The Book of Drugs (13 page)

Lars had this thing about Asleep at the Wheel, the Texas swing band. At the beginning of every tour, he'd find a greatest-hits cassette in a truck stop, and listen to it every time he drove. “I've got miles and miles of Texas!” and “I'm going to boogie back to Texas!” and “Texas something, blah blah something Texas.” He'd slip the tape surreptitiously into someone's luggage at tour's end.

(There was this piece of graffiti, by some astute band guy/ existentialist, that you'd see in the dressing rooms of shitty rock clubs all over America—Madison, Des Moines, Lawrence, Champaign, Tucson—expressing perfectly that feeling of dislocation you felt on tour: “I hate this part of Texas.”)

The band didn't drink beer—we just smoked weed, and were insufferable snobs about it—but clubs always supplied it in the dressing room, so Lars hoarded it. Eventually we were traveling on a sleeper bus; Lars filled the fridge with beer. Annoyed that he was hogging all the space, we made him take it out; he started storing it in his bunk. He slept on piles of cans.

 

I journaled in the van to kill time. I left my notebook under the seat. Personally, when somebody I know has a journal, even if they left it under my pillow, I wouldn't read it. The sampler player,
however, would take it out and read it when I wasn't around. I'd get in the van, and he'd confront me, saying, intensely, “How dare you say that we———?”

We did a photo shoot. The bass player had slipped my journal into his pocket when I wasn't looking. In the photos, he was standing just behind me with the journal open, holding it up, with an exaggerated look of fake shock on his face.

Warner Bros. gave us a small budget for gear—new amps, etc. I used my cut to buy a laptop—circa 1995, about as thick as a Tolstoy novel. The sampler player wanted to borrow it for some reason. I blew him off. He kept asking. Finally, I said: That's kind of like asking to borrow both my guitar and my journal, isn't it?

Somebody chided him for not answering an e-mail. “I would have, but Doughty won't let anybody else use that computer that
we bought for him,
” he said.

 

I slept with a girl in Amsterdam who refused to tell me her name. We played a place called the Melkweg—the Milky Way. The crowd was sparse. She was leaning on a column near the front. Her brown eyes floated upward to me as I sang.

Stanley Ray was following us on tour, riding in the same vehicle but staying at cushy hotels. We went back to his room after the show and got high. She followed us.

What's your name? I asked her.

We were walking along a canal. Lurid light was reflected on the water.

“I'm not going to tell you my name,” she said, with a tight smirk.

We sat around a coffee table, passing the joint around, but she sat at a dining table just outside the perimeter. I kept looking at her, and she looked back with that same frank, sexy regard. She
cocked her head a little, as if to say, Why aren't you taking me by the hand and walking me back to your hotel?

I was scared of the judgment of everybody in the room. I felt ludicrous. I pretended to follow the conversation, but my heart was pounding and I was desperately scheming for a way to get out of there with her. Maybe suddenly everybody would get absorbed in something, and I could escape unnoticed.

At last I said something stupid about having to leave. Stanley Ray looked at me with daggers in his eyes. He hated it when I went off with a girl. I managed to get up, walk over to the Dutch girl, whisper in her ear, and leave. Feeling burning eyes on my back.

So what's your name? I said as we crossed a footbridge.

My head was spinning from the weed. I kept stumbling into the bike path, and I'd hear jingling bells and think,
How pretty,
but they were the bells on bicycles, ringing at the idiot in their way.

“I'm not going to tell you my name,” she said.

We came to our cheap hotel. I didn't know how to say, Hey, want to come upstairs? I coughed up some topic, Did you like the show? Or, What's up with the weird breaded cheese sticks you can buy at automats here?

“I think I will come up to your room,” she said.

We made out in the elevator, and tumbled into my room. I had her blouse off and was trying to remove the beige bra from her plump, drooping tits, fumbling with the hook. Her pale skin was constellated with dark moles. I unbuttoned her jeans and slipped my hand beneath the beige panties—
What is this old-fashioned underwear doing on such a sexy girl?
—and my hand grazed the soft hair on her pussy's mound. She sat on the bed—a tiny twin bed facing a tiny television set, in a room half the size of a starlet's closet—and pulled me down onto it. She had another joint in her
purse, and we smoked it, and then I was just utterly obliterated. My tongue was puffed up, filling my mouth.

