The Book of Drugs (25 page)

At some point he realized what was happening. Those who scoff at the concept of addiction as a disease, I have no comprehensive argument to present, but please note that he was drinking
six big bottles of
Robitussin
daily without realizing something weird was going on
.

 

I chased a princess around the rooms. She was a Slavic girl of noble birth, her swank family displaced by a revolution. I had no
purpose, and when I saw her, I thought she might as well be it. She was thirtyish, like me; Hockney-pool-eyed, citrine-yellow-haired, ever so slightly weathered. I had fantasies of being with a thirtyish woman like this. It seemed proper. At the time when I had twenty days or so, she was approaching a couple of months.

I went to this one meeting uptown, near a studio where they shot soap operas. It was peppered with TV-handsome alcoholics, with that sheen of blazing health common to people who've been in recovery for a couple of years. The meeting was once populated with movie stars: it was some kind of agreed-upon movie star hang. The movie stars drifted away, leaving the B list. Eventually, the soap stars would move on, too. Years later, one would occasionally see a baffled movie star walking in, looking for his tribe.

The drama of my every day was whether or not the princess would be there. I never spoke to her; sometimes I'd be standing adjacent to a conversation between her and a mutual friend. She spoke of a glamorous life of beaches in France and jet-setting. I hoped one day she'd talk about the politics of her homeland, that I could maybe jump in and show off my brain.

I heard rumors about her—that she was a sort of concubine to a certain husky-jawed movie star, renowned for his prodigious drug intake, that she kept drifting back to him. That her strange cross-addiction was sucking off strange men, that she'd find some man in public and take him around the corner, moments after meeting him. I lamented never finding a way to be caught alone with her near a bathroom, but realized that I would've fallen in love with her the moment I was in her mouth.

I felt a little lowly around her, because she was a few weeks ahead of me, but that changed. I had two months, and then she relapsed, and the next time I saw her, she had five days. I had four months, she had four days. I had six months, and she had two
weeks. I had ten months, and she had eight days. I saw her picture in a restaurant review: she sat at a table with other glamorous types, a drink in front of her. I saw her again: I had two years, she had a month. On it went, until I didn't see her around anymore.

 

The first time I spoke at a meeting was that soap-opera-star one. I was up in front of everybody behind a table, rambling about whatever, and I got to when I was pissing the bed every night. I started talking about the etiquette of pissing the bed in a hotel; flipping the mattress, balling up the sheets and throwing them in a corner yourself, so the maid wouldn't have to deal with your piss. And just when I was realized that I might regret talking about my history of pissing the bed, I looked out and saw this beautiful woman, smiling at me. She was older, and had silver hair, and an elegantly lined face, and she was looking at me directly in the eyes and beaming.

 

I'm full-bore bat-shit crazy with regards to Soul Coughing. If somebody says they love Soul Coughing, I hear
fuck you.
Somebody yells out for a Soul Coughing song during a show, it means
fuck you.
If I play a Soul Coughing song, and somebody whoops—just one guy—I hear
fuck you.
People e-mail my own lyrics at me—“Let the man go through!” or “You are listening!”—oddly often (how weird is that, to blurt somebody's own lyric at them?), and I type back, “Don't put that on me, I'm not that guy anymore, that guy's dead.”

If somebody comes up and says, I've been listening to you since 1996, it means
I had a definitive youthful drug experience to an old CD, and now you'll never escape that band that you loathe, and you are forever incomplete without those three hateful faces.

When somebody hears your voice for the first time—particularly if they discover the record in school, or at some developmental
juncture—they stake out a little place in their minds for you. Your work can get more sophisticated, truer, closer to your ideal, but you'll never get out of that place. No song you make can get to them: it will fail to turn them twenty again.

