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TO MOM AND DAD,I PROMISED I WOULD BE GOOD.
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATEDTO ALL OF THE PEOPLE WHO TOLDME I WOULD NEVER…
COME, COME, COME MY LITTLE DROOGIES. I JUST DON’T GET THIS AT ALL. THE OLD DAYS ARE DEAD AND GONE. FOR WHAT I DID IN THE FAST, I’VE BEEN PUNISHED. I’VE BEEN CURE.
ALEX, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
REGRETS, I’VE HAD A FEW…
SID VICIOUS
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Epigraph
A HORSESHOE UP MY ASS
1 DADDY DEAREST
2 REEFER MADNESS
3 LARS AND ME,OR WHAT AM I GETTING MYSELF INTO?
4 METALLICA—FAST, LOUD, OUT OF CONTROL
5 DUMPED BY ALCOHOLICA
6 BUILDING THE PERFECT BEAST: MEGADETH
7 MISSION: TO BREAK ALL THE RULES OF GOD AND MAN
8 FAMILIARITY BREEDS CONTEMPT
9 THE END OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
10 THE TRAVELING CARNIVAL
11 AGAINST MEDICAL ADVICE
12 THE LIVING YEARS
13 I PRAY THE LORD MY SOUL TO KEEP
14 THE INNER WEASEL
15 SOUL FOR SALE
16 SOME KIND OF GOD
17 MEGADETH: REBORN
EPILOGUE: THREE BOATS AND A HELICOPTER
Copyright
About the Publisher
A HORSESHOE UP MY ASS
HUNT, TEXAS
JANUARY 2002
IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR BOTTOM, THIS SEEMS TO BE ABOUT AS GOOD A PLACE AS ANY-ALTHOUGH I’D BE THE FIRST TO ADMIT THAT THE BOTTOM HAS BEEN A MOVING TARGET IN MY DARK AND TWISTED, SPEED METAL VERSION OF A DICKENSIAN LIFE.
IMPOVERISHED, TRANSIENT CHILDHOOD? CHECK.
ABUSIVE, ALCOHOLIC PARENT? CHECK.
MIND-FUCKING RELIGIOUS WEIRDNESS ON MY CASE THE EXTREMES OF THE JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES AND SATANISM)? CHECK.
ALCOHOLISM, DRUG ADDICTION, HOMELESSNESS? CHECK, CHECK, CHECK.
SOUL-CRUSHING PROFESSIONAL AND ARTISTIC SETBACKS? CHECK.
REHAB? CHECK (SEVENTEEN TIMES, GIVE OR TAKE).
NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE? CHECK THAT ONE, TOO.
James Hetfield, who used to be one of my best friends, as close as a brother, once observed with some incredulity that I must have been born with a horseshoe up my ass. That’s how lucky I’ve been, how fortunate I am to be pulling breath after so many close calls. And I must acknowledge that on some level he’s right. I have been lucky. I have been blessed. But here’s the thing about having a horseshoe lodged in your rectum: it also hurts like hell. And you never forget it’s there.
So here I am, staring down the throat of another stint in rehab, at a place called La Hacienda, out in the heart of the pristine Texas Hill Country. It’s only about two hundred miles or so from Fort Worth, but it seems a world away, with only cattle ranches and summer camps for neighbors. The focus is on healing…on getting better. Physically, spiritually, emotionally. As usual, I’ve brought only modest expectations and enthusiasm to the proceedings. Ain’t my first rodeo, after all.
You see, I’ve learned more about getting loaded, more about how to get drugs, more about mixing drinks, and more about how to bed the opposite sex in Alcoholics Anonymous than in any other single place in the world. AA—and this holds true for most rehabilitative programs and treatment centers—is a fraternity, and like all fraternity brothers, we like to swap stories. It’s a ridiculous glorifying of the experience: drugalogues and drunkalogues, they’re called. One of the things that always bothered me most was the incessant one-upmanship. You’d tell a story, sometimes baring your soul, and the guy next to you would smirk and say, “Ah, man, I spilled more than you ever used.”
“Oh, really?”
“Damn right.”
“Well, I used a lot, so you must be one clumsy fuckhead.”
