The Book of Drugs (22 page)

The show, in a plush national theater, was barely attended. Between acts a booming disembodied voice, raspy and menacing, spoke in unfathomable Flemish. Apparently the voice was telling jokes; people were laughing. I went onstage looking like death, and when it came time to speak and sing, my voice took miserable dives on the high notes, squeaked through the lower ones. When the disembodied voice started talking as I left the stage, the people laughing, I was sure it was at the travesty of my performance.

Somehow Pete got me to Amsterdam, and I played a packed room, barely able to sing. They yelled, “Tune your guitar! Tune your guitar!”

 

Luke came over the first night of a detox. He walked in, drunk, and I handed him a Valium. My shrink called. You have to go, I told him. “No no,” he answered, very amiably, “I'm just gonna
hang out.” He walked into my bedroom, picked up a guitar and played loudly. I hung up the phone and told him to leave.

“No, it's cool, I'm just gonna hang out,” he said.

Somehow I ended up punching him in the face—the only time I've ever punched anybody in the face. I then came at him, absurdly, with an umbrella, and he whipped out some weird martial arts move he learned in the seventh grade, and knocked me onto my back. A farcical, slow-drunken-motion fight.

I shoved him out my door. He banged on it to be let back in. “You're a fool!” he kept yelling. “You're a fool!”

I actually called the cops on him, saying a guy was menacing me at my door. I immediately realized what a stupid idea that was, and didn't answer the buzzer when the cops rang. Luke descended the stairs drunkenly, calling out, “You're a fool, you're a fool, you're a fool.”

 

That was my last detox from heroin. I cadged painkillers from people occasionally, but mostly I just drank. I figured that 1 PM was a respectable hour for a rock star to have a drink with his lunch. I was waking up at noon.

 

The sampler player wanted me to record a bunch of cover songs for some website. I e-mailed him that it was a stupid idea. He e-mailed me back, saying that I'd make a little money, and there was no other way imaginable that I'd make money playing solo. I wrote him back that he should go fuck himself.

My phone rang. “Doughty, I'm sick of your nastiness—I QUIT.” Click.

This guy who ran a studio in Greenpoint, a friend of my bandmates', got robbed. I heard through a friend that they'd had lunch
with him and told him they'd do a benefit. Apparently the sampler player was back in the band. The guy from Greenpoint called—not my bandmates—and told me about the proposed benefit. He spoke with a pleading tone.

Our manager called me. I learned later that he was calling to fire us. I launched into babble: I can't do this anymore, the sampler player was in and then out and then in again, they planned this show and didn't even want to call me.

This was a convenient for the manager, queasy about firing a man at his lowest. “If you want to quit,” he said, “now would be a good time.”

 

I called the drummer and told him I was quitting. “That's OK, you can go make a solo record, and then in a year we'll tour.”

No. I'm
breaking up the band.

“That's cool, you can do that there acoustic thing and we'll make another record next year.”

I yelled, I'M LEAVING THE BAND.

“Yo, G,” he said, “you're making a
mistake.
”

Somebody told me that he had a hard couple of years after the band split. Nobody else would put up with “Yo, G, it's the same beat.”

 

I called the bass player's voice mail and left a message saying I was out. Next, I called the sampler player. He was upstairs putting the kid to bed, his wife said. Have him call me back, I told her.

I got an e-mail from the sampler player an hour later. He said: “The bass player called right after you did and said you were quitting. I didn't call you back because I don't want to talk unless it's important.”

The next day, I made the rounds, calling people to tell them before they heard it elsewhere. I pretended it was courtesy, but I was really just overjoyed to relay the news. At last. At last. At last.

I called Luke. He was cagey, said he had to go. It turned out that the bass player and the drummer were sitting in his living room, talking about what a selfish asshole I was; they were waiting for the tackle box man.

 

We pulled into Pittsburgh in a white Buick. When I got up to the hotel room, I opened two minibar bottles of Jack Daniel's and poured them into a glass. I brought the glass to my face and was instantly repelled by the smell. Piss. Somebody drank the whiskey, then pissed it back into the tiny bottles.

