The Book of Drugs (31 page)

People who got successful doing what they want to do tend to disbelieve in luck. Got here by working hard, we say. I did, indeed, work like a motherfucker. I credit myself, in particular, for sticking it out with Soul Coughing until I had enough of a career to go out on my own. But maybe I was just fortunate to be the right kind of insane.

A shrink friend of mine from the rooms had a good definition for
fear of success.
There was a poetic, elderly crank in the soap-opera-star meeting, given to wearing berets, who drank himself to death. He had relapsed repeatedly, always coming back to much affection. The story about him was that he was a brilliant painter who never caught a break. Not true, my shrink friend said. Breaks came, but he didn't take them. If he took them, he'd cease to be an undiscovered genius and become just a very good painter.

(I'm afraid of that right now: I've loudly vowed to write a book for years. I'm also trying to avoid the paralysis that begins with,
Now, just exactly how much better is Nabokov than me?
)

Prosperous artists
tsk-tsk
at the talented but hapless, and almost invariably diagnose a fear of success. To acknowledge that there may be such things as fortune and flukes is terrifying.

 

My former bandmates turn up from time to time. Usually on old Soul Coughing internet bulletin boards. The bass player posts that I never actually had a drug problem; I made it up to be glamorous. “Ask Doughty how he wanted to be Lou Reed when he grew up,” he typed.

I did a song with the techno producer BT, using some fragments from a song I brought into Soul Coughing that never turned
into anything interesting. But because there was a rudimentary recording of a Soul Coughing version of the song, they called my publisher and my lawyer and I had to pay them.

The sampler player talked to my manager. “I bet Doughty told you he was a drug addict, too,” he said.

Sometimes, when my bandmates say it—as with the songs they say I didn't write—I'm convinced that they're correct, I'm lying, and I have to go look at the two Post-Its that I put at the beginning of this book to convince myself that I'm not a hoax.

I never used a needle. I always had an apartment, and money. I never ran out of drugs—I was assiduous about that, because if I were to run out of drugs that would mean I had a
problem.
I have more than a few friends who've been to jail; I've never been arrested, except once for turnstile-jumping in the subway, and when I went to court, I was told that I was not, in fact, arrested, but
detained.
I have no record of bad-assery. Sometimes, this makes me feel like it doesn't count.

(You learn something about bad-assery in the rooms: it's not actually badass at all. Scared and pathetic people, whether with guns, or having guns pointed at them, or being thrown in jail, do not feel like badasses. They feel even more scared and pathetic than we on the outside can imagine.)

 

Long after the band broke up, the sampler player met Lou Reed in a studio. It turned out that Lou Reed was a Soul Coughing fan.

“Oh, thank you,” said the sampler player, “but the band was more than
just me,
you know.”

 

Someplace on the internet, the bass player was asked if there would ever be a reunion. “Not unless one of us dies,” he replied.
There's much to be said for having a life.

On good days, living is about acceptance. If I win the lottery, I'm a millionaire; if my leg gets chopped off, I'm a one-legged man. They're not all good days, but the good days are very good—sometimes the days are very good when things are very bad, if that makes any sense.

I prefer where I'm at to where I was; the general serenity and satisfaction of my life is better than the brief surges of euphoria that were all I used to have. I wouldn't want to go back to the drugs even if they concocted a pill that would allow me to use casually, like a non-addict does. (The joke goes: If there were a cure for alcoholism, I'd go get
wasted!
) But I don't discredit the drugs. I wouldn't be where I am now if I wasn't where I was, then.

(I don't
recommend
drugs, either: if you have the addict thing, you're more likely to die, or live a sad grey life, than get to where I got.)

I do stuff, the way I used to envy Molly Escalator's ability to do stuff. All the travel I've done. I learned how to speak German, just for the joy of it. (I'm of the minority opinion that it's a beautiful language; more people might dig it if we heard it anywhere other than being
yelled
in movies; even French sounds ugly yelled.) I went to a meeting in Germany and spoke, although what came out probably sounded like: “Drug is no happy, I make bad! To stop, many times meetings, I go fine! Good the life-ing is!”

