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.
“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