Susan and I went to see our doctor when she was two weeks overdue. He said he was going to make us an appointment to go into the hospital the following morning so they could induce labor.
Whoa!
Okay. We’ll just go home, pack some things, and get a good night’s sleep before we go and have our child the next morning. Yeah, right. We packed our stuff just fine, but the sleep part did not happen. We were way too excited. And ridiculously nervous.
When doctors induce labor, they introduce a drug called Pitocin into the mother’s bloodstream. Of course, they have to use the right amount at the right time to get the best results. In Susan’s case, however, they must have used too much because she went into sudden, acute labor.
Okay.
Shit, no doctor yet? No epidural? No spinal block?
Time to practice what we had worked on for the past few months: the meditation.
“Just look into my eyes, babe,” I said, “and stay with me.”
Easy for me to say.
Susan showed me through fifteen excruciating hours of labor that she owned the warrior spirit of ten men. She powered through all that pain and confusion. I know she was more scared than she had ever been in her life, but she never quit and never cried.
And then it happened.
Our daughter.
My daughter.
My baby girl.
I have a baby girl?
I have a baby girl!
We named her Grace.
Now life made sense. This was why I had survived my pancreatitis.
This was why I had survived my waterskiing accident. I was here to be the father of a baby girl, and I was, at last, ready for it.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Susan and I basked in parenthood. I learned to swaddle Grace, and I came to relish soothing her on my shoulder during those cool autumn nights in our quiet new surroundings.
Our dog, Chloe, had not only settled into the new house but had quickly made a new bed right underneath Grace’s crib. Just as she had gone everywhere with Susan while she was pregnant, Chloe now stuck close to the baby all the time. As Grace grew into a toddler, Chloe would gently play ball with her. It was astounding to watch them interact.
I decided to take another course at Santa Monica Community College—an intro-level business class. My decision to continue to take classes thrilled my mom, whom I was talking with even more now that Susan and I had a baby. Mom and I had excited discussions about the possibility of my going to college—not for a course or two, but for a degree. Her Parkinson’s disease greatly limited her physically, but her mind remained smart as a whip. My uncle John had told me many times that my mom was the smartest kid in the family, and that in another era she would have gone off to college and become a doctor or lawyer herself.
Thank God I didn’t have much work to do just then, because school ate all my nonbaby time. I didn’t know how to use Word or Excel. I had to learn rudimentary computer skills on the side. And I still didn’t know what the fuck I was doing at the most basic level. I would read everything, I would write down way too much, and I would take notes on all the wrong things in class. I didn’t know how to filter through my notes to get what I needed. I would go to the library and wouldn’t know what to look for. When I went back over texts I had read, practically every sentence was highlighted. I knew the material when a test came, but it was overkill. It would take me literally ten times the amount of time to prepare as the other students.
I had to relearn the learning process. I kept at it even when I felt I wasn’t getting any better at studying. I knew I could do it. And the process of formal education sparked me. Suddenly the world of finance became a fascinating, living thing for me. Again I got an A. And I immediately signed up for another class—introductory economics.
By early 1998, I began to record music again, too. I poured myself into it, working every day. Despite my departure from Guns, our old label, Geffen, remained supportive of my solo career.
“We’re backing you, Duff,” I was told at a meeting with Geffen staff. “This album will be our top priority for the first quarter of 1999.”
Despite my songwriting and recording, my latest class, and my workouts, Susan and I managed to find time to constantly shuttle back and forth between L.A. and Seattle—it was great to be able to share Grace’s first year with my mom. During my teenage years, my relationship with my mother had really blossomed when I quit taking drugs after my first panic attack. We had sat down over tea together nearly every day back then, and I had been able to come clean to her about some of the things I’d gotten into—like stealing cars—while struggling to find my way. It had been like that since my pancreatitis, too, and now, in 1998, we were becoming even closer as I learned to be a parent. I wanted to be around Mom as much as possible.
I was also beginning to think I really did want to attend a proper university. By the middle of 1998, I had completed three different business classes with a 4.0 GPA. I figured any school would most certainly see that I was a genius, right? Shit, with those grades I thought Yale and Harvard would fling open their doors.
Then I remembered: there was a grand old university situated atop Capitol Hill in Seattle, the school my uncle John had attended, Seattle University. When I was very young and still doing well in school, my mom would have liked nothing better than for me to have followed her brother to Seattle U.
A plan was starting to take shape in my mind.
By fall, I had an entire album done, which Geffen planned to release as Beautiful Disease on my birthday, February 5, 1999. An index of some lyrical themes explored on the songs:
Number of lines about getting kicked in the head: 2
Number of veiled references to GN’R breakup: 2
Number of drug deaths mentioned: 2
Number of songs about a person whose drug habit imperils his or her ability to parent: 1
By the end of 1998, promotional copies of Beautiful Disease had been sent out to magazines and the press campaign was in full swing. I ducked into Tower Records one afternoon and saw my album on their big list of upcoming releases. Cool. I formed a band in anticipation of touring the record. This group became the first incarnation of Loaded, the band that’s been a constant in my life ever since.
