KISS THE RING ☆ Taylor Hawkins

36. I don't wanna be me

One afternoon in mid-September, during the monthly break from the Garbage tour, Diane was lying on the sofa in the blond's living room. The two had moved a few weeks earlier, almost under the obligation of the redhead because, according to her, that house was a pigsty and abandoned to itself. And she was right. The house in Laguna now seemed to have become the home of parties, used only and exclusively for those. From the wide open windows it finally managed to enter a cool breeze that made the redhead sigh pleasantly, intent on reading a book at that moment. It wasn't the right time to start writing something, she didn't feel the need and with the release of the album which took place a few months before she could have cradled herself for quite some time. Fleetwood Mac's Tango in the night was spinning under the diamond pin and the first notes of Isn't it Midnight filled the lounge when the house phone began to ring. "Cherry, will you take it?" Taylor, looking out the back door that overlooked the garden, turned to the singer with the cigarette in his fingers, receiving no response from the latter apparently too busy reading her book to hear her phone ring. The blond rolled his eyes and shook his head, turning off the filter in the ashtray placed on the outer sill of one of the windows before returning to the house. Diane didn't notice anything, not even the worried expression on the drummer's face, not even the instant voice change after the first few words he heard as he picked up the phone. "What...?"-"Are you kidding, aren't you?"-"Where is he now?" Those were the three sentences repeated in continuous rotation in that call lasted just 5 minutes. The singer didn't shift her attention from the book even when the only thing she could hear was silence. "Diane, honey?" Taylor slowly approached the girl, lowering himself to his knees to get up to her level. She turned, closing the book before smiling at him and gently caressing his face. Only when she noticed the worried look on the blond's face the singer did sit up on the sofa almost immediately. "What happened? Why that face?" He looked down and, placing his hands on the redhead's bare knees, closed his eyes for a few seconds, sighing deeply in the meantime. "Dave..." - "Which Dave? Our Dave?" He shook his head, then ran a hand over his face. "Navarro, he overdosed." Diane let her hands be caught in the drummer's big ones, and when he looked up at her, he met her eyes, scared and wide open. "What?"

It wasn't the first time that this happened, the redhead had been with him during an episode like that just a few weeks before. Dave wasn't having a good time. Let's say he hasn't been through it since 1983, when his mother was murdered by an ex-boyfriend of hers. The guitarist had told his friend that, on the very same night of the crime, he approached drugs that have always served as a shield for his emotions and from that moment on he had become a drug addict all in one piece. He told her that if anyone could die suddenly, like that, then everyone might as well have fun. Sometimes it was scary to party or just keep up with him, especially for an ex-addict like Diane. It was intense, as well as in all the other things that the guitarist tried his hand at. He had never been very closed, it showed well the cold and desolation he had inside because of that event.

"You know, Diane. I'll tell you the same thing I said to my friend Twiggy: if I should, you know, die, you'll have to put my body in a tub full of ice-cold water, throw out any kind of drugs and call an ambulance."

His head was always full of questions about that fateful night: Who knows if those two women, his mother and his aunt (his mother's best friend), tried to scream? Who knows if they tried to escape from that madman's hands? Did they suffer a lot or was it a lightning-fast death? When Diane was with him, during one of his countless ODs, she was in utter panic within seconds. She didn't want to see him while he injected that poison into his veins, so she had left her hotel room to go get coffee. That day, the European sky seemed to be anticipating yet another event that would have traumatized the life of the redhead. It was hot, quite a lot, but despite this, it looked like it might start raining at any moment. Opening the door to her room, she couldn't hold back a desperate scream, dropping whatever she was holding out of her hands. She found him lying on the ground with the syringe still in his arm and the telephone wire twisted around it, his eyes wide and lifeless and the foam starting to come out of his mouth. Diane called immediately whoever was in charge at the hotel, and then approach the boy and take him in her arms, not before having removed the needle from his vein. Calling him by his name, she received no response and, clutching his cold torso to her, silently and in tears, she began to pray that it was a joke. She had never been in that situation, at least not on the other side. Until that moment she had never seen the problem, she had never put herself in the shoes of someone who was next to a person with an addiction. And she felt sick at the very thought that Taylor, or Izzy, might have found her in a similar situation.