by Mike Doughty
I can think of my parents as loving or I can think of them as crazy people. If I try to see the duality, I get disconcerted, disoriented.
There was a girl named Meredith whom Luke had a crush on; she was olive-skinned and beautiful; she wore prim pink sweaters and a tiny gold cross. He schemed up a pickup line for her that he never used; he would say, “How are you?” and she would say “Fine.” He would say, “I know you’re fine, but how are you?” Meredith asked me to dance at the Sadie Hawkins Dance; she came to visit me when I was in the hospital recovering from an appendectomy and happened to walk in just as I was getting a shot of morphine in my ass. Years later, Luke and I were looking through a photocopied yearbook. “Jesus, there’s, like, a picture of you on every page,” he said. “Who took these pictures?” He flipped to the last page. “Meredith Peterson. Wow, she was in love with you.”
How many signals did I miss? Maybe if Meredith Peterson had sat me down and told me, my life would have been different. It would have shaved just a little bit off the corner of my self-loathing, maybe enough that I’d have had something to live for other than the despair of my obsession.
Self-loathing freed me to be weird. Outlandish smarts weren’t a liability. I took tremendous pleasure in big fat words. At recess, I tried following the ebb and flow of a wall-ball game for a week, not actually playing, just running back and forth with the herd, trying to look like I was supposed to be there, but I gave it up, and from then on sat on the blacktop with my back to a brick wall reading books. I declared myself a Communist in the seventh grade—at West Point!—after reading a comic book about Mao. I wrote stories plagiarizing famous science-fiction movies that I was confident no one else had seen, and was praised for them.
I hung out with heavy metal kids, the younger brothers of the high school burners on skateboards. Some of them threw contemptuous jeers, but I think they actually found my angsty intensity—I shot them murderous glares over the top of my glasses when they mocked me—fascinating, and frightening.
Years later, a girl from a high school French class found me online. I quipped about my outcastness.
“I always thought you were one of the popular kids,” she typed back.
I met Chad Ficus in the West Point cemetery, where General Custer, General Westmoreland, and General Daniel Butterfield, the composer of “Taps,” are buried. We leaned on the mausoleum of Egbert Ludovicus Viele: a twelve-foot pyramid. Behind a barred door were the sarcophagi of Viele and his wife, and something on the back wall that looked like a light switch. It was said to be a buzzer, so that if Egbert were buried alive he could ring for help.
Chad was beloved by the girls on the first tier of cuteness. He was on the cross-country team and had fantastic grades. Like I said, I thought the world saw me as a peculiar no-hoper, and I was defiantly unathletic: when the gym teacher made us run 200 yards, I walked—leisurely, sullenly—I would’ve done it while smoking if I could.
We drank a mixture of spirits—two inches’ worth of alcohol from each bottle in his dad’s liquor cabinet—from a green plastic 7-Up bottle. I had a stillborn sister buried in the cemetery, a few yards from the pyramid. When I was a child, and my mom came to visit the grave, I climbed the sphinxes and tried to run up the pyramid’s sheer walls. I had no idea what was going on. I showed Chad Ficus the grave of Catherine Georgia Doughty and told an elaborate lie that my sister was a teenager who killed herself, and that she’d owned all the Led Zeppelin and Van Halen records.
We walked down the road, passing the 7-Up bottle between us. We met up with a bunch of kids and became a procession. A girl had a boom box and a cassette with Madonna’s first album on one side and Prince’s Purple Rain on the other. We acted conspicuously stupid: the alcohol let us. The idea was to go to a public pool up in the hills, climb the chain-link fence, and set off fireworks from the high-dive platform.
My dad suddenly drove up in his white Volkswagen Rabbit, opened the door, and told me to get inside. I did a decent job of pretending not to be drunk. I talked him into letting me walk home.
My dad drove off. I started following our parade up the hill. They were moving faster than before. “Go home, Doughty,” said Chad Ficus. “Your dad told you to go home. You have to go.”
If I didn’t, my dad would somehow intuit that I was up at the pool, and their party would get busted.
