by Mike Doughty
In my room, I videotaped a tube of Ta Prohm toothpaste, and a wild Bollywood dance spectacle on TV. Men danced the cabbage patch and threw paint on each other.
The boring light ceded to a conjuration of pink and orange. I looked out the window and saw Khmers zipping around on their mopeds, pack animals, magical chaos. I didn’t want to see the temples, I wanted to sit on a bed and watch bizarre, exotic life through a window and on a screen. Not to be in it, but to long to be in it.
The waiter at breakfast tried to set up an appointment to practice his English. Heavy-headed, I assented and then flaked. The next day, he was genuinely confused as to why I didn’t make it. I skipped breakfast the day after.
I went to the tiny pharmacy to clean them out. I piled box upon box of Valium onto the floor, then noticed—more preposterous luck!—boxes of codeine. I started flipping those out of the case as well.
I heard a French-accented voice behind me. “What are you looking for?” I turned around and saw a manly, unshaven guy in mirrored shades. I said something half-assed and dismissive.
“Maybe I can help you find what you’re looking for,” he said.
I snarled, kept rummaging. He shrugged and went away.
Maybe he was trying to help me in the way I wanted to be helped. Who knows what that guy knew how to get—heroin? opium? Here we were in the immediate vicinity of the Golden Triangle. There were a number of basic drug-addict skills that I never got together.
The frat boy took me on a tour of a floating village: barges and boats tied together in the Tonle Sap Lake, with houses and stores on them. It’s populated by ethnic Vietnamese; they’re a minority in Cambodia, regarded with suspicion and contempt.
Our boat was steered by a Khmer kid, maybe thirteen, in worn jeans, with a heart-shaped American flag patch sewn on the ass pocket. We cruised slowly through the weird scene. Rowboats loaded up with goods—plasticware, cookware, canisters of condensed milk, fruit, inflatable toys—eased past us. Naked kids jumped gleefully into the water from the railing of a houseboat as we passed, shouting to me. The frat boy laboriously cut open a durian fruit with a pocketknife, and we ate the soft, stinking flesh. We floated up to a barge where plastic picnic chairs were gathered around under a canopy.
The proprietor produced beer from a cooler. Then the entertainment began. There was a monkey chained to a rail. A beer was cracked open and handed to the monkey, who grabbed it with both hands and feet, rolled onto his back, and gulped it frantically. The proprietor brought another cooler and set it down, opened it up, reached in and removed a huge snake. He swung the hissing monster at the terrorized, drunk monkey. The monkey shrieked. Everybody on the barge laughed. I faked a laugh because I didn’t want to seem unappreciative.
The snake was taken away, and the monkey crouched there, unnerved, his eyes shifting around wildly. The proprietor plucked a cat from under a table and brought it towards the monkey. The cat mewled and struggled. He brought the cat down to the monkey and held it down. The monkey drunkenly grabbed the cat’s flanks humped its back. The cat wrestled out of his grip and shot away.
The proprietor came over with another cat, a grey one. This one wasn’t struggling so much. It seemed resigned. The monkey took the grey cat by the ears and humped its skull.
“OHHHH!” squealed the frat boy. “HE IS SUCH A NAUGHTY MONKEY!”
They gave the monkey another beer. He drank with greedy relief.
I was back in New York, and out of Cambodian codeine.
A girl with an unsingable name sent me an e-mail out of the blue, saying she was on a high school field hockey team with the assistant of a woman who worked at a music magazine, and that she loved my music. Her name was a melodious string of vowels. Just looking at the e-mail, I decided that a girl with that name must be beautiful.
She came to a gig at Irving Plaza. She was a funny Valentine, with a long, strange nose disfigured by plastic surgery received when she was teenage and still growing, and blue eyes so pale they were translucent. She was shit-faced, but she walked steadily, with folded arms.
We met a week later at a Moroccan-themed bar. We sat in an alcove, downing gin and tonics and Vicodins that I had gotten from the gas-happy dentist. Her mom was from Kiev: I made her say ridiculous things in Ukrainian to me. We made out messily. I don’t remember if she came home with me.
