The Book of Drugs

by Mike Doughty

  I turned to Genanew and sang the bridge:I hear her voice, in the morning hour, she calls me

  The radio reminds me of my home, far away,

  Driving down the road I get a feeling that

  I should have been home yesterday,

  Yesterday

  Genanew tried to smile as I gazed into his eyes and sang the longing lyrics, but he looked alarmed.

  A kid I didn’t know, sitting near me, tapped me on the shoulder. “I HATE MOTHERFUCKING WHITES,” he said. “But, I think I like you.” It sounded like he’d heard somebody say that in a movie.

  I got a lift back to the hotel. Everyone in the minivan held hands. Again, I tried hard to be OK with it. I opened the door to get out and received a tender kiss on the neck.

  Daniel drove me to the airport. “Coke and wine!” I said. We danced the boxing-cabbage-patch together, me on the curb, he behind the wheel.

  I had a day’s stopover in London. I spent $700 there, on a hotel room, two cab rides, food, a day pass on the Tube, a ticket to a Luc Tuymans show at the Tate Modern, and a shirt. I spent about the same amount in almost a month in Ethiopia.

  I was in Asmara, the Eritrean capital, the next Christmas Eve. Christmas carols, in English, played over loudspeakers in the tumult of the tight streets around the cathedral. Elegant old men in sunglasses—Asmara teems with them—in natty hats, threadbare suits, fat ties, leaning on canes, hung out on the corners and slouched on bus stop benches. I’d spent most of the last three weeks walking around Asmara, taking pictures of the fountains, the gas stations, and the houses—some curved, austere, Fascistic; some ostentatiously floral—that the Italians built. Excuse me, that the Italians designed, and the Eritreans built.

  I hung out watching my friend Menges paint a fat red candle and “Felice Anno Nuovo” on a storefront window; pervasive holiday decorating makes Christmas the busy season for a sign painter in Asmara. I tried to get him to come to a Christmas service at the cathedral with me, but he had to go back to the suburbs, where he lived with his wife and three kids in a one-room concrete house.

  I don’t usually do Christmas things, but I was lonely. The cathedral was homely, and filled mostly with Westerners, people from the NGOs and the embassies. A choir of Eritreans sang “Silent Night” torpidly. I left.

  It was now dark. I got in a taxi sitting at the curb; the backseat was already occupied by a woman in full Islamic-propriety cover-up : black hijab, black abaya, black veil. I didn’t see her till I sat down. “Yekanyeley,” I said—skittery about offending a Muslim woman—realizing as I said it that it means thank you, not excuse me. I reached for the door handle, but she grabbed my arm. “Wait! Where do you go?”

  “Just somewhere I can hear some music.”

  “You want to go to Expo?”

  I looked at her eyes, the only part of her face visible above the veil. They were copiously mascaraed. She told the cab driver something in Tigrinya, and he started the car.

  She pulled the veil off, revealing a pretty smile and orange lipstick. “Where are you from?”

  America. New York. Questions about America and New York; was I working at the embassy? No. Are you a peacekeeper? Just a tourist. Do you go to Massawa? Yes, probably, soon. You like music? Yes, I’m a musician. What kind of music? Rock music. Like 50 Cent? Kind of.

  She uncovered her hair: cornrows, tinted reddish. She kept asking questions. She pulled off the black robe. Her shoulders were bare; she wore tight charcoal acid-wash jeans. Acknowledging the stunned look on my face, she told a story about a man she said she didn’t know, who had a knife and was inexplicably angry at her. It was confusing, except that, in her shoes, I’d veil my face and cover my body, too.

  We reached the club, where we were the only customers. We sat in a sea of café tables and chairs; onstage was a Korg keyboard that nobody was playing, washed in dramatic blue light. A waiter came with a beer; I turned it down. She clung to my arm possessively.

  I invented an excuse. She frowned, confounded, as I walked out.

  The next week, I was in the dusty town of Keren, north of Asmara. I stayed in a steel cabin built on the top of a concrete-block hotel—the tallest building there, and entirely empty.

