I wrote my ideas on Post-It notes and stuck them on the wall by the desk. Lyrics, ideas for poems, ideas for newspaper pieces, preposterous diagrams for joysticks and wired-up boxing gloves that would work as sound-effects triggers. These are two notes I left for myself in November 1999:

I’m mostly writing drug stories. I have them. People read them.

I know a famous actor who was a regular on Page Six, going in and out of nightclubs, in the heyday of the Hilton sisters and the Olsen twins. He struggled with cocaine and painkillers but was embarrassed to talk about it. “Addiction stories are clichéd,” he said.

You’re a storyteller, I told him. You know how few essential stories there are. This one is new, how often does that happen? It’s up there with Boy Meets Girl Boy Loses Girl, Man Challenges the Gods and Is Punished, Rags to Riches. Joking cynically with friends, I’ve called this book a JADN: just another drug narrative. We, the addicts, keep writing them, but nearly everything we have to say has already been expressed just in the title of Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story.

I can’t renounce drugs. I love drugs. I’d never trade the part of my life when the drugs worked, though the bulk of the time I spent getting high, they weren’t doing shit for me. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t do the drugs first. This part of my life—even minus the bursts of euphoria—is better, sexier, happier, more poetic, more romantic, grander.

And if heroin still made me feel like I did the first time, and kept making me that way forever—kept working—I might’ve quite happily accepted a desolate, marginal life and death.

I’ve heard from so many people who got clean, then went out and got wasted again, that, bewilderingly, they were exactly at the same place they were when they left off, immediately. It’s just the bizarreness of addiction, which waits patiently, no matter how long you go without drugs. Who knows, maybe I am, in fact, unlike the aforementioned relapsers, but I have no desire to try the drugs again, and see if things go differently. I don’t want to test this life’s durability.

None of this guarantees I won’t go out and get fucked up. It happens, often to people who’ve made enthusiastic public declarations of recovery. I watch Celebrity Rehab and think: My people!

Caroline Knapp, it bears mentioning, was also addicted to nicotine, and died of lung cancer.

I loathe myself in a lot of these stories. I feel compelled to tell you now that eventually I turn into a kind, loving person who struggles to live the first line in Saint Francis’s prayer: “Make me a channel of your peace.” Not to demand peace, but to transmit it.

Maybe that’s not what you’re interested in—maybe you want salacious tales of the debased guy: the cleaned-up guy is intolerably corny. Maybe you just want to read drugs heroin heroin drugs over and over again. When I was getting high, that’s what I read these books for.

 

My dad’s dad was the town drunk in Tullos, Louisiana. In the mid-1950s, when everybody else’s family had gotten a car, my dad’s family still had a horse. Because the horse knew how to get home. My grandfather would get wasted at the bar, slump on the horse when his money was gone, and the horse would take him home.

He lost their house in a card game—I mean, he literally lost their house in a card game. He came home and said, get up, everybody, we have to leave.

My dad got into West Point. When he came back on vacations, his dad made him go to the bar with him in uniform so he could show him off, which my dad hated. He went to Vietnam, where he served as an adviser to a South Vietnamese tank unit, not with an American unit, possibly because the officers doing the assigning disliked him: he was too uptight, too intense.

I spoke to my dad about Vietnam just once when I was a kid.

Dad, what’s that citation from the South Vietnamese government that’s hanging on the wall of your study?

“Well, we were at———, and we were surrounded by———of them, and there were only———of us.”

So, it was a battle?

“It was a battle.”

Did you win?

“No,” said my dad. “But we killed a lot of them.”

He was interviewed by the New York Times in 2000, about how the war’s legacy is taught at West Point—a salient point, being that the Vietnamese were so fanatical, or so patriotic, that they leaped heedlessly, or courageously, into death.

“Lord, I saw them die by the hundreds,” my dad told the Times reporter.

I think what he saw in Vietnam amplified, demonically, what he learned as a child: terrible things could happen, unexpectedly, at any time. His became a life of hypervigilance. He tightened like a fist.

