Machine Headin Robb Flynn avautuu heroiinin käytöstä ja muistelee yliannostukseen kuollutta ystäväänsä

Yhdysvaltalaisen metalliyhtye Machine Headin nokkamies muistelee tuoreessa Facebook-julkaisussaan hyvää yhtyeen kanssa työskennellyttä ystäväänsä, joka kuoli heroiinin yliannostukseen. Flynn avautuu samalla omasta heroiinin käytöstään ja jakaa ajatuksia sekä kokemuksia aineen negatiivisista vaikutuksista itse käyttäjän lisäksi tämän läheisiin. Voit lukea hänen kirjoituksensa kokonaisuudessaan tästä:

THE GENERAL JOURNALS: DIARY OF A FRONTMAN… AND OTHER RAMBLINGS
—————————
JACK’S FUNERAL

**this is a long one, read at your peril**

I read the eulogy at Jack’s funeral Saturday.

His daughter Tawny had asked me to read it, and really, is there any other answer than “yes” when a grieving daughter asks?

A lot of friends turned up. Jack’s old cover band played the wake at the VFW Hall down at the shipyard in Antioch afterwards, or as most people were calling it ”the after party”.

Steve from Skinlab was there, Ahrue Luster was there, two of Jack’s oldest friends that I knew Robbie and Pete were there, we all hung out for a while and had some good laughs.

As far as funerals go, it was a beautiful tribute, great videos of Jack playing guitar in his early bands, photos of him as a child, a lot of tears. He was a damn good guitarist.

Jack worked for Machine Head as either Logan’s tech, my tech, our merch guy, or Ahrue’s tech for five years from 1995 to 2000.

He did every U.S. tour in that time, a few European tours and a Japanese tour.

We had a lot of good times together. We lived a lot of life together. He was/is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met in my life. A guy who was just gifted at making people laugh, and who would literally do ANYTHING for a laugh.

My favorite Jack story goes something like this. We were out on the Livin La Vida Loco tour in 1999, which from bottom to top went Amen, Slipknot, Machine Head, and Coal Chamber (who were just coming off of 350,000 in sales) were headlining.

Jack had recently gotten married to Julie and as gift to remember her by, she had given him her panties to hold/smell/jerk-off to.

Now, I’m not sure if Jack ever did any of those things, but he LOVED to get drunk/high and put on nothing but his wife’s panties, and prance up and down the bus as we all howled with laughter. One night (for reasons my brain cells have long ago erased) we ended with some extraordinarily large salami’s on our bus. Easily 2 ft long and 3 inches thick (they were shockingly phallic, a women’s dream cum true).

We’re all hammered.

I mean, H-A-M-M-E-R-E-D.

And Jack’s prancing up and down the hallway doing his Jim Carrey /Fire Marshall Bill “let me show ya somthin’” joke for the 467th time. I’m dying with laughter, and since Jack was always my torture-victim du jour, I of course grab the giant phallic salami and decide to hit him with it. He prances up to me, turns around and as he does, I swing the enormous meat-cylinder long-ways right up the crack of his ass.

THWACK!

”OOOOOWWWWWW!!”.

He looks at me and yells, ”That’s it, shows over fuckers!!!” as he runs into bunk alley and slams the door.

We all fell to the floor laughing.

It became the stuff of legend in our camp.

“Show’s over fuckers” is still uttered (17 years later) on a semi-regular basis.

I taught him how to do “The Helicopter” (where you take your cock out and spin it super-fast like the blade of helicopter).

I taught him how to do “The Fly”, where you take your balls and twist them over your cock so it looks like the bulging eyes of a fly and it’s snout.

From then on, you could count the hours before you’d see Jack’s cock doing a “helicopter” or “fly”.

I (along with Robbie) were the best men at his wedding.

He was the best man at my wedding.

We partied hard together.

We shared a lot of loss together.

I was there when his older brother died of a brain aneurysm. I cleaned up the bloody sheets, and took out the bloody mattress from his mom’s apartment.

I was there with him six months later when his mother died.

He took that one hard.

Somewhere around there Jack started drifting off…

After five years on the road with us Jack was sick of touring and his daughter was having a lot of trouble back home, in and out of Juvenile Hall.

The last shows he did with us were the Year Of The Dragon dates in Japan.

Now, before I make this come across as Saint Jack of the Funny Bone, the funniest Saint of all, let me tell ya… Jack was no angel.

So it’s said, I spoke with his daughter yesterday and she gave me her blessing to speak about him in this honest a fashion.

Since we had hired him, he’d had a long love-affair with Vicodin’s and pills. Hell, his humorous nick-name with the road crew was “Jackodin”. Unbeknownst to me at the time, he was getting packages of 300 or so “Vic’s” mailed out on the road, and keeping the rest of the crew hopped up on goofballs.

I did them with him from time to time, but they always acted like Speed with me. I couldn’t sleep on ’em, and as a singer, no sleep = no voice, so I laid off of them for the most part.

And I was there when he started doing heroin.

I did my best to keep him sober-ish in the limited amount of time that I was home. He was falling apart. Self-medicating.

When his wife discovered heroin needles, and threatened to divorce him, I sat him down at Red Robin burger joint in Concord, and I laid into him.

I wasn’t judging him.

Because I was no better than him.

I just tried to get it into his drug-addled skull, my horrible experiences with it.

Because I had done heroin at least 10 times.

I tried to share with him where it had gotten me.

I’d snorted china white, snorted tar, shot it a few times. Thankfully, I just never enjoyed the high. The whole puking-every-15-minutes-thing was a MAJOR bummer. I never got past that… and man, looking back… I’m so glad I never got past it.