  I was looking out the window when the power went out. The whole city suddenly went dark. A huge collective voice went AWWWWW!

  The lights came back on. I could hear the city start to move around.

  Then the electricity cut for a second time. Again, the entire town said, at once: AWWWWW!

  On May 5, 2005—05/05/05, the fifth anniversary of my first meeting—I was serving jury duty in Manhattan. The first thing I started thinking about, perversely, was creative ways of smuggling drugs in there. A hollowed-out bagel, I considered.

  I was made the chairman of a special grand jury exclusively hearing narcotics cases. There was a guy who recognized me from the old band and did a double take in amazement. My co-chair—sitting up at the head of the room, next to me, in the tall wooden Junta desk—was a girl who lived not in Manhattan but in Queens, but kept her legal address at her sister’s apartment in Harlem for an indeterminate, sketchy reason. She sat beside me, reading the African American–target-demographic porn novels of the prolific eroticist Zane, with a poised smile.

  We let one guy walk. He had rolled up, in his wheelchair, to a lady cop and tried to sell her sticks of Xanax while she was handcuffing a guy. She laughingly showed him her badge and he zoomed away in the middle of St. Nicholas Avenue, hands pumping madly on his wheels, trying to throw a handful of Xanax down his gullet.

  I don’t remember why we let him go. I do remember that we had to give each case a code name for reference purposes, and my dignified, porn-reading co-chair suggested we call this case “Scooter.” Upon hearing it, the assistant D.A. suppressed her giggles.

  My teeth were fucked up. I had a couple years clean, and eating involved moving food around in my mouth, chewing it only on one side: dental acrobatics.

  I got a tip on a sober dentist. He used to suck on his own nitrous tanks; now he fixed the teeth of dope fiends while radiating a charming benevolence. He intoned, Buddha-like, that you should take deep breaths as he sank the Novocain needle into your jaw. Leaving his office with a numb, puffy mouth and complimentary floss, you felt like you were leaving a meditation center.

  But he was profane when eloquence required it. “That motherfucker’s getting ready to blow,” he said, as I lay in his chair under the light, his instrument on a molar.

  I needed teeth extracted, so he sent me to a surgeon, a guy in his secret society of sober dentists, on Park Avenue. The profane Buddha-dentist wrote a prescription altering what they’d use to put me under, upping the Valium content and eliminating the opiates.

  But his guy was on vacation. They put me with another guy. He examined the prescription like I was messing with his style.

  “Is this what you want?” he said.

  Uh, yeah, please.

  “Well, OK,” he shrugged. He pulled a pad from the pocket of his blue scrubs. “Now, for afterwards, I’m gonna give you a prescription for thirty Vicodin . . . ”

  No, that’s okay, no Vicodin.

  He looked at me with an annoyed kind of puzzlement. “Well, I have to give you something.” He paused. “How about I write you one for five Vicodin, just in case you’re in pain?”

  He’s a dentist, and I should listen to him, and after all, he’s compromising, right? I went under, the teeth got yanked, and I walked out of the place in a wooze with the prescription in my fist.

  My girlfriend came over to tend to me. She was a tiny Bengali girl, a grad student at Columbia, thirteen years my junior. I wasn’t in pain, but I gulped the first pill and the wonderfulness came over me. The sleet outside was suddenly imbued with beauty and melancholy.

  She went to the bodega. I lay on the couch, staring at the pill bottle.

  What’s up, player? the pills said.

  Spooky rockabilly played on WFMU: echoed twangs. Isn’t this s
tately grey day, the music, the girl who loves me, good enough without being high?

  What’s up, player? the pills said.

  I popped two more before she came back. I didn’t tell her. I became expansively self-revealing that night, showing her yearbook pictures and telling her sad tales of my teenage years.

  I popped the last two pills.

  “Are you supposed to be doing that?”

  I’m doing what the surgeon told me, I said.

  I realized at some point that I had been scratching my nose for five hours straight. A terrible sign. I drifted off.

  Hours later I woke in a panic. I had had a microseconds-long dream in which my tiny girlfriend turned into a jackal and was gnawing my face off.