For some reason, this sort of interaction never did much for me, never made me feel like I was getting better or improving as a human being. Sometimes I got worse. It was at an AA meeting, ironically, that I first learned about the ease of procuring pain medication through the Internet. I didn’t have any particular need for pain meds at the time, but the woman telling the story made it sound like a great buzz. Before long the packages were coming to my house and I’d fostered one hell of an addiction. By this time I was a world-famous rock star—founder, front man, singer, songwriter, and guitarist (and de facto CEO) for Megadeth, one of the most popular bands in heavy metal. I had a beautiful wife and two wonderful kids, a nice home, cars, more money than I ever dreamed of. And I was about to throw it all away. You see, behind the façade, I was fucking miserable: tired of the road, the bickering between band members, the unreasonable demands of management and record company executives, the loneliness of the drug-addled life. And, as always, incapable of seeing that what I had was more important than what I didn’t have. The joy of writing songs and playing music, which had sustained me through so many lean years, had slowly been siphoned off.
Now I simply felt…empty.
And so I went off to Hunt, Texas, hoping this time the change would stick. Or not hoping. Not caring. Not knowing much of anything, really, except that I needed help getting off the pain meds. As for long-term behavior modification? Well, that wasn’t high on my list of priorities.
And here’s what happens. Early in my stay I wander off to get some rest. I remember slumping into a chair and tossing my left arm over the back, trying to curl up and sleep. The next thing I know, I’m waking up, dragging myself out of the fugue of a twentyminute nap, and when I try to stand up, something pulls me back, like I’m buckled into the seat or something. And then I realize what’s happened: my arm has fallen asleep and it’s still hooked over the back of the chair. I laugh, try to withdraw my arm again.
Nothing happens.
Again.
Still nothing.
I repeat this motion (or attempted motion) a few more times before finally using my right arm to lift my left arm off the chair. The moment I let go, it falls to my side, dangling uselessly, pins and needles shooting from shoulder to fingertips. After a few minutes, some of the feeling returns to my upper arm and then to part of my forearm. But my hand remains dead, as if shot full of Novocain. I keep shaking it out, rubbing it, whacking it against the chair. But the hand is numb. Ten minutes pass. Fifteen. I try to make a fist, but my fingers do not respond.
Out the door, down the hall. My breathing is labored, in part because I’m kicking drugs and out of shape, but also because I’m scared shitless. I burst into the nurse’s office, cradling my left hand in my right hand. I blurt out something about falling asleep and not being able to feel my hand. The nurse tries to calm me down. She presumes, not unreasonably, that this is just part of the process—anxiety and discomfort come with the territory in rehab. But it’s not. This is different.
Within twenty-four hours I will be on hiatus from La Hacienda, sitting in the office of an orthopedic surgeon, who will run a hand along my biceps and down my forearm, carefully tracing the path of a nerve and explaining how the nerve has been freakishly compressed, like a drinking straw pinched against the side of a glass. When circulation is cut off in this manner, he explains, the nerve is damaged; sometimes it simply withers and dies.
“How long before the feeling returns?” I ask.
“You should have about eighty percent within a few months…maybe four to six.”
“What about the other twenty percent?”
He shrugs. The man is all Texas, in movement and delivery. “Hard to say,” he drawls.
There is a pause. Once more, nervously, I try to squeeze my hand into a ball, but the fingers are unwilling. This is my left hand, the one that dances across the fretboard. The one that does all the hard creative work. The moneymaker, as we say in the music business.
“What about playing guitar?” I ask, not really wanting to hear the answer.
The doc draws in a long breath, slowly exhales. “Aw, I don’t think you should count on that.”
“Until when?”
He looks at me hard. Takes aim. Then he hits the bull’s-eye. “Well…ever.”
And there it is. The kill shot. I can’t breathe, can’t think straight. But somehow the message comes through loud and clear: this is the end of Megadeth…the end of my career…the end of music.
The end of life as I know it.
1 DADDY DEAREST
“No more of that shit in my house! You understand?”