I struggle with a notion of god-consciousness. I need both reverence and irreverence. I chafe at the word
god,
and I chafe at self-important atheists. I don't believe in God-the-dude, who
lives somewhere,
but I don't pray to a gaseous ball of energy, either, but to something with compassion in the way a human being has compassion.

A guy in the rooms said, “I call it
god
because it's easy to spell.”

By pray—and I wish I could express the act with a word other than that one—I mean, mostly, speaking out loud to the darkness. Sometimes, just thinking
at
the darkness. Some people like the on-the-knees gambit—it's been recommended to me, and I've tried, but couldn't get with it. (Do you lean back on your ankles? Or sit up,
Dorf on Golf
style, putting the weight on your knees?) Scrap and I go to meetings out on tour; sometimes the Lord's Prayer is said at the end of them, rather than the serenity prayer, and it fills me with resentment: I won't say it. Scrap sighs at me, annoyed, like,
Come on, man, it's not a big deal, just accept it as its own thing.

Sometimes, in a freakout on the subway, in a theater, in the park, I'll type long stream-of-consciousness prayers into my phone.

And it works. Atheists, your points are often impeccable—but, for me and a bunch of my friends, at least, it works. Or, maybe I should say, it
can
work. You want data. I don't have any. You might want me to quantify the effects of prayer on—what?—pulse rate, income level, serotonin secretion, indices of satisfaction. You probably can't take me seriously if I don't have a solid hypothesis on who/what/why god is, a firm set of givens, but that's not possible for me—my version of god is one thing one day, another thing the next, yet another thing an hour later. My faith in the usefulness of prayer fluctuates from the prompting of cosmic intervention to a very slight easing of stress. Even to call myself agnostic is to presume a lot more sense and rigor than I could muster.

Key to me is what the rock legend said:
You're like a flea contemplating the Empire State Building.
What's there is too vast for a human being to get his or her head around. The only shred of a rational justification—and I mean justification
to myself,
I'm not presenting an argument here—is this: if you believe in evolution, and thus believe that dogs aren't as smart as pigs, which aren't as
smart as dolphins, which aren't as smart as humans, you
must
believe there's an evolutionary step—millions of years down the line—beyond the current state of humanness. There
must
be things we aren't sophisticated enough, as animals, to comprehend—to perceive, even.

(To believe we're the pinnacle of evolution—that no facet of reality could elude our understanding—might be thought of as along the lines of the book of Genesis: god made man in his own image. God gave man dominion over the animals.)

This is deplorably shoddy proof of a personified, interventionist deity; what it more likely proves is that even the most expansive, nebulous, and mysterious idea of god-consciousness depicts what may be the true nature of the cosmos with less accuracy than a three-year-old's finger painting of a mountain. What I'm trying to say is that we're all—from cub scouts to Nobel laureates—viewing existence through our humanity. Which is to say: in metaphor. Some of our metaphors—and our metaphorical systems—are much, much more sophisticated, and meticulous, than others.

Yet. Half an hour ago, I spilled a cup of coffee. My automatic thought: the universe is directly intervening, to tell me I don't need more caffeine.

 

I believe in the twelve-step thing about making amends.
Making amends
doesn't mean to apologize, and it doesn't mean obtaining forgiveness. I go to somebody I've hurt and express that what I did haunts me. I once wrote something mean and vengeful about that
Spin
reviewer who scorned my voice; I wrote an e-mail telling him of my remorse. He was receptive, not to mention surprised. There are other people who haven't even returned my call. All I'm able to do is put it out there, and let go of whatever I want to get back. I wrestle with making amends to people who've hurt me.
How do I express my regrets to someone who's done something worse to me? How do I just take responsibility for what I've done, and move on?

