The Book of Drugs (26 page)

 

Fandom is often not altruism. Effusive praise, in these cases, isn't meant to make you feel good, but to get something out of you. He wanted me to provide him with, appreciatively, dutifully, a gratifying encounter. So, in lionizing me, he felt he was extracting from me an unquestionable obligation.

 

I did a gig at a college. The next day, I plodded near-blindly around the campus, in a quest for espresso that got more daunting by the minute.

I was barely looking up from the sidewalk, lurching among students carrying books who careened, in all directions, around me.

A kid walked up in front of me and just stopped there, blocking my way. He was beaming. He started to speak.

I stopped him. “Hey, hi, uh, I can't really talk right now, I have to . . . go do . . . uh . . . see you later . . . ” I hastened clumsily away.

Months later, I searched my name. This is a terrible thing to do to yourself if you're lonely and hoping for munificent admiration as a balm for loneliness. You will always, always, always find something horrible. If your mind works similarly to mine, one spiteful sting will ring truer than ten pages of accolades.

I found a review of the show at that college. The gig was described shruggingly, by a student who, later in that issue, wrote an editorial about hockey. In the comments beneath the article, there was one that said, “I bumped into M. Doughty near the humanities building and he was an asshole, I'M GOING TO THROW AWAY ALL HIS ALBUMS AND I'M NEVER GOING TO GO TO HIS SHOWS AND I'M NOT GOING TO GIVE HIM ANY MONEY.”

 

(Some affronted fans threaten to withhold their cash. Do they feel their relationship to music and musicians is, on the most essential level, as a consumer?)

 

Saul Mongolia dropped me from Warner Bros., telling my lawyer that it was because I was going bald.

(He would go on to gain a measure of infamy for being the guy who dropped Wilco from Warner Bros. when they turned in
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot;
he told them there wasn't a single on it. Wilco found a new label, and the record sold more than 500,000 copies.)

I got a new manager, this very short and stout, expansively convivial guy. He was married to a gorgeous, redheaded fashionista who towered over him. She dressed him flamboyantly, gave him a lavender faux-hawk and dressed him in linen shirts with complicated
floral embroidery. This squat, bespectacled Jewish guy from Long Island, dolled up in
L'Uomo Vogue
clothes.

It turned out he was clean, too, for a dozen years. I don't know of anybody else who would take on a newly clean, shaky addict who'd just been kicked off his record label. I wanted to go out and play solo shows; he actually took me out for
driving lessons.

I got a rental car, put the guitar in the trunk, printed up cheap copies of that acoustic album
Skittish
that I made with Kramer, and played wherever they'd have me. I drove 9,000 miles, by myself, on the first tour. After the show I sat on the front of the stage with the cardboard boxes of CDs and sold them for $15.

Skittish
had somehow gotten out on the internet; some people knew the songs. For the most part, the audiences were disappointed; they knew Soul Coughing, they wanted Soul Coughing, and here was the extreme opposite: one guy with an acoustic guitar—a fucking
balladeer?
Some of them were genuinely indignant. Angry. But in the front row, there were cute girls in thick black glasses lip-synching the
Skittish
songs.

The next tour, the audience was smaller: the Soul Coughing fans were abandoning me. I was still selling
Skittish
in a plain white sleeve, no label to publicize me. From there, an audience for my acoustic thing was built.

 

I played the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco—the same place where Jeff Buckley and I had sniffed heroin in the basement. The bass player from that renowned queer-punk band whom I had met at Sluggo's in Pensacola was managing the place. He asked me, with an implied wink, whether I
needed anything.
I laughed. No, no. I'm fine with the Diet Pepsi in the dressing room cooler.

Years later, I bumped into him in the rooms in Brooklyn.

I tried to jump back into songwriting and wrote terrible, trite songs. That was because my receptors were charred, disabled by the drugs' assault on my brain and my heart, and because for the last couple of years of the band, I had just given up on trying to write a great song, knowing that I was in a band that didn't care.

