The Book of Drugs

by Mike Doughty

  I felt a little lowly around her, because she was a few weeks ahead of me, but that changed. I had two months, and then she relapsed, and the next time I saw her, she had five days. I had four months, she had four days. I had six months, and she had two weeks. I had ten months, and she had eight days. I saw her picture in a restaurant review: she sat at a table with other glamorous types, a drink in front of her. I saw her again: I had two years, she had a month. On it went, until I didn’t see her around anymore.

  The first time I spoke at a meeting was that soap-opera-star one. I was up in front of everybody behind a table, rambling about whatever, and I got to when I was pissing the bed every night. I started talking about the etiquette of pissing the bed in a hotel; flipping the mattress, balling up the sheets and throwing them in a corner yourself, so the maid wouldn’t have to deal with your piss. And just when I was realized that I might regret talking about my history of pissing the bed, I looked out and saw this beautiful woman, smiling at me. She was older, and had silver hair, and an elegantly lined face, and she was looking at me directly in the eyes and beaming.

  I’m full-bore bat-shit crazy with regards to Soul Coughing. If somebody says they love Soul Coughing, I hear fuck you. Somebody yells out for a Soul Coughing song during a show, it means fuck you. If I play a Soul Coughing song, and somebody whoops—just one guy—I hear fuck you. People e-mail my own lyrics at me—“Let the man go through!” or “You are listening!”—oddly often (how weird is that, to blurt somebody’s own lyric at them?), and I type back, “Don’t put that on me, I’m not that guy anymore, that guy’s dead.”

  If somebody comes up and says, I’ve been listening to you since 1996, it means I had a definitive youthful drug experience to an old CD, and now you’ll never escape that band that you loathe, and you are forever incomplete without those three hateful faces.

  When somebody hears your voice for the first time—particularly if they discover the record in school, or at some developmental juncture—they stake out a little place in their minds for you. Your work can get more sophisticated, truer, closer to your ideal, but you’ll never get out of that place. No song you make can get to them: it will fail to turn them twenty again.

  There are six or seven Soul Coughing tunes that I like, mostly ones that sound more like my solo records. On those songs, my bandmates’ surliness and contempt makes way for keenly felt accompaniment, contrapuntal profundity. Honestly, I don’t truly love more than six or seven Jay-Z, or Regina Spektor, or AC/DC songs—I’m a song guy, not an album guy—but I’d tell you, without hesitation, that I adore those artists. Again: full-bore bat-shit crazy.

  There are a few others that I’m proud of as songs. I dislike the recordings, but, when I play them by myself, I feel what I meant. Unless they provoke whoops of approval, in which case I’ll immediately hate them. My insane-slash-conniving bandmates convinced some deep part of me that I’m not the songwriter. Songs I picked out alone in my room, for which I wrote the chord progression, the melody, the lyrics, the rhythm: not mine. The band’s. Not mine, not mine, not mine.

  The rest of the Soul Coughing tunes sound dreadful to me. Geeky, weighted down with a waka-waka Vaudeville thing, diseased with terminal uniqueness, pompous, crammed with ostentatious parts that barely acknowledge the songs, that fight to push the voice into the background, fight every other instrument because each guy’s convinced his part’s the most important. The really great instrumental parts are weakened, transformed from fantastic hooks to stumblers in a jumble. There’s often a refusal to play something that would just make a listener feel good, because what’s unique about that? Instead, those parts are self-consciously obscure, fake sounding, insincere.

  (Did I like the recordings when we made them? Two answers of equal weight, the first being yes and no, the second, I don’t remember. I remember loving tracks in this way that seems manic, injected with denial—I remember loving tracks that, now, should I hear them in a bar, nearly provoke me to jump over the bartender and bang my fist on the sound system’s off button, I remember loving some tracks when I was high, I remember loving some tracks in a way that seems genuine in retrospect but baffles me now.)

  We were a relatively successful cult band, but I think that, had my bandmates chosen to let me be a bandleader, we could’ve been Led Zeppelin. How do you tell that to someone who loves an album? Yes, you love it, so fiercely, but in my mind I hear something so much better, and thus reject this thing you love. All the people that wrote us off as geeks—I will never reach them to say: there was something great here, but we failed to let you hear it.

