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“Well, this package arrived here for you this morning, sir.” She looked at me oddly and held out a pen. “Will you sign here, please?”

I stared at the slip of paper sitting on the counter between us. I realized that if I was being set up, if there was any level of law enforcement watching this transaction, it would be the end of me, and that once I signed this paper, they’d have all that they’d need. I looked up at the girl, I looked down at the paper. I looked all around again, too obviously. I didn’t do anything for what became a very pregnant moment. Then I thought, Fuck it ; I signed for it, I said thank you to her, and I ducked into the service elevator and hurried back to my room.

Megan was still out somewhere at the time, but when she got back I was high, I was happy, and the rest of our trip was wonderful . Call me what you will, but that vacation took a one-eighty degree turn for the better once I got my meds. Megan and I started doing stuff, we went shopping, I rented a Jeep, and we toured some of the sights.

From Hawaii, Megan and I flew out to Chicago to spend Thanksgiving with her mother, whom I was meeting for the first time. I finished the last of my smack in the hotel in Hawaii, and by the time we got to Chicago, I was starting to experience the typical junkie itchy twitchy withdrawal. I only knew a few people in Chicago, and I ran into one of them at the Smart Bar our first night there. This guy was one of the engineers who’d set up our rehearsal rig, and though he didn’t have a line on heroin, he always had tons of coke, so he hooked me up with a pile of it. When I got back to Megan’s mother’s house, I started shooting it in an effort to get myself straight.

Megan had no idea, but I could tell that her mom knew that something wasn’t quite right with me; I’m just not sure whether she knew exactly what it was. It was tough to keep my whole scene under wraps that holiday season because she and her mom lived in pretty close quarters. Their bedrooms were divided by a shared closet; so if the sliding doors on both sides were open, you could walk from one room into the other. At night, when I was watching TV and shooting coke after Megan fell asleep, I’d start tripping out, convinced that her mom was watching me from the other side of that weird divider. This went on for a few nights. I don’t know what I was thinking; I was shooting coke in her twin bed, between Megan’s body and the wall. It was ridiculous.

When Thanksgiving Day arrived, I took a shower and got ready to meet the family and friends; and I noticed as I walked down the stairs that somehow heroin had been cleaned from my system—it defies common logic, but my only explanation is that the coke had inexplicably taken the edge off on a very intrinsic level. I was out of my mind the whole time I was over there, regardless, and that Thanksgiving dinner was one of the most uncomfortable holiday meals I’ve ever had, but it did have its moments. We had plenty to drink and we had some good times, and then Megan and I flew back to L.A. and at that point I was clean(ish)—or so: no drugs, and very little booze. At least for a while.

Before I knew it Christmas was around the corner and Megan started planning a lavish party: she was way into the decorations, she bought a fondue maker, and she invited all of our friends to her winter wonderland. It was the most bizarre thing I had been involved with for a long time, and the fact that I was straight made that feeling pretty hard to ignore. The day before the party, she came home with about $400 worth of useless garbage that she’d bought at the market to decorate the house. That was my breaking point.

I watched her decorate our place, thinking all the while, I don’t even know who the fuck you are . We had the Christmas party, we had our friends over; and as soon as they’d gone, I set about telling Megan that she had to go as well. It wasn’t cool, and it was pretty explicit; I flipped on her for going to the market but that wasn’t the real issue: I was done with her, cut-and-dried, and I needed her to vacate the premises as soon as possible. It didn’t matter to me how she’d gotten there, it just had to stop. It had to end immediately. It went horribly: I looked her in the eye and said, “Go away.” And she went… her friend Karen, who hated me anyway, showed up and packed her up.

Looking back, once I was sober, I didn’t see Megan the same way at all. She was sweet, she was fine… but she was just there . Suddenly she was like a piece of furniture that I didn’t remember buying and I began to ask myself, each and every day, what we had in common. With nothing to cloud my vision, it felt like she was a stranger. I also didn’t have time for the time-consuming responsibilities and distractions of a relationship, so it wasn’t her so much as it was me. I was getting back to my old self; I was getting into work mode. All I kept thinking when I looked at her was, What are you doing here? You’ve got to go. I’ve got shit to do . We’ve got a fucking record to make. I believe I said as much to her. I treated her harshly, especially for me, because that’s not my style. But I just couldn’t take it anymore, and that’s the last that I ever saw of her. I’ve always had to do things my way; I’ve gotten high my way, I’ve gotten clean my way, I’ve been in and out of relationships my way. I’ve taken myself to the edges of life my way. And I’m still here. Whether or not I deserve to be is another story.

When we started this band, our future depended on our uncompromising unity; our attitude fostered a loyal camaraderie among us the likes of which is very rare. Success fragmented that bond by giving us everything we wanted and a lot we didn’t need—all at once. We’d made it in the conventional sense; and that meant money and money meant freedom. We were free to splinter off on our own trips. We went so far that we almost forgot what it was like to be in the same room; we almost forgot how we had earned that freedom in the first place.

In the end we found it again, just in time… but there were losses and growing pains we could not avoid. To get back to where we started, we had to reintroduce ourselves; we had to trim the fat. We had to rediscover Guns N’ Roses. It had only been a few years, but it felt like we’d forgotten how fun it used to be to be us. You’d be surprised how quickly you forget what’s important when you’ve suddenly got everything you’d never thought you’d have.

Once I had dropped the smack again, once Megan was gone, and once I started hanging more with Duff, listening to music, drinking, and doing the occasional line, it all came together. It was all no big deal; I’d transitioned out of smack like I had before and into drinking and I was ready to do some work again. And that was good.

Izzy hadn’t come back from Indiana yet—he wasn’t ready for the temptation of L.A.—so it was Duff and I who started going back down to Mates to write. We hoped to get the ball rolling by way of our example, by maintaining a regular schedule during which we’d write music. We were feeling out the foundation of a few new songs and doing some work on some preexisting ones. As in Chicago, our goal was to get Izzy and Axl back in the room with us, but we knew that before we could do that, we needed to deal with Steven. Our man Steve had built himself up a pretty pesky drug habit and was in full denial. Steve never grew out of those junior high rock-and-roll fantasies, even when the threat of losing them was staring him in the face, so we had our work cut out for us. Duff and I split our time between jamming at Mates and monitoring Steven, who conveniently lived down the street from Duff, but was as sneaky as could be about his consumption. When we were in Chicago, everyone had started to see signs that he was becoming a little bit neurotic and frail, but back in L.A. in my strung-out haze, I hadn’t registered how bad off he was.