by Mike Doughty
“Can I come over right now?”
Ah, no, right now we’re . . . um, we’re . . .
“I want to make a positive change in my life,” Alfonso said. You could hear his heart pounding in his throat.
Swaz told me that she heard voices. She had sudden, bug-eyed outbursts: she’d burst into tears and shriek at me. She had an evil streak. She’d say something innocuous that would devastate, and she pretended she wasn’t trying to hurt me.
I’d go back to North America to play shows, mostly in brown, cold cities on flat terrain; at the end I’d fly from Columbus or Cedar Rapids back to London. I would be exhausted by the weeks on the road with the band that hated me. I smoked lots of weed and barely wanted to move off the Major Couch. Swaz mocked me cruelly for being crippled. She was a versatile mocker.
We went out to clubs, taking Alfonso’s pills. We heard all the great jungle DJs of London, a scene in full flower. We dropped the pills, the high came up, and I desperately tried to get away from Swaz. I was frightened when my druggy eyes looked into hers. She reached out and pulled me to her face. She kissed me. She’d been dutifully swigging water, as a cautious E-taker is supposed to: the inside of her mouth was cold.
I fled, and went around asking for sips of peoples’ drinks, greeting everybody with ostentatious fake love, being the most annoying person on Ecstasy you could imagine. Particularly considering how unapologetically E’d-up I was, when everybody else in the place was probably on adulterated cocaine.
When I got back to Swaz’s, and the high was coming off, I hated myself for the idiotic, chemical affection.
She poured me a glass of Scotch to ease the internal clatter. I refused, but she was persistent. I drank.
It tasted like adulthood. This is really nice, I thought. The jitters smoothed.
I thought: As coffee is a vehicle to help me transport from the sleeping state to the waking state, maybe alcohol is something to carry me from waking back to sleep again.
I flew to East Lansing for two weeks’ opening shows for Dave Matthews.
I put one of Alfonso’s pills on my amp during sound check at the Boston Garden. Halfway through the set, between songs, I stepped back to the amp and gulped. I wanted to be coming up as soon as the show was over.
We played to a crowd that had mostly not shown up yet. There were pockets of people in the chairs on the arena’s floor—people who paid big bucks for the good seats—who mostly drank their beer, looking bored. The people in the cheap sections were more likely to show up for the opening act: after the tunes, we’d hear a muted roar from the back of the hall.
I began to feel the glow. We clambered down the stairs and into the strange middle ground behind the stage, with big road cases gathered together like cattle, cables running from the stage to generators somewhere, Dave Matthews’s techs in states of distraction. By the monitors there was a tiny TV screen hooked up to a camera, currently showing an empty drummer’s stool. The guy’s kit was so huge, jungled with cymbals, chimes, tom-toms, that they needed the TV screen to communicate.
There was one lonely guy sitting at a computer. His job was to feed lyrics into the teleprompter. I thought: Who does this guy drink with when he gets on the tour bus at night?
Our dressing room was a visiting-team locker room. There were empty massage tables and stationary bikes; the lockers had been covered with white sheets. A guy from Warner Bros. stood by the sandwich platter. He had horn-rimmed glasses and an aw-shucks, kid from the cul-de-sac, Encyclopedia Brown demeanor. The high ratcheted up and I started to think he realized I was oozing into another state of being. He seemed weirdly menacing. He engaged me in some good-show-excited-for-New-York-tomorrow? chat; my eyes must’ve been ping-pong balls.
I got more googly-eyed as he chatted; I hopped up on one of the stationary bikes and started pedaling. Idly, then furiously. I stopped pedaling, and the force of the exertion shot an intense blast of drugs—when you’re on E, and you move intensely, then stop, you feel like you’ve ignited. This is why E goes so perfectly with dancing. My body shook in pleasure and disorientation. Encyclopedia Brown was still talking. I dismounted and walked off midsentence.
Dave Matthews took the stage to grand hurrahs. I walked out of the barricades and into the crowd, looked up at the people in the stands, the spotlights tracing over them. The whole place seemed to be breathing in unison.
I was grabbed by a girl in a hippie dress and pulled into the seats. “Dance with us!”