  Being strapped to ancient work would be stultifying to any artist, in any medium. It took rigorous effort to get out from under it. I played Soul Coughing songs on my first solo tour, but fewer on the next tour; even fewer on the next. Now I don’t play any. I busted my heart fighting a crowd that wanted old stuff. The people who came back came for the new songs.

  When people yell out song names, I repeat them:

  Madeline!

  Madeline, yes, a few songs from now.

  Disseminated!

  Disseminated, nope, don’t play Soul Coughing tunes.

  Only Answer!

  Only Answer, not tonight.

  40 Grand!

  40 Grand, maybe later, it’s on the bubble.

  I do this because a reviewer in Austin once wrote that the crowd was incessantly shouting for old stuff; I wearily, vainly tried to push new songs. But that crowd wasn’t shouting for old stuff. I don’t know if the writer didn’t hear the requests for solo tunes, or if he ignored what actually went down, but in any case, the better story was, “Bitter man fights his past.” So I say titles aloud, to make damned sure that nobody can write that story again.

  Each batch of songs I write feels realer than the last batch. But the bulk of the public, the ones who aren’t coming to my shows, don’t bother to investigate. Who leaves a famous band and gets better?

  (Somebody I know was at a marketing meeting where they were kvetching about nobody buying Elvis Costello records, despite Elvis being on a creative hot streak. “It’s because people have enough Elvis Costello records,” she said. They hated her.)

  The critics didn’t stampede to my shows, either, and sometimes when they write about me, they won’t hear, can’t hear, what I’m doing now. Some of them think I’ve downgraded: where once the music had experimental elements, now it’s a guy with a guitar, as there are thousands of guys with guitars. If I had no past, maybe they’d hear the music as what it is.

  (I make exactly the kind of songs I love. So when I listen to them, I dig the hell out of them. When they’re new, I’ll listen to them on headphones on the subway and love everything about them, in a manner disconnected from my pride and narcissism. Just as songs I love. This being the case, of course I feel like I’m genuinely an unrecognized champion. Maybe I’m as good as I think I am; maybe it’s purely myopia.)

  (I met M. Ward at a benefit. He professed to be a Soul Coughing fan. He asked me, “So what are you doing now? Writing plays?” I was crushed. He’s a solo-acoustic guy like me. I feel myself to be an artist of his echelon.)

  When I do an interview and the writer apologizes for not knowing anything about Soul Coughing other than “Circles,” I thank her or him exuberantly.

  There is a Soul Coughing fan reading this whose heart I’ve just broken, who picked up the memoir of the guy from a band he loves, and it turns out I hate what brought him to this book in the first place. Some Soul Coughing fan is going to read this and come to a show to implore me to love what he loves, to sell me on it. How can you hate this? It’s yours.

  All I can do is my work, work, work; give everything my best: write songs that I love and believe in, play shows, try to dial into that energy, whatever it is, to let it seize me. My bitterness demolishes me, wakes me at 5 AM and won’t let me fall back asleep, drives me to waste hours fighting ghosts in my head. But, in my struggle to stay with the music, I’ve lucked into people
who are with me.

  Every song seems to be somebody’s favorite song. The audience seems to be hearing the nuances and the deeper aspects of the tunes. I struggle to ignore whatever my narcissism tells me I should resent—for instance, that I began my solo work just as the big record labels hit icebergs and began to sink, and, being that I know how to write a decent hook, maybe, were it 1997, I’d have a hit or two on the radio, a big one or a small one, but certainly a song or two with enough presence that M. Ward might not think I had dropped out of music entirely. Because if there’s just fifty-five people listening to the music I make, and I’m eating food and sleeping in a bed—and making music I love and believe in—I have a fantastic life.

  I’m so grateful for these listeners. Maybe that’s you: I’m grateful for you.

  I was playing in Vancouver in 2000, only four months after the band’s death, three months after I’d drunk my last drink. I was alone at the mic with an acoustic guitar. Some guy shouted, “Do you miss the other guys?”

  No, I said. Do you?

  “Yes,” he said, from somewhere in the crowd.

  Ooooooh, the crowd went.

  I peered out, but he didn’t reveal himself.

  You should go get your money back, I said. They’re not hiding behind the curtain. They’re not coming out later.

  I almost pulled out my wallet to offer a ten-dollar bill right out of my pocket.

  There was much unkindness on the internet. “Doughty’s gonna end up with a gun in his mouth when he figures out the solo career isn’t going the way he thought he would,” somebody said.

