The Book of Drugs (6 page)

Wind-Him-Up-and-Watch-Him-Go Joe burst into the room behind his fuming girlfriend, pleading, trying to placate her. She stopped in the middle of the room, heard the ingenue crying,
turned on her heels, and went to the bathroom. She knocked on the door lightly, saying, “Honey, are you OK? Are you OK? Honey?”

I stayed on the futon for an hour, hoping the ingenue would come back to get cozy again. Eventually, I got up and walked home in the ashen daylight.

 

The Knit's manager yelled at me that I'd get fired if I didn't do a better job sweeping up at the end of the night. Then Wind-Him-Up-and-Watch-Him-Go Joe showed up telling me he had some Ecstasy and had found a Discover card lying on the ground someplace—he and some friend of his were going to drop the E's and call a whore. I gulped the E as I closed up the desk and left without touching the broom.

(I once found a credit card on the street; I would've bought stuff with it, too, if it hadn't been in the name of Yuka Kaneko. Instead I sent it to the address in Tokyo printed on the back, promising REWARD. Four months later, I got an embroidered towel in the mail.)

Joe's credit card was in the name of Ann Hill. How are we going to convince an escort agency that your name is Ann Hill?

“I'll tell them I'm from England,” Joe said.

Wind-Him-Up-and-Watch-Him-Go Joe was intent on getting a black girl. “I don't want a
black girl,
why would we get a
black girl?
” whined the friend. Mumlow was out of town. We went to her place.

“Hello? Yes, how much does it cost? Yeah. Do you take the Discover card?”

Nobody took the Discover card.

Ten calls later, somebody finally did. “The name is Ann Hill.” Pause. “Yes. Ann Hill. I'm from England.” He said this in his regular, suburban-Illinois accent.

They bought it. “We're young and handsome, so send somebody really good,” he said.

I drew second. So I went out into the stairwell and waited. I was coming up on the drugs. The stairwell was a cold, hollow chamber, painted institutional pale green. Every fidget echoed eleven stories down. I don't think it was really E—actually, I think every E I took was not in fact E until roughly 1996.

I puked a rainbow on the landing.

I sat there, staring ahead, getting paranoid, hoping nobody would come up the stairs. A ring in my ears became an insectoid buzz. Years passed. I stared at the pool of rainbow puke. Finally Joe came out and knocked on the stairwell door.

The whore wasn't beautiful. She spoke with an elegant accent that suggested she was from somewhere like Côte d'Ivoire. Her frank gaze scared me. I didn't get hard. “Have you been doing cocaine?” she asked pleasantly.

In the end I rubbed my soft cock between her ass cheeks as she lay there placidly. I came, she pulled out a massive credit-card charging device, and suddenly I was alone.

Joe's whiny friend got nothing.

I was paranoid for weeks. I didn't dare to look in the stairwell; I didn't know whether the puke had been cleaned up. It was a fancy building, who took the stairs? I feared a knock on the door from a wrathful superintendent, and then Mumlow would kick me out.

I feared lupine pimps nabbing me as I left the building. I feared Pinkerton men sent by the Discover card people. I feared Ann Hill, whoever she was, and whatever she made of that unexpected $400 charge.

 

There was a Rollerblading German cocktail waitress named Ilsa. She thought herself a soul singer, and when she went down to the
basement at the end of the night to replenish the beer—she carried the heavy cases on sturdy shoulders—she sang flamboyantly in a faux-Memphis Germanic accent. She Rollerbladed from the bar to the tables by the stage, the Rollerblades slamming on the wooden floor during the band's gentlest passages.

I saw her on Avenue A on a night when I was going to cop dope for the first time. I was always afraid to go there—every time I got high, somebody else went to buy it—but I resented being beholden to them. Mumlow had told me she'd kick me out if I got high in the universe, but she was in Texas seeing relatives. Ilsa was walking in a stream of people towards a place called the Laundromat, where you'd stick your money through a hole in the wall and get heroin or cocaine in return. There was a guy placed near the corner trying to mitigate the very obvious flow of customers, “They're gonna take you off the line,” he sang gently, tut-tutting. “They're gonna take you off the line.”

I gave Ilsa my money. Ten bucks. “Just one? Really?” she said.

