by Mike Doughty
The interviews went long, and the two acts that stuck around—me and a neo-hair-metal band in pink leather—played to ten people. The singer from Spacehog was there with Liv Tyler, as well as a renowned ’70s groupie who walked around the Bowery Ballroom shoving her fantastic tits into rock dudes’ backs, then smirking salaciously when they turned around. I made snide jokes at Ms. Tyler and the Spacehog guy, because I was an envious, sneering, bitter fuck.
I went to the bar afterwards for a Coke. They gave me a huge glass with the straw’s wrapper curled gaily above the lip, like a flag, declaring, This man isn’t drinking, there’s something wrong with him. I met a redheaded girl whom I had seen in the crowd lip-synching my songs. She pretended she’d never heard my music before, gave me her number, asked if I wanted to come out to Bay Ridge next week and watch the series finale of Beverly Hills 90210? It just so happens I used to write a 90210-summation-blog called Peach Pit Babylon, I told her, pretending like she didn’t know this, and she pretended to be surprised. She left, and I met another girl who said she’d flown in from Denver, and would I like to take her back to my apartment and fuck her? Yes. We went to my place, a fetid disaster of a drunk’s burrow; she pushed me onto the bare mattress and rode me. I’m going to come, I said, within a minute. “Don’t look at my tits, and just breathe through it,” she said.
I came instantly.
Something lingered after she split. Guilt? Loneliness? Embarrassment? I couldn’t tell. I was used to crushing that stuff with something. Without mitigating substances, sex involved feelings.
(I saw a parody of Mad Men on Sesame Street: Muppets in suits, in a conference room, enacted emotions: “We’re mad! We’re mad men! Now we’re glad—glad men! Now we’re sad men!” I needed this; I had a toddler’s emotional-identification skills.)
The next day I went to the Upper West Side. I wandered into the meeting late, blundering my way through rows of people. I sat down in the first empty plastic chair I found. A guy sat next to me, eating an unripe banana and drinking bodega coffee. I didn’t see his face.
“How you doing?” he asked. I turned. The rock legend.
I feel like shit, I said, too caught-off-guard to lie.
“That’s gooooood,” he said. His smile glowing.
After the meeting, I followed him around like a puppy as he received people; he was like the mayor. I stood there feeling dumb and ugly.
He took me to the park and told me, in his fantastically gravelly Staten Island accent, the twelve-step creation myth. Grinning, he spoke of revered figures in twelve-step history as “drunks” and “degenerates.” He told of his own drunken miseries. How could alcoholism, a behavior, be a disease? I asked him, and he told me the old parable of the jaywalker: guy’s really into jaywalking, his friends are all like, ha ha funny, then he gets hit, they figure he’s done, he does it again, this time gets both legs broke, the friends are like, whoa that’s weird, and then he does it again and they’re bewildered, and he does it again, and they abandon him, and he does it again, and he does it again.
“You can wear life like a loose garment,” the rock legend said. He was plainly serene.
I wanted what he had. I called him every day. He pontificated. I bleated complaints.
“I got two words for you,” he said. “Books.”
He buried me under a pile of them, spiritual tomes on every level of user-friendliness. Alan Watts, Thomas Merton, Autobiography of a Yogi, the Upanishads, Jorge Luis Borges’s poem “Everything and Nothing,” a loopy, ass-pocket-sized book called Metaphysical Meditations, a slim, wry volume called How to Be an Adult.
He told me that I could have an idea of something bigger than myself without narrowing into a set dogma, that I could hold entirely contradictory ideas about god—an iteration of what George Carlin mockingly called “the invisible man that lives in the sky,” some of the quasi-Buddhist quasi-Hindu stuff, some cluster of weirder notions—simultaneously, and in fact, not really understand what it was I believed in, and that this addled, playful version of god-consciousness could be genuinely useful.
“If we had true knowledge of the cosmos, our skulls would burst,” he said. “You’re like a flea contemplating the Empire State Building.”