The next day, I was wearing the DANGER!! BEWARE MINES!! t-shirt from Cambodia and suddenly realized it was way too tight. My jeans and coat, too. I realized that I'd been downing booze and drunkenly ordering mashed potatoes for months. When that angry physician who gave me the inhaler gave me a checkup in the fall, he weighed me at 135 pounds. My dope-fiend fighting weight. Skeletal. The Cambodia t-shirt rippled off me like a flag in the wind. When I weighed myself months later, I weighed 220. Assuming I was up around that weight that day in Pittsburgh, I'd gained eighty-five pounds in five months.

I was on my first solo tour in North America, with a tour manager driving me from town to town. I got drunk before the shows—onstage, I felt like I was playing the songs with a three-foot barrier of liquid between me and the world—and got drunker afterwards.

I felt so elatedly relieved that I'd finally cut the band loose, but everywhere I went, people talked to me as if someone had died. I saw my gigs as a triumphant emergence, they saw a postmortem.

One morning, driving out of Toronto, I realized my body was shaking. Having been a dope fiend, it was instantly recognizable: withdrawal. I went to a gas station looking for beer. No beer. We drove a couple hours to the border, where I bought an extra-large bottle of Jack Daniel's at the duty-free.

 

For the rest of the tour I stayed as close to the drunk/not-drunk line as possible, the border between functional and shit-faced. I pissed the bed every night. I flipped the mattress before the maid came, and if we were staying somewhere for more than one night, I would throw a bottle of water on the bed, like the maid might mistake piss for spilled Evian.

As we drove to Cleveland, I said, “I think I'm an alcoholic.”

“Oh yeah, you're an alcoholic!” the tour manager said. I expected a reaction of surprised concern. “You drank that entire bottle of Jack in four days!”

That was actually two bottles ago.

I played a basement club that night, at one of the universities: the college pub, in a student life center. A blackboard advertised that night's student-spirit activities: “Beer, Wings, and M. Doughty.”

 

I awoke in piss. Then I ordered a pizza from room service. Thirty minutes later, there was a knock on the door. I stumbled up to open it and found a gay white guy in a vest and bow tie, standing next to a tiny black girl in pigtails, maybe eight years old. She held the pizza box.

“It's Take Our Daughters to Work Day,” the gay guy said. “Do you mind if she delivers your pizza?”

The girl gingerly carried the pizza box to the desk to the gay guy's encouragements. “Okay, honey, put the pizza on the desk—okay, now take the bill to the guest—make sure he has the
pen, honey—okay, now open up the bill, the guest has to sign it, honey.”

 

I flew to Minneapolis the next day. I had gotten into the routine of drinking red wine before brushing my teeth, but I forgot to take the bottle from the club the night before. No whiskey either. I got into the airport shuttle, where a chatty guy with golf clubs pestered me incessantly with mild chatter, What's the guitar for? Do you know how to play it? Wow, have I ever heard of you? No, never heard of you, but I'm not up on the music scene these days, heh-heh.

I thought,
Please just let me vibrate to death.

 

I connected in Chicago, desperate for alcohol. I tried to buy a bottle of Jack Daniel's at the duty-free shop. The cashier asked for my boarding pass.

“This isn't an international ticket, sir,” she said.

Oh, of course, no no, I'm flying domestically, but here's the thing, I will
pay duty.
I'll pay it!

She looked at me with withering disdain.

I blundered around the terminal looking for a bar. I finally found one, just opening at 11 AM. I ordered a double whiskey, but found I was shaking too hard to lift it without spilling. I dipped to it, like a cat lapping at a saucer.

The bartender looked at me with withering disdain.

On the plane, I got a few of those tiny liquor bottles. The shakes subsided. Liberty. Peace.

 

There was a girl in Minneapolis whom I had slept with a couple of times. She worked at a liquor store across the street from the
Marriott. She had some crystal on her, did I want to get a little speedy?

I was in no shape to play the gig, and maybe it would've helped, but I refused the speed. My weird parameters.