The night that we signed the contract with Roadrunner Records on Oct 10th 1993, a buddy and I decided to go do some heroin at his dealers to “celebrate” after a long night of drinking at The Omni in Oakland.

They shot me up (I could never do it), and I OD-ed.

I woke up 6 hours later on a filthy bathroom floor in a puddle of vomit, feeling like death.

And at a heroin dealers house they weren’t about to call an ambulances to save me. They just hoped I was alive.

Genevra picked me and I confessed everything. She was livid. Incredulous. As I’ve talked about in an earlier General Journal, her father was a heroin addict his entire life. He died an alcoholic/heroin addict.

And while I was remorseful with Genevra, what happened one week later is what hit me like a ton of bricks.

Our friend Jimmy Lapin OD-ed on the same batch of bad heroin, from the same dealer.

But he didn’t live.

I lived.

And Jimmy died.

The song “I’m Your God Now” had always been about the dangers and seduction of drugs, but as I went into the studio a month later to record it for our debut album “Burn My Eyes”, it took on a chilling reality. The song became about that moment, me surviving, and Jimmy not.

“What the fuck are you doing with your life?” I screamed. And looking back I wonder if I was saying it to him, or if I was really saying it to myself. Trying to repair some fuck up I’d done 7 years earlier. We cried, we argued. He lied to me. Two hours later the whole conversation ended badly, he was mad at me, I was mad at him, and he was in the grips of a battle with heroin that he was never going to win.

I went back on tour.

He went off in a different direction we didn’t speak much for a few years after that.

We reconnected about 10 years ago by phone, but he lived all over the place, and the motherfucker never had a car, so we didn’t see each other much.

Jackie Lee changed phone numbers every three months. I literally had them in my contacts as Jack C Jan. 2014, Jack C April 2014, Jack C Nov 2014 and on and on.

He would tell me he was ”clean”, but I always had the feeling he wasn’t.

A month ago he called me up and razzed me about playing my birthday party. ”Can you even play anymore fucker?” I asked. He said “Oh fuck yeah I can Robb, I’ll kill that shit for you!”

”All right fucker, come on down and jam”.

He came to the last rehearsal and it was a crazy day, and we only talked a little.

The next day him, my dad and I got to sit with him and catch up. It was probably only 15 minutes but it was great. He had gained an alarming amount of weight, was sweating just sitting there. He said he was clean but his eyes were ”pinned”. I know the look, I’ve seen it in my own eyes.

I’m so glad he got to get up there and jam. Got to get up there and have one last go in front of a big crowd, playing his guitar on “Creeping Death” with some friends. He still had it.

Jack OD-ed on heroin in the bathroom stall of Celia’s mexican restaurant.

Man… that’s a shitty way to go.

And the frightening thing is that, there’s a heroin epidemic going on in America right now, but you would never even know it was happening if you watched the news.

Our drum tech Mudbilly just lost his sister the week before to a heroin overdose.

Even now, I have people in my family who are struggling with heroin addiction and/or Oxycontin, Norcos, or pills.

Yesterday I got off the phone with our guitar tech from the early-Machine Head era Mike. Mike has been strung out on heroin for the last three years, and after hitting rock-bottom, got sober a year ago. He’s clean from weed, alcohol, pills, and drugs for the first time in over 30 years.

I wish he could’ve talked with Jack before all this. I wish he could’ve offered some advice.

Like all those faced with someone you love or care about who is in the midst of drug addiction, there’s a guilt that you feel. You say, ”I wish I could’ve helped them”, ”I should’ve done this” ”I should’ve done that”.

And then the anger takes over and you think ”why couldn’t they do this?”, ”why couldn’t they do that?”

Because the inconvenient truth is that the only person who was going to fix Jack was Jack. And he just got lost.

And it’s sad.

It sucks.

And just like when Genevra’s father was told he had six weeks to live if he didn’t stop… he couldn’t stop…

Jack was no different.

Saturday was a sobering reminder of how fucked up heroin is.

I hate that drug.

I’ve watched it destroyed so many of my friends.

I was lucky enough that it never destroyed me.

All of us have our demons.

Jack had his.

Like Jack, we could all lose to our demons. Succumb to the darkness within.

That was the scariest reminder of all.

The pastor said ”we never know how much longer we get… we can have six months… we could have two years… we could have five years… we could have 20, who knows”.

And he’s right, Six months from now I could be dead.

Six months from now you could be dead.

Ahrue Luster told me his father had passed away three months ago. That he went from being completely healthy to getting pancreatic cancer and within three months he was dead.

Man, that sucks.

That really sucks.

I don’t know why but the funeral hit me really hard Sunday and every day since.

For the first 2 weeks after he passed, it didn’t affect me, I didn’t cry, and though I cried at the funeral, I was more anxious and nervous all day about having to read the eulogy.

But Sunday I cried. And I cried for five times yesterday. One girl told a story about how Jack was so happy that he was able to play my birthday bash, that he told her ”if I died tomorrow, I could die happy man”

That one really hit me. My face was shaking with tears. I never knew that that’d be the last time I saw him.

And it’s a hell of a great memory to have.

But I’ve just been staring off into space all day, depressed, little hollow.

And mad.

Fuckin’ mad at you Jack.

Because I loved you.

Because I fucking loved you and it fucking hurts a lot right now, and I don’t know what else to do except type these stupid words.

Hurts a lot to know that I’m never going to get to laugh with you.

I still have your last voice message on my phone.

And I’m crying writing this down.

Because I miss you.

Because I wish you were still here to call me “Robbie Lee”.

Because the show’s over…

…fucker.