  Her eyes clicked open to find me looming.

  “How are you feeling?” she said, very quietly.

  I lay awake the rest of the night. In the morning the tender sleet had turned into a dismal curtain, the radio into a resentful drone. It was what life was two years before: a terrible grey grind, just an interval to suffer until the next time I got high. The desolation, two years gone, took twelve hours to come back nearly at full power.

  I had to audition a drummer that day, a guy I played with in college, a jazz fusion guy who, back then, was exasperated by my elementary musical notions. Now that I was a rock star, he had this kind of nervous, forced niceness. We went through a few songs—I freaked him out by not explaining what I wanted, which is what I always do—in between, he’d ask, manically, How was that? Did you like that?

  Inside, I was wretchedness itself.

  I caught up with friends in the rooms. I hugged them, I told them. The day before, as I popped the first pill, I wondered if, after my medically sanctioned relapse, going back to the abstinent life would be depressing. Actually, I was deeply grateful for the reminder of what a life spent needing to stay high was actually like.

  A guy who sat with me in that meeting and told me his own tale of a creepy painkiller episode passed away a few years later. He was out on Long Island, helping a friend get clean. He went surfing and was stung by a wasp, had an allergic reaction, and died. I learned about it in Cambodia: I was sitting in a restaurant with wi-fi, and my friends had posted all these videos of him. He was, I suddenly learned, a pioneer skateboarder in New York—I knew he skated, I knew he built skate parks, but he never mentioned that he was quasi-famous. Huh. Weird. Why’s everybody putting all these videos up?

  Oh, no.

  I had a dream a few months later, back home in New York. I went to a meeting and saw him there. “You’re not really here, are you?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, smiling.

  I did an interview with a punk-rock-porn-pinup website: tattooed women give the camera slatternly looks. The guy who ran the site was a fan of mine; he gave me a free lifetime membership. I parlayed my minor rock-stardom to befriend a couple of the models; I photographed one of them on my roof for the site.

  I learned that when photographers say they don’t notice the naked sexiness in front of them, they’re not just telling a lie to be infuriating: I was panicked as I shot her, trying to take decent pictures. I tried hard to make her laugh; her default setting was a robotic porny face with sucked-in cheeks and lightless eyes, an unintentional lampoon of sexiness. So I made stupid jokes and imitated the barking Japanese photographer in Lost in Translation, and she laughed, goofily, with a big horsey grin.

  She was missing the top part of her left ring finger, from the knuckle up. I asked her how she lost it.

  “It’s a body modification,” she said.

  You mean, in the same category as tattoos, piercing?

  Her ex-boyfriend held her hand down while her current boyfriend whacked it off with a hammer and chisel. Afterwards, she wallowed in a pit of opiates for a year; ghost pain maddened her. She knew the finger was gone but she felt it there and it hurt.

  She’d been abstinent for a year, but I felt that addict energy, that force of denial, emanating from her. I brought up the rooms with careful offhandedness. She bristled.

  After the shoot, we sat at a café going through the pictures on my laptop. I begged her to not make me throw away the pictures with the horsey grin. I tried not to say that her porny-face looked un-human.

  She leaned pliantly into me. I could’ve turned her around and kissed her. But she was an addict; I couldn’t take advantage of her.

  She was at my house days after I had broken up with someone, and I let her go down on me; I didn’t come, because I was so freaked out that I was getting sexually involved with somebody I should’ve been helping into the rooms.

  Years later, she started going to meetings. She found a meeting she loved in which she was the lone girl among a bunch of elderly blue-collar dudes. A tattooed, quasi-porn goddess among these loving, funny, profane old men.

  She married a guy, got pregnant, and moved to a farm. She put up pics on the site where her belly stretched the tattoos to comical shapes.

  She had made an arrangement with a distinguished tattoo artist; she gave him the chopped-off finger in ajar, and he inked her for free. His shop looked like the interior of an H. R. Giger painting, grotesque organic forms covering the ceiling, but he was a rather aw-shucks kind of a guy.

