The Book of Drugs (15 page)

My bandmates were talking about making a video. I had spent a month exchanging e-mails with the video person at the record company. But, utterly disregarding the work I'd done, they had suddenly landed on some half-baked idea. I filled with so much rage that I shut down. I could barely speak. I had to control my movements severely. I felt that if I were to let a little bit of the rage out, my body would explode. We went around to radio stations all day, and at each of them I sat in the corner looking like a chimp shot with a tranquilizer dart. The record company guy ushering us around made desperate, forced jokes to the radio people to draw attention away from the singer's bizarre comatoseness.

“It's scary when you yell,” said Stanley Ray. “But it's scarier when you're
quiet
.”

 

In the midst of recording an album, we went to meet with the head of the art department at Warner Bros.; she was going to show us the portfolios of photographers and graphic designers. In the car on the way over, the sampler player said, in a noble tone, “Whenever we visit the record company, I realize that their jobs depend on
us.
”

Us?
How about I break up this fucking band and you'll see what the fuck
us
means? But I didn't say anything. Again: trying to keep the rage from busting me apart. We went into the art director's office, she passed around the books, I sat there shaking, scowling, unable to get it together to be the slightest bit cordial, professional. “Is there anything . . . wrong?” she asked.

I mumbled an answer that maybe wasn't composed of actual words.

 

Stanley Ray took me to a club called Fez—in the lounge was a portrait of Oum Kalthoum in a gilt frame—in a basement on
Lafayette Street so deep that the subway overpowered the music when it rumbled under the stage. A band called The Magnetic Fields was playing: never heard of them. Also, this guy Elliott Smith. Never heard of him, either.

The show changed my life. I mean, it
actually
changed my life.

The Magnetic Fields's singer, Stephin Merritt, was sort of troll-like, with a low, croaking voice. The songs were transcendent and the lyrics cuttingly shrewd. I'd say it was an arch take on the best'80s pop, but imbued with huge, tragic heart—but, though apt, that description can't capture the ineffable wondrousness of the songs. He kept giving the sound guy a death stare during the show for something messed up in the monitors.

Elliott Smith was a solo acoustic guy—as I used to be—with a wavering voice; gripping, stringent songs that seemed to
unspool,
lyrics radiating passion and desperation.

There was a blizzard the next day. I walked to Avenue A in a spooky, blank world. There were no cars. I walked in the middle of the white street. The racket of Manhattan was gone. Otherworldly. I heard my boots crunching in the snow, the wind. I went to a tiny record store, picked up an Elliott Smith CD and a Magnetic Fields CD.

It was just a few months after the nightmare of the second album: January 1996. It was time to do something where I only had to rely on myself. I took some songs that my bandmates had rejected—too normal—and wrote some new ones. I named it before I made it:
Skittish.

There was a producer named Kramer who had made albums by two bands that I loved, Low and Galaxie 500. The spare music floated in a billow of reverb.

So I would abandon the Soul Coughing sound entirely.

Kramer's studio was in an extravagant New Jersey suburb. He had bought a house once owned by a disco drummer of some renown who lost his fortune to a crack habit. There was a studio the size of half a gymnasium, bedecked in shag carpet—floor, walls, and ceiling—with concentric sun patterns set off in slightly beige-er shag.

We cut nearly twenty songs in a single day, just acoustic guitar and voice, me sitting in the darkness of the vast carpeted chamber. Kramer was invisible almost the entire time, seated below the control room window, smoking joints. An assistant did the work. Kramer's one solid contribution was to disallow me from doing a second take on an electric guitar overdub. Yet it sounded
exactly
like I wanted it to sound. It was unmistakably a Kramer record. It was more than the reverb—which was achieved with big echo plates running down the sides of his garage—there was an eerie plaintiveness to the music. It wasn't the assistant: he was a new guy. Kramer put some other parts on after I left, but mostly it's just as it was laid down that day.

I walked with a tape. Later, I tried to get the master tape from him, and he equivocated weirdly. It turned out that Kramer only owned two reels of tape, erasing and rerecording on them, for every record, over and over again.