Look, I said. Tell me your name. You have to tell me your name.

“It's ugly,” she said. “It's Dutch, and you won't like it.”

Dutch has a kind of
mish-mish-mush-mush
quality to it, punctuated with long, phlegmy, rolling consonants in the back of the throat. But how bad could it be?

“My name is Bregggggkkkkkgggggggya,” she said.

We fucked for a long time, an hour or more. I got that oceanic feeling of being extremely high; she became just a notion of femaleness. My cock was barely hard. It kept slipping out of her. Finally I came inside her, risk be damned.

I was staring at the ceiling, following the floaters in the liquid of my eyes, and she was talking. And kept talking. She went into a long and dull description of a dream.

“Don't you think that's funny?” she said. “I find this dream to be very funny.”

I mumbled something, but I was entirely disinterested.

 

The sampler player caught a semipermanent fake Dutch accent with which he spoke to everybody he met in Europe, haltingly describing mundane things as if they were American phenomena. “In my country? We have? Something which is called?
Cable television?
We have? Many channels? And some of them? Show what are called?
Music videos?
”

 

I fell in love with a picture of a singer named Dusha Arangu, from a second-string British band, in
Spin
magazine. She looked like an alien, with long arms and huge black eyes. Her brown skin looked silver in black-and-white photographs. I wrangled a chance to
meet her, and sometimes when her band would tour through New York I'd see her.

She had a night off and was staying at a hotel up on Lexington Avenue. It was one of those faceless, beige hotels. I went up to her room; she was lying on her bed. Her shirt rode up, and I could see a sliver of her back above the belt loops of her jeans. I asked her if she wanted to go downtown and eat, see some of the actual New York, but the idea unnerved her—New York's storied scariness? Distrust of me?

Suddenly Dusha Arangu was talking about how she needed a shag, really that's all she needed was a shag, a shag would mitigate her blues, sometimes you just really need a shag, you know?

I rolled up a joint and we smoked. I brought the weed because I thought we might have sex. I could shake off reality and be
there.
Why fuck a goddess not-stoned?

That's probably just a part of it. There's something about me that when I experience an intense feeling, any feeling, good or bad, I have to do something to mitigate it. I have an innate urge to smother exhilaration with medicine. Were I to get a phone call right now saying that I had hit the Lotto, I would immediately need to eat a gallon of sorbet and drink four cups of coffee.

The weed gnawed my confidence. Is that what she meant, shagging me? That's what she meant. But how could she mean that? Look at yourself, Doughty: like somebody could want you? I was saying all the wrong things as fast as I could say them, and then trying to backpedal and saying more wrong things, and I could have flopped onto the wide beige bedspread and kissed her—probably I'd have missed her face on the first two passes, that's how high I was—but I stayed in the chair, and when the long silences had erased any trace of a vibe in that hotel room, she suggested we go out to eat with her manager.

I ate tasteless Tom Kha in a nondescript Thai restaurant. I tried not to look at her. Baffled that I didn't make a move. Thinking that the waitress, the manager, every person in the place was thinking, “Look at this creature. We hate him.”

Dusha and I stayed in touch with biennial e-mails for a while; in the last one, she joked about the record company dropping her band. “I've discovered what I was put on this Earth to do, and nobody's trying to help me do it!” she wrote, cheerfully irate. I knew that her band was neither good nor famous enough to survive the cultural sea change. It terrified me.

There was a lull as I typed this, during which I clicked from the word processor over to the browser, and typed her name into one of the social-networking sites: I found five Dashu Garangas, a Shusha Malangu, and a Dasu Ashangu.

 

I fucked somebody every time I got the chance. The sheer range of women I slept with on tour is striking to me, now: breathtaking women, and women that a desperate man on a lot of speed wouldn't consider as the bar closed at 4 AM.

I fucked an acne-scarred Irish girl in a Nashville Radisson for two hours straight.

