Array Slash - Slash

I’d caused quite a bit of a commotion by then; the cops had arrived and, along with a crowd of onlookers, they confronted me in my hiding place. I wasn’t seeing the Predators anymore, but when I gave the cops my testimony, it involved a detailed re-creation of how they’d chased me all over the resort trying to kill me. I was still high enough that I told the story without a shred of self-consciousness. Everything around me still looked pretty bizarre; even when Steven broke through the crowd and handed me a pair of sweat-pants. The cops took me back to my room and found a bag full of syringes, but no drugs; and since I had a prescription for Buprinex, (which did not get you high,) I was allowed to have syringes and nothing seemed amiss.

Still, the Arizona police weren’t buying it: at some point they left me in the room to discuss among themselves what to do with me. I was still convinced that everything I told them had happened, which didn’t help exonerate me at all. They kept staring at me, like, “okay.” They eventually took me in, once they found coke residue in the spoon on the floor. But Doug stepped in; he called Danny Zelisko, this high-powered promoter in Phoenix, who managed to keep me out of jail. Doug and Danny hustled me out of there, minus one shoe, because one of my feet was far too injured to wear one. They got me on a private jet and flew me the fuck out of there. Without Danny’s help, I was looking at serious jail time. Thank you again.

WHEN I LANDED IN L.A., I WAS PICKED up and snuck into a suite at the Sunset Marquis. My speedball rally at the golf course had left me exhausted, so I went straight to sleep.

I woke up to Duff standing over the bed. “Hey man… you awake?”

“Yeah,” I said, trying to figure out exactly where I was.

“Get some clothes on, I’m going to wait for you in the other room,” he said. “I have to talk to you about something.”

“Okay, cool.”

I walked into the living room and every seat in the place was full: my managers, my mom, my bandmates (except for Izzy and Axl)—aside from my drug dealer, almost everyone I knew was there. It was an official intervention. I was still getting my bearings, but I immediately thought that it was ridiculous that Steven was there because he needed rehab as much as I did, if not more. I stared at him, just thinking, Hypocrite. Everyone else’s attendance meant something to me. I’m not quite sure what, but definitely something. Almost everyone there also had something to say.

My security guard Earl said, “Slash, you were vibrant and alive in Chicago. In Chicago you were so strong. I can’t stand to see you like this, in this weak condition.”

My mom was stupefied. She sat there in silence for the most part.

Alan Niven was typically bombastic. “Slash, you have to go to rehab,” he said. “It’s all been arranged.”

They all said that they loved me, and God bless their hearts, I’m sure they meant it, but being confronted that way was so heavy that it lost something in translation. I was completely cornered, so my usual bullshit lines about being fine were not going to work. I was stuck with no defense, I was guilty without a trial, and there was nothing I could do. Like anyone in that situation, my lying had come into harsh focus.

I never blamed my mom for any of this, I never for a moment thought that this was her idea; she looked as confused as I did that day. The rest of them were scheming motherfuckers as far as I was concerned. Regardless, if I was going to make it right with the band, I’d have to go to some clinic in Tucson called Sierra Tucson, and so I entered rehab for the first time.

The thing about rehab is that you have to want it. When you do, it works wonders—but when you don’t, it may clean out your body, but it won’t change your mind. That is precisely what happened to me my first time: I went through detox, in a very secure, sterile environment, but there was no way in hell that I intended to take part in any aspect of the clean-living community that is phase two of rehabilitation.

But before I even got there, I did what every dedicated junkie does: I told everyone at my intervention that I agreed with them, that I intended to go along with their plan for me, so long as I could spend one last night in my own bed before I set off to clean up in the morning. They said okay, because my shenanigans had run their course as far as they were concerned.

I went back to my house, retrieved my stash, did my fix, and hung out with Megan—who was completely unaware of this entire event going down. I told her that I’d be away for a while on band business, and in the morning, I got up bright and early, fixed again, and got into the limo with Doug to go to Tucson. This place was in the middle of the desert in every way: there were no markets, housing developments, strip malls… nothing civilized was within miles. It was a little sober oasis.

I was checked in to a two-bed room, but never had a roommate for the duration of my stay, which was great . The first three or four days of drying out were typically awful, though they were made less drastic due to the combination of medications I was given. I’d never kicked that way, so it was a welcome relief, but nothing quite so comfortable that I could eat anything or sleep soundly for more than an hour or two at a time.

After a few days, once the sweats and the anxiety and the inescapable discomfort receded, I was comfortable enough in my own skin to get out of bed and walk around a bit. It was all that I could do; I wasn’t ready for human interaction at all. But the moment I emerged from my room, the staff was all over me to attend group therapy. It was out of the question—just because I could walk didn’t mean that I wanted to talk. I wanted to avoid other people so much that I waited until I was totally famished to seek out food, because doing so meant encountering strangers in the cafeteria.

I learned later that should I have checked in a week earlier; I’d have known one person there: Steve Clark, the original guitarist for Def Leppard. Steve was in there for drugs, but as is customary in places such as those, once you surrender to their methods, they find countless other “afflictions” that are ailing you. In that frame of mind, sex and just about anything else, if you look at it from a certain perspective, can be seen as an addiction that rules your life. In Steve’s case, I hear they labeled him as a sex addict and slapped a “No Female Contact” patch on him after he broke the regulations by talking to the same girl more than once in private. He didn’t take to that too well and he promptly checked himself out of there. Steve died of a drug overdose two years later.

When I wasn’t in my room at Sierra Tucson, I spent most of my time sitting at a massive table with a giant ashtray for a centerpiece. I did my best to avoid conversing with the other residents. When I couldn’t avoid it, the conversation generally went like this.

Some stranger would sit down and start smoking nearby.

“Hey, what are you in for?” they’d ask me.

“Heroin.”

Usually, at the mention of that word, at least one or more other patients present and within earshot would start visibly twitching and scratching themselves.

“Yeah, cool. That’s nothing. Let me tell you my story…”

Most of the people I met there had multiple addictions and personalities so complex that they defied all of my preconceived notions. They were a strange collection of individuals from all walks of life; it was just like One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and like Jack Nicholson’s character, I was convinced that I was the least fucked up of all of them. I was operating under the impression that I knew what I was doing when I was doing it, no matter what it was, while these people didn’t seem to know what they were doing at any moment ever and had no idea of what they’d done to get here.