My Life With Deth (13 page)

Throughout that year, I tried to maintain the illusion of sobriety by attending a few meetings, taking appointments with a drug counselor, and even picking up sobriety celebration chips for thirty, sixty, and ninety days clean. The truth was, just before each chip I had actually lapsed back into drug use, even if just for a day. I remember sitting in my apartment and thinking, “This is a real drag. Everybody thinks I’m
sober. I don’t have a girlfriend anymore and I can’t even invite anybody over to get high, because they all think I’m sober!” So a month went by and I got high. Then a second month went by and the same thing happened, and I didn’t tell anybody—so everybody thought I was three months sober, when really I only had a month because I’d slipped every month for three months in a row. It was embarrassing, and I realized how powerless I really was against my addiction.

My conscience was kicking in, big time. Lots of people who thought of me as a junkie had distanced themselves because I couldn’t be trusted. There is a saying, “A belly full of booze and a head full of recovery is a pretty awful feeling,” and that was exactly where I was in life. I knew what sobriety looked like, but I just couldn’t bring myself to seize it. It was like swinging from a vine in the jungle but being too afraid to let it go and grab the next vine in front of me. I was stuck.

Then, in the summer of 1989, Ron Laffitte introduced us to Desmond Child, who was an A-list songwriter for artists like Bon Jovi and other major arena rock stars. He was hired to produce our single “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” a cover version of the famed Alice Cooper song, intended for inclusion in the soundtrack for the film
Shocker
. This was the first song we recorded with Nick Menza. At the time, I hated the song, though I don’t dislike it now. Not so much the actual song itself, but because of the way the whole process was handled businesswise with people around the band. It felt as if it should really have been a Dave Mustaine solo song rather than a Megadeth tune.

Meanwhile, I was plummeting further still into the pit of my addiction. Rehab hadn’t worked, methadone hadn’t worked, and the last vestige of something I was holding on to, which was my identity in Megadeth, was threatened because my senior partner told me that if I got high I’d be out of the band. The one thing I was holding on to was the “Hey, it’s rock ’n’ roll” attitude, where I could just take drugs, party with the girls, get onstage, and still feel validated. The bad news about rock ’n’ roll is that it is very forgiving of decadence; it actually celebrates that way of life.

Ron Laffitte wanted to help me get sober, and he really did help me, just when I needed it most. I remember bursting into tears in front of him one day in the apartment in Studio Colony, when I was suffering most, and telling him that I needed help. He said, “If you want help, I can get it for you—but you have to really want to quit drugs for this to work.” I said, “Yes, I really want to quit.” He then introduced me to a doctor in Hollywood who prescribed a medication called Buprenex. You’d inject it into your buttock with a diabetes needle and it would curb the heroin withdrawal symptoms. That was the beginning of the end of my addiction, but I wasn’t out of the woods quite yet.

I now had a professional counselor helping me, a guy named John B., and I started working through the sobriety process with him. He was
a former addict who was five years sober with the recovery programs, and he was doing some one-on-one and group counseling on the side.

Do you want to know how I finally got sober? It went like this: By November 1989, I was in deep trouble with my addiction but starting to use this Buprenex. I’d been through several methadone detox programs throughout 1989, none of which worked, because I’d do the methadone and I’d get so high that I realized that I needed to go get some cocaine—and then when I got some cocaine I realized that it was twelve o’clock at night, and that I needed to get some heroin to come down, so I could get some methadone from the clinic. My opiate addiction had really progressed rather quickly, and I desperately needed help.

So, in early November I went to a party for
RIP
, a hard rock magazine owned by Larry Flynt’s publishing company. I came home after the party, and I just couldn’t get high anymore. Nothing was working for me. I had hit bottom, so I lay on my bed and I prayed: “Please, God, help me. I’m completely through.” I knew I couldn’t do it on my own anymore, and so I reached out to God. That was the last night I ever drank, and I only chipped on smack a couple more times over the next two months.

Suddenly, and with increasing frequency, thoughts of faith would come to me. I prayed often and started reading spiritual books, which was also when I began to develop my own concept and my own definition of God. I didn’t know who I was praying to at first, but my prejudices toward religion had been softened after a visit to church with my dad during Christmas that year. I listened to the sermon and something clicked; my bias against religion melted away and I suddenly felt hope.

Then a strange thing happened. I’d been praying during this time—“God, help, help, help!”—and in quick succession, my two main smack connections got busted and went to prison. It felt as if God was doing for me what I couldn’t do for myself. The way was being cleared and my temptations were stripped away.

