by Mike Doughty
There was a single brand—other than the sample Krack-House! bags—that Greg brought, and I can’t remember what it was. There wasn’t a logo, it was just the brand, in a simple font, stamped on the bag. My house was filled with hundreds of these discarded bags, ripped open, the contents sucked out. Strewn on the floor, all over the table where I sniffed the dope, stuffed in those bags of leftover takeout Chinese. The name’s just out of reach in my mind. Baffling. Before the heroin binge began, I had gotten a new doctor, the fiancée of a photographer friend from the Knitting Factory days. She liked drugs. Freud’s The Cocaine Papers was on her bookshelf; she had appeared on TV, advocating the decriminalization of Ecstasy for clinical purposes. The first thing she did was switch me to another antidepressant, and I could have orgasms again.
Now, much later, to help me detox, she prescribed a sizable quantity of oxycodone and wrote out cessation plans neatly on legal paper. First day, five pills every two hours; second day, two every three hours; and so on for a week until you were gently delivered from your cravings. What I did was spend three days detoxing, and then gulp them all down on Tuesday. Then I would despair that somehow her detox program hadn’t worked.
I was indignant that the antidepressants had stopped working, too. I went to her and whined, and she prescribed me more. Still no dice. As I sniffed bag after bag, then licked the sniffing plate, then put the bags in my mouth and sucked on them for residue.
It was New Year’s 1999. We all thought, merrily, that when the clock turned to 2000, money would disintegrate in the banks, airplanes would fall out of the sky, the power would go off forever. I had detoxed a week earlier. The Cocaine Papers doc had prescribed Naltrexone to me, which is what they call an “opioid receptor antagonist”; you can use all the dope you want, and you won’t get high.
The unsingable girl came with the only champagne she could find in a convenience store near the Spuyten Duyvil Metro-North stop; it was Whoopi Goldberg–brand champagne. It came in a shrink-wrapped box: two plastic champagne flutes, and a bottle with Whoopi’s signature on the label.
I snarled at her all night. She kept trying to be nice, to have a good New Year’s. But I was intractable. Finally, she said, “Fuck it, I give up.” She pushed me towards the bathroom, where she had been sniffing dope off a random book—a coffee-table book depicting buses in Hong Kong—all night.
I sniffed some, but the Naltrexone worked, and I didn’t get high. Alas.
One day she called and said, “It’s my birthday. You forgot my birthday. You don’t want me anymore. You’re going to break up with me.”
I said, You know what? You’re right. I’m breaking up with you, right now.
“What?!” she said.
By the end of that month I wanted her back. I needed to nuzzle the back of her neck and smell her shoulders. So I went uptown and met her at a decrepit sports bar, and we got drunk.
I tried to kiss her and she pulled away. “You broke up with me on my birthday,” she said.
That was your birthday? I said.
It turned out that on her birthday, on the very day I dumped her, she went out to a bar, saw a band, and made out with the guitar player. They moved in together by the end of the weekend.
“When you broke up with me, I was stunned,” said the unsingable girl. “It came out of nowhere.”
I never asked her to come back to me again, but I was obsessed. I had disdained her, but now she had become perfect. When I got clean, the longing became more acute, partially because she was still out there in the world getting high, like my drug life had just gone on after I left it.
After I was clean, I started writing songs again: they were all about her. I didn’t realize, as I wrote them, that they were in fact lost-love songs addressed to heroin. When I met her, I realized that her beautiful, strange name would make an excellent song title. I tried and tried, but there was something maddening and elusive about it—the accent was on the wrong syllable for the melody, or the sequence of vowels was a clumsy fit on the bar. Every song I wrote for a year was either a song about her, or a song that began as a song about her. In each song there’s some three-syllable point, usually a descending three-note thing of a certain scansion, where her name was. One began with the lyric, “That girl that brought me low.” (As if it were me, not her, who got the boot!) Another was built around the name Madeline, a stand-in name. Another was called “Unsingable Name.”
Stanley Ray called me, speaking in a grave whisper. “Don’t think I don’t know exactly what you’re doing,” he said.
Uh-huh, I said. Gotta go.
That was the last time I spoke to him. Soon after that, he lost his job at Warner Bros.; a new president took charge of the label and sent him a few CDs that he, as an A&R guy, was to review. Stanley Ray found this insulting and fucked-up, refused to surrender his punk rock vainglory, and was fired.
I heard years later that he would rage about what an ingrate I was, how I had once been rad but was now an asshole, didn’t even call him when I was in L.A., that I’d used him and dropped him.
I was still showing up for therapy. It was the only thing I had to do other than write Sanchez, which provided my drug budget.
I didn’t realize how my appearance was changing; I was hollowing, greying out. I became aware that the doormen in my shrink’s office building were alert to me as I waited at the elevators; soon they would stop me and ask where I was going. I was affronted.
I sat in the high-back chair across from her; I nodded out midsentence. I awoke to find her smiling at me. “There are twelve-step meetings down on St. Mark’s Place,” she said.
What?! I said. Are you listening to me?!
I figured the messed-up state of my lungs was asthma. I never had asthma before—even when I was smoking three packs a day. Why me? I kept thinking. I still didn’t connect it to the daily two bundles of heroin.