My closeness to the rooms waxes and wanes. I'm often ambivalent in the real sense of that word: I believe as much as I disbelieve. I'll blow off meetings even though I know that just going and sitting in one will make me feel better. Sometimes much better, sometimes a little bit better, sometimes just a speck better, but always better.

I have friends. I recommend having friends. Were they in trouble, I'd help them, and I wouldn't hesitate to ask for help myself. The question, How are you? posed to someone in recovery gets an actual account of how one is, and one actually
hears
what the other guy is saying.

This stuff sounds corny, right? I don't want to be corny. But it's all true.

 

I'm typing this to you from Los Angeles on Labor Day. I broke up with my girlfriend last month, during a vacation to Cambodia (my advice to you is, should your relationship implode, don't be 5,000 miles from home). Since coming back, I've been spending money madly, trying to alter my feelings via consumption. I paid to fly out here business class; I'm staying in a pricey hotel. The business class flight didn't make me feel better; there was a movie star sitting a row ahead of me; I sat there feeling like I didn't measure up to the movie star, who held hands with a handsome boyfriend and was thus mocking me as boring and unlovable. The expensive hotel room isn't doing it for me, either. I need a bigger room, I need to spend more money. I need to throw more material into this weird hole in myself.

The night before I was doing a track with a producer who smoked weed continually. The kind that you get at dispensaries in California, in pharmacy bottles, with their varietal names—
White Widow, Northern Lights, Pancake Throatjam
—printed on the labels. As a friend to the demimonde, I can't fault the racket, but I don't buy the medicinal-value thing, other than helping chemotherapy patients gain weight by giving them the munchies.

I'm feeling jumpy. I skipped out on the men's meeting in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, I go to on Saturday nights, my mainstay of late. It's filled with groovy art dudes, and the occasional Polish guy from the neighborhood's enclave. Groovy art dudes intimidate me, even though I am one, because I feel their very existence proves me to be a sham. This meeting, because it's only men, no women to impress, is particularly soulful and honest; hearing the groovy art dudes open their hearts, express their insecurities, is extremely moving to me. But I skipped it, and now there are uninvited, unwanted feelings knocking around me.

I spent the morning moping in the hotel bed, watching Jerry Lewis lumber around exhaustedly on the set of his telethon, but I got smart and dialed up a meeting on the internet. There was one ten minutes away, at a university, in a nondescript student union. I went up to the floor with the meeting on it; there was a student in the elevator with me. She wore a yellow t-shirt that said
Life, Pot, Microdots
. So, likely not looking for the meeting, I judged. I walked up and down the hall, peering into the sterile meeting rooms.

“Are you looking for . . . a meeting?” the microdot-shirt girl said.

What . . .
kind
of meeting? I said. She must be looking for something else.

“A twelve-step meeting?”

Oh! It's supposed to be in here, I said, pointing into Room 3508. You a friend of Bill's? (I alluded to it earlier; a code for twelve-step people.)

“No? . . .” she said.

I took a closer look at her face. Yellowish-grey.

“My first meeting,” she said.

It was just the two of us sitting in the empty conference room, with its institutional chairs and dry-erase board. I was panicky—suddenly I'm responsible for helping this girl, by myself.

I smiled. So what happened?

She shook her head, didn't want to talk about it.

Once you get your shit together, you stay in to help other people. It keeps you clean. It astonishes me that I get one of the best feelings in my life when I encounter a stranger, suffering from the same thing I suffer, who needs help. It was not ever thus.

You sure? I said.

“I had a really bad night,” she said. I was filled with tenderness. I could've sobbed out loud.

The door opened, a woman walked in. She had a gee-whiz-dadgum-jim-cracky! sort of demeanor. She, too, was passing through Los Angeles, and found this place on the website.

So, apparently, they'd canceled the meeting because of Labor Day. We had one anyway. The gee-whiz lady knew the preamble by heart; she recited the twelve steps. Impressive. I cringed every time she said “god”—this new girl's got to think that's creepy, I thought, all the god god god over and over.