 

He drank beer at night and on weekends. I don’t remember him drunk—not in the way he told me my grandfather was drunk—but on the weekend, if you had done something wrong—(failed Algebra, neglected to mow the lawn)—you had to tell him early. At 11 AM, he would be disappointed. At 2 PM, he would be angry. At 4 PM he would leap out of his chair, red-faced, in a rage, and whip his belt out, threatening to finally beat me the way his dad beat him.

My dad never hit me. I waited, and waited, but he never did. He reminded me often how lucky I was; that he grew up in a house with an openly, constantly drunk father who actually beat him. I did feel lucky.

 

My younger brother, a matchless student who eased virtuously through school, began to have strange episodes when he went off to college. He stopped going to class, and, for reasons he found to be perfectly sensible, started sleeping only every other night. He’s brilliant, and odd; when he turned thirty, I congratulated him. He shrugged: “It’s only significant because we have a base-10 number system.”

My mom had unpredictable manias when she’d yell at you for something someone else did. “Your brother doesn’t have a plan he doesn’t have a plan he needs a plan a person needs a plan!” she screamed. OK, Mom, I’m not him, so . . . “How can you live without a plan he’s an adult he needs a plan!”

He moved home and spent his days hanging out in the garage playing chess on the internet. I gave him my old laptop when his died; he would drive his car to a riverbank and spend the day writing code on it, in antiquated computer languages like COBOL and FORTRAN. He got a job, at night, sitting in the basement of a bank counting things. She still yelled at him. “When are you going to get a job?”

“Mom, I have a job.”

“When are you going to get a job, you little shit?!”

Eventually my brother was living in his car. It’s harder, post-9 /11, to live in your car—they won’t let you just park and sleep just anywhere, anymore. So he’d come home for interludes.

He developed delusions. He thought somebody had broken into his car and moved things around. He stayed up all night gripping a kitchen knife, believing people were coming for him. He was institutionalized and medicated, then got out, didn’t take his meds, went back home, went out and lived in his car again, went back home, etc. He seemed better off when he was homeless.

I see my brother as the guy I should’ve been. I have the same disorder: I down four pills every morning to stay rational. But he’s the guy whose illness was exacerbated to the point where he became homeless and delusional. He was once the family star and I was the fuckup.

I had something he didn’t have: an obsession.

 

When I was eleven or twelve, I’d pull up a folding chair to the jukebox at the teen center and listen to the same songs repeatedly: “Tainted Love,” by Soft Cell, “For Those About to Rock, We Salute You,” by AC/DC, “The Stroke,” by Billy Squier. Mostly older kids came there, to play pinball and that formalist masterwork of vector-graphic arcade games, Tempest. They taunted me, I think because my intensity scared them. An adult staffer saw me pulled up so close to the jukebox that my head rested on the grille, and said, encouragingly, “There’s a piano in the other room, do you want to go play it?” What? What made her think, so mistakenly, that I actually had within me the capacity, the potential, to make music?

I lived with this desperate feeling: no access to anywhere that bands played, no friends who played guitar. When I should’ve been doing homework, I would be lip-synching to Thin Lizzy and Dio records. “You don’t think we hear you jumping around up there?!” my mom yelled. “You think you’re gonna be a rock star? Well, rots of ruck!” She liked the racist faux-Chinese put-down.

I tried to stop wanting it, but I couldn’t. As life went on, I pursued my dreams, for sure, but not in joy: I was harangued by them. I pursued them in dread.

 

My mom told me she’d buy me a guitar if I got on the honor roll. So I did—by a tenth of a point, and I had to go and argue with a gym teacher for it. I got a guitar—an Aria Pro II, and a Marshall practice amp, from a guitar store in Paramus, where the Jersey-metal sales guy yelled at me for touching the instruments hanging on the wall—and returned to fuck-up-hood.

I picked up simple chords and coarse riffs here and there, and watched the British New Wave how-to show Rockschool on PBS. I invented a song every time I learned something new.

