The Book of Drugs (23 page)

It exasperated me, for utterly no reason. She told me how she'd met a famous ex-junkie singer at some event, and later he knocked on her hotel room door and said, “Want to go get some soup?” Soup! What's romantic and reprobate about
soup?

After Molly dumped me, I moped around, listening to the Teddy Riley remix of Mary J. Blige's “Changes I've Been Going Through” over and over. Tiresomely, she kept calling. “You
have to
be my friend,” she said. Like fuck I have to, I replied.

Molly kept showing up now and then, and she'd always have something new going on: she had fallen in love with Bach's
Goldberg Variations,
so she'd learned to play piano; she read all these mystery novels, so she started corresponding with the authors; she'd gotten interested in horse racing and was writing a book about it.

I was the rock star, I was the one with the things going on and the awesomeness. What business did she have with an interesting life?

In fact, what I was doing was getting high alone in a room, getting high in the back of a bus, getting high as I lay in bed.

I sat in a hotel in Madison, Wisconsin, shaking because I hadn't had my morning drink yet, and I typed her an e-mail. I told her that I went through a bad heroin binge, and it nearly killed me, and now I have to be drunk all day. On some essential level, I could accept being a drug addict, but I can't accept being a drunk. Can you please take me to one of those meetings of yours?

That's why she kept that line open all those years.

 

I woke up on the third of May 2000, looking at a half-full glass of Jack Daniel's. I had passed out before the task was through. Somehow I managed to pour it out into the sink.

The tour manager drove me home, shaking, stuffing myself with chalupas. The trip took a day and a half; when I got home, there was beer in my fridge but I didn't touch it. There was dusty weed on my bedside table, glued to a sticky layer of NyQuil. A half bottle was my longtime nightcap of choice.

 

I sat across from Molly at Kate's Vegetarian Joint on Avenue B. She was staring at me curiously across my plate of tofu Buffalo wings. She was about to take me to my first meeting.

(The unisex bathroom at Kate's Joint had two amazing pieces of graffiti:
Yaphet Kotto Fucking Crazy.
Which meant—Yaphet Kotto is fucking crazy? Or an echelon of crazy, like, “Man, that shit isn't just crazy, that's like
Yaphet Kotto fucking crazy.
” And in silver pen:
“Robot” is a Czech word. It means “worker.”
Next to it, sardonically:
Did you learn that at NYU?
Next to that, in shaky script:
no Larry told me
.)

So, I asked Molly, why should I stay clean if I go to these meetings? Can't I just go between binges?

She made a wistful face. “That's what I was going to do,” she said, sincerely.

It disarmed me. I had grey skin, dead eyes, and anybody with half a mind would've slapped me. But Molly had loved drugs; she just knew they had stopped working, would never work again, and she didn't want to die.

I had a bottle of Valium in my pocket; I had hustled a prescription from the Cocaine Papers doc earlier that day.

 

You see movies and think that a twelve-step meeting involves somebody holding a clipboard. There was no clipboard. A guy who used to be a wasted drug fuckup read something at the beginning, another guy who used to be a wasted drug fuckup told
the tale of his addiction, and then a roomful of former wasted drug fuckups spoke, each in turn—nobody interrupting anybody—about where they were at, or what happened to them, or where they wanted to be, about their lives both with and without getting fucked up.

Every variety of person was there. One guy talked about living in a shelter. Another guy talked about owning a business, but feeling trapped by it. A woman I recognized as a goth icon sat in the back row, knitting. She raised her hand and spoke of anguish over a crackhead ex.

There were heroin people, coke people, meth people, weed people, prescription-painkiller people, liquor people, beer people. Most of them, actually, a mixture of the whole list, serially or simultaneously.

The atmosphere was reverent, but not pious; it was both ritual and intimate. Whenever something borderline corny went down—the phrase “we share our experience, strength, and hope,” a reference to god, the room saying, en masse, “Thanks for sharing,” when somebody had finished talking—Molly turned to me and rolled her eyes sympathetically. But actually I felt an incredible warmth.

“Now's the part where we all hug and pray,” she whispered into my ear, half sarcastically, as the meeting came to a close. “I should've mentioned that.”

Everybody stood up in a big circle and put their arms around each other. “Let's have a moment of silence,” said the guy who'd told his addiction story, “for the addict still sick and suffering, inside and outside of these rooms.” And then everybody said the serenity prayer. I half knew it. And it made sense to me.

I typed the serenity prayer here, but then I deleted it: you've read that prayer thousands of times. I beg you to see it like this:
you want to get high. You know that it's going to kill you, or humiliate you, or drive you to desperation, that you're not really going to get
high
at all, but every part of yourself wants to. You want to get out from under it, and you've tried, but you don't have it in you to do it alone. You're willing to take a half step towards something big and weird, something that you don't even know you believe in, hoping that it, or they, or she, will help.