Are you on E? I asked idiotically.
“No! We’re drunk!” she said. My bones were noodles.
I felt like a vice-presidential candidate. I walked the rings of the stadium, slapping hands with fans here or there who recognized me. I was by myself, on drugs, grinningly holding up the all-access pass on a lanyard around my neck to security as they stepped up to block my way. They parted resentfully. This is what I wanted to do with my life. Be outrageously high, be absolutely alone except for the random high fives and yelped You’re awesome’s.
Our bus was parked with a dozen other buses in a concrete chamber beneath the stadium. One weirdness of an arena tour is that you go to sleep on the bus at night as it heads to the next show, and then wake up inside a hockey stadium, in a giant grey room—some of them big as a double football field—lit with yellow fluorescence, neither in daytime nor night, in the loud thrumming of all the buses’ generators. Once you had your coffee in you, you had to clamber all over the arena searching for an exit to see what kind of day it was.
Our bus was rented from a company that painted the same murals on all their buses—a beach scene, in a purple sunset, with gentle waves, driftwood, and a beached rowboat—with subtle variations of the elements in the picture, like a puzzle in Highlights magazine. There were several buses from the company on this tour. After one night, early on, when I looked in panic from bus to muraled bus, not knowing which one was mine, I memorized an aggregation of seagulls to know which one to get into.
As the bus pulled out of the arena that night, I was in the back lounge of the bus. The E began to wear off, and in grief I gulped another. I came up as the sun came up. Not knowing what else to do, I took off all my clothes. I lay on the banquette, savoring the ever-diminishing buzz. Each time I felt it subside a level, I would get up and manically improvise weird calisthenics, causing a rush. Each rush less satisfying than the one before it.
In New York, we played Madison Square Garden. I had one E left. Dave brought me onstage to do something with the band—I improvised an onomatopoetic melody: frighteningly manic, scary fake joy. I danced circles around Dave—literally. I’m guessing now that every member of the band was staring at me with bayonets in their eyes, this freak who had seized their stage. I was oblivious. I introduced each of them in detail—though I couldn’t remember some of their last names—by their star sign and their affinity for hiking or swimming. The audience—fucking sold-out Madison Square Garden—looked like a sea of love lapping at the stage.
The second night I smoked weed: the jam was more contemplative. I scorned myself for wasting that one E on the drive out of Boston. Luke had come to the show, and I took him on my customary perambulation. We stopped on one of the upper levels to watch the music a little. There was a fifteen-year-old hippie girl dancing. She turned around and saw me. Her eyes lit up. I realized that I was wearing the same clothes I had worn onstage with Dave, and having essentially been in the Dave Matthews Band, I was a celebrity. I playfully shushed her: don’t reveal my secret identity. She screamed. In seconds I was dogpiled by fifteen-year-old girls. Like a Monkee. Luke yanked me to safety.
After a year of cold London rain, my heart was sick; I wanted to be in the sunshine. Gus was from Pensacola, so I went there to rejuvenate. He put me up with a guy named Nick, one of his henchmen. (Gus had dudes in Pensacola he called henchmen: Henchman Nick, Henchman Tim, Henchman Ramel.) So I went down to the Florida Panhandle to dry my soggy soul in Nick’s spare bedroom.
It’s said that Pensacola isn’t reall
y Florida, but rather the part of Alabama that they put in Florida. The houses around the near-deserted downtown were battered shotgun shacks. Nick’s small house was under a giant pink overpass; the cars on I-10 whooshed towards Jacksonville or Mobile. I had mailed myself eight different varieties of weed on the Amsterdam stop of the European tour right before I moved there, so I had this little rainbow of marijuana—yellow-haired buds next to purplish ones next to ones with a sheen of silver crystals. I got stoned and sat on the porch writing songs, as the freight train rumbled past on tracks thirty yards from the house.
(A couple of years later, Nick briefly worked for Soul Coughing on tour, tuning instruments poorly. He remarked about one tune, “I remember that one—you wrote it on my porch!” My bandmates glared disgustedly.)