 

The army sent my dad to UCLA—also paying to send my mom and my infant self to California with him—after he came back from Vietnam, so he’d get a degree and return to West Point as a professor. He lived in L.A. when Joan Didion was writing screenplays there, when John Phillips and David Crosby were up in the hills chuffing mounds of cocaine. He went on to get a Ph.D. and became an authority on French history, particularly the period between World Wars I and II, and France’s failure to stop the invading Germans. He’s written books, including one called The Seeds of Disaster, which sounds to me sometimes like a dark joke about his sons.

He taught at West Point for a few years, was sent to Germany, where American tank divisions prowled moodily up and down the Iron Curtain, worked for a year as a speechwriter for a NATO general in Belgium, then came back to West Point and was made head of the History Department.

West Point was so orderly, it was in a chokehold: an enforced family atmosphere. Divorce was a scandalous rarity. Neighborhoods were segregated by rank, each subdivision of identical houses having its own strange name: lieutenants and their families lived in Grey Ghost, captains in New Brick, majors in Stony Lonesome, lieutenant colonels in Lee Area, colonels in Lusk. There was a tiny crescent of houses for members of the military band called Band.

This was the early ’80s. Most of the adult men had been to Vietnam; essentially, everybody’s dad. There was an undercurrent of stress and rage—sometimes barely controlled panic—which I thought was the nature of adulthood. Most of them joined the army in an America still in the glow of World War II’s victories; many of them had themselves gone to the military academy, were inculcated in West Point’s resonant motto, Duty, Honor, Country, and a host of other sacred words chiseled into the arches of the castle-like barracks and academic buildings. They came back, carrying the horrifying things they saw—having killed other people—to a country that disdained them. I subbed on a friend’s paper route and was screamed at by a man in a baby blue bathrobe for being a half hour late; I was raking the yard and a man walked by, barking, as if it were my fault, “The leaves will always win! You try, but the leaves will always win!”

There were plaques on the steps of each house with movable letters telling the name of the officer within. Most of the nameplates said something like “LTC Matthew J. Jones,” or “MAJ Simmons and Family,” or sometimes “The MacDonald Family,” which to me seemed manic in its profession of familial unity. I had a friend named Luke, whose dad was Mexican and taught Spanish to the cadets, a civilian; this gave him a certain liminal status, an outsider’s authority. Luke and I would sneak out at night and change the movable letters in the nameplates around, so they said “Captain Shit” or “Fuck My Ass.” Military police cars, painted pale green, cruised by every few minutes. We dove into bushes and behind cars, breathing fast, eyes bulging with delight at the danger.

 

I went to summer camp. There was an ostracized kid in my cabin called Jumpin’ Josh MacIntosh. He wanted to be a comedian, and he told weirdly pointless stories meant to be jokes: his sister’s bike hit a twig and she fell over the handlebars; one time he was walking to school and he was late; one time his cable TV went out. No punch lines. A cruel prank was started: whenever he told one, everybody in the cabin would burst out in fake laughter.

Jumpin’ Josh exulted.

The ruse spread. Even the first-graders were in on it. At the camp talent show, Jumpin’ Josh MacIntosh stood in front of the bonfire and told this joke:

I got detention, and I was sitting alone in class after school. Somebody had drawn football goals on the blackboard. A teacher came in and said, “Did you draw those football goals?” And I said, “No, I didn’t draw those football goals.” [In falsetto] “I think you did! I think you did! I think you did draw those football goals!”

A hundred kids broke out in fake hysterics. The camp director stood horrified. Jumpin’ Josh MacIntosh walked off, and we chanted, JUMPIN’ JOSH! JUMPIN’ JOSH! He came back and told another. The fake laughter doubled in intensity. The camp director walked up as Jumpin’ Josh started another, turned to us with a glare and said, “That’s enough!” He put his arm around Josh and said, “Let’s go; come on, Josh, let’s go.” Jumpin’ Josh MacIntosh burst into tears in front of the entire camp, struggling to pull away from the camp director, squawking, “But they want me!”