For most of the press interviews, I would go to the Geffen office and talk on the phone with writers planning to cover the album. One day in December, I headed over to the office for another round of phone interviews. When I walked in, everyone was in hysterics, crying.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“We were just bought. There are going to be mass layoffs.”
A few days later, I went to the office again—this time to meet with an executive of the new corporate entity. I was ushered into a conference room. He came in and shook my hand.
“Here’s the story,” said the exec. “I’m going on a ski vacation and I’m going to listen to all the upcoming releases with my kids. We’ll decide whether they have a future with the label or not. When I come back I’ll let everyone know. I’ll have each artist into my office to tell them personally where they stand.”
I never heard what his fucking kids thought of my record. In fact, I never heard from the guy again. On my birthday—the day of the album’s supposed release—an intern from the label called and left a message on my answering machine to say it wouldn’t be released that day or any other day.
I subsequently offered to buy the album back from the label so I could release it some other way. After all, I had put a lot of work into it and was proud of the results. I said I would pay all the recording costs—about $80,000. They said no, sorry, we will only sell it at a profit. You can have it back for $250,000. Otherwise we’ll just keep it in the vault.
Fuck this, I thought.
This was just another test, another challenge.
Rise above.
I rented a van and Loaded did its first-ever tour, punk-rock style, playing the songs from the unreleased album up
and down the West Coast for a few weeks. I wanted to stay in motion rather than sitting around and stewing over the severing of this last tie to the past.
That tour reminded me of one of the reasons punk was so great: the interaction with the audience. The fans weren’t in Row 600. They weren’t behind a barricade. They were right in front of our faces. Obviously, if they were at our show, we shared musical interests; the sweaty intimacy of these hastily organized, small gigs amplified that feeling of camaraderie.
Still, once I was back in L.A., I began to think.
Fuck this business.
Fuck this whole fucking town.
You’ve been itching to go back to school. So let’s fucking do it.
I pictured myself up at Seattle University, following in Uncle John’s footsteps. I pictured my family living in our place on Lake Washington, far away from L.A.’s bullshit. I pictured being able to visit Mom every day.
We were already shuttling back and forth to Seattle constantly. I asked Susan what she would think about moving there full-time. We started talking about marriage, too. It felt like the right time, so I proposed to her. We started to plan an August wedding. We sold the place in Malibu. And along with our toddler and an aging yellow lab, the soon-to-be Mr. and Mrs. McKagan moved to Seattle.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Those first few months in Seattle in 1999 were an exciting time. Grace had just passed eighteen months and was building up a vocabulary. I started counting the words she used and quickly hit one hundred. We saw my mom nearly every day. Together with Mom and my uncle John—my mom’s brother, a doctor, and sober since the early 1980s—I tried to figure out what I wanted to study when I started at Seattle U—which now felt like an inevitability. Finally I decided on my goal: the undergraduate business program at Seattle University’s Albers School of Business and Economics.
Then one afternoon in April 1999, I was driving to my mom’s place with Susan and Grace. We had just stopped to pick up some lunch for her at Taco Time. My phone rang.
Mom had died.
What? I just spoke to her this morning! This can’t be!
Mom had been battling Parkinson’s for a long time, but the doctors thought she had a lot of life ahead of her. Anyone who has lost a parent knows the huge and bottomless hole left yawning in the lives of the children. For a while at first, it was tough to curb some habits—I would instantly reach for the phone to call her every time Grace used a new word, for instance. Mom, guess what Grace just said …
My mother’s death had a huge impact on me. Her sage advice and calm demeanor helped not only me but dozens of my friends—and even kids who were random strangers to me. I’ll never forget coming home on various occasions after I’d left the family house to find bedraggled punk kids sitting with my mom, talking over a cup of tea about whatever was eating at them. That sort of generosity of spirit was important for me. Always had been, and I hoped it always would be.
Her well-lived life informed and influenced all that I did in my own life, and I’d been striving to hew closer to her ideals as I’d put my life back together in recent years. While I was devastated, I could at least take consolation in the fact that she’d witnessed my determination to start a new life, to form a family, and to get an education.
After Mom’s death, Uncle John became the patriarch of the McKagan clan in addition to his own side of the family; his sons and daughters and grandchildren shared him with us. He helped me focus on the goal I had set for myself most recently—getting an education. The undergraduate admissions guidelines at Seattle University included categories for transfer students, international students, and “other students.” That was me. Or so I thought. As it turned out, even the “other” category didn’t have a slot where I would fit—it was for kids who had been homeschooled or had previously been booted from Seattle U, or adults who already had a BA and were seeking additional enrichment without working toward a degree.