Nick’s name wasn’t really Nick. He had picked up some girl by pretending he was an English guy named Nick, and the lie snowballed. For years, he had to use the accent around her. Nick was a devoted cigarette smoker, merrily acknowledging the deadliness. This was when I was still smoking; hanging out with Nick was celebrating tar.
(I smoked three packs a day. Ridiculous. It was like a job. I woke up, and began the work of the first pack. It was a repetitive, manly task, like getting up early every day to chop down pine trees.)
Nick owned Sluggo’s, the punk rock bar in Pensacola. It was on Palafox Street, which was the main drag until the malls came along. Most of the storefronts were empty, except for a knickknack shop run as a vanity project for a navy officer’s wife, and a uniform store. Sluggo’s didn’t draw a sailor crowd; the sailors went to a bar done up as an ersatz New Orleans house with a wrought-iron balcony. Pensacola was a born-again stronghold; occasionally at the fake New Orleans there’d be demonstrations against moral turpitude. They held up signs with pictures of Hell and Bible citations. The protesters stayed politely across the street from the bar, obeying city ordinances. When 8 PM came around, they put down their signs and dispersed.
Sluggo’s was threadbare, dirty-carpeted, furnished with ratty couches, festooned with band stickers. Nick’s sound engineer and factotum was a guy who’d dropped out of the air force and drifted to Sluggo’s. His name was Ryan, but he went by the rapper-inspired handle Ry Moe Dee. The club survived on the local alternative community, which was oddly substantial, and the happenstance that when touring acts had a gig in Tampa, and then a gig in Birmingham or New Orleans, they needed someplace to play in between. You’d see British bands, feted in the hyperbolic U.K. music publications, bewildered to be playing this dingy joint in front of five people on a Tuesday night.
A San Francisco queer-punk band played. The bass player pulled out a floppy dildo and waved it around between songs, talking about how he hadn’t gotten laid, and thus it had gotten much usage on the tour. The audience squealed in delighted shock. I bumped into him after the show. He did a double take; he was a Soul Coughing fan. “What are you doing here?!”
Nick also had a rave bar around the corner called Bedlam, where in the early evenings a fat guy on Ecstasy would flop around, shirtless, on the empty dance floor, his folds jiggling in the mirrored walls. There was this weird thing where half the people in Pensacola called Sluggo’s “Sluggo,” and Bedlam “Bedlam’s.”
A guy named Kent lived in Nick’s garage. He was known around town because he’d done an airbrush portrait of David Lee Roth on a t-shirt and had given it to him backstage at a Van Halen show; D.L.R. actually wore it, with the sleeves cut off, in the video for “Jump.” Kent was quiet and strange, and was supposedly involved in twelve-step programs, which creeped me out. There was a picture of him tacked to the wall in Sluggo’s—among other pictures of the friends of the bar—twice his current size, bloated and red. He left a copy of Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story lying around, and I read it one afternoon, doing bong hits between chapters.
I met a lot of girls in Pensacola. Slept with some. None of them smoked weed, and were thus unsuitable for repeat visits. How many beautiful women did I blow off because they didn’t get high?
We did a package tour sponsored by a clothing company; they set up a little concourse of booths in the back with snowboarding gear on display, and complementary energy drinks. The booths were run by a crew of post-collegiate kids who were so excited to be traveling in a tour bus with a bunch of rock bands they could’ve shit themselves. Every night was a party on their bus; they’d entice off-duty strippers to come aboard and get drunk with them, then their alpha, the pack leader—so selected for his huge cock—would get one to suck him off while the fratty rabble applauded.
Naturally the bands used the concourse kids’ bus as the party salon, keeping the riffraff off their own buses. There I touched a set of fake tits for the first time.
Off-duty stripper: “I just got them!”
Me, taking them in my hands: They’re so FAKE!
I ended up in an irritating threesome with her and one of the concourse kids, a guy with a pharaoh’s beard and gigantic raver pants. He ate her out while I kissed her, and she made out with me, dully. Then we switched. I was better at eating her pussy than the other guy; she kissed him passionately, thrilled.