 

My parents expressed vicious grudges against each other openly, daily. We listened to them yowl at each other, and as years of shrieking fights passed, my terror that they’d divorce turned into Will you please, please just get divorced?

Much of the terror and the anger was focused on me. I was a fuckup for sure, but that’s not why. It was because the awfulness needed a place to go.

My mom screamed at me until I broke down in tears. My dad would pass by, get a beer from the fridge, glare at me, and then walk back to his TV. I made a couple of pitiable suicide attempts. I tied a guitar cable to a shower curtain rod and jumped off the side of the tub, bringing the shower curtain crashing down; I chugged a bottle of completely benign medication. Instead of taking me to the hospital, my dad made me stick my fingers down my throat to puke it up. He didn’t want to become the officer whose kid tried to kill himself.

He took me to a military shrink—all of our doctors were military, free to us because we were an army family—and loudly filled out my questionnaire at the nurse’s desk. “Drug use? No. Homosexual behavior? No.”

The military shrink told me my problem was that my parents were pushing my buttons.

I thought this was how it was everywhere. I thought everyone feared and hated their parents like I did. I saw TV shows with teenaged kids who behaved affectionately, and thought: How weird that our society feels compelled to pretend that children love their parents. In the 2000s, after being demolished by a pitiless rant from my mom about what my brother was doing, I removed myself from my family. I told them not to call unless somebody was ill. My mom called anyway, and again yelled about something going on in somebody else’s life. I changed my number.

My mom found me on Facebook seven years later. My parents have unquestionably changed. There’s compassion there. My mom used to yell at me—as a man in his thirties!—about failing Algebra in the seventh grade, like it happened last week. In seven years, she learned how to live in the present. My parents love each other now, which is strange, nearly implausible. I have empathy for them. I know their brains a little, because I know how my brain is like theirs. We had a long talk about the grief and rage of my teenage years. “But did you know we loved you, Mike?” my mom asked, pleadingly.

Yes, I said.

I lied. I didn’t want to hurt her. I saw on her face that, despite her cruelty to me as a teenager, what she remembered was loving me.

 

I remember my dad fixing my guitar after I dropped it on the kitchen floor and broke the headstock off. I was despondent, thinking my only hope of ever being a musician had perished. My dad meticulously applied wood glue and fashioned a brass plate to reinforce the crack. Days before, there had been some event of screaming and threatened violence and abrading blame for my nonfulfillment, but now I stood there, watching him in this very practical demonstration of love. I couldn’t make my hate and fear go away, but how could I not be grateful? I stood there, bewildered at life inside and outside of me, watching him mend the guitar neck.

I can think of my parents as loving or I can think of them as crazy people. If I try to see the duality, I get disconcerted, disoriented.

 

There was a girl named Meredith whom Luke had a crush on; she was olive-skinned and beautiful; she wore prim pink sweaters and a tiny gold cross. He schemed up a pickup line for her that he never used; he would say, “How are you?” and she would say “Fine.” He would say, “I know you’re fine, but how are you?” Meredith asked me to dance at the Sadie Hawkins Dance; she came to visit me when I was in the hospital recovering from an appendectomy and happened to walk in just as I was getting a shot of morphine in my ass. Years later, Luke and I were looking through a photocopied yearbook. “Jesus, there’s, like, a picture of you on every page,” he said. “Who took these pictures?” He flipped to the last page. “Meredith Peterson. Wow, she was in love with you.”

How many signals did I miss? Maybe if Meredith Peterson had sat me down and told me, my life would have been different. It would have shaved just a little bit off the corner of my self-loathing, maybe enough that I’d have had something to live for other than the despair of my obsession.