  “Fuck Doughty selling out,” said another. “I miss the old Doughty, who ate E’s like candy!”

  I played a show in New Orleans. I was selling CDs off the front of the stage afterwards. A woman came up, grabbed my hand, held it to her breast.

  “You have to get back together with your friends,” she said.

  My friends, I said. Bewildering—but, of course someone who loves a band thinks it must be a roving party of merry compatriots.

  I tried to sound gentle, though I felt punched in the gut. That’s not gonna happen, I said.

  “But how are you going to play ‘Casiotone Nation’?” she said shrilly, as if the fact it was her favorite song meant it was an integral spoke in the universe, and she was helping me—poor, misguided man—to understand my true mission.

  How am I gonna play ‘Casiotone Nation’? I’M NOT. I yelled in her face.

  The look of shock on her face suggested she felt screamed at by someone she had tried to helpfully, compassionately steer in the right direction.

  I was shaking as I packed my guitar, wrapped up my cables. Tipsy guy walked up.

  “That was my girlfriend. She’s a dancer, she wants the beat, that’s all,” he said.

  Uh-huh, I said, wanting to get the hell out of there, go somewhere to be alone.

  “That was the most honest show I’ve ever seen,” he rhapsodized. “Every note you played was like magical blar blar blar et cetera et cetera.”

  I have to go, I mumbled, and hotfooted towards the door.

  He was suddenly furious. “BUT I’M NOT DONE COMPLIMENTING YOU,” he barked after me.

  Fandom is often not altruism. Effusive praise, in these cases, isn’t meant to make you feel good, but to get something out of you. He wanted me to provide him with, appreciatively, dutifully, a gratifying encounter. So, in lionizing me, he felt he was extracting from me an unquestionable obligation.

  I did a gig at a college. The next day, I plodded near-blindly around the campus, in a quest for espresso that got more daunting by the minute.

  I was barely looking up from the sidewalk, lurching among students carrying books who careened, in all directions, around me.

  A kid walked up in front of me and just stopped there, blocking my way. He was beaming. He started to speak.

  I stopped him. “Hey, hi, uh, I can’t really talk right now, I have to . . . go do . . . uh . . . see you later . . . ” I hastened clumsily away.

  Months later, I searched my name. This is a terrible thing to do to yourself if you’re lonely and hoping for munificent admiration as a balm for loneliness. You will always, always, always find something horrible. If your mind works similarly to mine, one spiteful sting will ring truer than ten pages of accolades.

  I found a review of the show at that college. The gig was described shruggingly, by a student who, later in that issue, wrote an editorial about hockey. In the comments beneath the article, there was one that said, “I bumped into M. Doughty near the humanities building and he was an asshole, I’M GOING TO THROW AWAY ALL HIS ALBUMS AND I’M NEVER GOING TO GO TO HIS SHOWS AND I’M NOT GOING TO GIVE HIM ANY MONEY.”

  (Some affronted fans threaten to withhold their cash. Do they feel their relationship to music and musicians is, on the most essential level, as a consumer?)

  Saul Mongolia dropped me from Warner Bros., telling my lawyer that it was because I was going bald.

  (He would go on to gain a measure of infamy for being the guy who dropped Wilco from Warner Bros. when they turned in Yankee Hotel Foxtrot; he told them there wasn’t a single on it. Wilco found a new label, and the record sold more than 500,000 copies.)

  I got a new manager, this very short and stout, expansively convivial guy. He was married to a gorgeous, redheaded fashionista who towered over him. She dressed him flamboyantly, gave him a lavender faux-hawk and dressed him in linen shirts with complicated floral embroidery. This squat, bespectacled Jewish guy from Long Island, dolled up in L’Uomo Vogue clothes.

  It turned out he was clean, too, for a dozen years. I don’t know of anybody else who would take on a newly clean, shaky addict who’d just been kicked off his record label. I wanted to go out and play solo shows; he actually took me out for driving lessons.

  I got a rental car, put the guitar in the trunk, printed up cheap copies of that acoustic album Skittish that I made with Kramer, and played wherever they’d have me. I drove 9,000 miles, by myself, on the first tour. After the show I sat on the front of the stage with the cardboard boxes of CDs and sold them for $15.

  Skittish had somehow gotten out on the internet; some people knew the songs. For the most part, the audiences were disappointed; they knew Soul Coughing, they wanted Soul Coughing, and here was the extreme opposite: one guy with an acoustic guitar—a fucking balladeer? Some of them were genuinely indignant. Angry. But in the front row, there were cute girls in thick black glasses lip-synching the Skittish songs.