She worked at a jealously regarded web company—this being the height of the cash-shitting internet boom—that would one day crash and dwindle to nothing, along with all the other jealously regarded web companies. I met her there to take her to dinner. She was glassy-eyed. She didn’t eat. I should have asked for a bump of her dope right there.
I had been in the band for seven years, and I had given up. I didn’t know yet that I could beat the stuff that was killing my heart. I listened to Stanley Ray, who shook me to my core with masterful strikes of passive-aggression when I made feeble efforts to convince him that I could leave—because I couldn’t just walk away from the band, I needed someone to tell me it was OK to do so. I believed the dudes in my band, who did all they could to keep me insecure. I believed my manager, who commissioned on gross, of course, and thus would make more money if we stayed together.
So I woke up one morning in 1999, and there were a few bags of dope left over from the night before. I said to myself: There’s no way off this despairing march. My promise to myself to keep the heroin use somewhat in control, because I wanted to protect my artistic faculties, had become laughable. Why? I was going to get high first thing this morning, and the next, and the next. I’ll stumble along, show up when they tell me to, sing when it’s time to sing. I’d eke out a mediocre existence. The very worst thing that could happen, death, seemed outlandish, but, were it to come, maybe wouldn’t actually be the worst thing at all.
When my flight back from Cambodia landed, I immediately convinced the girl with the unsingable name to call her heroin guy. We went back to my tiny place on Rivington Street, cut lines on a CD, and sniffed them. We lay in bed all night, listened to Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, and felt that spreading ease. “Must Jesus bear this cross alone?” they sang. “There’s a cross for everyone. I know there’s a cross for me.”
She bumbled out of bed in stark white morning light—I didn’t have curtains—and off to the lavish loft of that internet concern. She took a bag of dope. She told me later that she liked to do little bumps in the bathroom during the day, using a pen cap as a spoon.
I put on my t-shirt with the skull and crossbones and the admonishment to watch for land mines, and set up my video camera on its tripod. I then sniffed a line, and smoked some weed from the ceramic-skull pipe. The tape rolled as I nodded out in a chair.
One morning we woke up together, and were junkies, and she was in love with me. The first month of our three-sided love affair—me, heroin, and the girl with the unsingable name—was beautiful.
We kept listening to the Soul Stirrers. Redemptive songs: Jesus, the woman at the well, touching the hem of his garment, the river Jordan. In delirium, I began to think of myself as a Christian. Of course, I thought, anybody who says they believe in god is lying; but to profess a belief in god, to go through the motions, to be among other people who knew you knew that they knew that it was all a sham: there was redemptive power in this. I wrote “Help me, Jesus” on a Post-It and put it up over my stove.
I sniffed some dope before going to sleep, though I didn’t need any more to pass out—“You’re going to build up a tolerance,” the unsingable girl chided—but I wanted that soothing tingle as I drifted off. The moment before oblivion was the best part of life. The girl with the unsingable name had these tiny hairs on the back of her neck; I would spoon her, brush my lips back and forth across them, smell her smell, raise chill-bumps on her flesh. We stopped having sex—our intimacy was transmitted through the heroin and the hairs on her neck.
I came to the conclusion that the unsingable girl wasn’t good enough—partially because what person who could love me c
ould be good enough? I resented her, devalued everything about her, felt sorry for myself, refused to think of her as my girlfriend. What am I doing with this awful girl?
We went out drinking; I bumped into some friends. I left the girl with the unsingable name in the corner as I flirted shamelessly with a friend of mine’s girlfriend. At one point I drunkenly reached out and pinched her nipple. My friend stood by trying to stop himself from punching my lights out. I shrugged at the girl with the unsingable name, and she followed me home.
She called me from work and said, “You don’t care about me. You think I’m lo-fi. You’re going to dump me.”
I would say, Why would you think that? No, no.
I beeped the guy at five. “This is Greg. Send me a numeric page. Do not leave a message. Send a numeric page, a numeric page, a NUMERIC PAGE.”
