Welcome to My Jungle (19 page)

With that he grabbed a flashlight out of his pocket, and the first thing I thought was he’s going to hit me with it.

He didn’t. Instead he pointed it down the street, to his right, and turned it on and off. He then pointed the flashlight down the left side of the street and turned it on and off.

“That’s right, an asshole!” I added.

Less than a second later I was attacked by the Red Lion bouncer and about five other huge bouncers from every direction.

They punched and kicked me in the head. I was getting pummeled by six or more huge guys right in the middle of the street in New York City.

My glasses went flying, and it felt like it went on for about two minutes.

Robert jumped in to try to help me, and in his rage, actually summoned the strength to get one guy off me during the attack.

He grabbed that guy, threw him up against the wall, and with his thumb, hit him in the throat and told him to lay off.

That was awesome.

They must have gotten tired from all the punching and kicking, because they finally stopped. They immediately went back to their respective bars as if nothing had happened. Not a word was said, but no words were needed. I got a good old-fashioned whuppin’.

Amazingly, I never went to the ground the entire time. I was bent over in an effort to protect myself, but I never went down. As I stood up straight I realized I wasn’t in any pain. I must have been kicked and punched over fifty times, but nothing hurt. It’s incredible what alcohol can do for pain.

I retrieved my glasses, which were broken. Our two lady friends were obviously in shock. I looked over to the bouncer one more time and just stared at him.

He smiled.

But this time I didn’t say a word. The four of us left the area and walked over to a twenty-four-hour restaurant down the street and ate breakfast.

The next day, I guess you can say, I was in a lot of pain. I looked back on the evening and realized that what I did was completely stupid, but there are three sides to every story. In this case there was my side, the bouncer’s side, and the truth.

In my mind, the truth was that I did not deserve to be singled out and thrown out of the bar. But I
did
deserve to get an ass-beating for the taunting on the street.

But not by six guys.

Earl came into my room the next day and noticed that I had been beaten up. I told him the whole story. And he said that he was going to take care of this and he left.

He was gone for the next three hours.

When he came back to the hotel, I asked him, “Earl, what did you do?”

Earl told me that he went down to the Red Lion Restaurant and Bar and spoke with the manager. It was the afternoon, so none of the night bouncers was present yet. Earl told the manager that the bouncer made a huge mistake last night, and that I was a member of the entourage of Guns N’ Roses, and that we are all a close-knit team, and when you hurt one of us, you hurt all of us. And then Earl said, “We will all be back.” And he left. The manager was silent as Earl walked out the door. Remember, Earl is a very large, very strong man.

I wish I would have seen the face on the bouncer when he found out that we were with Guns N’ Roses, and that we were going to come back in force.

Classic.

Of course, we never went back there—we were not those kind of guys. But I must admit that it was good to know that if something did go wrong, I had guys that would watch my back. We were family.

Bottom line: I have the utmost respect for bouncers, I really do. Especially because on our world tour security was extremely important, and I understand how vital it is to keep the peace. But this bouncer took it to another level, I’m convinced only because of the way I looked. And that just was not cool.

STRIP CLUBS

Nudity happened to be part of the Guns N’ Roses tour. Whether one of us was caught naked in a hotel hallway, or women flashed their breasts for the cameras before every show, or one of us was paid to run naked through a parking lot in South America, or a fan was making love to an Indianapolis 500 car just outside the backstage dressing rooms, it seemed as though nudity was everywhere we looked.

Including, of course, strip clubs. To be honest, and this is the truth, I was never a big fan of strip clubs. It just never felt right for me, and I don’t know why. Had I been to strip clubs before Guns N’ Roses and Air Supply? Yes, but really only when there was a bachelor party, or a special event. I never attended a strip club just to go to a strip club.

But Guns N’ Roses did. While on tour, members of the band went to strip clubs quite often. But it was almost like a hangout, like going to a bar, except this bar was filled with beautiful naked women. I was fortunate in that Axl very rarely went to strip clubs, so I didn’t go as often as other members of the entourage. But when we went, we went in style.

It was VIP treatment all the way. We would walk in and be escorted to a private room, usually in the back. Somebody from the management team would sometimes hand us wads of $1 bills for the obvious reasons. I would sit there and talk to either Robert or Earl while band members got lap dances.

We went enough times in the three years on the road that it actually became boring. As I write this, it seems weird to me that seeing a naked woman could be boring, but try going to these places on a weekly basis. You get immune to it.

Then there is Japan.

Japan takes the strip club thing to a whole new level.

When I was on tour with Air Supply a few of us went out one night in Tokyo to get a drink. I think we were in the Roppongi District, and everywhere you looked there was either a bar or a strip club. We just wanted to have a drink or two at a regular bar. Besides, we were with Frank Esler-Smith, Air Supply’s keyboard player, and he was gay. The last place he wanted to go was a strip club.

So we’re walking down the street and each bar has a “barker” outside trying to get people to come inside. We passed a few bars when we came to a place that looked interesting, and the barker told us that we would have a good time. We told him that we just wanted to get a drink at a regular bar—no strip club. He assured us that his place was not a strip club.

We went in.

It was empty. It definitely wasn’t a strip club, though, so the barker had told the truth. It actually looked more like a restaurant.

As we walked in, a Japanese fellow came out from the back room, and in broken English he put the five of us each at a separate table. We all could have easily fit at one table, but we were each now sitting at our own table.

“Okay, this is weird,” someone bellowed.

Before any of us could agree, music started blasting as if a show was about to begin. The lights in the restaurant dimmed, and five Japanese girls came out from behind the black curtain and began to parade around the room.

“This is a strip club,” Frank yelled.

But none of us wanted to be rude to the five girls, so we stayed to see where this was going.