He lived in a weird time warp in regard to the New York City subway system. There’s a certain brand of lifetime New Yorker who refers to the 4, 5, 6 trains as the IRT and the B, D, F as the BMT, after their names when the subways were operated by independent companies. He was beyond even that. I invited him somewhere. “What train?” he asked. The F. “No way I’m taking that! The broken wicker chairs, the straps banging against the windows . . . ” Um, that’s the way the F train was in the early ’70s.
He quoted Saint Francis and Casey Stengel. He was given to non sequiturs.
“Do you ever see some degenerate passed out in a doorway and think, ‘I could do that’?”
“I shot dope when I was sixteen. My mom thought I was sick and made me chamomile tea.”
We were sitting at a picnic table in the park, in midwinter, eating sandwiches. Suddenly he said, “Did I ever tell you about the time I made Buddy Hackett cry?”
You never heard anybody’s last name in the rooms, so there was nickname upon nickname: Larry T., Larry C., Larry G., Quaalude Wayne, Howdy Wayne, Jersey Dave, Miracle Dave, What’s-Cookin’ Dave, Weepy Rita, Dave the Magic Man, Bill the Wizard, X-man, Todd the Painter, Pool-hall Ria, Big Anthony, Hardcore Tommy, Stick-and-Stay Scott, Mikey Bagels, Scottish Craig, Ian the Goat-Sacrificer, Rocker Mike, Ed the Buddha, Nine-Year Bobby, Five-Year Bobby, and Fucking Chris, who would say, “I hate it when they call me Fucking Chris, I don’t want to curse, I’m not going to fucking curse anymore.”
(I know three people named Barclay in the rooms. Two men, one woman. Three people named Barclay.)
There was this one guy, a gangly, sinewy guy, maybe my age, who came to meetings on a blazing chrome bike with handlebars so high he dangled from it, like a medieval prisoner. He wore a silver helmet with a row of Germanic spikes lined front to back. He had about a year clean. It seemed incredible to me that somebody could put down drugs for a year. If a guy like this can be clean, I thought, a guy who won’t surrender the things that make him weird, I can do it, too.
There was this kind, sagacious Jamaican guy named Wayne. He grew up in the projects, the only black kid there who was into rock music. He got beat up by the kids in the projects for wearing a The Who Long Live Rock jacket, and beat up by the white kids at the school he was bused to for being black. He had sometimes bought drugs at a Harlem record store called Da Hardest Hard. (Hardest heart? “No, hard.”) I thought of his old self as Theoretical Wayne. Theoretical Wayne carried multiple knives, robbed crackheads, smoked angel dust, lived on cinnamon buns—they came in a package of two, so he’d eat one, throw the other one to the rats in the alley, whom he thought of as friends—and Nutrament, had a mom who dealt weed—her house on Long Island was once subject to a drive-by shooting. Somehow Theoretical Wayne, the dust-smoking knife-fighter, had turned into Compassionate Wayne, a guy who rode out on a motorcycle to South Dakota every summer to visit a Lakota Sioux tribe that had adopted him.
Barely a few months clean, he was asked what he wanted from recovery. “To stop the noise in my head,” he said.
One thing I kept hearing in the rooms was, “If you don’t use, you won’t get high.” But I got high all the time. I got really into getting up early in the morning to watch the light come on. I’d walk to get coffee and be stopped in my tracks when I saw the Manhattan Bridge against a pink sky, framed by tenements.
As a teenager, I scoffed at the TV stars in pastel sweaters, on the cover of People magazine, I’m-off-the-drugs-and-high-on-life! But here I was. Off the drugs and high on life.
I was awakening to what was around me, and in doing so, realized I’d had no idea just how shut off I was. One evening I had the TV on, and the weatherman said, “It was unseasonably cool today.” Yes it was! It was unseasonably cool. I was t
here!
I was desperately trying to figure out how to pray. I felt lucky that I’d had that romance with Sam Cooke’s gospel records—my flimsy link to the universe of faith.
