The Book of Drugs (17 page)

Redman liked a song of ours, and one night just showed up onstage with a mic, singing the chorus. The next night he came on and did the chorus and the little chant section after the chorus. The next night, he added a freestyle. By the time he left the tour, he would come on and do two freestyle verses, two choruses, and a throw-your-hands-in-the-air chant; we'd end the song with the simulated death of Redman in a hail of sonic gunfire.

He left because he got a better offer. Rock agents would've scrupulously turned down the money because they'd committed to the lower-paying tour, but hip-hop agents were more cutthroat. He was replaced by the Black Eyed Peas—then unknowns—who
were supergeeky and wanted every member of every other band they could round up to join them for a big jam at the end of their set. I'd say, “Sure,” and then would find someplace else to be when the time rolled around.
These guys are going nowhere,
I thought.

 

The buses traveled as a caravan. One night, at 3 AM, all the buses stopped for an hour. We found out that the concourse bus had seen a car flip over, tumbling into a ditch. One of the concourse kids was trained as an EMT, and he ran out onto the median and held the head of the driver up, keeping his broken neck aligned.

Apparently he cracked corny jokes for twenty minutes until the ambulance arrived, to keep the guy from going into shock. “He'll probably never walk again,” said the kid, “but it was a good night.”

I was supereffusive with the EMT kid, called him a superhero. The next night, and every night for the remainder of the tour, he would come into our dressing room—uninvited—drink our beer, grin cheesy grins, and make schmoozy, repetitive small talk about the night he saved a life.

 

We played New York on the tour's last night. I met a cute blonde girl from the hedge-fund belt of Connecticut and brought her back to my apartment. I crushed Ecstasy pills, cut the powder into lines, and we sniffed them up.

I put Marvin Gaye on. “Why are we listening to this
old
music,” the girl said. “Do you have any Sublime?”

I kept sniffing the lines, and she, nervously, kept sniffing them alongside me, trying to keep up. As we were fucking, I noticed she was frowning. I came, and she ran to the bathroom, where she lay on the cool floor moaning.

What do I do if this girl dies?
I thought.

No compassion.

“I'll be OK,” she kept saying.

I went up on my roof, naked, freaked out on the E, feeling radiant under the New York sky, which had been turned green by the city's ambient light.

 

When we went to Los Angeles to make our third record, I had more or less given up. In Pensacola, I'd taken recordings of the drummer, made in rehearsal, loaded them into a sampler, looped them, and wrote songs to them. In the studio, I laid the loops down as a scratch track, recorded my vocal over it, and then went back to the Magic Hotel, a place of dingy apartments around a pool—there were porn shoots in the suite next to mine—next door to the magicians' clubhouse, the Magic Castle. The rest of the band came up with parts and recorded them to the track while I was gone. I mostly didn't care.

I was beset with migraines, almost daily. In the midst of recording, I'd see a spot in my vision, shaped and colored like a diamond, shimmering. It gave me a psychedelic blind spot—I'd look at my hands and see fingers missing, look at myself in the mirror and the left side of my face would be blank. Over an hour or so, the diamond spot would grow, I would get blinder, eventually the whole world would look strobe lit. Then the pain and nausea came on. I spent much of the sessions lying in my dark room in the Magic Hotel, trying not to focus on the horrendous throb in my temples, popping Valiums and Ambiens. Occasionally getting up for dry heaves.

An L.A. friend took me to the Formosa, a shabby Hollywood bar left over from a '40s heyday as a star magnet. She introduced me to a gorgeous friend; we went out for drinks, then parked her Nissan in front of the Magic Hotel and made out. The next time
we were meant to go out, I had a migraine. I called her with regrets. Then the next time: the same. The third time our plans were preempted by a migraine, I didn't even call her. I was too embarrassed. She came to the Magic Hotel and called my room; I unplugged the phone. She left a bewildered message, called the next day, called the next.

