The Book of Drugs (29 page)

“My life today is nothing but reading, smoking, having coffee,” he said. There was a paperback in front of him; an Amharic translation of Chekhov's short stories. Fat Amharic letters outlined a cartoon dandy with an undulating mustache and a pocket watch. “I've read them in Swedish and English already.”

 

I went back to the Azmari bar with the guys I knew. There were two beautiful African American girls who had just come to Bahir Dar to teach English. They were from Brooklyn; they wore
groovy-Brooklynite-asymmetrical-sexy clothes and hairstyles. Lul and Genanew were transfixed by them.

Lul held my hand. I tried to be OK with it. I failed. I reached across the table, feigning the need to pickup a glass.

We went to a bar crowded entirely with men, except one tetchy woman who came in to bus the bar and then disappeared again. Daniel the driver ordered a wine—it came in a beer bottle—and a Coke. He mixed them in a glass, laughing at my expression of alarm.

I imitated Daniel Coke-and-Wine's boxing-cabbage-patch dance. Everybody laughed. I pointed to Daniel, saying, “Coke and wine!” and then the two of us would do the boxing-cabbage-patch together.

Being the rich man, I bought the drinks. Everybody got shit-faced except me and Genanew. The dancing got wilder. Lul twirled and reeled. A robust and tacky European disco version of John Denver's “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” came on. The packed bar exploded.

I turned to Genanew and sang the bridge:

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 stately 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.