The buzzer rang—glorious buzzer, the drugs were here!—and he came up the stairs, looking like one of those polished, mellow neo-soul stars in his buttery-soft leather jacket. I came bounding down two flights to meet him. What a nice customer, I wanted him to think, he doesn’t even make me come up all five flights. What a good egg.
(Years later, clean, when I had Thai food delivered, I’d hear the buzzer, and my heart would involuntarily leap.)
He palmed me two bundles of dope. A bundle is ten bags, tiny glassine envelopes bound with a rubber band. For years I remembered, fantasized, about what those two bundles felt like, cupped in my hand: two little ruffles tied in rubber bands.
Greg liked having a minor rock star as a client. Sometimes he’d call back and say he had no plans to drive into Manhattan, then say, well, maybe he would, if he did, he’d call me. He always came. Once he gave me two bonus bags of a new brand called Krack-House ! to test. You hear warnings to take new brands slow, as they might be unexpectedly pure and kill you, but I sniffed them right up, never thinking that I could be so lucky. I mean, lucky to get fabulously pure heroin, not to die. Well, perhaps, on some level I was dimly aware of, lucky to die.
The drugs worked less and less well. I became more and more of an asshole. The unsingable girl yelled at me, “You don’t get high, you just get fucked up!”
She would go home to the Bronx and detox for the weekend, and I would stay home and detox, too. We reconvened a few days later and got high again, but it was never as satisfying as the first month.
Detoxing became routine. After a weekend without heroin, just weed and liquor, I could get a bundle and sniff it for a couple of days, and get high the way I used to, though soon I’d be back to maintenance using again. The gap closed: a weekend’s detox made a day being high; then I could be high for the time it took to sniff just a bundle. Then I’d detox for five days, sniff a bag, and be high for just a blissful fifteen minutes.
It was worth it to me. That’s all I had for delight in my life: my body stopped making any chemical that would make me feel good. Nothing was funny or pleasurable unless it was inside the window between detox and the re-onset of maintenance. I plotted longer detoxes: maybe if I stayed off it for two months, I could get high for a weekend? Six months of a grey, miserable slog through existence in exchange for a good week?
There was an episode of Behind the Music about the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Their guitar player was a dope fiend, and the show used some footage from a Dutch documentary depicting him as a bug-eyed, imbalanced wreck, mumbling about how heroin allowed him to keep a connection “to beauty.” His skin was yellow and grey. He was barely coherent.
The unsingable girl and I had both just detoxed when we saw it.
“Wow, doesn’t that make you jealous?” she asked, longingly.
Oh, good lord, yes, I said.
There was an episode of The Sopranos in which the Jersey gangsters go to Naples to finesse a smuggling connection. The youngest one, Chris, a junkie, sees needle marks on one of the Italian enforcers’ arms, and they spend the whole trip nodding out in a hotel room with the drapes closed.
Chris keeps talking about going to see Mount Aetna. “I’m gonna go see that fucking volcano,” he says. He doesn’t. He flakes on sumptuous dinners, saying he’s got a stomach bug. He’s a teetering cadaver by the time he lands back in Newark, where he hurriedly buys his girlfriend gifts in the duty-free shop; the older gangsters make fun of him for not going to the famous luxury stores of Naples.
Message: Chris has chosen a piteous, destructive stasis over what could be a fascinating life. But I watched him with tremendous envy.
The unsingable girl pitied me obsequiously, wailing that I couldn’t stop.
We’re both junkies, I said.
She gasped. “We’re not junkies!”
She had a list of ex-boyfriends who quickly became more pronounced dope fiends than she was, and she would rail against the terrible things they were doing with their lives.
My lungs weakened. I had so little breath that I would routinely have a panicked, choking fight for air just by standing up from a chair too quickly. I like to leap up and pace whenever I get a good idea. So creativity was hazardous.
I couldn’t stand all the way upright; I shuffled, half bent. It took me ten minutes to cross my tiny apartment, piss, and return to bed. It took half an hour to go down the stairs of my building—I walked backwards, gripping the rail, as if I were descending an Alp.
I never connected this with the $300 worth of dope I was sniffing daily. I was twenty-nine, and I thought, Well, twenty-nine, you know, getting older, the body starts shutting down.