FLIP THROUGH A STACK OF SCHOOL YEARBOOKS FROM MY CHILDHOOD OR ADOLESCENCE, AND MORE OF TEN THAN NOT YOU’LL FIND ONE OF THOSE GRAY SILHOUETTES, OR MAY BE EVEN A BIG QUESTION MARK-THE GREAT SCARLET LETTER OF YEAR BOOKS!-WHERE MY PHOTO SHOULD BE. LIKE A LOT OF KIDS WHO BOUNCE AROUND FROM SCHOOL TO SCHOOL, TOWN TO TOWN, I WAS FREQUENTLY ABSENT AND THUS BECAME SOMETHING OF A PHANTOM, A SULLEN, RED-HAIRED MYSTERY TO CLASSMATES AND TEACHERS ALIKE.
THE JOURNEY BEGAN IN LA MESA, CALIFORNIA, IN THE SUMMER OF 1961. THAT’S WHERE I WAS BORN, ALTHOUGH IT’S POSSIBLE I WAS CONCEIVED IN TEXAS, WHERE MY PARENTS had lived during the latter stages of their tumultuous marriage. There were two families, really: my sisters Michelle and Suzanne were eighteen and fifteen years old, respectively, by the time I came along (I often thought of them as aunts rather than sisters); my sister Debbie was three. I don’t know exactly what happened in the years between the two sets of children. I do know that life unraveled in a great many ways, and in the end my mother was left to fend for herself, and my father became some sort of shadowy figure.
For all practical purposes, John Mustaine was out of my life by the time I was four years old, when my parents finally divorced. Dad, as I understand it, had once been a very smart and successful man, good with his hands and head, skills that helped him rise to the position of branch manager for Bank of America. From there he moved to National Cash Register, and when NCR transitioned from mechanical to electrical technology, Dad was left behind. As the scope of his work narrowed, his income naturally declined. Whether this failure contributed to his escalating problems with alcohol, or whether alcohol provoked his professional failures, I can’t say. Certainly the man who ruled the Mustaine household in 1961 was not the man who married my mother. Much of what I know of Dad was passed down in the form of horror stories from my older sisters—stories of abuse and generally insane behavior perpetrated under the shroud of alcoholism. There are snapshots tucked away in the back of my mind, memories of sitting on Dad’s lap, watching TV, feeling the razor stubble on his cheeks, smelling booze on his breath. I don’t have memories of him not drinking—you know, playing ball in the backyard, teaching me how to ride a bike, or anything like that. But neither do I have a catalog of despicable images.
Oh, there is one—the time I was down the street, playing with a neighbor, and for some reason Dad came strolling up the driveway to take me home. He was angry, yelling, though I don’t recall the exact words he used. Something about me being late. What I do remember is the sight of the channel locks in his hand. Channel locks are like pliers, only bigger, and for some reason I guess my father felt like he needed them to corral his four-year-old son. Or maybe he was working on something in the garage and forgot to put them down before setting off. Regardless of the motivation, the channel locks were soon taking a big bite out of my earlobe. I remember screaming and Dad seeming oblivious. He dragged me down the street, never releasing his grip as I stumbled and fell, then scrambled to my feet, trying to keep up, hoping my ear wouldn’t just rip right out of its socket. (Do ears have sockets? I was a little kid—what did I know?)
Over the years I’ve generally defended my father against the allegations of abuse. But I have to admit—this particular incident does not serve as much of a defense. It doesn’t exactly reflect the actions of a sober, loving daddy, now, does it? But sober is the important word in that sentence. I know better than most that people under the influence are capable of unspeakably bad behavior. My father was an alcoholic; I choose to believe that this did not make him an evil man. A weak man, perhaps, and a man who did some bad things. But I have other memories as well. Memories of a benign man smoking a pipe, reading the newspaper, and calling me over to kiss him good night.
After the divorce, though, my father became a monster. Oh, not in the literal sense of the word, but in the sense that he was referred to by everyone in my family as someone to be feared and despised. He even became a weapon to be used against me, to keep me in line. If I misbehaved, my mother would yell, “Keep it up and I’m going to send you to live with your father!”
“Oh, no! Please…no! Don’t send me to Dad’s house!”