I saw an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer is shanghaied into missionary duty in the South Pacific. “But I don’t even believe in Jebus!” he says. As the plane takes off, he’s told that there’s no alcohol on the island. “SAVE ME JEBUS!!” he screams.
I was leaving a meeting, feeling utterly out of focus and purposeless, and I walked around a corner and found a liquor store. I looked past the towering god-bottle of champagne, the absinthe posters with devils on them, the gallons of Georgi vodka, and found the bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Stared at it.
Save me, Jebus! I said. I laughed.
Thus began my spiritual awakening.
Every morning I poured out a stream-of-consciousness prayer into my notebook: please help me, what am I doing, help me, be with me, and on and on for pages and pages. It looks crazy when I read it back. But it was scraping the ugly veneer off myself like scratching a lottery ticket with a coin to see the number.
I felt that the Cosmos was communicating to me through my lucky number: twenty-seven. As a kid, I picked twenty-seven because I felt I ought to have a lucky number, and it was the one that sounded best when spoken and was the most interesting to me, graphically. That first year clean, I saw it on license plates, on bus-stop placards, on receipts. When I was dwelling on a depressing fantasy of relapse, or feeling hopeless, twenty-seven would appear. I was reading a guidebook for Southeast Asia, and I came to a passage that was something like, “If you want to try opium, and you’re in X town, go to N restaurant and look for one of the desperate-looking guys in grimy clothes, and . . . ” Suddenly Snoop Dogg walked onto my TV, across the set of MTV’s Total Request Live with a giant twenty-seven on his jersey. I took them as messages from the Almighty that I should feel bolstered and backed by forces beyond my comprehension.
(I did a poetry reading with a guy wearing the very same jersey and tried to bond with him over the significance of twenty-seven. “Yeah, Eddie George—best running back in the NFL,” he said, hesitantly.)
I started feeling connected to everything. Looking back on how earnestly I believed in the benevolent number-spirits, I wonder just how insane I was. I wish I had an ounce of that irrationality today. My irrationality took care of me.
Still, I fantasized about fleeing. I’d run home after meetings—I had the urgent business of isolating to attend to—and get online, dial up travel sites, look up fares. I set up itineraries to Tashkent or Caracas or Kolkata, luxurious travel and accommodations, fantasized about going to those places and just getting high. To lie back on a plush bed in a mysterious faraway city, and just be high. When I came to the page where you type your credit card information in, I clicked on “cancel.”
My spiritual guide Homer was succeeded by John Coltrane. I first heard his music on WBGO the day I moved to New York in 1989; when the chant of “a love supreme, a love supreme, a love supreme,” came in, I realized that I might find an entrance into jazz, which had never interested me. I read the liner notes to A Love Supreme: During the year 1957, I experienced by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music.
There happen to be some twelve-step codes in there: “grace of God,” “spiritual awakening,” “gratitude,” “humbly asked.” Phrases used not just in the recovery books, but in the actual twelve steps. I have no idea if Coltrane was a twelve-step dude, but I clung to it.
I listened to, and got lost in, Transition, Sun Ship, Afro Blue Impressions, New Thing at Newport, Kulu Sé Mama, One Down One Up. Coltrane is beyond classification: he’s beyond jazz, he’s a spiritual force. He kept pushing, until his death in 1967, getting wilder, scarier, more powerful, more hallucinatory, more transcendent with each recording.
I saw a video of a performance he did with Eric Dolphy: first Dolphy solos, and it’s amazing; the man was a giant for sure. Then Coltrane comes in and explodes the music with the power of the ecstatic. Next to Coltrane, even a giant is just playing the saxophone.
Before the late ’50s, Coltrane was a fair-to-middling sort of workaday jazz guy. Roughly around his cited date of 1957, he got inspired. I was used to the People magazine pieces about artists getting clean and becoming blandly cheerful paragons of lite rock. Like I said, no idea if Coltrane really had a twelve-step thing going on or not, but with him in mind, I became determined to be clean and chase art.