Chad ran away towards the pack, already getting smaller. He turned around, jogging backwards. “Go home! Go home!”
Some parents at West Point pressured their kids into going there for college. My dad wasn’t one of them. I suspect that if he had the option as a kid, he wouldn’t have gone, and without Vietnam, which I think made him need a structure in which to live, he wouldn’t have stayed in the army.
Chad Ficus’s dad did want him to go to West Point—he was one of the rare officers there who hadn’t gone there himself, and he seethed with resentment about it. He told Chad that once he graduated, he’d buy him a Porsche.
Chad’s dad owned a lot of guns. (Everybody’s dad at West Point owned some guns—my dad had two hunting rifles and a double-barreled shotgun handed down from my great-grandfather, a knife-fighting youth who, upon getting a bullet lodged an inch from his heart, repented and became a pastor. Perhaps not incidentally, I look exactly like him.) Chad’s dad actually made his own ammunition as a hobby; there were drums of gunpowder in the basement.
Chad showed his friends his dad’s porn collection. It was a notebook into which his dad had pasted a profusion of box shots; that is, he cut out pictures of vaginas from porn magazines and made himself a disembodied vagina portfolio. Page after page of them.
Chad did end up going to West Point. I saw him the summer before he entered, and he was cynically blithe; he said he didn’t care about serving his country, he was going for the prestige (it’s roughly as difficult to get into Harvard, but at West Point you also need a congressional recommendation to go with your grades and athletic bona fides). He was going to parlay it into a Wall Street job. Not to mention the Porsche.
Before your sophomore year at the military academy, you can quit, no questions asked. After that, you owe the government five years in the army. If you flunk out, or mess up, you have to enlist as a private. Chad called his dad at the midpoint of his West Point stint, in tears, begging his dad to let him drop out, he didn’t want the car. His dad said no.
Chad Ficus came to a gig of mine twenty years later. After his service, he had become a snack food magnate. He gave me one of the warmest, most loving and kind hugs I have ever received.
There were, like, fifteen black kids, total, at my high school, but one of them owned the only sound system. DJ DRE IS ASSKICKING! was stenciled on the side of a speaker cabinet. At the dances in the cafeteria, he spun twelve-inch rap records that he got in New York; a dozen black kids danced, did the chants—“The roach! The roach! The roach is on the wall! We don’t need no Raid, let the motherfucker crawl!”—on a nearly empty dance floor, while the white kids stood at the walls. Then, a blonde cheerleader from the senior class took Luke—we were freshmen, so it was shocking, but Luke was, even by then, the star of the school musicals, Guys and Dolls, Damn Yankees, etc.—by the hand, as Kurtis Blow’s “Basketball” played, and pulled him out to dance. The white kids trickled out after them, reluctantly.
I was fourteen, listened to Judas Priest—I probably wouldn’t have danced to the music those white kids liked, anyway, Billy Idol, The Outfield, Kenny Loggins, whatever—and would have had no idea what a great rap record was, were it pitched like a throwing star and lodged in my head. It was 1984. I can’t imagine how good those records must’ve been.
(There are two lines in the song “Rapper’s Delight” that fascinate me: one is, “Guess what, America? We love you,” which has to be the only time that sentiment was expressed in a hip-hop song. The other is, “Now what you hear is not a test: I’m rapping to the beat.” Because it was necessary to say, I know you’re out there thinking, hey, that guy’s not sin
ging, he must be just making sure the mic’s on, but, in fact, what I’m doing is called rapping to the beat. )
(Another moment in the history of rap’s emergence: Stanley Ray, whom I’ll tell you about later, went to see George Clinton in the early ’80s—Stanley Ray was flying on LSD—and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five opened. A lady behind him sputtered, “He’s just playing the record! He’s just playing the record!”)
I talked my parents into sending me to Simon’s Rock, a tiny experimental college in Massachusetts that admitted students after their sophomore year in high school. It was half kids who wanted to be in med school by age twenty and half fuckups like me who wanted to play guitar and find out what drugs were like. I talked to the admissions guy about Sartre; I told him that I also thought hell was other people. I didn’t really think hell was other people, but it was a fantastic teenage pose. I had, however, actually read the play, which wasn’t the case with most of the literary and filmic works I stole my poses from. My grades were wretched, but my precociousness quotient got me in.