There were periodic reconciliations, but they never lasted long, and for the most part we were a family on the run, always trying to stay one step ahead of my father, who supposedly was devoting his entire life to two things: drinking and stalking his estranged wife and children. Again, I don’t know if this was accurate, but it was the way things were portrayed to me when I was growing up. We’d settle into a rented house or apartment, and the first thing we’d do is run down to Pier 1 and get a roll of crummy contact paper to turn the shithole of a kitchen into something usable. Things would be quiet for a while. I’d join a Little League team, try to make some friends, and then all of a sudden Mom would tell us Dad had figured out where we were living. A moving van would show up in the middle of the night, we’d pack our meager belongings, and like fugitives we were on the run.
My mother was a maid, and we lived off her salary along with a combination of food stamps and Medicare and other forms of public assistance. And the generosity of friends and relatives. In some cases I could have done with a little less intervention. For example, it was during this period of transiency that we lived with one of my aunts, a devout Jehovah’s Witness. Very quickly this became the center of our lives. And trust me—this was not a good thing, especially for a little boy. Suddenly we were spending all our time with the Witnesses: church on Wednesday night and Sunday morning, Watchtower magazine study groups, guest speakers on the weekends, home Bible study. Then I’d get to school, and while everyone stood with their hands over their hearts during the Pledge of Allegiance, I’d have to stand quietly with my hands at my sides. When the other kids were singing “Happy Birthday to You” and blowing out candles, I’d stand mute. It’s hard enough to make friends as the new kid in school, but when you’re the JW freak as well…forget it. I was a pariah, always getting picked on, always getting smacked around, which really hardened me.
I remember going to work one day with my mother, in a very wealthy neighborhood called Linda Isle in Newport Beach. There was a little sand pit near the boat dock, and a group of boys was tossing around a football, playing a game that is sometimes referred to as Kill the Guy with the Ball, although in the politically incorrect world of adolescent boys in the early 1970s, it was more commonly known as Smear the Queer. These guys were all bigger than me, and they took great joy in kicking the shit out of me, but I didn’t care, and I had no fear. Why? Because by this time I’d grown accustomed to getting knocked around in school, and disciplined by aunts and uncles, and harassed by a variety of cousins. I blamed almost all of it on the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I mean, the fucking insanity of having a brother-in-law or uncle spank me because I supposedly violated some obscure rule of the Witnesses. And this was all stuff that happened under the guise of religion—in the service of a supposedly loving God.
For a while, at least, I tried to fit in with the Witnesses, although from the very beginning it seemed like some giant, multilevel marketing scheme: you sell books and magazines, door-to-door, and the more you sell, the loftier your title. Total bullshit. I was eight, nine, ten years old, and I was worried about the world coming to an end! To this day I still have trauma caused by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I don’t get all excited around Christmas, because I still have a hard time believing everything that goes along with the holiday (and I’m speaking as a man who now considers himself a Christian). I want to. I love my kids, I love my wife, and I want to celebrate with them. But deep down inside, there is doubt and skepticism; the Witnesses fucked it up for me.
WHAT DO YOU do when you’re a lonely kid, a boy surrounded by women, with no father or even a father figure? You make shit up, create your own universe. I played with a lot of plastic models—miniature replicas of Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney, whose rivalry was re-created nightly on the floor of my bedroom; tiny American soldiers stormed the beach at Normandy or invaded Iwo Jima. Sounds weird, right? Well, this particular world, the world in my head, was the safest place I could find. I don’t mean to sound like a victim, because I’ve never felt that way. I think of myself as a survivor. But the truth is, every survivor endures some shit, and I was no exception.
Sports provided a glimmer of hope. Bob Wilkie, the chief of police in Stanton, California, was married to my sister Suzanne. Bob was a big, athletic guy (about six foot four, two hundred pounds), a former minor-league baseball player, and he was, for a time, something of a hero to me. He was also my first Little League baseball coach. Bob’s stepson Mike (my nephew—how weird is that?) was the team’s best pitcher; I was the starting catcher. I loved baseball from the very beginning. Loved putting on the hardware, directing the action from behind the plate, protecting my turf as if my life depended on it. Other kids would try to score and I would beat them down. I wouldn’t do anything illegal, but I would put the fear of God into them if they tried to get past me. And I could hit—led the league in home runs that first season.