The rock legend exhorted me to pray. The idea spooked me too much. But I started writing prayers in my journal—maybe not prayers, but scrawled entreaties, please let me get through this day, please help me to not throb to death, please, please, please. Hours and hours, pages and pages.

I started praying to god, then praying sarcastically to god, then to my certainty that I couldn't trick myself into belief, then to a blurred spiritual notion, and then back to a god that I fully believed in again. In a loop.

(I want to note that I really dislike capitalizing “god.” It's more like saying “music” or “light” than, for example, “Doreen” or “Uzbekistan.” But my copy editor is telling me that conventional usage dictates “God,” not “god,” and typing “god” calls attention to itself, implies a more complicated philosophical point than I'm capable of making, and makes it seem like I'm one of those people who wants to be e.e. cummings when he grows up.)

One day, without me noticing it, the ability to get something new out of the guitar, out of my voice, came back. I went into those notebooks and pulled phrases and sentences and thoughts out. They became lyrics. Some songs were addressed to god, and I changed them to address the unsingable girl. Some songs were addressed—wistfully or angrily—to drugs themselves.

There were songs in which I was speaking to a beautiful woman, listing all the reasons she'd be better off not loving me. I didn't mean to be arch, or sardonic. This was just how I felt. The songs just fell out that way.

The new crowd grew from curious to fanatical. I'd start songs—new songs, songs that weren't on albums yet—and within two seconds they'd recognize it and whoop. (“No offense intended,” said an amazed acquaintance, “but to me, your songs are kind of similar.” None taken. The guy was right. Happily, the four songs I repeatedly write are my favorite four songs, and, seemingly, some audience members', too.) People asked me to sign their arms and then had the signature tattooed. I did a live recording; people yell out the
between-song jokes
at me.

I got stalkers. There was a woman who wrote me long e-mails to the fan-mail address on my website as if I had always been her boyfriend: I can't wait until you come home, we'll go to _______for dinner, go play cards at _________'s house, we'll make love by the fireplace. There was a girl who got my phone number and would leave interminable messages, sometimes professing love, sometimes screaming at me for something imaginary I'd done to her brother. There was a girl I saw by the back door of a club in Philly. She was standing with a bunch of other fans, who were getting stuff signed. Do you want me to sign something? I asked. She stared at me, stunned. What is it? “Don't you remember all those e-mails you wrote me?” What? No—what did I say in them? “All kinds of wonderful things,” she said. As is my pattern with crazy people, I thought it must be me: I wondered if I really had sent her e-mails and had forgotten about it. There were two stalkers from Maryland: one was a gorgeous nineteen-year-old with an unnerving look in her eye who looked like a
Playboy
model circa 1963. She showed up at gigs hundreds of miles away and then said she had nowhere to stay, could she stay with me? There's a mountain of a blonde woman who drives a dump truck in Baltimore. She's got my signature and the art from my first solo record tattooed on her massively flabby right arm. She writes e-mails asking
if I want to meet for lunch, then, when I don't respond, pleads: “I don't understand, what have I done, why don't you want to be friends with me?” She offers to buy me expensive gifts. She would hug me after the shows, her body twice the size of mine, and squeeze the air out of me. I had to struggle to get loose. She drives long distances, too, and stands in the center of the front row, never looking at me but glowering at the floor, lost in some distressing reverie.

 

I played a gig in Rochester with this miniature Scottish singer-songwriter. He entered the dressing room and said, in a Scots burr, “We'll get along fine if ye'll drrrrink with me!”

Uh, actually I don't.

“Oh, then do ye smoke weed?”

Nope.

He looked kind of scared. “Are ye in the prrrogram?”

We drove to Philly together the next day. He spent the whole drive making unsolicited excuses. “I trrrried cocaine once and I didn't like it. I don't drrrrink before shows, I don't drrrink as much as my frrriends. I didn't smoke any weed at all last Febrrruary. I've never done herrroin, I don't . . . ”

The litany was ceaseless.

I asked if usually he got stoned on long drives. Yes. I pulled into a Shell station; he walked behind it and got high. We talked about other means of getting fucked up as we drove. What's your favorite drug? Opium. Opium? Was it a squishy black lump? Yes. Did you smoke it off a piece of tinfoil? Yes.