Finally I talked to a staffer at the admissions office and was told I could apply. He instructed me to write an “admissions essay.” Admissions essay? What about my perfect GPA? I thought the doors would open instantly for me, a hero returning from the battlefields of life, scarred but alive. No. None of that. It instantly became clear that the school saw my junior college “achievements” as just sort of cute. And all I had to show from high school was a GED. You can’t get into Seattle U with a GED. Reality was setting in.
I hadn’t written an essay since I was in junior high, twenty years before. Thank God for Dave Dederer. I’d been friends with Dave since the last time I’d written an essay. By the mid-1990s, he was best known as the guitar player in Presidents of the United States of America, who had huge hits with “Lump” and “Peaches.” But I also knew him to be a well-educated man: he had majored in English at Brown—an Ivy League college—and had worked as an English teacher before his music career took off. He and I had a little side band, an acoustic duo called the Gentlemen, and we had been playing tiny gigs around Seattle ever since Susan, Grace, and I had started coming back regularly the year before.
“I don’t remember how to write an essay,” I told Dave.
Dave showed up at my house with a gift that I use to this day: Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. It became my go-to book on the ins and outs of the English language, and in its pages were the blueprints for the structure of an essay.
Next I asked Dave the obvious question.
“What do they want me to tell them? Do I just pick a random topic and write an essay on it?”
“No, Duff, tell them your story,” said Dave. “Tell them everything. Tell them about growing up in Seattle and playing in punk-rock bands and moving to L.A. Tell them you were in Guns N’ Roses, tell them you were a drunk, tell them you did cocaine and a lot of it. Tell them about your success, about getting strung out, and about your fall. Tell them about your redemption and getting sober and your martial arts and mountain biking. Tell them about Susan and your new baby. Let them know you are of the here and now and exactly how you got here.”
Whoa. I was skeptical.
But the admissions office liked the story. They invited me in for an interview.
“The next thing to address,” the admissions adviser said, “is your academic record. All we have to go on are a few classes at a community college in California. I’m sure you can understand how difficult it is for us to assess that. You don’t have any track record whatsoever in math, for instance.”
Shit. The essay was all well and good, but it was merely a starting point for a rigorous university like this.
“Here’s what we propose,” he continued. “See if you can gain admittance to Seattle Central Community College. If you can, here’s a list of classes we’d like you to take. Get all A’s and come back to us and we’ll consider your application at that time.”
The course list was like nothing I had ever done—college-level math, history of western civilization, a survey of English literature. But a challenge had been issued and I was at the exact point in my life to face it. I was fueled for this. With Susan and Dave and Sensei Benny and my uncle John firmly planted in my corner, I could rise to this occasion.
This time I took my GED and commendation from the governor with me when I went to the community college—I got into Seattle Central right away. Then I had to take placement tests. I scored low in math. I just couldn’t remember anything. The classes themselves interested me—even the math, in part because it was such a challenge.
At the end of the fall semester, I returned to Seattle U with my community college transcript in hand. I had straight A’s—Mom would have been proud, and I wished I could have shown her the transcript before I took it to the admissions office.
“That’s great,” I was told at Seattle University. “Now we want you to take this list of classes and get all A’s.”
Come on!
I ended up spending an entire academic year at community college. Throughout that year, there were indicators t
hat let me know my mom was still around. One time, two-and-a-half-year-old Grace turned to look at me and Susan and we both froze—we were looking at mom’s crinkled-up seventy-six-year-old face, just looking at us and smiling. It stayed there for a few seconds. I guess such a strong connection based on love and all-encompassing trust doesn’t disappear overnight.
Early the next summer, in 2000, after submitting another slate of A’s from Central, I received a letter from Seattle University.
Dear Mr. McKagan,
Congratulations! We are pleased to inform you that you have been selected for admission to the class of 2004 at Albers School of Business and Economics.
That same summer, on July 14, 2000, Susan gave birth to our second daughter, Mae. She was a big, round Buddha baby, but Susan’s labor was much shorter and easier than it had been with Grace. And for her part, Grace took an instant liking to Mae and doted on her little sister.
For a middle name, we gave her Marie, after my mom.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
When my first semester of classes at Seattle University kicked off in the fall of 2000, I quickly realized the year at community college hadn’t helped me much as far as studying was concerned. The classroom situation was different, too. At Seattle U, the students knew they were there for the next four years. This was it. They weren’t just trying things out; they would be there, seeing one another, every day, for years. I had the same basic plan in mind, but I went home to a family every night and was closer in age to the professors than to my fellow undergrads.
Still, the kids were pretty respectful—they could see I was serious about it. They could see I wanted to learn. Early on, a few classmates brought in their copies of Appetite for me to sign, but that stopped as soon as they saw I really was just another student—one taking notes so voluminous they could fill a dumpster. I was up on campus all the time and got to know some of the kids in my classes. They were so smart. About half were from elite schools in and around Seattle, and the rest were academic studs from farther afield, including a good number of international students. It seemed everyone had taken AP classes or college-level courses while still in high school.