The Book of Drugs (5 page)

The band that night was a trio: Joe Lovano, Bill Frisell, and Paul Motian. I strolled through the club in a trance, amazed by the music, though I didn't know anything about jazz. The next night Bob Mould played acoustically; he let the audience sit Indian-style around him on stage. The night after that the Lyres played, with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion opening—their first gig ever.

The sound guy got me high every night. Then he'd complain for hours about how he wanted to be a recording engineer and nobody appreciated him. There was a tiny recording booth upstairs
from the stage that he'd go into, get baked, and twiddle with the knobs while the band played, leaving the mixing board unmanned. Feedback howled every night.

The bartenders were mostly dope fiends, and the customers foreign tourists. Japanese jazz nerds would wander in, stunned that the legendary club was a dive, run by surly malcontents. Europeans would pretend they didn't know they were supposed to tip in America; as they walked away, the bartenders hurled fistfuls of change at them, cursing.

The Knit was a magnet for a certain type of dissatisfied upper-class Japanese girl—there was a steady stream of them showing up at the club, having moved to New York seeking gritty adventure. One by one, they were scooped up by one of three guys—an avant-garde saxophone player, a drummer, and a guy who worked at record companies, doing some kind of job I couldn't fathom. “Oh, she's with D———? I thought she was with T———.”

 

They took me off the bar and made me the doorman. I did two nights a week, then five, then the freaked-out dope-fiend rockabilly guy who did weekends quit, and suddenly I was working seven nights a week. Naturally, I began to hate the job, but in my half-cocked military-bred mind I didn't think it was my place to tell the owner he had to get somebody else for Mondays and Tuesdays. So I started stealing.

Nearly everybody in the place was stealing. The bartenders would put the dough for two beers in the register and the third in their tip jar. The beer was always running low before its time, but nobody got fired. The would-be recording-engineer sound guy would order Chinese food at the ticket desk and stare at me incredulously when I called him down to pay for it. He expected me to take the money from the till as a matter of course.

I seethed with frustration—when applying the hand stamp that audience members got in lieu of a ticket, I'd bang the stamper down on their wrists so hard they'd yelp in pain. One night a saxophone player known for his assholery—an '80s icon due to some suave roles in black-and-white indie movies—had packed the joint. He called up and said petulantly that he was considering canceling the gig. My guess: he wanted to hear the club plead with him.

Do it, I said. I want to go home.

And I slammed the phone down.

 

Mumlow was in love with me, until I started hanging out at her place constantly, because I was desperately lonely, at which point her love blended with contempt. Then I moved in. Mumlow kept the door unlocked; we'd come home to find random friends sitting on the bed, smoking cigarettes. One of these was our friend Sally. We treated her like a pedigreed dog. Mumlow would stroke her sandy-blonde hair. Mumlow had a video camera; we'd get high, videotape ourselves having a conversation, then watch the tape and laugh and be fascinated by our own conversational nuances. We'd beg Sally to stay; she'd sleep on the couch. She stayed for four or five days at a time; when she finally left, we nearly clung to her legs.

Sally's father was dying of AIDS in North Carolina. As he got sicker, dormant mental illness stirred in her. She called from our friend Dottie's parents' house, deep in Queens. She was having delusions. She wasn't sleeping for days at a time. She was planning a party, with cheerless determination, for which she was writing a ten-page guest list of rappers and movie stars.

Dottie was a committed party girl. Despite having flunked out, she somehow walked in the NYU graduation ceremony; she paid a guy who could do calligraphy to forge a diploma for her parents'
wall. Her mom looked like Peggy Lee—just shy of elderly, with platinum wig and gigantic sunglasses that covered half her face.

In Queens, Sally sat on Dottie's mom's ottoman, by turns motionless and creepily agitated. Dottie's mom brought Sally crackers and cheese on a platter with sweetness, “Do you want another snack, honey?” Then she went back into the kitchen and barked in a stage whisper, “What's the matter with this girl, what's wrong with this girl?”

I called a car service to get Sally back to Manhattan. En route, she kept hallucinating family members on the streets of Rego Park. Back at the universe, Mumlow was calling Sally's mother.