I went to a peculiarly foul-mooded physician recommended by the Cocaine Papers doc. I told him, cheerfully, that I was addicted to heroin. He gave me an inhaler, showed me how it worked—hold it to your mouth, pump the top, and a little psssht! of mist goes down your throat. He barked at me never to do more than two pumps at a time, never more than twice a day.
If he told me that my problem wasn’t asthma, but that I was overdosing almost daily, I didn’t hear it.
It helped, a little, when my lungs would seize up on the long trek to the bank machine. I ignored the two-pumps rule; nearly collapsed on the traffic island, I’d pump-pssht!-pump-pssht!-pump-pssht! -pump-pssht! the mist until I could almost stand upright.
The sampler player came over to pick up something. I sat in a chair, shriveled, all bones, while he rolled a joint of my weed. We smoked. I offered to tap out a line for him.
“I have things to do. I can’t do heroin,” he said, with a disdainful chuckle.
He called me later and asked me if my heroin guy could get some coke for him, and if so, could I give the guy a call?
I overdosed at Thanksgiving dinner. My parents and my brother and the family of one of my dad’s colleagues were there. Everyone said grace, and I pushed the cranberry sauce around the plate. I went into the bathroom, sniffed some dope, came back to the table, and my lungs started to close up. I pumped at the inhaler desperately, but to no avail. My brother drove me to the hospital. As I sat in the car, gagging, my dad looked at me from the doorway, unsettled, having no idea what was happening.
In the emergency room in Cornwall, I told them, genially, that I was a heroin addict. They strapped a mask to my face that emitted a spooky mist.
The last Soul Coughing show was at the Bowery Ballroom in 1999. It was a benefit for an illustrator at the New York Press who sent a prank e-mail in the guise of a more famous cartoonist, who sued.
I sniffed some dope before heading to sound check, got two cheeseburgers at McDonald’s en route, threw them up the moment I got to the dressing room. Sniffed some more before we went onstage.
In the second song, I felt my
lungs spasming. My brother was stage-side, watching the show. Nearly unable to speak, I motioned him over to me, gasped that I needed my inhaler; it was in the dressing room, in my jacket. I leaned against the proscenium, struggling to breathe. Ages seemed to pass; the audience stared at me shocked and confused; I was trembling, unable to stand. The band vamped on the same groove; my brother came back with the inhaler, and I pumped the mist furiously. I finished the show, which, because it was a benefit with a bunch of bands playing, was mercifully abbreviated.
This guy kept e-mailing me about some festival in Antwerp called Die Nachten, Flemish for “the nights.” He wanted me to read poetry. The first time I read the e-mail I was high, and said sure, and after that I couldn’t get rid of him. Once he showed up backstage in Rotterdam—I walked into the dressing room, and he was just sitting there, which was infuriating.
Eventually he succeeded in confirming me. I was set up on a tiny tour that included a show in Amsterdam and Die Nachten.
I brought a couple bags of dope on the plane, sniffed them in the bathroom, and passed out in Premium Economy on Virgin Atlantic. When I landed in London to connect, I drank a beer at the first bar I came to in the airport; I puffed miserably along my way, barely able to walk. I took an insanely expensive ride all the way across town to London City Airport. I slumped in a black cab on a bright, beautiful day, through London traffic.
I was met in Antwerp by an English tour manager named Pete, an aging Yorkshire rock guy, very meek, who saw his job as making sure the band got where they needed to go, taking utterly no responsibility for anything after that. He’d done a bunch of Soul Coughing tours; once I walked onstage to find that my guitar wasn’t out there, and I ran backstage, scrambling among the road cases of all the other bands’ guitars looking for mine, and Pete just stood there, shrugging. The one thing he was diligent about was letting you know whether or not breakfast was free at the hotel. He wrote it on the slip of paper your hotel key came in, told you verbally as you got your bags, and left a note under your door at night. This despite the fact that everybody slept through breakfast unless something was wrong.
A consequence of his not giving a fuck was that he was really pleasant to be around.
I got to the Antwerp hotel and into bed, wheezing, body aching. I opened the minibar and drank everything in it, probably spending every dime I’d make on the tour. My phone rang, and I woke in a panic; it was pleasant Pete telling me that the promoters wanted to take me out for dinner that night. I said, call me back in three hours, and he did, and I said, can you call me back in two hours? Pete informed me that it was 7:30 and if I wanted to go they’d be showing up in fifteen minutes. I didn’t. I spent another fitful twelve hours in bed, sleeping and then not sleeping, dreading the time I’d have to go to the theater, and then it came, and I packed my shivering body off to work.
The show, in a plush national theater, was barely attended. Between acts a booming disembodied voice, raspy and menacing, spoke in unfathomable Flemish. Apparently the voice was telling jokes; people were laughing. I went onstage looking like death, and when it came time to speak and sing, my voice took miserable dives on the high notes, squeaked through the lower ones. When the disembodied voice started talking as I left the stage, the people laughing, I was sure it was at the travesty of my performance.