(Again, the baffling ambiguity: my parents berated me nearly to suicide the same year, but they paid for this weird school in full.)
I sat at the punks’ table my first day at Simon’s Rock; everybody had a piece of their hair missing. That was the identity I was most interested in adopting. I didn’t meet orthodox punk standards. “I’m a goth, and———’s a punk, but you’re not anything,” said a girl they called Laura Morbid. I was in love with her. She had seen Pretty in Pink the summer before, and, in her head, wrote a goth Molly Ringwald script for herself; she’d have a Ducky figure, hip but geeky, chasing her, while she crossed clique lines to be with a rich kid. The rich kid turned out to be gay—not to mention deranged: he had weekly dorm-room-trashing fits—so she ended up with me. She was mean. The first snowfall came in November, and I said it was beautiful. “You’re so immature!” snapped Laura Morbid.
She left the school, and I fell in with a gentler group of goth girls. They were cheerful, and into building their own working versions of Brion Gysin’s dream machine out of stereo turntables and poster board. One of them was obsessed with the German industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, and the New Jersey Devils; her bedroom walls were papered with pictures of Blixa Bargeld, and hockey players.
I papered my own walls with pictures of Keith Richards and Lou Reed. Heroic junkies.
I had a lovely beer binge. We drove to a bar just past the New York border, to elude the Massachusetts blue laws; I went in with somebody’s brother’s ID to pick up a case of Rolling Rock and emerged giddy, arms laden. We drank the beer, and I transformed into some kind of magical celebrity-roast emcee. We wandered the dorms having magnanimous exchanges with everybody; I chatted amiably with people to whom I’d previously been scared to speak, shook hands with the hippie dudes skulking around the girls’ dorm, flirted with girls in sweatpants sitting in the hallway doing homework.
Beer, I thought, is the ANSWER.
The next day I awoke with my first hangover, and swore off liquor. If you hang around twelve-step types, you’ll hear tales wherein an alcoholic wakes up with a hangover, swears off booze forever, and then is drunk later that same day; a bleak joke repeating itself throughout her or his drinking life. But when I swore off booze, it took. I knew alcoholism was rampant in my family, and that I didn’t want to become a drunk. It was weird for youthful rebellion, to give up drinking as a fuck-you to your family. I got snooty about it, and when kids who were drinking asked me if I wanted a beer, I’d tell them, theatrically, that due to genetic misfortune, I was an alcoholic.
I started smoking weed. I realized that I’d found the solution to my genetic dilemma: I could satisfy that innate urge to get messed up by using something that, as every honest person in America knew, wasn’t addictive in the least: wholesome, in fact. I was writing songs and hating them; when I was stoned, they sounded amazing to me. I could love my own mind.
Weed, I thought, is the ANSWER.
I discovered cigarettes. I got two packs of Benson and Hedges that I smoked in one night, one after the other, staring at my sexy, smoking self in the mirror. Soon I was shoplifting cartons of Marlboro from the Price Chopper. Smoking rings that little bell in your head that the rat in the clear plastic tank, with the wires in his skull, is compelled to ring when he gets that signal, use use use use. But it doesn’t enact fucked-up-ed-ness. It’s using-lite. And it makes you look incredibly cool.
When I was nine years old, I read a comic book meant to scare kids away from drugs. One panel showed a kid looking, in terror, at trees and houses with scary faces.
That looks amazingly great, I thought.
I’m reminded of an ad campaign against meth: teenagers are shown with scabby faces going into motel rooms to prostitute themselves with sinister middle-aged men, robbing elderly people, overdosing hideously. I find the campaign inherently cynical, because it’s specifically targeting one drug. If the guys at the ad firm have any awareness, they must know that a kid prone to meth addiction is prone to addiction in general and might very likely end up, say, an alcoholic. Meth is a tremendous societal drain; the ad campaign isn’t about why a kid would become an addict. It’s designed to mitigate that one particular civic problem.
