by Mike Doughty
When we went to Los Angeles to make our third record, I had more or less given up. In Pensacola, I’d taken recordings of the drummer, made in rehearsal, loaded them into a sampler, looped them, and wrote songs to them. In the studio, I laid the loops down as a scratch track, recorded my vocal over it, and then went back to the Magic Hotel, a place of dingy apartments around a pool—there were porn shoots in the suite next to mine—next door to the magicians’ clubhouse, the Magic Castle. The rest of the band came up with parts and recorded them to the track while I was gone. I mostly didn’t care.
I was beset with migraines, almost daily. In the midst of recording, I’d see a spot in my vision, shaped and colored like a diamond, shimmering. It gave me a psychedelic blind spot—I’d look at my hands and see fingers missing, look at myself in the mirror and the left side of my face would be blank. Over an hour or so, the diamond spot would grow, I would get blinder, eventually the whole world would look strobe lit. Then the pain and nausea came on. I spent much of the sessions lying in my dark room in the Magic Hotel, trying not to focus on the horrendous throb in my temples, popping Valiums and Ambiens. Occasionally getting up for dry heaves.
An L.A. friend took me to the Formosa, a shabby Hollywood bar left over from a ’40s heyday as a star magnet. She introduced me to a gorgeous friend; we went out for drinks, then parked her Nissan in front of the Magic Hotel and made out. The next time we were meant to go out, I had a migraine. I called her with regrets. Then the next time: the same. The third time our plans were preempted by a migraine, I didn’t even call her. I was too embarrassed. She came to the Magic Hotel and called my room; I unplugged the phone. She left a bewildered message, called the next day, called the next.
I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard, which I did every day to the studio, just to confound conventional Los Angeles behavior. I was stopped on the corner, waiting for the light, and a powder-blue pickup truck with three Mexican guys came screeching to a halt directly in front of me. “Hey, clown! Clown! You fucking clown! Ha ha, fuck you, you fucking clown!”
I turned around and saw a guy in a clown suit standing there looking embarrassed.
Stanley Ray didn’t believe in my migraines. “They’re not that bad. It’s just an excuse for you to get out of the studio,” he said.
We went out to see a band we both adored, after the session. When I walked into the club, I saw that the head of the opening act’s singer was missing. It had been blanked out in my brain by an oncoming migraine. I told Stanley Ray.
“Well, we’re already here, don’t even think I’m going to drive you home,” he said, indignantly.
I waited for an hour in front of the club for a taxi, the diamond spot in my eyes slowly growing.
Stanley Ray and I went to a comedy show at Largo, on Fairfax, every Monday night when we were in Los Angeles making the record. Patton Oswalt, David Cross, Paul F. Tompkins, Sarah Silverman, Todd Barry, all these amazing comedians playing this small room. The then-unknown Jack Black’s Tenacious D would debut at that show, alas, the week after I left California.
Stanley Ray and I got stoned before the show in the car. We were both at the point where getting high barely got us high: we just got paranoid and groggy. “Why do we do this?” said Stanley Ray. “It doesn’t make anything better. Isn’t that what addiction is, when you keep getting high, but it doesn’t do anything, and you don’t want to, but can’t stop?”
What? I said. That’s ludicrous.
Amusingly, Saul Mongolia was appointed the head of A&R. I met him at his office—Warner Bros. Records was in a big wooden building that looked like a ski lodge from 1974—and spat bitterly about how terrible the tracks were, that I didn’t give a fuck. I expected him to sympathize. But now his job was to make sure the acts on his label recorded something the radio guys at the label could use.
“You’re still going for a single, aren’t you?” he asked, disconcerted.
Um, yeah, I said, realizing on the spot that I had to lie.
We had a break. I went back to Pensacola with the understanding that I had to write a single. I got high, took Valium to soothe the paranoia, wrote guitar parts, wrote melodies, ordered Papa John’s twice a day. Our manager kept calling and asking if I was writing.