The headlining band had a reputation of self-righteous sobriety. The strongest item on their rider was a package of Pixy Stix, which they would rip open, downing the baby-blue powder in one gulp, while laughing at us as we stumbled, wasted, from our dressing room.
Their singer was this veteran of half-assed alternative rock bands who had finally hit pay dirt, sinking hit after hit. Casual conversation with him usually involved radio-industry-ese, phrases like “It got great phones,” and words like spins and adds. There was almost always an ultra-hot girl waiting for him by the side of the stage. I figured out his racket; for their encore, the roadies would troll the crowd, taking girls by the hand to the stage and then lifting them up on it, along with a few token boys. The crowd laughed and jumped around to the song, and then, as they were filing off the stage, the singer would grab his selected girl by the wrist, just as she walked behind the speakers and out of the audience’s view.
I thoroughly player-hated the guy. Plus, what good is trumpeting your pious sobriety if you’re just going to be addicted to something else?
The other act on the bill was the rapper Redman. I met him when I opened the door to the back lounge of the concourse kids’ bus and happened upon his ass as he was fucking a plump girl who still had her shirt on. Rock bands were required to maintain a dour decorum-of-authenticity, but Redman’s bus was wrapped with a gigantic ad for his album. His record company hired street-teamers ; as he played, they stood out in the crowd with placards, waving them up and down.
He had two hype men, twins whom they called “the twins”—they interjected “yeah” and “uh-huh” into microphones while Redman rapped the verses—a DJ, and a white guy who was selling mushrooms. The entire party tripped for most of the tour. Mushroom-fed Redman felt indestructible—he took a fake swing at a security guard at a show in Idaho; his fist swooshed inches from the guy’s face. Then Redman just wandered away.
At a show in Montana, Redman was busted for weed; one of the tour managers talked the constables out of taking him in. On a tour with fifty, maybe sixty techs and musicians and decadent energy-drink purveyors, most of whom carried some kind of contraband, the one guy who gets busted is the black guy.
Redman liked a song of ours, and one night just showed up onstage with a mic, singing the chorus. The next night he came on and did the chorus and the little chant section after the chorus. The next night, he added a freestyle. By the time he left the tour, he would come on and do two freestyle verses, two choruses, and a throw-your-hands-in-the-air chant; we’d end the song with the simulated death of Redman in a hail of sonic gunfire.
He left because he got a better offer. Rock agents would’ve scrupulously turned down the money because they’d committed to the lower-paying tour, but hip-hop agents were more cutthroat. He was replaced by the Black Eyed Peas—then unknowns—who we
re supergeeky and wanted every member of every other band they could round up to join them for a big jam at the end of their set. I’d say, “Sure,” and then would find someplace else to be when the time rolled around. These guys are going nowhere, I thought.
The buses traveled as a caravan. One night, at 3 AM, all the buses stopped for an hour. We found out that the concourse bus had seen a car flip over, tumbling into a ditch. One of the concourse kids was trained as an EMT, and he ran out onto the median and held the head of the driver up, keeping his broken neck aligned.
Apparently he cracked corny jokes for twenty minutes until the ambulance arrived, to keep the guy from going into shock. “He’ll probably never walk again,” said the kid, “but it was a good night.”
I was supereffusive with the EMT kid, called him a superhero. The next night, and every night for the remainder of the tour, he would come into our dressing room—uninvited—drink our beer, grin cheesy grins, and make schmoozy, repetitive small talk about the night he saved a life.
We played New York on the tour’s last night. I met a cute blonde girl from the hedge-fund belt of Connecticut and brought her back to my apartment. I crushed Ecstasy pills, cut the powder into lines, and we sniffed them up.
I put Marvin Gaye on. “Why are we listening to this old music,” the girl said. “Do you have any Sublime?”
I kept sniffing the lines, and she, nervously, kept sniffing them alongside me, trying to keep up. As we were fucking, I noticed she was frowning. I came, and she ran to the bathroom, where she lay on the cool floor moaning.
What do I do if this girl dies? I thought.
No compassion.
“I’ll be OK,” she kept saying.
I went up on my roof, naked, freaked out on the E, feeling radiant under the New York sky, which had been turned green by the city’s ambient light.