  He called and told me that a friend of his, another model from that site, was in and out of the rooms in Minneapolis, getting clean and then shooting dope again. She was a fan of mine. As it happened, I was off to Minneapolis to spend a month or so working on a recording.

  So we met. She came to my hotel, after a job dancing for a bachelor party, and drove me to a meeting. She drove a sumptuous Jeep: dancing is lucrative, and, not incidentally, hard to walk away from.

  She was fidgety. When she drove me home, she gave me a recovery book called Twenty-Four Hours a Day, in which she had written:You have an amazing energy, and you’re a beautiful man with an amazing voice (I mean that in a few different respects). I hope you keep in touch, and I can call you a friend. Live in Love, Erika.

  She texted me while I was in a cab in Brooklyn to tell me she had a crush on me. She said it obliquely, in such a way that I could simply choose not to answer. Which is what I did, just ignoring it, rather than saying: You’re beautiful, but I can’t get involved with you. Your feelings are, as should be expected, pretty wild at the moment: no drugs to regulate them. You don’t know their powers yet. I don’t want to mess up your recovery.

  The next time I was in Minneapolis, she had relapsed, then come back, and had about a week clean. We went to a meeting, then she came back to my hotel room to watch TV. I let her talk her way up to my room. But I wasn’t going to try anything.

  We lay on the bed watching The Wire.

  “I’m going to cuddle you,” she said.

  Okay, I said.

  She lay at my side, with her head on my chest, that position that feels like she’s a battery and you’re the recharger.

  I came back a month later and texted her. No response.

  She’s relapsed again, I figured.

  I left her a voice mail, saying nothing about it, just, Hi, I’m here. She could call if she wanted.

  The hotel’s internet was malfunctioning. When it was back up, I logged on and found everybody she knew eulogizing her in the comments on her page. She had overdosed and died.

  Her last blog was a day or two before her death. She described a dream in which she is running from something and comes to a house. She opens a sliding door to enter and suddenly realizes it is the house of somebody important to her. She finds him there, in a suit and tie, wearing a corsage. She leaves, running through the trees in the snow, and suddenly the guy’s there again, but there are two of him. They peel off in two directions, and she doesn’t know who to follow, so she follows neither.

  I found out a few things about her after she passed. For one thing, she was married.

  A year later, I texted her old number: I’m still thinking about you.

  A text came back. Who is this?
>
  I typed embarrassedly that I had the wrong number.

  Are you sure? came the response.

  Twenty Four Hours a Day is sitting in a pile of half read books by my bed. Sometimes I open it up to look at her handwriting.

  That final blog is still there on her page.

  I was stopped for speeding as I drove out of Athens, Georgia, on a local highway. One cop was missing half his teeth. But he was cool—I was cheerful, didn’t argue. Apologetically, he searched my trunk and guitar case, and went through my pills—finding out that I didn’t have the prescriptions on me, he had to call in and describe each of them to the station house (“How many antidepressants do they have you on? Have you thought about just changing your diet?”).

  I waited behind the car, talking to his partner, a guy with a grey mustache. He said he used to be a nightclub bouncer, twenty years ago, and doesn’t drink now. “I had two libations the day before I put on this badge,” he said. “When they legalize marijuana, I’ll start smoking it,” he said.

  When, not if?

  “They’ll legalize it as soon as they figure out how to tax it.”

  He said it’s not addictive. I said I agreed it should be legal, but I know lots of people completely crippled by it, they wake and bake, can’t get their lives together. Creative people that think their creativity depends on weed, but don’t seem to notice when their art dries up and dissipates. Haven’t you noticed that you can have a glass of wine for a mild buzz, but if you get stoned, you’re going to get wasted? They don’t grow weed that gives you a glass-of-wine feeling anymore. It’s all turbo-charged Amsterdam shit. If you want to just get a little purr on, you have to, like, use tweezers to meticulously pluck a single tiny leaf off a bud and put that in the bowl. The gateway drug thing may or may not be true; some people get fucked up just hanging out in front of the gate for the rest of their lives.