The Book of Drugs (18 page)

No.

 

I was waking up in the morning, trying to figure out where to get coffee; I'd lie in bed until the late afternoon, unable to decide.

I forgot how to take out the trash. A city of trash grew around the wastebasket, empty bags of Chinese delivery food that I used as supplemental garbage receptacles. They surrounded the trash can, five bags deep.

How do people do this?
I thought.
How do people take out the garbage?

My shrink got out of her chair and sat on the floor. “I'm a bag of Chinese food,” she said. “What am I trying to tell you?”

I laughed. She persisted.

“Talk to me, I'm the Chinese food, what am I saying?”

 

They sent me to the shrink because they figured that, naturally, she'd go, How can this guy not realize what a fantastic band he's in? Why would he ruin everybody's fun? Let's cheer him up and set him right.

She did nothing of the sort. She was leading me to realize that I could, when the moment was right, leave the band, get out of this freakish, abusive relationship.

 

When I first saw the shrink, I demanded antidepressants. My shrink sent me to this guy uptown whom I loathed, but he gave me drugs. I even duped him into prescribing some Xanax. The antidepressants worked, but I lost the ability to have orgasms. It was worth the trade: for a good long moment, the crushing depression slightly eased. I could function, with the raging shake downgraded to a quieter ticking.

 

I got a gig writing a pseudonymous column called
Dirty Sanchez
for the
New York Press.
It was a venting of the ugly things I'd learned about the music business, an expression of self-hatred, of how cheated I felt that, in attaining my dream of rock stardom, I ended up in this horrible band of torturers and cockroaches. Mostly, though, I did it because I needed the money. Despite our putative success—playing to 2,000 people a night, selling hundreds of thousands of CDs—when I moved back to New York I wasn't making enough money to get by in Manhattan.

It was a good time to be a satirist. The music world had gone goofy and bizarre: this was the golden era of the boy bands. I
went to Times Square for an NSYNC appearance on MTV's
Total Request Live,
amazed by the sound of the girls screaming. One girl would start screaming on some high-pitched note, then another would up it to a higher note, then another higher, and all the screaming girls gravitated to the same note, while some ultra-screamer in the bunch found a note even higher than that, to waver above the din. The most inspired avant-garde oratorio I ever heard.

I exulted over the triumph of choreographed fluff over angsty, earnest alternative rock. The diminishing rock stars whined about the death of realness; I always felt trivialized or ignored by them, so I dashed off column after column reveling in their self-pity.

The
New York Press
was started in 1988 by a guy who wrote a column called
Mugger;
in menacing '80s New York, this was audacious, but in clean, peppy '90s New York—where screaming teenage girls could gather safely in a Disney-renovated Times Square—it was an anachronism. He was a mean-spirited Republican from Long Island who grew up a Red Sox fan—to grow up a Red Sox fan on Long Island bespeaks a long career of calculated assholery. The editor was John Strausbaugh, who wrote about UFOs, maverick artists, angelically insane fringe-theorists, defiantly weird old-guard downtowners, blackface minstrelsy, and the emergence of Elvis-ism as a legitimate faith. He wrote a spellbinding allegory of alien abduction as the experience of a trout, caught, then thrown back into the lake. He coached me in the delicate art of interviewing the insane before I went out to Crown Heights to interview an old man who wrote a book listing the 223 ways to tell whether someone is possessed by demons. Strausbaugh was the heart of the thing. The joy of it was the friction between him and the incongruous Republican-ness, but most people identified the paper simply with
Mugger
's gleeful repugnance.

“The
New York Press?
I don't read that, who does?” said Peter Mack, sniffily. He'd grown up to own a company making video games.

I write this column called
Dirty Sanchez,
I said.

“
YOU'RE
DIRTY SANCHEZ?!” he yelped.

 

We had released our third album; our shows had gotten bigger, and our video was now on MTV. There was a modicum of actual fame in my life. But every Monday I had to shut the curtains in my hotel room, type up the column and e-mail it.