I was tortured, freaked out, convinced that the jig was up, that Saul Mongolia would crumple us up and throw us out if I didn’t come up with the goods. As I was grinding through chord progression after chord progression, I wondered what my bandmates were doing at exactly the same time.
I wrote a couple of good ones, one of which had the chorus “I don’t need to walk around in circles.” I was talking about the endless stupid cycle of life in the band. The first verse referenced, obliquely, the Winchester Mystery House, where the widow of a rifle magnate, convinced that the ghosts of those killed by her husband’s guns were coming for her, built endless rooms and extensions on her mansion—she kept having them built until the day she died—staircases going nowhere, superfluous corridors, all to disorient the evil spirits. “When you were languishing in rooms I built to foul you in,” went the first line of the song.
It would remind radio programmers of Sugar Ray’s “Fly,” and Sublime’s “What I Got,” giant hits that, hilariously, were both produced by Saul Mongolia. “Circles” was the biggest radio song Soul Coughing ever had.
It was 1998. I moved back to New York. I looked at places in Brooklyn, but realized that I couldn’t get drugs delivered out there. So I got a place I couldn’t afford on Rivington Street in Manhattan.
Luke, now living on Avenue B, had a roommate with a great drug delivery dude: the tackle box man. His tackle box had compartments of every drug you could want: Vicodin, cocaine, Ecstasy, Quaaludes (Quaaludes! In 1998!), weed, those skinny, four-dose sticks of Xanax—everything but heroin (because heroin is bad, right? I mean, you’re OK being fucked out of your mind on five different drugs every night of your life as long as you’re not on heroin). Alas, the tackle box man had a very specific clientele and didn’t like the looks of me. So I went to Luke’s house whenever I needed something that my own drug delivery guys wouldn’t get.
(Luke and I had the same favorite scene in The Godfather: the one in which the singer Johnny Fontane—whom the Godfather sprang from a contract by having the severed horse head put in the bed of his studio boss—is asked by Al Pacino to repay the favor: appear at his casino in Las Vegas. The look on Johnny Fontane’s face says he realizes it’s bad for his career, but Johnny says, “Sure, Mike. I’ll do anything for my godfather, you know that.” He says it without resentment: he’s loyal, selflessly obedient. Duty, Honor, Country: the West Point motto. We absorbed it.)
I returned to the studio with “Circles” and was spiteful; as we mixed the album, my bandmates increasingly contemptuous of me, I was vindictive; I struggled to get the artwork done and was despondent.
In the album photos, I wore a hat. The graphic designer used a miniature silhouette of me in an upper corner of the back cover as a graphics detail; the bass player called him up and told him to shave the hat off the graphic, lest somebody examining the back cover with a magnifying glass—who remembered I was the hat guy in the inside photo—would recognize me.
My bandmates told me they wanted the credits to simply be our names, not identifying the instruments we played. Meaning, nobody would look at the CD and know which name was the singer’s.
Now I was in a constant state of shivering rage.
Stanley Ray brought us up to a meeting at the record company offices in Rockefeller Center. Our manager was there.
“Before we continue with this, Doughty,” said the manager, “we want to be clear that you want to be a part of this.”
“Things are really good, and you don’t care, it’s like you want to be a problem,” said Stanley Ray. “You can’t be unhappy. I’m the one who’s allowed to be unhappy.” He actually said this.
“Don’t be stupid, G,” said the drummer, “you don’t know how good you have it. We don�
��t want to hear you complain anymore.”
The other two band guys glared at me with their arms crossed.
I stood up, wobbling. Tears were coming on. I couldn’t break down in front of these hateful people. I stumbled towards the door. Stanley Ray followed me. “You can’t leave,” he said, urgently, kind of bug-eyed.
I went to the bathroom, got in a stall, and let the sobs out. It was a marble bathroom; the sobs pinged off the marble at outrageous volume. I heard somebody come in. I didn’t want, like, the new guy in the marketing department, or whoever it was, to hear me. So I pulled the sob in, and gulped it down, and my eyes went dead. I sat through the rest of the meeting, waxen, lifeless.
