Read Online It's So Easy: And Other Lies by Duff McKagan - Free Book Online Page A

have to find it in your heart to forgive her.”
    So Stacy and I were back on. It’s the only time I’ve ever gone back to someone after something like that. Things went great for about a year. I even heard about a job opening at Lake Union Café’s patisserie that could get me out of Schumacher’s Bakery. My hair was dyed different colors all the time, so jobs that put me in the public eye were out of the question. Fortunately the opening was for a dishwasher. And as it turned out, the head pastry chef was an oversized and extremely flamboyant homosexual who didn’t look twice when he saw my hair at the interview. He actually liked the fact that I was a musician. I suspect he may have taken me for gay. I got the job.
    Then, in 1983, my band Ten Minute Warning got the opening slot on a tour of the Northwest with the big Vancouver punk band D.O.A. When I came back home from a week or so on the road, I walked into our place to find Stacy hanging out with a guy I knew was part of a crew of people dabbling in heroin. I was worried.
    We didn’t address it directly, but as the signs that she was using began to get more obvious, I would spend more and more time away from our apartment. I didn’t want to be proactive, I didn’t want to deal. Stacy finally told me she was indeed doing heroin. I moved out. She drowned herself in smack for the next few years. We were done.
    I struggled to deal with the loss of that first love—all the more so because of the way it happened. At first I was physically ill—so sick that I couldn’t hold down any food. Of course, I also needed a new place to stay right away. One of my best friends, Eddy, had a great idea. His mom bought houses and flipped them; he did renovations on the properties for her. He and I moved into one of the places they were fixing up to resell.
    Eddy and I had first met on the basketball court during a third-grade city league practice. I fouled him too hard while trying to block his shot—the kind of thing you do when you have yet to achieve control of your growing body. He punched me right in the nose in retaliation. For some reason, when boys get into a fight, they will often become inseparable friends. That proved true for me and Ed.
    As we came up through junior high together, Eddy and I got into all of the same trouble and experienced all the same stuff together: sports, girls, drugs, grand theft auto. At some point in the eighth grade, as Andy and some other friends and I began playing instruments, Eddy joined in our new fascination with punk rock. He couldn’t play the guitar or drums, so he started to focus his attention on being a singer. And why not? He had always been the coolest of us and could certainly stand in front of a crowd without an instrument to hide behind. It didn’t take long before he was singing for one of the city’s most promising punk bands.
    Once ensconced in one of Eddy’s mom’s renovation projects, we developed a routine. I would get up in the morning and go to work at the Lake Union Café; Ed would get up and work on the next phase of the refurbishing—drywall, plumbing, electrical, whatever. Most nights we would go to gigs, either playing with our bands or going to see friends’ bands. With both of us in bands, we had seemingly unlimited opportunities to meet and sleep with girls. Newly single and working my way out of an emotional funk, I now took advantage of those opportunities.
    I was eighteen, and here we were, two best friends living on our own in a big house in a nice neighborhood. One night, Billy Idol, who had just rocketed to mainstream success with his second solo album, Rebel Yell, was to perform on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. It was the first time any of our punk heroes had managed to get on a show as big as this, and we were on a mission to watch it—though not enough of a mission to stay in for the night. On the way home, drunk, we got pulled over for speeding just blocks from our house. I was at the