  The next tour, the audience was smaller: the Soul Coughing fans were abandoning me. I was still selling Skittish in a plain white sleeve, no label to publicize me. From there, an audience for my acoustic thing was built.

  I played the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco—the same place where Jeff Buckley and I had sniffed heroin in the basement. The bass player from that renowned queer-punk band whom I had met at Sluggo’s in Pensacola was managing the place. He asked me, with an implied wink, whether I needed anything. I laughed. No, no. I’m fine with the Diet Pepsi in the dressing room cooler.

  Years later, I bumped into him in the rooms in Brooklyn.

  I tried to jump back into songwriting and wrote terrible, trite songs. That was because my receptors were charred, disabled by the drugs’ assault on my brain and my heart, and because for the last couple of years of the band, I had just given up on trying to write a great song, knowing that I was in a band that didn’t care.

  The rock legend exhorted me to pray. The idea spooked me too much. But I started writing prayers in my journal—maybe not prayers, but scrawled entreaties, please let me get through this day, please help me to not throb to death, please, please, please. Hours and hours, pages and pages.

  I started praying to god, then praying sarcastically to god, then to my certainty that I couldn’t trick myself into belief, then to a blurred spiritual notion, and then back to a god that I fully believed in again. In a loop.

  (I want to note that I
really dislike capitalizing “god.” It’s more like saying “music” or “light” than, for example, “Doreen” or “Uzbekistan.” But my copy editor is telling me that conventional usage dictates “God,” not “god,” and typing “god” calls attention to itself, implies a more complicated philosophical point than I’m capable of making, and makes it seem like I’m one of those people who wants to be e.e. cummings when he grows up.)

  One day, without me noticing it, the ability to get something new out of the guitar, out of my voice, came back. I went into those notebooks and pulled phrases and sentences and thoughts out. They became lyrics. Some songs were addressed to god, and I changed them to address the unsingable girl. Some songs were addressed—wistfully or angrily—to drugs themselves.

  There were songs in which I was speaking to a beautiful woman, listing all the reasons she’d be better off not loving me. I didn’t mean to be arch, or sardonic. This was just how I felt. The songs just fell out that way.

  The new crowd grew from curious to fanatical. I’d start songs—new songs, songs that weren’t on albums yet—and within two seconds they’d recognize it and whoop. (“No offense intended,” said an amazed acquaintance, “but to me, your songs are kind of similar.” None taken. The guy was right. Happily, the four songs I repeatedly write are my favorite four songs, and, seemingly, some audience members’, too.) People asked me to sign their arms and then had the signature tattooed. I did a live recording; people yell out the between-song jokes at me.

  I got stalkers. There was a woman who wrote me long e-mails to the fan-mail address on my website as if I had always been her boyfriend: I can’t wait until you come home, we’ll go to _______for dinner, go play cards at _________’s house, we’ll make love by the fireplace. There was a girl who got my phone number and would leave interminable messages, sometimes professing love, sometimes screaming at me for something imaginary I’d done to her brother. There was a girl I saw by the back door of a club in Philly. She was standing with a bunch of other fans, who were getting stuff signed. Do you want me to sign something? I asked. She stared at me, stunned. What is it? “Don’t you remember all those e-mails you wrote me?” What? No—what did I say in them? “All kinds of wonderful things,” she said. As is my pattern with crazy people, I thought it must be me: I wondered if I really had sent her e-mails and had forgotten about it. There were two stalkers from Maryland: one was a gorgeous nineteen-year-old with an unnerving look in her eye who looked like a Playboy model circa 1963. She showed up at gigs hundreds of miles away and then said she had nowhere to stay, could she stay with me? There’s a mountain of a blonde woman who drives a dump truck in Baltimore. She’s got my signature and the art from my first solo record tattooed on her massively flabby right arm. She writes e-mails asking if I want to meet for lunch, then, when I don’t respond, pleads: “I don’t understand, what have I done, why don’t you want to be friends with me?” She offers to buy me expensive gifts. She would hug me after the shows, her body twice the size of mine, and squeeze the air out of me. I had to struggle to get loose. She drives long distances, too, and stands in the center of the front row, never looking at me but glowering at the floor, lost in some distressing reverie.