 

Stanley Ray was irritated when I played
Skittish
for him. He'd spent a lot of energy keeping us from breaking up. He certainly wasn't going to help me get Warner Bros. to put the record out.

 

I make inexplicable decisions to get with a certain kind of woman. A short woman, a Latina, an Asian woman, an artist, a non-artist, a woman above twenty-nine but below thirty-three; it's less than a fetish, more like an arbitrary criterion. Maybe my unconscious
mind wants to limit my possibilities, and keep me lonely. Lonely is safer. I decided that what I wanted was an English girl: the accent.

 

I did a vocal on a song by a techno band from Manchester (do you call it a band when all the music making is done in the studio, and live, it's three guys standing behind machines, watching data turn into music, like Laverne and Shirley watching the bottles on the quality control line?). They flew me to Britain to shoot a video.

The set was an abandoned airstrip. The German lady directing the video made me chase a truck, until I was wheezing, lip-synch in front of flame jets, and lie on the cold, wet asphalt. All the band had to do was stand in a triangular formation in their mod jogging suits, looking past the camera, regally.

They had a potbellied guy named Rufus with them, who didn't dress groovily and had an unfashionable mustache. “Do you want some pyooaah?” Huh? “Some pyooaah, mate.” Oh,
pure
. Pure what?

“Whizz, mate, pure whizz.” Rufus held up a bag of white powder. I didn't know what “whizz” was, but I sniffed some anyway. It was something other than cocaine—probably speed? My displeasure at lying on an airstrip in the drizzle dispelled.

There was a girl cast as the girl in the video. I wasn't that attracted to her. She was, in fact, the German lady's pinch-hitter for the girl role—the model who was originally cast dropped out, and this woman was somebody who worked in a production company the German director was affiliated with. She was a half-Chinese girl with an extremely snooty-sounding English accent, incongruously named Françoise. Her friends called her by the last syllable of that name: Swaz.

How do you say that name when making love to her? Well, it's sexier than the phlegmy charms of Bregggggkkkkkgggggggya.

We were taken to a trailer, where a gay guy with an Afro and circular glasses wielding blush and eye shadow had transformed Swaz into a glamour icon. Her sudden transformation into a beauty was disquieting.

In the makeup chair, I said, They want me made up to look like a dead man.

“Really?!”

No, I said, not really.

He got sullen.

We were seated in the cab of the truck I had chased, for shots in which I lip-synched while Swaz pretended to drive. They shot one angle, then another from the side, then one from the front, then a close-up. Then the German lady said, “And now it is time you and Swaz vill have a snog.”

We were startled. Did they tell us beforehand that the job description included making out with a stranger? Cameras rolled.

I leaned in and gave her a real kiss. My lips brushed hers, and I budged in closer. Her mouth yielded. A long, soulful, all-enveloping kiss.

 

In the car back to London we talked about poetry, and then we met the next day; she came over to my hotel room and took a shower with the bathroom door open. I watched her soap herself up, scrub herself off.

At some point in the six hours we hung out, it was decided that I was going to abandon New York and come live with her in London.

I went back to Brooklyn. She called me, blind drunk, when I was throwing my stuff into boxes, and slurred over and over, “Are you going to save me? Are you going to save me?” Unnerving. I told her to stop, she kept repeating it, I pleaded with her, Stop,
please stop, but she kept saying, “Are you going to save me? Are you going to save me?”

I boxed up my life and went anyway.

 

Swaz and I would get high and say words back and forth to each other.

Swear, I said.

“Swah,” she responded.

There, I said.

“Thah,” she responded.

 

We went to see a refurbished version of
Star Wars.
I learned that the English put sugar on their popcorn, and they ran a parade of arty commercials before the previews.

The movie started. “Is Han Solo Luke's brother?” Swaz asked. “Or was it—Obi Wan Kenobi is Luke's uncle? . . .”

No, I said. Darth Vader is Luke's father.