There are six or seven Soul Coughing tunes that I like, mostly ones that sound more like my solo records. On those songs, my bandmates' surliness and contempt makes way for keenly felt accompaniment, contrapuntal profundity. Honestly, I don't truly love more than six or seven Jay-Z, or Regina Spektor, or AC/DC songs—I'm a song guy, not an album guy—but I'd tell you, without hesitation, that I adore those artists. Again: full-bore bat-shit crazy.

There are a few others that I'm proud of as songs. I dislike the recordings, but, when I play them by myself, I feel what I meant. Unless they provoke whoops of approval, in which case I'll immediately hate them. My insane-slash-conniving bandmates convinced some deep part of me that I'm not the songwriter. Songs I picked out alone in my room, for which I wrote the chord progression, the melody, the lyrics, the rhythm: not mine. The band's. Not mine, not mine, not mine.

The rest of the Soul Coughing tunes sound dreadful to me. Geeky, weighted down with a waka-waka Vaudeville thing, diseased with
terminal uniqueness,
pompous, crammed with ostentatious parts that barely acknowledge the songs, that fight to push the voice into the background, fight every other instrument because each guy's convinced his part's the most important. The really great instrumental parts are weakened, transformed from fantastic hooks to stumblers in a jumble. There's often a refusal to play something that would just make a listener
feel good,
because what's unique about that? Instead, those parts are self-consciously obscure, fake sounding, insincere.

(Did I like the recordings when we made them? Two answers of equal weight, the first being
yes and no,
the second,
I don't remember.
I remember loving tracks in this way that seems manic, injected with denial—I remember loving tracks that, now, should I hear them in a bar, nearly provoke me to jump over the bartender and bang my fist on the sound system's off button, I remember loving some tracks when I was high, I remember loving some tracks in a way that seems genuine in retrospect but baffles me now.)

We were a relatively successful cult band, but I think that, had my bandmates chosen to let me be a bandleader, we could've been Led Zeppelin. How do you tell that to someone who loves an album? Yes, you love it, so fiercely, but in my mind I hear something
so much better,
and thus reject this thing you love. All the people that wrote us off as geeks—I will never reach them to say: there was something great here, but we failed to let you hear it.

 

Being strapped to ancient work would be stultifying to any artist, in any medium. It took rigorous effort to get out from under it. I played Soul Coughing songs on my first solo tour, but fewer on the next tour; even fewer on the next. Now I don't play any. I busted my heart fighting a crowd that wanted old stuff. The people who came back came for the new songs.

When people yell out song names, I repeat them:

Madeline, yes, a few songs from now.

Disseminated, nope, don't play Soul Coughing tunes.

Only Answer, not tonight.

40 Grand, maybe later, it's on the bubble.

I do this because a reviewer in Austin once wrote that the crowd was incessantly shouting for old stuff; I wearily, vainly tried to push new songs. But that crowd wasn't shouting for old stuff. I don't know if the writer didn't hear the requests for solo tunes, or if he ignored what actually went down, but in any case, the better story was, “Bitter man fights his past.” So I say titles aloud, to make damned sure that nobody can write that story again.

 

Each batch of songs I write feels realer than the last batch. But the bulk of the public, the ones who
aren't
coming to my shows, don't bother to investigate. Who leaves a famous band and gets
better?

(Somebody I know was at a marketing meeting where they were kvetching about nobody buying Elvis Costello records, despite Elvis being on a creative hot streak. “It's because people have enough Elvis Costello records,” she said. They hated her.)

The critics didn't stampede to my shows, either, and sometimes when they write about me, they won't hear, can't hear, what I'm doing now. Some of them think I've downgraded: where once the music had experimental elements, now it's a guy with a guitar, as there are thousands of guys with guitars. If I had no past, maybe they'd hear the music as what it is.

(I make exactly the kind of songs I love. So when I listen to them, I dig the hell out of them. When they're new, I'll listen to them on headphones on the subway and love everything about them, in a manner disconnected from my pride and narcissism. Just as songs I love. This being the case, of course I feel like I'm genuinely an unrecognized champion. Maybe I'm as good as I think I am; maybe it's purely myopia.)