So here I was in this universe where I was the problem; I was the devil’s asshole at the center of Hell. Stanley Ray, the manager, Encyclopedia Brown, even the roadies, were, like, What the fuck is wrong with Doughty? Why can’t Doughty just get it together? Wouldn’t everything be fine if Doughty just chilled the fuck out?
None of these guys considered that, maybe, if I called it a day, maybe they’d be out of a job. It didn’t occur to me, either.
After that meeting, they got me to a shrink. I went up to one of those doorman buildings on the Upper West Side with shrinks in every nook on the first five floors. If you go to a certain part of the Bowery, around Delancey Street, every other building has a lighting store; there’s a part of Hell’s Kitchen that’s all wholesale gardening supplies; there’s an area on Broadway around Twentieth Street filled with stores selling hair for weaves. As there is the lamp district, the flower district, and the wig district, so there is the shrink district.
I mentioned casually, within the first fifteen minutes, that I smoked weed: not problematically, I just needed it to make music and have sex.
“Oh,” she said. “There’s twelve-step meetings down on St. Mark’s Place. You might be interested in what goes on there.”
What? What the fuck? Is this what shrinks do, just immediately assume anybody into drugs is an addict? Recommend the corny self-help jive without the slightest understanding of your nuances?
I kept showing up for therapy, even as I was becoming ever more disconnected to my life. She’d ask me what was going on, and I’d say, Nothing. Oh, wait, tomorrow I’m flying out to go on tour for a couple months.
“Tomorrow?! Where are you going?!”
I don’t know.
“You don’t know?”
No, I’m getting picked up at one, and then I’m flying to—um—Arizona? I think.
“Where do you go after Arizona?”
I don’t know.
“You really don’t know?”
No.
I was waking up in the morning, trying to figure out where to get coffee; I’d lie in bed until the late afternoon, unable to decide.
I forgot how to take out the trash. A city of trash grew around the wastebasket, empty bags of Chinese delivery food that I used as supplemental garbage receptacles. They surrounded the trash can, five bags deep.
How do people do this? I thought. How do people take out the garbage?
My shrink got out of her chair and sat on the floor. “I’m a bag of Chinese food,” she said. “What am I trying to tell you?”
I laughed. She persisted.
“Talk to me, I’m the Chinese food, what am I saying?”
They sent me to the shrink because they figured that, naturally, she’d go, How can this guy not realize what a fantastic band he’s in? Why would he ruin everybody’s fun? Let’s cheer him up and set him right.
She did nothing of the sort. She was leading me to realize that I could, when the moment was right, leave the band, get out of this freakish, abusive relationship.
When I first saw the shrink, I demanded antidepressants. My shrink sent me to this guy uptown whom I loathed, but he gave me drugs. I even duped him into prescribing some Xanax. The antidepressants worked, but I lost the ability to have orgasms. It was worth the trade: for a good long moment, the crushing depression slightly eased. I could function, with the raging shake downgraded to a quieter ticking.
I got a gig writing a pseudonymous column called Dirty Sanchez for the New York Press. It was a venting of the ugly things I’d learned about the music business, an expression of self-hatred, of how cheated I felt that, in attaining my dream of rock stardom, I ended up in this horrible band of torturers and cockroaches. Mostly, though, I did it because I needed the money. Despite our putative success—playing to 2,000 people a night, selling hundreds of thousands of CDs—when I moved back to New York I wasn’t making enough money to get by in Manhattan.
It was a good time to be a satirist. The music world had gone goofy and bizarre: this was the golden era of the boy bands. I went to Times Square for an NSYNC appearance on MTV’s Total Request Live, amazed by the sound of the girls screaming. One girl would start screaming on some high-pitched note, then another would up it to a higher note, then another higher, and all the screaming girls gravitated to the same note, while some ultra-screamer in the bunch found a note even higher than that, to waver above the din. The most inspired avant-garde oratorio I ever heard.
I exulted over the triumph of choreographed fluff over angsty, earnest alternative rock. The diminishing rock stars whined about the death of realness; I always felt trivialized or ignored by them, so I dashed off column after column reveling in their self-pity.
