The Book of Drugs

by Mike Doughty

  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—a
nd 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.

  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.