 

Self-loathing freed me to be weird. Outlandish smarts weren’t a liability. I took tremendous pleasure in big fat words. At recess, I tried following the ebb and flow of a wall-ball game for a week, not actually playing, just running back and forth with the herd, trying to look like I was supposed to be there, but I gave it up, and from then on sat on the blacktop with my back to a brick wall reading books. I declared myself a Communist in the seventh grade—at West Point!—after reading a comic book about Mao. I wrote stories plagiarizing famous science-fiction movies that I was confident no one else had seen, and was praised for them.

I hung out with heavy metal kids, the younger brothers of the high school burners on skateboards. Some of them threw contemptuous jeers, but I think they actually found my angsty intensity—I shot them murderous glares over the top of my glasses when they mocked me—fascinating, and frightening.

 

Years later, a girl from a high school French class found me online. I quipped about my outcastness.

“I always thought you were one of the popular kids,” she typed back.

 

I met Chad Ficus in the West Point cemetery, where General Custer, General Westmoreland, and General Daniel Butterfield, the composer of “Taps,” are buried. We leaned on the mausoleum of Egbert Ludovicus Viele: a twelve-foot pyramid. Behind a barred door were the sarcophagi of Viele and his wife, and something on the back wall that looked like a light switch. It was said to be a buzzer, so that if Egbert were buried alive he could ring for help.

Chad was beloved by the girls on the first tier of cuteness. He was on the cross-country team and had fantastic grades. Like I said, I thought the world saw me as a peculiar no-hoper, and I was defiantly unathletic: when the gym teacher made us run 200 yards, I walked—leisurely, sullenly—I would’ve done it while smoking if I could.

We drank a mixture of spirits—two inches’ worth of alcohol from each bottle in his dad’s liquor cabinet—from a green plastic 7-Up bottle. I had a stillborn sister buried in the cemetery, a few yards from the pyramid. When I was a child, and my mom came to visit the grave, I climbed the sphinxes and tried to run up the pyramid’s sheer walls. I had no idea what was going on. I showed Chad Ficus the grave of Catherine Georgia Doughty and told an elaborate lie that my sister was a teenager who killed herself, and that she’d owned all the Led Zeppelin and Van Halen records.

We walked down the road, passing the 7-Up bottle between us. We met up with a bunch of kids and became a procession. A girl had a boom box and a cassette with Madonna’s first album on one side and Prince’s Purple Rain on the other. We acted conspicuously stupid: the alcohol let us. The idea was to go to a public pool up in the hills, climb the chain-link fence, and set off fireworks from the high-dive platform.

My dad suddenly drove up in his white Volkswagen Rabbit, opened the door, and told me to get inside. I did a decent job of pretending not to be drunk. I talked him into letting me walk home.

My dad drove off. I started following our parade up the hill. They were moving faster than before. “Go home, Doughty,” said Chad Ficus. “Your dad told you to go home. You have to go.”

If I didn’t, my dad would somehow intuit that I was up at the pool, and their party would get busted.

Chad ran away towards the pack, already getting smaller. He turned around, jogging backwards. “Go home! Go home!”

 

Some parents at West Point pressured their kids into going there for college. My dad wasn’t one of them. I suspect that if he had the option as a kid, he wouldn’t have gone, and without Vietnam, which I think made him need a structure in which to live, he wouldn’t have stayed in the army.

Chad Ficus’s dad did want him to go to West Point—he was one of the rare officers there who hadn’t gone there himself, and he seethed with resentment about it. He told Chad that once he graduated, he’d buy him a Porsche.

Chad’s dad owned a lot of guns. (Everybody’s dad at West Point owned some guns—my dad had two hunting rifles and a double-barreled shotgun handed down from my great-grandfather, a knife-fighting youth who, upon getting a bullet lodged an inch from his heart, repented and became a pastor. Perhaps not incidentally, I look exactly like him.) Chad’s dad actually made his own ammunition as a hobby; there were drums of gunpowder in the basement.

Chad showed his friends his dad’s porn collection. It was a notebook into which his dad had pasted a profusion of box shots; that is, he cut out pictures of vaginas from porn magazines and made himself a disembodied vagina portfolio. Page after page of them.