I fucked a Danish girl, so fantastically beautiful that I was dumbfounded to be with her, for two minutes.

I fucked a woman from Milwaukee who described her job as “homeopathic oncologist.”

I fucked a sandy-haired, pudgy woman who sold t-shirts for reunited classic rock bands; she cornered me at a club in New Orleans, fed me mushrooms, and we fucked, tripping; as I hotfooted out, she cried, “Don't you want to go fuck in the City of the Dead?”

I fucked a hirsute, angular Frenchwoman whose enthralling moans sounded for all the world like an oboe.

I fucked a fat Canadian journalist with a pin-up's face on her obese body.

I fucked another French woman who wore a rubber dress, had a full back-piece tattoo of
The Scream,
called me “zee byoo-tea-fall blond-uh angel,” and had a notebook of pencil sketches of the other guys from bands she'd invited home.

I fucked a woman in Boston who, to turn herself on, spoke Russian the entire time.

I fucked a stewardess in Seattle who wouldn't take off her motorcycle boots.

I fucked a black woman nearly half a foot taller than me—I'm six foot one—backstage at a hockey arena in Minnesota; when I complained I was blind wasted, she took me by the wrist and led me to the bathroom, where, kneeling across the toilet from each other, we stuck our fingers down our throats and puked together.

I fucked a gangly, dazzling woman whom I recognized from an episode of
The X-Files.
Though insanely gorgeous, she spoke with the nerdiest voice I've ever heard.

I fucked a girl in Pittsburgh, in the back of a bus, with a boyish seventeen-year-old's body and a middle-aged senator's jowls.

I fucked an Italian woman in Paris who was almost but not quite beautiful enough to be a model; she kept talking, brightly, pathetically, about her future on the runways, and later became the traveling concubine of one of the Backstreet Boys.

I fucked a strawberry-haired girl in a billowing hippie skirt with a
Fargo
accent who, afterwards, pushed upon me a cassette tape of her terrible sludge-rock band.

I fucked the hostess of a country-music video countdown show, whose shoes I complimented; thus, she thought I was a foot fetishist, and mailed me snapshots of her feet for months after—
poolside, with “My Feet on Vacation” written in red marker on the back.

I fucked a publicist for hip-hop acts who wept as I went down on her.

I fucked a curvy goth princess who made squeaking noises.

I fucked a gamine Iowan; I begged her to wear her green-framed glasses while she went down on me.

I fucked a radio programmer who could've dashed my career, but I never called her again, anyway.

I fucked a girl with a high-school-pep-rally sort of personality who ten years later was managing a band with the number one record in America.

I fucked a serene Native American girl who smiled, noiselessly, as she rode me; she made me come, then she made herself a cup of tea and split.

I fucked a woman in a broom closet at the Paramount Theater.

I fucked a girl who picked me up with a friend at an after-party in London; the three of us went back to my suite, drank shitty champagne, then each said, “Yawn, time to go to sleep,” then one went and feigned slumber on the couch, the other feigned sleep on the bed, and I had to choose which one to fake-wake-up and have sex with.

I fucked two girls in stairwells within a single week—one in a hotel, one in a mall. When I was with one of them, a pair of stoic tourists passed us as they headed down the stairs; I had my entire hand shoved up her pussy.

I fucked a woman in a limousine in Miami; we swigged tequila, mid-fuck, as the driver lectured us on the social history of Coconut Grove.

Mostly, though, I didn't fuck anybody. The above litany is uninspired compared to that of the average singer of a band that had
a video on MTV in the '90s. I was usually too high to pickup girls. Every night that I spent alone, cotton-mouthed, in a hotel room, I loathed myself for loneliness itself.

On the scarce occasions where there was sex without weed, my disappointment was such that I felt I wasn't having sex at all.

In the last days of my drug life, I was unable to fuck, and uninterested besides. When I got clean, I started up again. Immediately, the stripe of women improved markedly. But I was itchingly dissatisfied, dogged by unfamiliar self-reproach. Flippant sex is a wasted man's pastime. At least, I was unable to do it without a basic desire to want to talk to, hang out with, the woman I was with.