We went to her apartment to pick up her things. She whirled around on the steps. “I'm Madonna,” she yelled, “and you're all going to be in
my movie!
”

 

My friend Luke, from West Point, came down to Manhattan to audition for some drama schools and stayed with us. We had removed the cable (telling an incredulous cable company guy that, no, we weren't in fact moving, we just
didn't want cable anymore
) and had just a VHS tape of
Goodfellas
to watch. We put it on every night; Ray Liotta pistol-whipped Lorraine Bracco soundlessly, flickering in the corner like a fireplace. The other VHS tape we had was called
Taste My Juices.
We never watched it. We got Luke high—he was unaccustomed to it—and left him alone in the apartment. Paranoid and agitated, sitting on the bed, he put it on; the opening scene was a man fucking somebody in a rainbow wig, with a dubbed voice—Japanese-monster-movie style—going, “Aw. Aw. Aw. Aw. Aw. Aw. Aw. Aw. Aw. Aw.”

 

I never wanted to fuck Mumlow. I stayed because her mind was so wonderfully strange, she was so much fun to get high with, and
because I was broke. The old joke: What do you call a musician without a girlfriend?
Homeless.

She paid for the Domino's pizza we ordered twice a day (“How many ICE-COLD COKES do you want with that?” the Domino's guy would yell enthusiastically, on every call. How about
no
ice-cold Cokes, thanks), and my contribution was to get the weed, the funds for which I embezzled at the Knit. Every tenth ticket, I'd put the cash in my pocket, rather than input the money into the computer.

I was meeting girls at the club, getting them high, and fucking them in their living rooms while their roommates slept. They'd ask for my number and I'd say I didn't have a phone.

Mumlow was getting churlish and horny. She binged on porn, buying stacks of gruesome magazines with titles like “Black Plungers,” “Preggo Sluts,” and “Shaved Asian Snizz.” She spread them out in a porn-rainbow fan on the bed and plied her vibrator on herself for hours, grunting, never having an orgasm. I kept my back to her, typing lyrics on her beige, boxy Macintosh.

 

My friend Wind-Him-Up-and-Watch-Him-Go Joe introduced me to a weed source. He called the proprietors Smokey and the Toastman. They worked out of a shop on East Ninth Street, onto which they had painted, in shaky letters, RECORD-A-RAMA.

Smokey stood behind a glass counter inside of which maybe four or five dusty twelve-inch singles—vinyl records—lay. There were a few nailed onto the walls, too. The Toastman would be sitting a few feet behind him, staring blankly. Both were Caribbean dudes in Hawaiian shirts, with red, slitted eyes.

“What do you want?”

Um, a $50 bag?

“Who are you? I don't know you.”

I bought from you last week.

With a wary gaze, Smokey walked backwards towards the Toastman, who handed him something, and then Smokey palmed it to me. I put it in my pocket.

“Put it in your waist, man! Put it in your waist!” he hissed.

I stuffed it down by my cock, embarrassedly.

Smokey looked side to side, as if there might be cops suspended from the walls of the Record-A-Rama. “Take this.” He handed me one of the dusty twelve-inches. I walked out with the record, ostensibly looking like I'd bought it.

There was a collection of misbegotten twelve-inches leaning against the wall in the universe. All these third-rate reggae and house singers, their dreams of fame having resulted in being the decoy record for Smokey and the Toastman.

 

Mumlow had a bunch of heroin friends she knew from the arty-groovy Northeastern college from which she'd dropped out the previous year. One of them abandoned a cat named Big Bunny in the universe. Big Bunny radiated angst. We'd throw a stuffed duck on the floor and Big Bunny would hump it—obediently, bleakly, neurotically—while we cackled.

The heroin friends came down for the weekends; one of their parents had a pricey loft in the West Village. I looked down on them. One of them came over and, without asking, ripped open a bag of dope and cut lines on a CD. I kicked him out, yelling.

I got a terrible fever. Mumlow wanted me to take a bath to cool off, but the water, though lukewarm, was icy to me. She had a bag of dope that had been sitting in her purse for weeks, after an evening with the heroin kids. “If you take a bath, I'll let you have this,” she said.