I played the 7th Street Entry, a tiny room affixed to the First Avenue club, where the old band had done multiple-night stands, 1,500 people per gig. The Entry was half full. Har Mar Superstar opened—he was just a local Minnesota guy at the time. I sat in the basement dressing room watching him prepare his boom box, hanging out in the underwear he performed in. I resented him for being new.

During the show a grinning kid up front, loving the show, jubilantly cried out the name of my old bass player. Pumping his fists,
“Whoohoo!”

The liquor store girl and I went back to the Marriott and fucked. She produced her tiny bag of speed and tapped it out onto the table. I sniffed a line. It felt amazing. Naturally.
Hey!
I thought.
Perhaps I should spend some time with this particular drug before cashing in my chips.

I tossed back a glass of whiskey, and immediately threw it up onto the liquor store girl.

The next day, I was driven to Wisconsin by a girl somebody at the club knew; I sat in the shotgun seat pouring whiskey into a Coke can, so the cops wouldn't see me drinking it openly. I passed out, then I came to, and then I passed out again.

 

Years before, I had dated a woman named Molly Escalator—a performance poet with a hilarious fuck-you aspect to her writing; she didn't speak in that kind of boring poet's singsong but sounded like a melodic comedian. She had this love poem that started:

We met at a gig when Soul Coughing was just a local band. She had been sober for years. She told me stories of her salad days as a runaway in the old, weird New York; shooting dope on the Lower East Side as a teenage punk rocker, weaning herself off heroin on her mom's farm in Delaware, facilitated by shooting up horse tranquilizer with gigantic veterinary needles. By the time we were dating she figured out that I had a major weed appetite. Which she tolerated.

On New Year's Eve, I heard about this disagreeable guy who had bought a shit-ton of cocaine and was throwing a party. He let people have his cocaine so they'd hang out with him. But, alas, I was just stopping by. Molly had lent out her tiny East Village studio apartment to her twin brothers, and therefore had to stay the night at my place in Brooklyn.

So I packed my face with this guy's cocaine, fast as I could get it in. Then I went to Molly's, sweating like a monster, looking so freaked out that I concocted a lie about getting accosted on the subway. Molly and I went to a boring party that most people had already left, and I kissed her, and then dove into a long babble about Wow, Molly Escalator, you're really special, and I just want to tell you . . .

“How much cocaine did you do?” she asked. She could taste it in my kiss.

 

On tour, I went to sleep in a motel in Akron, Ohio, on a warm evening, listening to soft rain; when I woke up, it had turned into
a violent snowstorm, and I got an e-mail from Molly saying she'd left me for a famous artist from the rooms.

The rooms were twelve-step meetings. They're shorthanded as “the rooms,” or “the program,” or “the fellowship,” among other things. I find calling the rooms “the program” to have a Huxleyan vibe, and “the fellowship” sounds to me like something involving a skull-faced man screaming about Jesus. So I'll go with “the rooms.”

(I'm going to walk a line between talking about my experiences in the rooms, and not violating other peoples' anonymity. Twelve-step programs are not called, for instance, Narcotics Talk About It in Your Book, or Alcoholics Reveal Themselves Publicly, but it would be disingenuous to pretend I'm not riding a line by talking about it. The danger is that you're going to read this book and think that I'm speaking some kind of party line. I wouldn't be anybody's spokesperson, it's unlikely anybody would want me to be their spokesperson, and there
is no party line,
truly, definitively, absolutely none.)

(More likely, you might think: fuck this guy, if I ever was interested in twelve-step programs, I'm not anymore, because those rooms are chock full of self-righteous Mike Doughtys. That's not the case. There is variety in the people, just as there is anywhere else in life—you can find people who reflect your experience, or people who reflect something completely unlike your experience. I found freaky intellectuals who cultivated their insanity, whom I wanted to be like.)

(Here's the other thing: like I said, I might get fucked up again.) When Molly talked about the rooms, my mind's ear heard a prison door clanging shut. There was something sort of alluring around the edges when she'd talk about a meeting she'd just been
to—a sense of peace and grooviness, like the meeting had done some sort of magic—but mostly I saw it as a weird cult.