I stood there thinking she'd stolen my money, but she returned and gave me the single bag of heroin, an envelope an inch and a half long, the size of two razor blades held together. We walked past her place, a storefront on Seventh Street with futons on the floor and tie-dyed sheets hanging on the walls. There were a couple of other Germans there, who looked like they were just beginning to tip into real junkiedom; they looked like tourists in shiny European clothes, but there was something drawn and desperate in their faces. They were surprised that I didn't want to hang out and get high with them.

The bag of dope was tiny, but I felt its every contour in my pocket.

I had started moving the furniture around the universe earlier in the day, wanting to change my brain by rearranging the physical
world. So the place was a mess; it didn't suit my visions of effete drug use. I tapped the little quantity of powder onto a book anyway. I sniffed up a line, sat there, decided I wasn't high yet, sniffed up another line, thought the same, and suddenly had sniffed the whole bag within five minutes. The high walloped me.

I nodded out, then came to. I had bought a Charlie Parker tape—some live recording. I put a Walkman on and lay back on the bed in the jumble of shoved-about furniture. I didn't know much about bebop, except that I wanted its sophistication. I wrongly thought that Charlie Parker would be a soothing, heroin-genic drug soundtrack. I passed out again.

I had some kind of frenetic nightmare that I can't remember. I sat up in a panic. The wild music was shrill in my ears.

 

Sun Ra's Arkestra played the Knitting Factory soon before Sun Ra died. He'd recently had a stroke. The band wheeled him onstage for sound check, then left him there, alone, as they all went to dinner before the show. After the first set, they left him onstage again. I walked up with my notebook and Sun Ra signed it with a shaking hand, his autograph like that of a third-grader just learning cursive.

The guitar player Marc Ribot was a regular; I idolized him for the biting, bitter leads he played on Tom Waits's
Rain Dogs.
Somebody said that he'd been at the bar speculating that the next musical revolution would be led by a band featuring the white-rapper version of Kurt Cobain. I buttonholed him.
I am that kid!
I said.
Let's start a band!
He politely declined.

A fellow doorman named Gordon and I started an improvised-music band called Isosceles; we grabbed slots from the boss on off-nights and asked twenty musicians to play. Seven or so would show up, hopefully a drummer among them. We played to stragglers
who hung around after the night's first set. Gordon bawled on a tenor sax; I bayed poetry out of a notebook. Once, all twenty players showed up. We literally couldn't fit on the stage.

They say if the band could beat up the audience, cancel the show.

I heard the free-jazz prophet Charles Gayle every Monday. The same fifteen people came every week, so after they'd all gone in, I'd shut down the desk, get high with the sound guy, and watch. The sound was exquisite pandemonium. I learned how to
hear
this music; it was like seeing through the Matrix. Minuscule changes would flip the whole sound over.

John Zorn's game piece “Cobra” was performed on the last Sunday of every month. It's an ingenious system for structured improvisation: twelve players in a semicircle face a prompter at a table who administers multicolored cards that stand for various musical acts. The musicians signal their desired operation, using hand gestures, then the prompter picks up a corresponding card, bangs it on the table, and a musical change happens: players enter or exit, volume goes up or down, tempo goes up or down, players imitate other players, players trade phrases between each other.

A different avant-garde luminary picked the cast every month. (One month, there was a Cobra done by a bunch of layman avant-garde enthusiasts. They were given the night because they were the ones keeping the scene stoked; record-store guys, flyer-putter-uppers, habitual attendees. The show was wretched. The sampler pioneer Anthony Coleman was there. “It's now proven that there's such a thing as
can play
in this music,” he said.)

In March, it was all sampler players. There were a bunch of musicians pioneering new approaches to playing the sampler: they were playing it live, as an instrument, as opposed to chaining
the sounds in a pattern using a sequencer, as hip-hop and techno producers did.

I was a solo acoustic guy in a magical time for hip-hop music. You heard it everywhere, booming from passing cars. It was before SUVs were called SUVs, so they called them
Jeep beats
. The bass Dopplered down Broadway. I tried to replicate the rhythms on guitar, and failed, but in an interesting way. At the Knit, I heard all this atonal, outside, beautifully messed-up music, and connected it to the dissonant textures and flourishes on the rap records. I saw LL Cool J's glorious version of “Mama Said Knock You Out” on MTV, with a band instead of a DJ. In my head I heard huge rhythms, played live, shot through with surreal
information.