 

I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard, which I did every day to the studio, just to confound conventional Los Angeles behavior. I was stopped on the corner, waiting for the light, and a powder-blue pickup truck with three Mexican guys came screeching to a halt directly in front of me. “Hey, clown! Clown! You fucking clown! Ha ha, fuck you, you fucking clown!”

I turned around and saw a guy in a clown suit standing there looking embarrassed.

 

Stanley Ray didn't
believe in
my migraines. “They're not that bad. It's just an excuse for you to get out of the studio,” he said.

We went out to see a band we both adored, after the session. When I walked into the club, I saw that the head of the opening act's singer was missing. It had been blanked out in my brain by an oncoming migraine. I told Stanley Ray.

“Well, we're already here, don't even
think
I'm going to drive you home,” he said, indignantly.

I waited for an hour in front of the club for a taxi, the diamond spot in my eyes slowly growing.

 

Stanley Ray and I went to a comedy show at Largo, on Fairfax, every Monday night when we were in Los Angeles making the record. Patton Oswalt, David Cross, Paul F. Tompkins, Sarah Silverman, Todd Barry, all these amazing comedians playing this
small room. The then-unknown Jack Black's Tenacious D would debut at that show, alas, the week after I left California.

Stanley Ray and I got stoned before the show in the car. We were both at the point where getting high barely got us high: we just got paranoid and groggy. “Why do we do this?” said Stanley Ray. “It doesn't make anything better. Isn't that what addiction is, when you keep getting high, but it doesn't do anything, and you don't want to, but can't stop?”

What? I said. That's
ludicrous.

 

Amusingly, Saul Mongolia was appointed the head of A&R. I met him at his office—Warner Bros. Records was in a big wooden building that looked like a ski lodge from 1974—and spat bitterly about how terrible the tracks were, that I didn't give a fuck. I expected him to sympathize. But now his job was to make sure the acts on his label recorded something the radio guys at the label could use.

“You're still going for a
single,
aren't you?” he asked, disconcerted.

Um, yeah, I said, realizing on the spot that I had to lie.

 

We had a break. I went back to Pensacola with the understanding that I had to write a single. I got high, took Valium to soothe the paranoia, wrote guitar parts, wrote melodies, ordered Papa John's twice a day. Our manager kept calling and asking if I was writing.

I was tortured, freaked out, convinced that the jig was up, that Saul Mongolia would crumple us up and throw us out if I didn't come up with the goods. As I was grinding through chord progression after chord progression, I wondered what my bandmates were doing at exactly the same time.

I wrote a couple of good ones, one of which had the chorus “I don't need to walk around in circles.” I was talking about the endless
stupid cycle of life in the band. The first verse referenced, obliquely, the Winchester Mystery House, where the widow of a rifle magnate, convinced that the ghosts of those killed by her husband's guns were coming for her, built endless rooms and extensions on her mansion—she kept having them built until the day she died—staircases going nowhere, superfluous corridors, all to disorient the evil spirits. “When you were languishing in rooms I built to foul you in,” went the first line of the song.

It would remind radio programmers of Sugar Ray's “Fly,” and Sublime's “What I Got,” giant hits that, hilariously, were both produced by Saul Mongolia. “Circles” was the biggest radio song Soul Coughing ever had.

 

It was 1998. I moved back to New York. I looked at places in Brooklyn, but realized that I couldn't get drugs delivered out there. So I got a place I couldn't afford on Rivington Street in Manhattan.

Luke, now living on Avenue B, had a roommate with a great drug delivery dude: the tackle box man. His tackle box had compartments of every drug you could want: Vicodin, cocaine, Ecstasy, Quaaludes (Quaaludes! In 1998!), weed, those skinny, four-dose sticks of Xanax—everything but heroin (because heroin is
bad,
right? I mean, you're OK being fucked out of your mind on five different drugs every night of your life as long as you're not on
heroin
). Alas, the tackle box man had a very specific clientele and didn't like the looks of me. So I went to Luke's house whenever I needed something that my own drug delivery guys wouldn't get.