Somehow Pete got me to Amsterdam, and I played a packed room, barely able to sing. They yelled, “Tune your guitar! Tune your guitar!”
Luke came over the first night of a detox. He walked in, drunk, and I handed him a Valium. My shrink called. You have to go, I told him. “No no,” he answered, very amiably, “I’m just gonna hang out.” He walked into my bedroom, picked up a guitar and played loudly. I hung up the phone and told him to leave.
“No, it’s cool, I’m just gonna hang out,” he said.
Somehow I ended up punching him in the face—the only time I’ve ever punched anybody in the face. I then came at him, absurdly, with an umbrella, and he whipped out some weird martial arts move he learned in the seventh grade, and knocked me onto my back. A farcical, slow-drunken-motion fight.
I shoved him out my door. He banged on it to be let back in. “You’re a fool!” he kept yelling. “You’re a fool!”
I actually called the cops on him, saying a guy was menacing me at my door. I immediately realized what a stupid idea that was, and didn’t answer the buzzer when the cops rang. Luke descended the stairs drunkenly, calling out, “You’re a fool, you’re a fool, you’re a fool.”
That was my last detox from heroin. I cadged painkillers from people occasionally, but mostly I just drank. I figured that 1 PM was a respectable hour for a rock star to have a drink with his lunch. I was waking up at noon.
The sampler player wanted me to record a bunch of cover songs for some website. I e-mailed him that it was a stupid idea. He e-mailed me back, saying that I’d make a little money, and there was no other way imaginable that I’d make money playing solo. I wrote him back that he should go fuck himself.
My phone rang. “Doughty, I’m sick of your nastiness—I QUIT.” Click.
This guy who ran a studio in Greenpoint, a friend of my bandmates’, got robbed. I heard through a friend that they’d had lunch with him and told him they’d do a benefit. Apparently the sampler player was back in the band. The guy from Greenpoint called—not my bandmates—and told me about the proposed benefit. He spoke with a pleading tone.
Our manager called me. I learned later that he was calling to fire us. I launched into babble: I can’t do this anymore, the sampler player was in and then out and then in again, they planned this show and didn’t even want to call me.
This was a convenient for the manager, queasy about firing a man at his lowest. “If you want to quit,” he said, “now would be a good time.”
I called the drummer and told him I was quitting. “That’s OK, you can go make a solo record, and then in a year we’ll tour.”
No. I’m breaking up the band.
“That’s cool, you can do that there acoustic thing and we’ll make another record next year.”
I yelled, I’M LEAVING THE BAND.
“Yo, G,” he said, “you’re making a mistake.”
Somebody told me that he had a hard couple of years after the band split. Nobody else would put up with “Yo, G, it’s the same beat.”
I called the bass player’s voice mail and left a message saying I was out. Next, I called the sampler player. He was upstairs putting the kid to bed, his wife said. Have him call me back, I told her.
I got an e-mail from the sampler player an hour later. He said: “The bass player called right after you did and said you were quitting. I didn’t call you back because I don’t want to talk unless it’s important.”
The next day, I made the rounds, calling people to tell them before they heard it elsewhere. I pretended it was courtesy, but I was really just overjoyed to relay the news. At last. At last. At last.
I called Luke. He was cagey, said he had to go. It turned out that the bass player and the drummer were sitting in his living room, talking about what a selfish asshole I was; they were waiting for the tackle box man.
We pulled into Pittsburgh in a white Buick. When I got up to the hotel room, I opened two minibar bottles of Jack Daniel’s and poured them into a glass. I brought the glass to my face and was instantly repelled by the smell. Piss. Somebody drank the whiskey, then pissed it back into the tiny bottles.
The next day, I was wearing the DANGER!! BEWARE MINES!! t-shirt from Cambodia and suddenly realized it was way too tight. My jeans and coat, too. I realized that I’d been downing booze and drunkenly ordering mashed potatoes for months. When that angry physician who gave me the inhaler gave me a checkup in the fall, he weighed me at 135 pounds. My dope-fiend fighting weight. Skeletal. The Cambodia t-shirt rippled off me like a flag in the wind. When I weighed myself months later, I weighed 220. Assuming I was up around that weight that day in Pittsburgh, I’d gained eighty-five pounds in five mon
ths.
I was on my first solo tour in North America, with a tour manager driving me from town to town. I got drunk before the shows—onstage, I felt like I was playing the songs with a three-foot barrier of liquid between me and the world—and got drunker afterwards.
I felt so elatedly relieved that I’d finally cut the band loose, but everywhere I went, people talked to me as if someone had died. I saw my gigs as a triumphant emergence, they saw a postmortem.
One morning, driving out of Toronto, I realized my body was shaking. Having been a dope fiend, it was instantly recognizable: withdrawal. I went to a gas station looking for beer. No beer. We drove a couple hours to the border, where I bought an extra-large bottle of Jack Daniel’s at the duty-free.
For the rest of the tour I stayed as close to the drunk/not-drunk line as possible, the border between functional and shit-faced. I pissed the bed every night. I flipped the mattress before the maid came, and if we were staying somewhere for more than one night, I would throw a bottle of water on the bed, like the maid might mistake piss for spilled Evian.