The show was wonderful: unearthly noises, volleys of mayhem. You could barely tell who was doing what, as it was twelve guys standing next to machines. Post-show, I cornered them one by one. Each gave me the same spiel: there were two ways to play the sampler—either to trigger sound effects or as a more conventional keyboard. I hoped for something
in between.

 

I was asked to do Cobra and felt like I'd arrived. The doorman takes the stage! To an
audience!
This one was all singers. One of them was this guy Jeff Buckley.

Jeff had been playing with the guitar player Gary Lucas, a jocular psychedelicist of Zorn's generation. Gary had, incidentally, been a publicist at Columbia Records in the '70s and came up with the Clash's slogan,
The Only Band That Matters.

Jeff 's dad was Tim Buckley, whom I'd never heard of but who was apparently notable in the '70s. (Everybody thought this meant Jeff was rich. From where I stand now, that's hysterical; I've had a couple songs on the radio and receive a negligible check a few times a year. Everybody thinks I'm rich now, too.)

Alone among the Cobra singers, Jeff had presence on the stage. The show was quasi-disastrous: singers don't like supporting roles. We fought to bellow loudest. Jeff soared over our ruckus.

Gary Lucas was quickly realizing that Jeff was en route to something spectacular. He tried to corner him, but he ditched Gary and began to play his own shows, accompanying himself on a Telecaster—that brittle, tight guitar sound. Jeff had a fantastic ear, could pick anything out. I saw him mostly play covers: Van Morrison, Edith Piaf, Morrissey, Shudder to Think, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Yeah, that's right,
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.
He grew up on Kiss and Led Zeppelin and could play anything of theirs. “Detroit Rock City!” I yelled at him during his shows, and he'd doodle a bar of it, smiling.

Jeff happened to call me on the day Luke and I were moving from Brooklyn to an East Village tenement. “I'll meet you there!” Uh, Jeff, it's a
six story walkup.
He came anyway, ebulliently humping furniture up the stairs with us. We sat on the back of the U-Haul afterwards, eating plums and a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

A year later, Luke bumped into him in front of the Second Avenue Cinema, a gorgeous indie-celebrity songstress trailing him. He was snooty and aloof: “I'm sorry, what was your name, again?” Didn't introduce Luke to the songstress.

The cutest girl in the room always beelined to him. So I hated him for that. We did a gig together; I shorted him his cut of the door money. “Thanks, this is my rent!” he said.

He was conscripted into playing the title role in a cheap production of Georg Büchner's
Woyzeck
by a friend of mine who saw him at that gig. It's the story of a soldier forced to be the subject of cruel experiments. Woyzeck loses his mind, suffers terrible hallucinations, murders his girlfriend. In the last scene, he walks into a lake to wash the blood off, and drowns.

He did a weekly show at a bar on St. Mark's Place. Even crazy people flocked to him; he played by a window, and this renowned maniac called Tree Man—he adorned himself in branches, looking like he was scowling from inside a bush—would come and glower. There was another guy, Camera Man: fake cameras made out of plastic bottles hung from his neck. He'd stop passersby and coax them to turn their chins in flattering directions as he pretended to take their picture. He'd lean over Jeff 's shoulder to frame the audience of enraptured girls.

Soon St. Mark's Place was lined with black Lincoln Town Cars. Jeff signed with Columbia Records. Columbia was a Sony subsidiary, run from a tower on Madison Avenue with a crown shaped like that of an antique cabinet. The label was renowned for ruthlessness, not for carrying out its artists' creative impulses. There was a marketing person there who brought a big cardboard box into her office and sat in it with her phone for a month, not leaving until Alice in Chains's “Man in the Box” was in the top ten. This was artistry as Columbia saw it.

Jeff was utterly crushed-out on Sony. He called it Sony, never Columbia. Before CBS sold it off, Columbia had been famous for its stable of iconoclasts—Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen. Sony, on the other hand, was a bloodless monolith. Jeff 's lust for a conglomerate's approval wasn't uncharacteristic of the times. There were a lot of artists—myself included—who longed for acceptance by the entities of commerce. (Why? Being an artist wasn't good enough? We chose bohemian lives and now needed to be patted on the head by somebody respectable?)