 

I met a guy named Leon, who knew the moment he looked at me that this was my first meeting. He gave me his number and a meeting list, and told me to call him the next day. I went to a diner and sat in the window, amazed to feel hopeful. I found another meeting to go to, late night, far on the West Side.

There was a deranged man in headphones dancing obliviously in the middle of the room; somebody shooed him away. Homeless guys slept in the back. There were two glamorous women, dazzlingly made up, in dresses and heels. Two men spoke: the first talked about how he had spent his life fantasizing about having a farm to grow his own weed and mushrooms, but then, bafflingly to him, had become a crack addict. The second guy had recently been homeless and had worked as a gravedigger before his life went haywire. His story went like this: “I went back to the shed and had a couple of belts. Then I went back to digging the grave. Then I went back to the shed, and had a couple of belts. Then I went back to digging the grave. Then I went back to the shed . . . ”

Back at my apartment, I put the beer in front of my neighbor's door and went to the roof. I pitched the bottle of Valium; it arced upward, barely missed the streetlight on its way down, and exploded dramatically in the intersection, whereupon it was run over by a taxi.

It was the fifth of May—Cinco de Mayo. The day the Mexicans defeated the French. In the years to follow, I would think of Cinco de Mayo as my day of surrender. The beer industry celebrates the anniversary every year with commercials about boozing up on Mexican beaches.

 

That night in Pittsburgh when I almost drank the bottles of piss, I had gone drunkenly online and bought a ticket to Laos, adjacent to the Golden Triangle: you know, the place where they make the heroin.

In the reading they did at the top of the first meeting I'd ever gone to, there was a part that went something like, “If you're new, we suggest you make ninety meetings in ninety days—if that sounds like too much, make a meeting a day and the ninety will take care of itself.” My addled mind didn't hear that as,
Go to a meeting every day for three months
—I heard it as if you could do ten meetings a day for nine days and you're set. I'll make forty-five meetings this month, I thought, go to Laos, then come back and do the latter half.

I told Leon the plan. He did not tell me it was insanely dumb. Instead, he took me to his apartment on Duane Street, rummaged around, found a photocopied guide to meetings all over the world, and copied out for me a phone number in the Laotian capital, Vientiane.

If the rooms were about people shaking a finger in my face, telling me what I must and must not do, maybe I wouldn't have stayed clean. I know some people who were told rigidly what to do, but that wasn't my experience. The people I met must've been experienced in defiance—what addict isn't? I was chock-full of terrible ideas. Nobody told me they were terrible. Somehow they disarmed me, and I dropped them.

Two days clean, I had this weird show to do; a symposium on New York musical history, thrown by the
New York Press
. A bunch of éminences grises were to do onstage interviews, and then a few locals would play.

I called Leon in a panic. How did I do this, in a bar, not drinking? He told me that somebody he knew was one of the guests. Who? He said the name of a rock legend, the singer of a band that more or less invented both punk and glam rock at the same time in the '70s. Wait.
Who?
Really?

I went to a meeting in the West Village, on Perry Street, a clubhouse that held meetings around the clock. It was an undecorated storefront surrounded by spendy bistros. The interior was painted pink. The guy who spoke was an actor; he'd just played a drunken hobo on a cop show. “It's amazing what the Russians can do with a potato,” was one of his lines, delivered while gazing admiringly at a vodka bottle.

I walked all the way across town, past NYU, through SoHo, through Chinatown, to the Bowery Ballroom. My editor, Strausbaugh, was out front, taking a joint passed by one of the music writers, a delicate white kid in rapper drag, coordinated yellow Wu Wear billowing around his tiny body. Strausbaugh called out my name, but I kept my eyes to the pavement and asked where the rock legend was. Why—you know him? Huh? How? He hadn't shown up yet.

When the rock legend arrived, I stumbled up and told him who sent me. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of fax paper; on it was a few lines from a Sufi poem:

The paper had gotten stuck in the fax machine; the remaining lines were distended like phantoms, illegible.

Somebody snapped a picture. It was in the paper the next week, with other photos of the event: the rock legend, handing me a poem, the very moment I met him.

His interview was hilarious. A story about being thrown in jail in Memphis. “I was dressed like Liza Minnelli at the time.” A story about stalking Janis Joplin, stealing a Pepsi can she drank from at the Pink Teacup, which he used as an ashtray; how he obsessed over her like gay guys stereotypically obsess over Judy Garland. A story about standing next to Jim Morrison in Max's Kansas City: Morrison drank a bottle of Jack Daniel's in three guzzles and said, “Takes the edge off the acid.” A story about being up for three days doing coke with David Bowie—“He was giving me the stink-eye!”—and discovering that his nose had bled all over his face and soaked his shirt. A story about tripping so severely at Altamont that he didn't know anything weird went down. A story about seeing Led Zeppelin play at the Central Park Zoo—“I thought they were a joke!” (surely he's the last of the late-'70s hipsters to have regarded Led Zeppelin as a crass enterprise)—and his distaste for the Beatles—“You'd get beaten up if you listened to that in my neighborhood.”

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.