The tagline is: NOT EVEN ONCE. If you use meth once, you may end up one of those scabby-faced wraiths. In some of the ads, the humiliated, sick addicts return, like the ghost of Christmas future, to the very party where their past selves are about to get high for the first time and beg them not to start towards this inevitable fate.
They’re pretending not to understand that what they’re really saying is: Don’t take this, you’ll love it.
Here’s a message I prefer: If you try meth, it’ll feel amazing. You’ve been in emotional pain for a long time, and you don’t know it; you won’t know it until the drug makes the pain go away. You’ll feel like you’ve solved the essential problem of being alive. But sometimes this leads to an unthinkably gruesome humiliation. Be aware of that.
We, the adults in authority who are concerned about you, want you to know that other ways to deal with emotional pain certainly won’t provide the sudden cure that a noseful of drugs will. They take more time, more effort, and you may be extremely discouraged along the way. But they may be worth it, especially considering that drugs can be a form of suicide.
I took acid on Halloween, and I ended up in my room with this black kid I barely knew, who had painted his face white to look like the moon. The acid came on stronger and stronger and I became deathly afraid of the moon-faced man: I hadn’t met many black people in my life, and the face paint seemed to be bubbling on his cheeks. He left. A roommate gave me a giant rubber band to play with; I tangled myself in it for a few hours. Then I became seized with an idea: the universe was a fabric. Everything was a fabric. My life’s key moment of enlightenment. I fumbled for a cassette recorder.
I listened to it the next day and heard this manic voice intoning, half laughingly, “The universe is a fabric. Everything. Is a fabric. A fabric. A fabric.”
So of course I realized that I had had one of those ridiculous moments one has on drugs, those embarrassing epiphanies that are really stupid and meaningless. I didn’t even remember what I meant by that.
Years later, my friend the rock legend kept hipping me to all these quasi-Buddhist, quasi-Hindu nebulous spirituality guys, as a means of grasping for a power greater than myself. One of them—and I can’t for the life of me locate the text—wrote something like: The entire universe and everything in it is kind of a fabric, where everything is stitched to everything else, and nothing is a truly independent entity.
“You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing,” Alan Watts wrote.
I had a friend named Peter Mack. Peter Mack’s version of being a punk was to dress like a middle manager, circa 1960. He wore grey suits, skinny ties, and a fedora. He actually owned
a pair of jodhpurs, the kind worn by British officers of the Raj, with the weird wings sticking out by the hips. Everybody called the teachers by their first names; Peter called them Professor———and Dr.———.
Peter Mack and I would get high in his dorm room, then put on a recording of the chimes at Notre Dame. We’d blast it and yell, “THE BELLS! THE BELLS! THE BELLS!”
The next Halloween, Peter Mack and I went to a different college for their famous hallucinogen-fueled Halloween shindig. We took acid. We got separated. He got into what he thought was a bathroom line, and kept following it, his mind zooming every which way at once. Suddenly he found himself on a stage, in a spotlight, and a guy in a vampire costume thrust a mic in his face.
“So what are you supposed to be?”
Peter Mack paused. “I’m an art fag,” he said.
The crowd erupted with cheers, and Peter Mack won the Halloween costume contest.
I got a funny haircut—a semi-Mohawk-mullet, shaved on the sides. I dyed the floppy front part black. “You look like a queer,” my dad said to me one holiday I had come home for, as he opened a beer can.
I told people I was bisexual. I identified intensely with being gay; I felt ostracized, disparagingly feminized. I tried making out with dudes, and I didn’t dig it, but I kept trying. There was this one guy named Alfred. He was a black kid, from Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, where life couldn’t have been easy for him. “Are you bisexual? I’m bisexual, too,” he said. He was fake-bisexual in the other direction; he was gay, and was very slowly admitting it to himself. I kissed him once, and from then on he’d come knock on my dorm room door every now and then, sit on the bed, and say things like, “Have you ever thought about blow jobs? I mean, hmm, isn’t that interesting, blow jobs? Hey! I just got an idea! Why don’t I try giving you a blow job?”