The New York Press was started in 1988 by a guy who wrote a column called Mugger; in menacing ’80s New York, this was audacious, but in clean, peppy ’90s New York—where screaming teenage girls could gather safely in a Disney-renovated Times Square—it was an anachronism. He was a mean-spirited Republican from Long Island who grew up a Red Sox fan—to grow up a Red Sox fan on Long Island bespeaks a long career of calculated assholery. The editor was John Strausbaugh, who wrote about UFOs, maverick artists, angelically insane fringe-theorists, defiantly weird old-guard downtowners, blackface minstrelsy, and the emergence of Elvis-ism as a legitimate faith. He wrote a spellbinding allegory of alien abduction as the experience of a trout, caught, then thrown back into the lake. He coached me in the delicate art of interviewing the insane before I went out to Crown Heights to interview an old man who wrote a book listing the 223 ways to tell whether someone is possessed by demons. Strausbaugh was the heart of the thing. The joy of it was the friction between him and the incongruous Republican-ness, but most people identified the paper simply with Mugger’s gleeful repugnance.
“The New York Press? I don’t read that, who does?” said Peter Mack, sniffily. He’d grown up to own a company making video games.
I write this column called Dirty Sanchez, I said.
“YOU’RE DIRTY SANCHEZ?!” he yelped.
We had released our third album; our shows had gotten bigger, and our video was now on MTV. There was a modicum of actual fame in my life. But every Monday I had to shut the curtains in my hotel room, type up the column and e-mail it.
We had a day off in Santa Barbara. Everybody else went to the beach; I sat in a room banging out the column. It was only 800 words, and all I had to do was look up some piece of music news online—usually just grabbing it off MTV.com—and riff on it bile-fully. An hour’s work? Two hours? There was a bag of weed sitting at the edge of the desk. I told myself I wasn’t going to smoke until I had finished the column, but, of course I smoked, and then I was lingering, stoned, half-lidded, over the keys, trying to get a sentence together. An hour or so after that, I told myself I wouldn’t smoke again until I’d finished the column, but I did. It took me nine hours.
Every week: I’m not gonna smoke today, I’m gonna finish the column and then I’ll get high. But every Monday I ended up with a pipe in my mouth, and the excruciating struggle to write.
I got a video camera and became obsessed with it. I started making this endless, aimless movie on tour; I’d record something for three seconds, then cut to the next arbitrary, oddly beautiful thing: a tour of randomness.
I was in Amster
dam, and I spent the day videotaping Dutch snippets, then took a break to get stoned. I went to a coffee shop called GOA, where I flirted with the bespectacled bartendress. As is de rigueur for arty Americans in Europe, I tried to bond with her by ridiculing Americans. I smoked some weed—purple-threaded, sparkly-crystal-dusted—and fell into paranoia, and then I was unable to speak to the cute bartendress anymore.
There was a guy sitting alone in the corner of the coffee shop with a bong. He looked to me like an American who had come to Amsterdam on vacation to get high for a week or two. He took bong hits and lolled back in his chair. A Portishead record was playing, and every time a chorus soared, he pumped his fist in the air, oblivious to those around him, anguished joy on his face.
I went videotaping in the red light district. All the whores sit on stools, behind glass doors, in gaudy pink light. You knock on the glass to see what the price is, and the whores age fifteen years immediately upon opening the door. I was shooting the empty windows, making an elegiac reel of empty stools sitting in pink-lit doorways, meaning the whore was in the back with a client.
I wandered the endless alleys, door after door. You could select a woman of any possible combination of attributes—a plump redhead? A skinny Latina? A tattooed black woman? How weird to think that, if I wanted to buy sex, I’d have to decide on my type. It was like the Strand bookstore in New York, where the shelves are so numerous that you shouldn’t go if you’re looking for something specifically, but rather in the hope you’ll stumble on something unexpectedly. Otherwise, you’d be cursed to wander the aisles forever.