I don’t mean to imply that I was destined for greatness in baseball, but I do think I could have been a jock if I wanted. Unfortunately, there was no stability in my life, and whatever extracurricular activities I chose to pursue, I did so largely without help. We would live with Suzanne for a while, until Dad would find us, and then we’d move out on our own, until the money ran out and we got evicted, and then we’d move in with Michelle or with my aunt Frieda. That was the cycle. One move after another, one home after another.
I wasn’t lazy. Far from it, actually. I picked up a paper route to pay for some of my baseball gear and registration fees, and then I added a second route so I’d have some extra money for food and whatever else I might need. During that period we moved from Garden Grove down to Costa Mesa; both of my paper routes were in the Costa Mesa area, but my baseball team was in Garden Grove. So I’d routinely spend the afternoon on my bike delivering papers and then ride my bike up to Garden Grove—a distance of some ten miles—for baseball practice. Then I’d ride back home and fall asleep. The end of that insanity came near the end of the season, when our coach, having exhausted all pitching options during one particularly ugly game, ordered me to the mound.
“But I’m not a pitcher,” I said.
“You are now.”
I wasn’t trying to be an arrogant prick or anything. It’s just that I was exhausted and in no mood to play a new position; I didn’t want to deal with the learning curve or the embarrassment and then have to pedal all the way back home, dejected and pissed off.
So I played, and I walked in several runs. And that, as it turned out, was one of my very last baseball games.
MUSIC WAS ALWYS there, sometimes in the background, sometimes inching forward. Michelle had married a guy named Stan, who I thought was one of the coolest guys in the world. He was a cop, too (like Bob Wilkie), but he was a motorcycle cop, and he worked for the California Highway Patrol. Stan would get up in the morning and you’d hear the leather squeaking, the gestapo boots smacking against the floor, and he’d get on his Harley, fire it up, and the whole neighborhood would rattle. No one ever complained, of course. What could they do—call a cop? I liked Stan a lot, not just because of the Harley and the fact that he was clearly not someone you’d want to mess with, but also because he was a genuinely decent man with a real fondness for music. Every time I went to Stan’s house, it seemed that the stereo was roaring, filling the air with the sounds of the great crooners from the sixties: Frankie Valli, Gary Puckett, the Righteous Brothers, Engelbert Humperdinck. I loved listening to those guys, and if you think that seems odd for a future heavy metal warrior, well, think again. I don’t doubt for a second that the sense of melody that would inform Megadeth took root back in Stan’s house, among other places.
My sister Debbie, for example, had a terrific record collection, mostly hook-laden stuff by the pop stars of that era: Cat Stevens, Elton John, and of course the Beatles. That kind of music was always in the air, sinking into my skin, and when Mom gave me a cheap acoustic guitar as a present for graduating from elementary school, I couldn’t wait to start playing. Debbie had some sheet music laying around, and before long I had taught myself some rudimentary chord progressions. Nothing great, of course, but respectable enough for the songs to be recognizable.
For a long time Debbie was my best friend, the person with whom I spent most of my time. She’d come home from school and we’d hang out together, watch TV, play music (Debbie on piano, me on guitar). We leaned on each other when things got hard; we also fought like siblings do, with Debbie usually getting the better of me in our disagreements.
As Debbie grew up and began dating, and eventually fell in love with a guy named Mike Balli, I was left behind. She was seventeen years old when they married. I knew even then it wouldn’t last, and of course it didn’t. Anyone who met Mike and saw him with Debbie knew it was a relationship doomed to fail. Whatever chemistry there was quickly evaporated, and they were left with an unbalanced union just waiting to die. Debbie was strong and dominant; she basically called the shots—a Big Momma kind of thing.
But Mike had his positive attributes, especially to a fourteen-year-old aspiring guitar player. For one thing, his mother was in some way related to Jack Lord, who at the time was the star of the hit television show Hawaii Five-O. In 1974, it didn’t get a lot cooler than Steve McGarrett, and Mike didn’t mind dropping the guy’s name in casual conversation: “Dude, McGarrett’s like…my second cousin or something!” Can’t say I blame him. I would have done the same thing. Mainly, though, what I liked about Mike was the fact that he could play electric guitar, and he didn’t mind playing with me. Admittedly, his guitar was a complete piece of crap; it was called a Supra, and it was a ridiculous sunburst red, with three pickups, but it served its purpose. To my still uneducated ears, he seemed to be a fairly decent player.