We had a day off in Santa Barbara. Everybody else went to the beach; I sat in a room banging out the column. It was only 800 words, and all I had to do was look up some piece of music news online—usually just grabbing it off
MTV.com
—and riff on it bile-fully. An hour's work? Two hours? There was a bag of weed sitting at the edge of the desk. I told myself I wasn't going to smoke until I had finished the column, but, of course I smoked, and then I was lingering, stoned, half-lidded, over the keys, trying to get a sentence together. An hour or so after that, I told myself I wouldn't smoke again until I'd finished the column, but I did. It took me nine hours.

Every week: I'm not gonna smoke today, I'm gonna finish the column and then I'll get high. But every Monday I ended up with a pipe in my mouth, and the excruciating struggle to write.

 

I got a video camera and became obsessed with it. I started making this endless, aimless movie on tour; I'd record something for three seconds, then cut to the next arbitrary, oddly beautiful thing: a tour of randomness.

I was in Amsterdam, and I spent the day videotaping Dutch snippets, then took a break to get stoned. I went to a coffee shop
called GOA, where I flirted with the bespectacled bartendress. As is de rigueur for arty Americans in Europe, I tried to bond with her by ridiculing Americans. I smoked some weed—purple-threaded, sparkly-crystal-dusted—and fell into paranoia, and then I was unable to speak to the cute bartendress anymore.

There was a guy sitting alone in the corner of the coffee shop with a bong. He looked to me like an American who had come to Amsterdam on vacation to get high for a week or two. He took bong hits and lolled back in his chair. A Portishead record was playing, and every time a chorus soared, he pumped his fist in the air, oblivious to those around him, anguished joy on his face.

I went videotaping in the red light district. All the whores sit on stools, behind glass doors, in gaudy pink light. You knock on the glass to see what the price is, and the whores age fifteen years immediately upon opening the door. I was shooting the empty windows, making an elegiac reel of empty stools sitting in pink-lit doorways, meaning the whore was in the back with a client.

I wandered the endless alleys, door after door. You could select a woman of any possible combination of attributes—a plump redhead? A skinny Latina? A tattooed black woman? How weird to think that, if I wanted to buy sex, I'd have to
decide on my type.
It was like the Strand bookstore in New York, where the shelves are so numerous that you shouldn't go if you're looking for something
specifically,
but rather in the hope you'll stumble on something unexpectedly. Otherwise, you'd be cursed to wander the aisles forever.

So I kept videotaping the empty glass booths. “Hey!” I heard a voice behind me. I turned to find a gigantic black woman glaring at me.

“Are you
crazy?
”she said.

I blinked. Then I said: Yes. I am crazy.

“Give me camera,” she said through gritted teeth.

No, no, I'm not shooting people, just the doorways—no
people.

No, please, look, I said, flipping the viewscreen around. I played the footage back. Empty doorway after empty doorway.

See? I said. No people.

She laughed a forced laugh. “Huh!” she said. “Maybe you want to take picture of some of this now, right?” She squeezed her tits together with a vicious look on her face.

Sure, I said, and raised the camera.

She glared confusedly. Then she spun around and marched away.

 

I was walking around Chicago, taking minuscule videos of architectural details, when I dropped the camera. It burst. Wire guts boiled out of it.

I took it to my guitar tech, J.D., back at the hotel. We sniffed iffy yellow cocaine and drank the minibar as he tinkered with it. It ended up deader than before, the metal skeleton and transistors exposed.

“What is
that?
” the sampler player asked when he saw it.

“That's the yellow coke,” J.D. said.

 

J.D. hooked us up with better cocaine; he knew a guy who knew the guy that was allegedly Metallica's coke hookup. “He said
ask for the '80s stuff !
” J.D. reported gleefully.

I stayed up all night sniffing it after a gig in Texas. Each of my bandmates peeled away, one by one, until it was just me sitting there, packing my face with cocaine. I made myself stop as the sun came up, and took an aching walk around the lake. I went to the airport shaking slightly, in growling pain, as the coke worked its way out.