 

(Luke and I had the same favorite scene in
The Godfather:
the one in which the singer Johnny Fontane—whom the Godfather sprang from a contract by having the severed horse head put in the bed
of his studio boss—is asked by Al Pacino to repay the favor: appear at his casino in Las Vegas. The look on Johnny Fontane's face says he realizes it's bad for his career, but Johnny says, “Sure, Mike. I'll do anything for my godfather, you know that.” He says it without resentment: he's loyal, selflessly obedient.
Duty, Honor, Country:
the West Point motto. We absorbed it.)

 

I returned to the studio with “Circles” and was spiteful; as we mixed the album, my bandmates increasingly contemptuous of me, I was vindictive; I struggled to get the artwork done and was despondent.

In the album photos, I wore a hat. The graphic designer used a miniature silhouette of me in an upper corner of the back cover as a graphics detail; the bass player called him up and told him to shave the hat off the graphic, lest somebody examining the back cover with a magnifying glass—who remembered I was the hat guy in the inside photo—would recognize me.

My bandmates told me they wanted the credits to simply be our names, not identifying the instruments we played. Meaning, nobody would look at the CD and know which name was the singer's.

Now I was in a constant state of shivering rage.

Stanley Ray brought us up to a meeting at the record company offices in Rockefeller Center. Our manager was there.

“Before we continue with this, Doughty,” said the manager, “we want to be clear that you want to be a part of this.”

“Things are really good, and you don't care, it's like you
want
to be a problem,” said Stanley Ray. “You can't be unhappy.
I'm
the one who's allowed to be unhappy.” He actually said this.

“Don't be stupid, G,” said the drummer, “you don't know how good you have it. We don't want to hear you complain anymore.”

The other two band guys glared at me with their arms crossed.

I stood up, wobbling. Tears were coming on. I couldn't break down in front of these hateful people. I stumbled towards the door. Stanley Ray followed me. “You can't leave,” he said, urgently, kind of bug-eyed.

I went to the bathroom, got in a stall, and let the sobs out. It was a marble bathroom; the sobs pinged off the marble at outrageous volume. I heard somebody come in. I didn't want, like, the new guy in the marketing department, or whoever it was, to hear me. So I pulled the sob in, and gulped it down, and my eyes went dead. I sat through the rest of the meeting, waxen, lifeless.

 

So here I was in this universe where I was the problem; I was the devil's asshole at the center of Hell. Stanley Ray, the manager, Encyclopedia Brown, even the roadies, were, like, What the fuck is wrong with Doughty? Why can't Doughty just get it together? Wouldn't everything be fine if Doughty just chilled the fuck out?

None of these guys considered that, maybe, if I called it a day, maybe they'd be out of a job. It didn't occur to me, either.

After that meeting, they got me to a shrink. I went up to one of those doorman buildings on the Upper West Side with shrinks in every nook on the first five floors. If you go to a certain part of the Bowery, around Delancey Street, every other building has a lighting store; there's a part of Hell's Kitchen that's all wholesale gardening supplies; there's an area on Broadway around Twentieth Street filled with stores selling hair for weaves. As there is the lamp district, the flower district, and the wig district, so there is the shrink district.

I mentioned casually, within the first fifteen minutes, that I smoked weed: not problematically, I just needed it to make music and have sex.

“Oh,” she said. “There's twelve-step meetings down on St. Mark's Place. You might be interested in what goes on there.”

What? What the
fuck?
Is this what shrinks do, just immediately assume anybody into drugs is an addict? Recommend the corny self-help jive without the slightest understanding of your nuances?

 

I kept showing up for therapy, even as I was becoming ever more disconnected to my life. She'd ask me what was going on, and I'd say, Nothing. Oh, wait, tomorrow I'm flying out to go on tour for a couple months.

“Tomorrow?! Where are you going?!”

I don't know.

“You don't know?”

No, I'm getting picked up at one, and then I'm flying to—um—Arizona? I think.

“Where do you go after Arizona?”

I don't know.

“You really don't know?”