The Book of Drugs (30 page)

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:

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.

“Marijuana is
not
addictive,” he said, with some hostility.

He told me he had a '68 Fender Stratocaster once owned by Minnie Pearl.

 

I put up a notice on my blog that I was looking for a bass player. This one guy sent an MP3 of an esoteric free-jazz jam from which I could discern almost nothing about his playing. His e-mail read:

There's no way this is the guy, I thought, listening to his MP3. But
man,
I wish this guy could be the guy.

I went to his place. He was wiry, wore octagonal Ben Franklin spectacles, and was dressed like a homeless golf coach. He was a deft and responsive player. He was indeed the guy.

After our first rehearsal with the full band, we were taking the F train downtown, and our drummer turned to him and said, “You don't look like an Andrew. You need a nickname.” Rubbed his chin. “Scrappy.” More chin rubbing. “No,
Scrap.
”

Thus was Andrew “Scrap” Livingston named. I've been touring with him for years—sometimes he plays the upright bass, sometimes cello, sometimes electric guitar (I lent him a solid-body Silvertone that was lent, in turn, to me by Molly Escalator years ago, when we were going out).

“Aw, word, B,” he'll say, in his Mississippi drawl, to assent. “That's how I'm living today.”

His self-description in an online profile reads: “I like many things, and mini things. I like to check my blood sugar. I like to speak when it's appropriate.”

He's preternaturally gentle. As there is a Theoretical Wayne, so there is a Theoretical Scrap. He was a Dallas street kid as a teenager, shooting dope, driving around with a gun in his glove compartment. He once nodded out and fell asleep while placing an order at the drive-through window in a Whataburger.

He concocts nicknames. He calls our friend Daniel Old Tin Rummy. He calls our drummer McBible. He calls our electric
piano player Benjack Ladstack. He calls his best friend from Mississippi Tumpy. He calls his daughter Larry. He called his daughter's mother Funticus, which perhaps bespoke the fate of the relationship. None of these have any discernible logic to their etymology, except my nickname, which is Foss: my middle name is Ross, but there's a typo on my Social Security card.

He uses the word
friends
instead of
things:
“We should move these friends over there.” Or, “I think I'm gonna eat those friends for lunch.” I've heard him call chicken carbonara “chicken carbon-friends.”

He calls a street a “scrump.” He calls Starbucks “Whorbitron's.” He calls cigarettes “dodecahedrons.”

If you ask something like, Do you think we can make it over the Throg's Neck bridge before rush hour? Or, Can we stop for chicken sandwiches? He'll answer, “We can do all things through Christ.”

Examples of Scrap utterances:

“If we were cartoon characters, don't you think I'd be a moth?”

“This doughnut is right in the eyes of the Lord.”

Upon being asked what he's doing: “I'm just learnin' about my body.”

“You can turn a spider into food, but you can't turn food into a spider.”

While driving: “That guy yielded! If he needed a mechanical pencil, I'd be like, Hey, take mine.”

“There might be people here that look like Steven Spielberg. I don't know much about Connecticut, but I know that.”

“If a unicorn is more than a pentacorn, maybe they just call it a multicorn.”

“If this airport turned into a straight-up dance party, I'd be stoked.”

Several times daily, unpredictably, I'll say “goddamn it!” out loud. Sometimes under my breath, sometimes audibly. Sometimes in public: on the subway, in a store. It's because I'm flogging myself, internally, for something I've done: last week, two years ago, ten years ago, when I was fifteen. In my head, it's all still in the present.

Sometimes I'll yell out, MOTHERFUCKERS! Plural. Not that I know who the motherfuckers are.

I tried to type out a shopping list of grievances against myself to put here, and I couldn't. Even seeing each episode as an absurd banality—how can I be angry at myself for a faux pas committed as an eight-year-old? How can I not have sympathy for myself committing shitty behavior under duress? How can I hate myself for writing some corny, contrived lyric that I
didn't even use in a song?
How can I punish myself, relentlessly, for things I
thought about but didn't actually do?—
I couldn't sit through the singe of discomfort long enough to type out the incidents.

On the way out, the
goddamn it!
or the
motherfuckers!
is the voice in my head saying,
How dare you _______?
By the time it's out in the air, the
goddamn it
boomerangs: it's my voice, saying, Fuck you, voice in my head, for constantly torturing me for my mistakes.

My shrink told me the diagnostic term for this voice is an
introject.
The introject is like a malevolent district attorney, forever presenting evidence against me. Each piece of evidence goes
bang!
as he throws it on the table.

Just being able to know that this voice is a
voice
is a victory. In shrink-speak, my introject the evil D.A. is ego
dystonic,
rather than ego
syntonic
. Ego syntonic, which it used to be, means, basically, that I didn't recognize it as a voice in my head at all; whatever ancient trespass popped into my mind, I saw it as something that occurred to me innately and reasonably.

I was driving around with Scrap.
Goddamn it!

Startled him. “What's wrong?!”

Just punishing myself for something that happened years ago that I can't do anything about, I said.

 

I went up to Schenectady to see Luke in a touring production of
South Pacific.
I said I was writing a memoir. “Yeah,
I know,
” he said, glaring at me in worry and consternation. My editor—the guy editing this very book—used to play bass in a band with him.

In his prestigious grad acting school, he played the leads in all the productions: the directors didn't operate on an elementary-school-soccer-team everyone-should-get-to-play system. He was the best. When he graduated, he went from
Hamlet,
and Berenger in Ionesco's
Rhinoceros,
to trying out for minuscule roles as Latino hoodlums: “I'll cut you, ese!” Some of his classmates became movie stars or took iconic TV roles. He worked as a bellhop between parts in Spanish-language cable commercials. Now he does some Broadway and touring musicals. Twice, he's been replaced by ex-contestants from
American Idol.

He seems bitter. Maybe I'm projecting: it's just my guilt for being more successful than he is (am I? I have no idea how much money he makes). We were born a week apart. One year I gave him the June 1970 issue of
Life—
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in evening wear on a rocky beach—as a birthday present. The current issue in the month we were born—it was probably on a chair in the waiting rooms of the hospitals we were born in. The year we both turned forty, I wrote him and didn't hear back.

When I was in school, all my friends were artists. As I reached my thirties, they began to drop away; they weren't able to make any money doing what they used to dream of doing. I feel embarrassed, not lucky: when I see them, I play up the hard part of my
job—demanding travel, persistent rejection—but a claim of hardship is absurd.