I’m on a cocktail of pills for bipolar disorder. Briefly, when I was newly sober, I got on an antidepressant, and it helped, but I was conflicted about leaning on a drug. I thought of the old canard “Better living through chemistry” and thought that I wanted to be able to say, “I’ve achieved better chemistry through living.”
I couldn’t. I felt like an aircraft carrier was on my chest.
After much anguish and second-guessing, I went to a psychiatrist—meaning he had an M.D. and could prescribe drugs. He was a rabbinically bearded guy with a Texan accent. It took a year and a half for him to dial in a working combo—he put me on two pills, increased the dosage of one, removed another, replaced it, decreased the dosage on one, et cetera. Now I feel pretty sturdy. The drugs are a huge part of that, but so is talk therapy, the rooms, friends both of the rooms and not, songwriting, eating the occasional vegetable, moving around in sunlight. Sometimes I’m disappointed that I need a pill, but I can accept that there’s an element of my whole thing—not, by any means, the whole shebang—that’s a physical part of my body.
Personally, I think the appellation “bipolar” is a shuck. It’s a trendy diagnosis; it doesn’t even mean you oscillate between two poles anymore. That’s not uncommon—for instance, “borderline personality disorder” is still a valid diagnosis, despite that nobody considers the disorder to be on the border of anything anymore. I don’t have those insane lows and highs now. My attacks of anger and resentment—lying awake all night, unable to stop my mind from swiping at phantoms—are my mania.
Actually, I find the term “maniac” to be more accurate. And fun.
Whatever it is, I can’t dispute that the rabbinically bearded guy from Texas has dialed me in. The cocktail of meds has wrought amazing relief. There aren’t any notable side effects, sexual, soporific, or otherwise. Though I sometimes feel naggingly inauthentic. As if it were cowardly to need medical help.
Leon, who had maybe fifteen years clean when I met him, relapsed. He had a cold and started using Robitussin for it, and in time he was drinking the equivalent of a six-pack a day of it. He did a circuit of different pharmacies on different days, buying only a single bottle at each stop. (If I were into cough medicine, I’d go to the same place every day and be matter-of-fact about it, a way of saying, If this was a real problem, I’d be trying to hide it.) I was sitting next to Leon at a meeting and all of a sudden he said, “Is it ridiculously hot in here or is it just me?”
It was just him. I didn’t think anything of it. Maybe he had too many layers on.
At some point he realized what was happening. Those who scoff at the concept of addiction as a disease, I have no comprehensive argument to present, but please note that he was drinking six big bottles of Robitussin daily without realizing something weird was going on.
I chased a princess around the rooms. She was a Slavic girl of noble birth, her swank family displaced by a revolution. I had no purpose, and when I saw her, I thought she might as well be it. She was thirtyish, like me; Hockney-pool-eyed, citrine-yellow-haired, ever so slightly weathered. I had fantasies of being with a thirtyish woman like this. It seemed proper. At the time when I had twenty days or so, she was approaching a couple of months.
I went to this one meeting uptown, near a studio where they shot soap operas. It was peppered with TV-handsome alcoholics, with that sheen of blaz
ing health common to people who’ve been in recovery for a couple of years. The meeting was once populated with movie stars: it was some kind of agreed-upon movie star hang. The movie stars drifted away, leaving the B list. Eventually, the soap stars would move on, too. Years later, one would occasionally see a baffled movie star walking in, looking for his tribe.
The drama of my every day was whether or not the princess would be there. I never spoke to her; sometimes I’d be standing adjacent to a conversation between her and a mutual friend. She spoke of a glamorous life of beaches in France and jet-setting. I hoped one day she’d talk about the politics of her homeland, that I could maybe jump in and show off my brain.
I heard rumors about her—that she was a sort of concubine to a certain husky-jawed movie star, renowned for his prodigious drug intake, that she kept drifting back to him. That her strange cross-addiction was sucking off strange men, that she’d find some man in public and take him around the corner, moments after meeting him. I lamented never finding a way to be caught alone with her near a bathroom, but realized that I would’ve fallen in love with her the moment I was in her mouth.