Seriously, I thought this.
There was a Jennifer Lopez video that was on all the time—synopsis: Jennifer Lopez, a carefree girl from the Bronx, goes and picks up her paycheck at the beauty parlor, then gets on the train and heads out on the town with her friends, laughing. The video bewildered me. I knew, just from passive pop-culture consumption, that she was one year older than me. How’s she able to do this? To function?
It was about four blocks to the bank machine. Every day I beeped Greg, and then headed for the stairs. Thirty minutes down. Then one block down Ludlow Street, which was transitioning from a discount market—Hasidic Jewish guys in their black hats and quasi-nineteenth-century garb selling knockoff leather goods—to a groovy-people playground. I felt invisible on the street. Maybe life was moving around me so much faster than I was that I was invisible.
Most likely, though, people were just averting their gaze from this guy who was clearly dying. I didn’t look like a dope fiend, more like a cancer patient.
It took me three lights to cross Delancey, a wide street leading to the Williamsburg Bridge, looming grey in the distance. One Walk and I started across the westbound lanes. When I was half - way across, Don’t Walk started flashing. Drivers would wait, rolling their eyes—gruff white commuters, thuggy dudes in decked-out Mazdas, delivery vans, Jersey-plated cars filled with girls in sequined outfits, en route to parties—as I finally got to the traffic island. Some time spent wheezing on the traffic island, my heart racing. Then I started crossing the eastbound lanes. It took me ninety minutes, sometimes two hours, to the ATM and back.
Puking became so normal that I stopped kneeling. The only thing in my fridge would be a dozen corn-syrup-loaded green or pink simulated-fruit drinks. I’d get ridiculously thirsty, so devoid of nutrients, and down one in a gulp. Five minutes later, I’d walk into the bathroom, stand by the toilet, aim, and puke the entire drink, still the same color it was in the bottle.
The radiators in my apartment broke down, but I didn’t want to get the landlord in there—my garbage can was piled past the brim with empty heroin bags, I’d sometimes take a handful, ball them up, put them in my mouth, suck on them—so, utterly sick, I lay in bed with layer upon layer of clothes on, under the blankets, my breath steaming in the air of my own bedroom.
Greg was primarily a coke dealer: he offered heroin as a comedown option. I think being a coke dealer entitled him to feel a little superiority. This was undermined, perhaps, by watching me die.
I had a mont
h’s abstinence from heroin. A friend—secretly a junkie for years whom I always did coke with, but never did dope with—maybe a drug variation of that O. Henry Christmas story about the watch chain and the comb—called me up, looking for dope for a friend. I beeped Greg.
“Hey man, where’ve you been?”
I, uh, I said, making up a lie, I’ve been in California.
I loaded a lot into that compact lie, and he got it. “That’s good, man, that’s good,” he said. But when I asked him to come into Manhattan, he said, “Uh, there’s nothing really going on with that right now.”
No?
“No.”
Are you sure?
“Yeah.”
It’s bad news when your dealer cuts you off because he doesn’t like watching you die. I didn’t really get it.
In New York, heroin traditionally comes in a tiny glassine envelope with a brand name stamped on top, to identify differences in quality between dealers. I can barely remember the brand names I had: there was one called Ruff Ryders, after the rap label. There was an empty—naturally—bag I found on the C train with the silhouettes of Civil War soldiers firing their rifles and the brand Glory. There was a legendary bag in the early ’90s called Tango and Cash—after a Stallone movie—that was laced with fentanyl and killed a bunch of dope fiends. The dope bag made the cover of the New York Post. Once, after I was clean, I bought a basket at IKEA, looked down into it and thought, hmmm, that tag’s about the size of a bag of dope, thinking nothing of it until months later, when I reached in it and came out with a bag called Timberland. (I flushed the bag—actually, more truthfully, I ripped it open and lovingly sprinkled the powder into the water, then flushed the bag itself—then called clean friends for reassurance. They all told me I had done the right thing; my friend the rock legend said, in a merry tone, “Ah, what a waste.”)