Chad did end up going to West Point. I saw him the summer before he entered, and he was cynically blithe; he said he didn’t care about serving his country, he was going for the prestige (it’s roughly as difficult to get into Harvard, but at West Point you also need a congressional recommendation to go with your grades and athletic bona fides). He was going to parlay it into a Wall Street job. Not to mention the Porsche.

Before your sophomore year at the military academy, you can quit, no questions asked. After that, you owe the government five years in the army. If you flunk out, or mess up, you have to enlist as a private. Chad called his dad at the midpoint of his West Point stint, in tears, begging his dad to let him drop out, he didn’t want the car. His dad said no.

Chad Ficus came to a gig of mine twenty years later. After his service, he had become a snack food magnate. He gave me one of the warmest, most loving and kind hugs I have ever received.

 

There were, like, fifteen black kids, total, at my high school, but one of them owned the only sound system. DJ DRE IS ASSKICKING! was stenciled on the side of a speaker cabinet. At the dances in the cafeteria, he spun twelve-inch rap records that he got in New York; a dozen black kids danced, did the chants—“The roach! The roach! The roach is on the wall! We don’t need no Raid, let the motherfucker crawl!”—on a nearly empty dance floor, while the white kids stood at the walls. Then, a blonde cheerleader from the senior class took Luke—we were freshmen, so it was shocking, but Luke was, even by then, the star of the school musicals, Guys and Dolls, Damn Yankees, etc.—by the hand, as Kurtis Blow’s “Basketball” played, and pulled him out to dance. The white kids trickled out after them, reluctantly.

I was fourteen, listened to Judas Priest—I probably wouldn’t have danced to the music those white kids liked, anyway, Billy Idol, The Outfield, Kenny Loggins, whatever—and would have had no idea what a great rap record was, were it pitched like a throwing star and lodged in my head. It was 1984. I can’t imagine how good those records must’ve been.

 

(There are two lines in the song “Rapper’s Delight” that fascinate me: one is, “Guess what, America? We love you,” which has to be the only time that sentiment was expressed in a hip-hop song. The other is, “Now what you hear is not a test: I’m rapping to the beat.” Because it was necessary to say, I know you’re out there thinking, hey, that guy’s not singing, he must be just making sure the mic’s on, but, in fact, what I’m doing is called rapping to the beat. )

 

(Another moment in the history of rap’s emergence: Stanley Ray, whom I’ll tell you about later, went to see George Clinton in the early ’80s—Stanley Ray was flying on LSD—and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five opened. A lady behind him sputtered, “He’s just playing the record! He’s just playing the record!”)

I talked my parents into sending me to Simon’s Rock, a tiny experimental college in Massachusetts that admitted students after their sophomore year in high school. It was half kids who wanted to be in med school by age twenty and half fuckups like me who wanted to play guitar and find out what drugs were like. I talked to the admissions guy about Sartre; I told him that I also thought hell was other people. I didn’t really think hell was other people, but it was a fantastic teenage pose. I had, however, actually read the play, which wasn’t the case with most of the literary and filmic works I stole my poses from. My grades were wretched, but my precociousness quotient got me in.

(Again, the baffling ambiguity: my parents berated me nearly to suicide the same year, but they paid for this weird school in full.)

I sat at the punks’ table my first day at Simon’s Rock; everybody had a piece of their hair missing. That was the identity I was most interested in adopting. I didn’t meet orthodox punk standards. “I’m a goth, and———’s a punk, but you’re not anything,” said a girl they called Laura Morbid. I was in love with her. She had seen Pretty in Pink the summer before, and, in her head, wrote a goth Molly Ringwald script for herself; she’d have a Ducky figure, hip but geeky, chasing her, while she crossed clique lines to be with a rich kid. The rich kid turned out to be gay—not to mention deranged: he had weekly dorm-room-trashing fits—so she ended up with me. She was mean. The first snowfall came in November, and I said it was beautiful. “You’re so immature!” snapped Laura Morbid.