Wrapped in towels, I sniffed the dope.

Wonderful. Peace. Warmth.

“Another one of the heroin faith-healed,” Mumlow said.

 

(I loved the Stones' song “Gimme Shelter”: “Rape, murder: it's just a shot away.” Rape and murder? Heroin imparts a
soothing warm and fuzzy feeling
.)

 

After that, I got excited when the kids from the arty-groovy school came to town on a heroin excursion. I still disdained them—they were
junkies—
but I always connived a bag of dope out of them. Mumlow didn't like it. She forbade me to use heroin in the universe. I myself thought it was better for me to avoid it; I had so much I wanted to
do.
I figured that I could get high every other month or so. I wouldn't go where the groovy-liberal-arts-school kids were going. Their faces were a little greyer each time they came to town.

 

I was going out and doing open-mic nights, doing poetry at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe's Friday night slams. I was a desperate and ambitious kid; at twenty-one, I felt like I was almost too late for stardom. I slogged through my notebooks of club bookers' numbers and record companies' addresses, sending demo cassettes, repeatedly calling the gatekeepers of New York nightlife.

The most feared booker was Louise from CBGB. CBGB let unknown bands play on Sunday and Monday nights; the sound guys, who could be relied upon to not give a fuck, would write down what they thought of the band—and if the band had brought a significant number of beer-buying friends—and maybe you'd get a real gig after that.

I played a Monday night, then anxiously waited. The call never came. I called up Louise, nearly hyperventilating.

“Call me next Wednesday at 3 o'clock,” she said, and hung up the phone.

Next Wednesday I called promptly at three.

“Call me next Wednesday at five.” Click.

Next Wednesday: Hi, is this Louise, this is M. Doughty, I . . .

“Call me on Tuesday at noon, on this number.” She gave me a number different from the one I called on. I fumbled madly for a pen and took it down.

Tuesday: “Call me next Tuesday at one.”

Next Tuesday: “Call me on Friday at this number:———.”

I called dutifully on Friday. An unfamiliar voice answered. “CB's.”

Hi, uh, I'm looking for Louise . . .

“She's not here right now,” he said, “but you're calling
the right number.
”

 

Louise wouldn't book a solo guy in the main room—massively disappointing—but she gave me a gig at the space next door, CB's Gallery. I lugged an amp all the way up the Bowery—I was skinny as hell, it took forever. A car pulled up—a bunch of drunk girls from out of town looking for Bleecker Street. I told them I'd show them the way if they gave me a ride. I put my amp in the trunk, and they drove me—just a few blocks—to CB's. They were incredibly impressed that I was a musician, in New York, no less, who wrote his own songs, no less, and actually
had a real show to play.

There were two guys at the bar. I played some songs. Another guy showed up. Another guy left. Then the other guy left. It was just me, playing to the bartender. What do you do? I had a meticulously
conceived set list at my feet, and I couldn't figure out anything to do but stick with it.

The bartender went out front and brought down the steel grate over the big window. She came and stood in the center of the empty room. “I think I'm gonna close down now,” she said.

Years later, she was the manager of a big band on the hippie circuit. I bump into her at music festivals and tell everybody near us the story of her shutting down the club on me. I'm trying to be good-naturedly funny, but she winces.

 

We took acid and went to a dance club. It was me, a couple of friends, Wind-Him-Up-and-Watch-Him-Go Joe, and another, a cute blonde girl who had played the ingenue in this cult movie that everyone had seen.

We spent the night jiggling and wobbling wildly in front of a speaker. We knew we looked like idiots.

We left as the sun came up, and sat on the curb. Wind-Him-Up-and-Watch-Him-Go Joe ate a piece of pizza; the slice devolved into an indistinct mass of cheese that he held in both hands and gnawed at like a dog. We went back to another friend's place. Everybody went up to his roof, and I lay in bed with the blonde ingenue. She started telling me intimate things about her life, how she'd fucked a creative-writing teacher and read the stories she wrote about it aloud in class, how she gave a lighting guy on the cult movie a hand job every night after shooting ended. I kept waiting for the moment that I would kiss her, but she bolted up and went to the bathroom. I heard her puking, and crying.