(I met M. Ward at a benefit. He professed to be a Soul Coughing fan. He asked me, “So what are you doing now? Writing plays?”
I was crushed. He's a solo-acoustic guy like me. I feel myself to be an artist of his echelon.)

When I do an interview and the writer apologizes for not knowing anything about Soul Coughing other than “Circles,” I thank her or him exuberantly.

There is a Soul Coughing fan reading this whose heart I've just broken, who picked up the memoir of the guy from a band he loves, and it turns out I hate what brought him to this book in the first place. Some Soul Coughing fan is going to read this and come to a show to implore me to love what he loves, to
sell
me on it. How can you hate this? It's
yours.

All I can do is my work, work, work; give everything my best: write songs that I love and believe in, play shows, try to dial into that energy, whatever it is, to let it seize me. My bitterness demolishes me, wakes me at 5 AM and won't let me fall back asleep, drives me to waste hours fighting ghosts in my head. But, in my struggle to stay with the music, I've lucked into people who are
with me
.

Every song seems to be somebody's favorite song. The audience seems to be hearing the nuances and the deeper aspects of the tunes. I struggle to ignore whatever my narcissism tells me I should resent—for instance, that I began my solo work just as the big record labels hit icebergs and began to sink, and, being that I know how to write a decent hook, maybe, were it 1997, I'd have a hit or two on the radio, a big one or a small one, but certainly a song or two with enough presence that M. Ward might not think I had dropped out of music entirely. Because if there's just fifty-five people listening to the music I make, and I'm eating food and sleeping in a bed—and making music I love and believe in—I have a fantastic life.

I'm so grateful for these listeners. Maybe that's you: I'm grateful for you.

I was playing in Vancouver in 2000, only four months after the band's death, three months after I'd drunk my last drink. I was alone at the mic with an acoustic guitar. Some guy shouted, “Do you miss the other guys?”

No, I said. Do you?

“Yes,” he said, from somewhere in the crowd.

Ooooooh,
the crowd went.

I peered out, but he didn't reveal himself.

You should go get your money back, I said. They're not hiding behind the curtain. They're not coming out later.

I almost pulled out my wallet to offer a ten-dollar bill right out of my pocket.

 

There was much unkindness on the internet. “Doughty's gonna end up with a gun in his mouth when he figures out the solo career isn't going the way he thought he would,” somebody said.

“Fuck Doughty selling out,” said another. “I miss the old Doughty, who ate E's like candy!”

 

I played a show in New Orleans. I was selling CDs off the front of the stage afterwards. A woman came up, grabbed my hand, held it to her breast.

“You have to get back together with your friends,” she said.

My
friends,
I said. Bewildering—but, of course someone who loves a band thinks it must be a roving party of merry compatriots.

I tried to sound gentle, though I felt punched in the gut. That's not gonna happen, I said.

“But how are you going to play
‘Casiotone Nation'?
” she said shrilly, as if the fact it was her favorite song meant it was an integral spoke in the universe, and she was helping me—poor, misguided man—to understand my true mission.

How am I gonna play ‘Casiotone Nation'? I'M NOT. I yelled in her face.

The look of shock on her face suggested she felt screamed at by someone she had tried to helpfully, compassionately steer in the right direction.

I was shaking as I packed my guitar, wrapped up my cables. Tipsy guy walked up.

“That was my girlfriend. She's a dancer, she wants the beat, that's all,” he said.

Uh-huh, I said, wanting to get the hell out of there, go somewhere to be alone.

“That was the most honest show I've ever seen,” he rhapsodized. “Every note you played was like magical blar blar blar et cetera et cetera.”

I have to go, I mumbled, and hotfooted towards the door.

He was suddenly furious. “BUT I'M NOT DONE COMPLIMENTING YOU,” he barked after me.