Just as much, prayer seemed to be opening doors in other areas of my life, too. The guitar auditions finally paid off when Dave and I went up to Ron Laffitte’s office one day, and sitting on his desk was a Cacophony album and Marty Friedman’s solo album. Ron told us that Marty wanted to audition for Megadeth, and we said, “Is that Marty Friedman from the band Hawaii?” and he said it was. We agreed to the audition and set it up. Marty was very professional, bringing a guitar tech to come in and set up his gear for him. Marty was wearing white hi-tops and skin-tight black jeans with holes in them like the Ramones, a Ramones T-shirt, and a leather jacket: he looked like a rock star. A poor rock star, but a rock star nonetheless. He played really well. He understood the nuances of our music and played the songs perfectly.

We agreed that Marty was our guy. I did some initial woodshedding with him as I had done with everybody else. Nick had a friend who filmed all the guitar auditions, including Marty’s, and we gave all those films to Capitol with the idea of doing a behind-the-scenes-with-Megadeth movie, but Capitol disposed of them. I was told that they threw them in a Dumpster and that a guy who was painting the building at the time pulled them out. They’re all over YouTube now, of course. It’s still fun to watch them all these years later.

We were now getting ready to go in and start recording
Rust in Peace
. The band and the producer, Mike Clink, showed up at the studio every day, recording the beginnings of
Rust in Peace
with the bass and drums and some of Marty’s guitar tracks.

Jimmy Bain of Dio, whom I’d become good friends with from the tour in 1988, loaned me a Yamaha eight-string bass, and one day while playing in my apartment I came up with “Dawn Patrol.” It’s interesting how different instruments inspire you to play and write differently. Mike Clink, Nick, and I put down all the bass and drums and I recorded “Dawn Patrol.” Dave had to choose between my song and one that Nick had written, and though he liked Nick’s song, he preferred mine, so “Dawn Patrol” ended up on the album. It has the only mellow interlude of the entire
RiP
record.

By then Dave had quit smoking cigarettes. He was on a health kick, so I tried to quit, too. Right about this time the Federal Aviation Administration had decreed that there would be no more smoking on airplanes, and I thought, “Oh no! As a traveling rock ’n’ roller, this is gonna be a real drag!” There was a place in Beverly Hills which treats cigarette withdrawal just like it was a drug withdrawal. They gave me a shot in the neck of some mind-altering substance, and a shot in the arm, which was a nicotine blocker, plus some scopolamine patches, and they told me, “Go home, throw out your ashtrays, and wash your clothes: you’re a nonsmoker when you leave here.” I was completely hammered on whatever this medication was. I remember being in the car with Nick and Marty while Dave was driving and they were all
laughing at me because I was out of my mind on this dope that the clinic had given me.

But those drugs helped me get off Buprenex that week, and after that stop-smoking clinic I never did another drug again. I never have, to this day. That was the last week of February 1990, which is why I call March 1, 1990, my first day of sobriety. It was the beginning of true freedom from my addictions.

A THOUGHT

G.O.D.: Good Orderly Direction

My experiences show that I tried to live my life according to my own self-serving methods during the years of my addictions, only to find myself entrenched in them. Eventually they became a lifestyle that I couldn’t stop or escape on my own.

When I became overwhelmed by my addictions, I realized that I had two choices. One was to go on to the bitter end, hoping blindly that one day things would magically be different. Or I could surrender to some higher power and trust it to pull me out of my dilemma. This sounds easy, but it isn’t. However, when I was out of options, the right choice became clearer by the moment.

I was in a drug rehab back in 1989, during one of my darkest periods of heroin addiction. Some things changed quickly once I found sobriety. But not everything changed all at once. Rather, my new life developed over the course of many years.

What aided me in these life transitions was a concept I heard about at meetings, a cute little saying that somehow traveled the longest twelve inches, those being from my head to my heart. I was struggling with the God idea, but I heard it said that I should simply consider God as G.O.D. or “Good Orderly Direction.” It was suggested that I pray to God, even if I didn’t believe in Him, and then do the next right
thing that was put in front of me. In other words, I should stop trying to control everything and trust that whatever the outcome was, it was God’s will.

Regardless of what we each may call it, that concept of G.O.D. kept it simple for me, and the God idea really started to work in my life.

“Do not conform to the patterns of this world.”

—Romans 12:2

F
or any alcoholic or addict to get sober is really a remarkable act of grace. That is the spiritual connection. The moment you surrender your life and everything you do to a higher power, whether you understand that power or not, and you say, “My way isn’t working: I’ve been beat,” something happens in that moment and a sort of peace comes over you. To me, that is the presence of God—G.O.D., or Good Orderly Direction, as I now know it.

As we sober up and become more developed in our faith, we realize that the only successful life is a constant surrender of our human tendency of self-will. That is naturally inherent in all of us, something that is correctly adjusted in a normal person but is very maladjusted in an addict or alcoholic. Whether it’s that way from the beginning, or it just turns that way as we decline in our drug and alcohol abuse, that lifestyle starts to bend our souls and our morality, and forces us to compromise everything that we know to be good, right, and wholesome.
On that journey toward the bottom, our whole moral compass is completely skewed.