—on purpose.

I tried to back up and take off, but our cars were stuck together; I’d smashed him on the driver’s side by the rear wheel and my car’s front end was attached to his car. At that point it dawned on me that I probably shouldn’t have done that.

I sat there trying to back up and split; I pulled my bumper to pieces because it was severely mashed into this guy’s car. As I was doing so, he got out and walked up to my window.

“So?” I asked, and stared at him for a minute, squinting.

The guy reeked of booze; he was completely wasted and now totally confused by me.

“You’re fucking drunk, ” he said, his speech a little slurry.

“No, I’m not,” I said. “ You’re fucking drunk.”

I lit up a cigarette as he and I slowly came to the realization that both of us were pretty fucked up to the degree that police involvement was a bad idea.

“Do you have insurance?” the guy asked. “I don’t.”

“Listen… I can’t afford to get in trouble with the law,” I said.

“Let’s pretend this didn’t happen,” he said.

“Fine by me.”

We managed to pry our cars apart; that guy bolted and I drove up my little hill as fast as I could. I put the car in the garage and sat there for a moment. My heart pounded as the reality of what could have happened sunk in. I had a much-needed moment of clarity: the repercussions of that misadventure would have halted everything for me.

It didn’t take a clairvoyant to see that if we would ever be a band again, Izzy and Duff, Steven and I, would need to write some music and get Axl interested and back in the mix. We had a few songs going but we had to keep up the pace and stay focused. We were already almost there: it was becoming exciting again; the original hunger was returning and the fire was alive. We wanted to make Guns music our top priority.

We kept rehearsing, and once we’d gotten a few songs all together, we went over to Izzy’s place on Valley Vista and Sepulveda in the Valley to do some writing and see where his head was. It didn’t take me long to figure it out: I was in the bathroom over there taking a leak when I noticed the two-inch-thick layer of dust in his shower and bathtub. That thing hadn’t been used for weeks—Izzy was that far gone. Even Axl showed up that day, and regardless we started working on a song that became “Pretty Tied Up.” I remember that Izzy had taken a cymbal and a broomstick and some strings and had made a sitar out of it. Needless to say… Izzy was pretty fucking high.