The music stopped, and the five girls each slid into our individual tables. It seemed each of us had a date.

Awkward.

To make matters worse, the barker who led us into the “bar” and the host who seated us at our individual tables were both nowhere to be found. We were alone with our predetermined Japanese dates.

I heard one of the guys trying to ask his “date” a question, and she just giggled.

“Do you speak English?” he added.

Again, just a giggle.

None of these women spoke English.

We all sat there and talked to each other from our respective tables, until one of us had the nerve to make the first move to leave.

After about three minutes, Frank said, “I’m not having fun.”

I started laughing. And because I was laughing, the girl I’m sitting with started to laugh as well, and I noticed that
she has no teeth
.

She couldn’t have been more than twenty-two years old, and she literally had no teeth.

That did it for me. I apologized to my “date,” even though I knew she had no idea what I was saying, and I got up to leave. It didn’t take long for Frank to follow me out the front door. The others immediately followed.

That was just so weird.

But even weirder than that was when I was with Guns N’ Roses in Japan, and the same thing happened—a few of us decided to go out for a drink. This was about seven or eight years after the Air Supply incident. I honestly forget who was there, but it was a few members of the band, a couple of us from the entourage, and even a few guys from the crew.

We hit the same area as I had with Air Supply. It’s not that this was a coincidence, everyone goes to the Roppongi District when visiting Tokyo.

So, same thing, we’re walking around Roppongi, and the barkers were out in full force. Probably the same guys as before. And just like last time, a place seemed pretty cool, so we went in to check it out.

And this is what we saw …

There was a bar, and past the bar there was a full audience. Beyond the audience there was a small stage. And as shocking as this may seem, the audience was watching a man having sex with a woman onstage.

I was on tour with Guns N’ Roses, and even though I thought I had seen everything, I had not seen this before, and if I had a vote, I wish I never saw it. It was shocking to all of us.

I don’t know how long the two of them had been going at it onstage before we got there, but about two minutes after we arrived we noticed he was obviously “finished,” and with that, received a standing ovation.

He got dressed, and took his seat back in the audience.

Again, shocking! I think we all just stood there with our mouths wide open.

The woman onstage left, also to applause, and the next woman came out. She looked about twenty-five years old, maybe a little older. She started to take off some of her clothing, and stood at the edge of the stage in her bra and panties.

Then she scanned the audience.

She was looking for someone from the audience to have sex with … onstage … in front of everyone.

She turned her attention to us. We were standing in the back of the room, and she called to us, “C’mon, American boy, come on.”

We couldn’t tell which “American boy” she was looking at, but if she was talking to me there wasn’t a chance in hell that I’d go up there. My cohorts all felt the same. We each started hiding and ducking so she wouldn’t choose any of us.

After a minute or two of no response from any of us, she turned her attention back to the audience and chose a Japanese man. The woman this man was sitting with seemed so happy for him. We thought it might be his wife, and maybe this was some kind of birthday present.

This was one weird, funky place, and as soon as that guy got onstage and started taking his clothes off we were out of there.

That was too much for even Guns N’ Roses.

As we left the building a large tour bus pulled up right where we had just exited. The doors to the bus opened and out came about thirty to forty men and women in their late sixties, or seventies, at least. They all walked straight into the bar that we just left. Giggling.

They were going to see a “show.” That was just so wrong!

AXL KILLS A MOTH

Right now you’re thinking “Big deal.” Boring story, right? Axl killed a moth. So what. But this is actually one of my favorite stories.

When we were fortunate enough to be off the road for more than a week, we all got to go home to see our families. I always went home with Axl, because even off the road, I still worked with him full-time. Every day, I’d drive up to his house in Malibu, do some advance work for the next leg of the tour, take care of some house stuff, handle all his personal matters, and so on.

One afternoon a moth got into the house. An uninvited, very rude moth. Obviously this moth was a huge fan of Axl’s because it
would not leave
no matter how many times we asked it to. Robert was there, too, and he and I tried and tried, but the moth ignored us and kept flying around Axl’s dining room chandelier.

Well, at some point, Axl had had enough. He was absolutely determined to get rid of that pesky moth. Most people at this point would get a ladder or a chair and a flyswatter and go to work.

Most people.

But not a rock star.

And especially not Axl Rose.

Axl instructed me to keep a close eye on it, and he ran upstairs. So, there I was, watching a moth and worrying about how pissed Axl would have been if I had let it out of my sight. If someone could have taped me tracking that moth from room to room, I would have won $100,000 on
America’s Funniest Home Videos
, no contest.

When Axl finally came back he’s wasn’t carrying a flyswatter. He was carrying a gun. Not a pistol, but a long gun. A rifle maybe, or even a shotgun.

Now, I’m not a gun expert. In fact, this may be hard to believe for some, but I have never shot a gun in my life. And what might be harder to believe is that I’ve never even held a gun in my entire life. I’ve shot BB guns before, but that’s it. So when I say I’m not an expert in guns, I truly mean it.

My first thought was,
Thank God I know where that moth is, otherwise Axl would probably shoot me
. But at that point it was obvious that the gun wasn’t for me—it was for the rude moth.

Axl was on a mission.

Rock stars do everything bigger and better.

It wasn’t enough for Axl to just shoot the moth. No, he insisted on setting up a barrier so that just in case he missed (though how you could miss anything with a shotgun at a range of less than ten feet I don’t know), he would be safe behind his own personal wall. You know, in case the moth chose to attack or something.

Axl said, “Get me a chair.”

I brought over a dining room chair (a really nice chair—it was Axl’s house).

Axl positioned himself
under
the chair, lying on his back, using the seat of the chair as cover from the potential killer attack moth.

“Okay, dude, make him go into the corner,” instructed Axl.