“DARTH VADER IS LUKE'S FATHER?!” cried Swaz in the middle of the theater.

 

I was a terrible boyfriend. I'd get home from tour and not want to do anything but lie on the couch—of which Swaz had two, called the Major Couch and the Minor Couch. I sat on the Major Couch, smoked weed, and ate the Cumberland bangers that Swaz cooked for me.

Swaz was a terrible performance poet. There's a certain kind of would-be artist who chooses poetry because of its materials: to make a film, you need a bunch of people, a camera, lights, a script; to write a song, you need a guitar or a piano, and you need to learn how to play; to write a poem, you need a piece of paper and half an hour. Swaz's performance involved undulating while
she intoned in a ridiculous sexy-fairy voice. In poetry, she found a way to vend her sexiness.

She performed around London, sometimes just a few blocks from our place. I could've gone and been good and clapped and kissed her. But I never went. Lousy, lousy boyfriend.

Since then, she's become a kind of quasi-academic. She gives performance poetry workshops all over Britain, and the world: Bogotá, Sarajevo, Dublin. Vending your sexiness works in any medium.

 

At that time in Britain, it had become near impossible to find good drugs, unless it was cocaine. Swaz had the country's last decent Ecstasy connection, a bug-eyed, chubby guy named Alfonso who seemed totally hapless and sometimes wore a bolo tie over a Hawaiian shirt.

I was in a club, sitting on the floor, rolling my jaw around and obsessively feeling my skull. A guy came up, shouting over the music.

“Whadeegetyapah,” he said.

Ha ha, what? Ha ha.

“Where did you get your pill,” he repeated.

Alfonso!

“What? Who?”

This guy named Alfonso. Ha ha ha.

“Where is he?”

He's, ummm, I don't know, he lives . . .

“Did you get it here?”

No, no, we called him. My eyes crossed and uncrossed.

“You don't give a fuck, do you, you daft cunt?”

Ha ha ha.

“You fucking twat, you don't even know where the fuck you are, do you?”

Ha ha ha. Eyes rolling and rolling.

 

(I don't do E anymore. I'll hang out with you when you're on E. But if you start rubbing your face and telling me how amazing your face feels, I
will
make fun of you.)

 

Alfonso called, sounding coked up and disturbed. He said he wanted to be an artist, he wanted to design CD covers; you make CDs, can I design your CD cover?

Um, Alfonso, why don't you bring some art over next time?

“Can I come over right now?”

Ah, no, right now we're . . . um, we're . . .

“I want to make a positive change in my life,” Alfonso said. You could hear his heart pounding in his throat.

 

Swaz told me that she heard voices. She had sudden, bug-eyed outbursts: she'd burst into tears and shriek at me. She had an evil streak. She'd say something innocuous that would devastate, and she pretended she wasn't trying to hurt me.

I'd go back to North America to play shows, mostly in brown, cold cities on flat terrain; at the end I'd fly from Columbus or Cedar Rapids back to London. I would be exhausted by the weeks on the road with the band that hated me. I smoked lots of weed and barely wanted to move off the Major Couch. Swaz mocked me cruelly for being crippled. She was a versatile mocker.

We went out to clubs, taking Alfonso's pills. We heard all the great jungle DJs of London, a scene in full flower. We dropped the pills, the high came up, and I desperately tried to get away from
Swaz. I was frightened when my druggy eyes looked into hers. She reached out and pulled me to her face. She kissed me. She'd been dutifully swigging water, as a cautious E-taker is supposed to: the inside of her mouth was cold.

I fled, and went around asking for sips of peoples' drinks, greeting everybody with ostentatious fake love, being the most annoying person on Ecstasy you could imagine. Particularly considering how unapologetically E'd-up I was, when everybody else in the place was probably on adulterated cocaine.

When I got back to Swaz's, and the high was coming off, I hated myself for the idiotic, chemical affection.

 

She poured me a glass of Scotch to ease the internal clatter. I refused, but she was persistent. I drank.

It tasted like adulthood.
This is really nice,
I thought. The jitters smoothed.