It's
very
unlikely that's opium—it's probably black tar heroin.

He was appalled. But haven't you ever taken Vicodin? Percocet? That's the
same shit.
I mean
literally
the same. In your brain, it's exactly
the same chemical—it's morphine. It's like saying “Well, I like gin, of course, but I'd
never
drink whiskey.”

 

On September 10, 2001, heavy clouds were over New York. I walked over to my manager's office to pickup a box of CDs to sell at my gig that night in Massachusetts. My last view of the World Trade Center was directly down West Broadway; clouds gathered at the midpoint, obscuring the tops of the towers.

I had come up with a new chord progression, and I was messing with melodies in my head as I drove. I pulled into Northampton in the rain. I stood outside in the drizzle before the show; there was a church across the street with people standing around a back door, smoking and drinking coffee from paper cups. Clearly, a twelve-step meeting.

I was opening the shows with a Soul Coughing song, the first line of which was:

So sick of that song, I thought. Need an excuse to stop playing it.

I fell asleep to thunder, and woke up to a brilliant day. Green leaves scraped the motel window. I turned on the TV. Ann Curry was interviewing Tracey Ullman on the
Today
show.

I had been clean a little more than a year, and I was still doing the thing where I woke up early every morning to watch the day come on, in love with light. I kept myself company with the TV, so I was accustomed to the rhythms of the
Today
show; it starts at
7 AM with hard news; the news goes until 8, when the cookbook authors show up. It was just past 7:30; that Tracey Ullman was being interviewed so early meant it was an uncommonly slow news day. Tracey Ullman, in fact, had draped her legs over the arms of her chair and batted at Ann Curry's questions breezily. It was such a slow news day that even Tracey Ullman couldn't plug herself in earnest.

I like news, not celebrity corn. I switched it off, mildly bummed. Reproachfully, I told myself the old Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times.

I got Starbucks; the sky was wholly blue, in a cloudless condition that happens after strong storms called “severe clear.” I drove south listening to the BBC. They said a small plane—a one-passenger plane, like a Piper Cub or something—had crashed into the World Trade Center. “Foul play is suspected,” said the Brit reading the news.

My brother called and left a message. Two planes had hit the World Trade Center, could I see them from my place? My living room window had a direct view of the towers. The Brit hadn't said anything about a second plane.
Two planes, ridiculous,
I thought.
Rumors are so weird.

The Brit acknowledged the second plane. “Foul play is suspected,” he said again.

The BBC sputtered and faded. I hit the seek button and landed on Howard Stern. The first tower fell. Then Howard's signal sputtered away, and I switched to a station that had just put a feed from a local TV station on. The anchor's vantage was exactly that of Howard Stern: sitting in a studio, looking at a monitor.

A friend called. She had a gig at the fashion shows in Bryant Park that week: her job was to scratch the bottoms of the models'
shoes with scissors, so they didn't slip on the runway. She said the White House had been bombed.

The second tower fell. It became clear that if I drove back to New York, they wouldn't let me in. So I drove over the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge on I-84, turned around, drove back. Howard came back on. Howard was howling. I turned again, the local anchor came back, just trying to fill up the air with authoritative anchor-ese, but clearly halfway into a freakout. He faded; back to Stern howling.

I wanted to call my parents. The cell-phone lines were jammed up, so I stopped at a Dunkin' Donuts and tremblingly asked if I could use the phone: I lived near the towers and wanted to call my family, I said. “It's a local call, right?” said the Dunkin' Donuts guy.

Apparently my mom, a guidance counselor, spent the day making sure none of the kids used the attacks as an excuse to skip class.

I got through to a friend who'd just gotten out of a rehab in Connecticut and was living in a small apartment near the hospital, working at a record store—she blew the mind of the record store manager, having a résumé with heavy music management companies on it but applying for a job stocking the racks in this tiny shop. I picked her up, and we immediately went to Starbucks, which had a sign in the window that said CLOSED DUE TO THE NATIONAL EMERGENCY.