“I can't believe you made it all day without doing more,” said an astonished J.D. I was adamant about controlling my use. I was like a fist held so tight, for so long, that the arm jacks up and goes numb.

Somebody J.D. knew brought some heroin from Los Angeles. Black tar, which came wrapped in a blue party balloon. He took a pen and removed the ink cartridge, so the pen was just a plastic tube. He put the dark nugget on a piece of foil and held a flame under it as I sucked up the fumes with the pen-straw.

“Git it! Git it!”
J.D. enthused as I chased the plume of smoke around the foil.

Then I turned to the coke. Very stupid. I should've done the coke all night and then used the dope to come down. But J.D. was so proud of his heroin—he went into loving, racist detail telling how one buys dope in Los Angeles—“A
taco
comes and spits it right out of his mouth!” he said—that I couldn't deny his parental delight.

Again, the four of us sat there, taking turns on the coke. Out the window, by the pool, a woman was going down on a fratty-looking guy. He came, his body jolting. She sucked down his come maniacally until she was hurting him: he pushed her head away. Then she lay back in the lawn chair, and he went down on her.

I got out my new video camera and started taping. I held my breath as I taped, thinking that outside and three stories down they could hear me breathing.

His head bobbed up and down between her legs ineptly. He would work up momentum; she arched in the chair; you could see her twitch, getting close to the plateau before coming; then his stamina seized up, he lost control of his head and slowed down involuntarily.

Behind me—again—each of my bandmates stood up, at intervals, and left the room. I stayed up for hours, the tape rolling—he almost gets her off, he falters, he dives in again—sniffing the cocaine, holding up the camera until my wrists shook.

 

I got a number for a dentist from some friend of my manager's. She ticked off a list of all the band guys who had gone to him. “He's great with the gas,” she said.

Indeed he was. I lay back on the dentists' chair, he strapped the little pig-nose gas-purveyor onto my face, and cranked the nitrous. He put a radio Walkman on me, tuned to a classic rock station; as the gas came on, I realized I wanted to listen to Hot 97 instead. My thumb twitched on the tuner-knob. The music became less and less recognizable as the gas was taking over; it turned the music to abstract mush.

What kind of music is this?
I thought.
Is it classical music? Salsa?
I was intellectually thrilled that the drugs had erased genre lines, suddenly I was free of prejudice, listening to music just as it was—at last, I could
hear!

The dentist snatched the headphones off me, giggling. “You're listening to static,” he said. I had maxed the volume; the white noise blasted so loudly that he and the hygienist could hear it over the drill.

He had a sort of sniveling mien. Maybe his eagerness to give you all the gas you could want came from a need for those who passed beneath his drill to like him. He gave me a prescription for fifty Percocets.

 

I gulped three or four pills and logged on to AOL instant messenger. I had set the privacy settings so anybody could see I was
online; the moment I was signed in, it went
ding ding ding
, as a dozen chat windows filled the screen. There were scary chatters who typed, in all caps, “IS THIS THE SINGER OF SOUL CAUGHING?” I ignored an all-caps guy and he went berserk. “FUCK U I HATE UR BAND U THINK UR SO GRAT U SUCK UR BAND SUX.”

Someone would type, “Hello, I saw you in my friend list but I don't remember who you are? . . .” I knew this was a cutesy set up, that I was supposed to say, It's me, Soul Coughing guy, and they'd go “No way, what a coincidence!” and I'd go, No, really, it's me!

Nice try, I typed back, then hit the block button.

I wasn't capable of going somewhere to meet actual people, so my social world was this series of random instant messenger windows. I couldn't keep track of who was who and which window was which, so I was tossing out disjointed communications at random. I smoked a bowl, took more Percocet, and typed through the night.

At some point I went to bed; when I came to, I found the laptop was still open. The top window said:

They: “i luv ur band :)”

Me: Uwabt u ciykde gi tge8u stib=re abd tgeb u;d byt nysekgf a e3kuidiys 370n 9 rd9rr33.