She left the school, and I fell in with a gentler group of goth girls. They were cheerful, and into building their own working versions of Brion Gysin’s dream machine out of stereo turntables and poster board. One of them was obsessed with the German industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, and the New Jersey Devils; her bedroom walls were papered with pictures of Blixa Bargeld, and hockey players.

I papered my own walls with pictures of Keith Richards and Lou Reed. Heroic junkies.

 

I had a lovely beer binge. We drove to a bar just past the New York border, to elude the Massachusetts blue laws; I went in with somebody’s brother’s ID to pick up a case of Rolling Rock and emerged giddy, arms laden. We drank the beer, and I transformed into some kind of magical celebrity-roast emcee. We wandered the dorms having magnanimous exchanges with everybody; I chatted amiably with people to whom I’d previously been scared to speak, shook hands with the hippie dudes skulking around the girls’ dorm, flirted with girls in sweatpants sitting in the hallway doing homework.

Beer, I thought, is the ANSWER.

The next day I awoke with my first hangover, and swore off liquor. If you hang around twelve-step types, you’ll hear tales wherein an alcoholic wakes up with a hangover, swears off booze forever, and then is drunk later that same day; a bleak joke repeating itself throughout her or his drinking life. But when I swore off booze, it took. I knew alcoholism was rampant in my family, and that I didn’t want to become a drunk. It was weird for youthful rebellion, to give up drinking as a fuck-you to your family. I got snooty about it, and when kids who were drinking asked me if I wanted a beer, I’d tell them, theatrically, that due to genetic misfortune, I was an alcoholic.

I started smoking weed. I realized that I’d found the solution to my genetic dilemma: I could satisfy that innate urge to get messed up by using something that, as every honest person in America knew, wasn’t addictive in the least: wholesome, in fact. I was writing songs and hating them; when I was stoned, they sounded amazing to me. I could love my own mind.

Weed, I thought, is the ANSWER.

I discovered cigarettes. I got two packs of Benson and Hedges that I smoked in one night, one after the other, staring at my sexy, smoking self in the mirror. Soon I was shoplifting cartons of Marlboro from the Price Chopper. Smoking rings that little bell in your head that the rat in the clear plastic tank, with the wires in his skull, is compelled to ring when he gets that signal, use use use use. But it doesn’t enact fucked-up-ed-ness. It’s using-lite. And it makes you look incredibly cool.

 

When I was nine years old, I read a comic book meant to scare kids away from drugs. One panel showed a kid looking, in terror, at trees and houses with scary faces.

That looks amazingly great, I thought.

I’m reminded of an ad campaign against meth: teenagers are shown with scabby faces going into motel rooms to prostitute themselves with sinister middle-aged men, robbing elderly people, overdosing hideously. I find the campaign inherently cynical, because it’s specifically targeting one drug. If the guys at the ad firm have any awareness, they must know that a kid prone to meth addiction is prone to addiction in general and might very likely end up, say, an alcoholic. Meth is a tremendous societal drain; the ad campaign isn’t about why a kid would become an addict. It’s designed to mitigate that one particular civic problem.

The tagline is: NOT EVEN ONCE. If you use meth once, you may end up one of those scabby-faced wraiths. In some of the ads, the humiliated, sick addicts return, like the ghost of Christmas future, to the very party where their past selves are about to get high for the first time and beg them not to start towards this inevitable fate.

They’re pretending not to understand that what they’re really saying is: Don’t take this, you’ll love it.

Here’s a message I prefer: If you try meth, it’ll feel amazing. You’ve been in emotional pain for a long time, and you don’t know it; you won’t know it until the drug makes the pain go away. You’ll feel like you’ve solved the essential problem of being alive. But sometimes this leads to an unthinkably gruesome humiliation. Be aware of that.

We, the adults in authority who are concerned about you, want you to know that other ways to deal with emotional pain certainly won’t provide the sudden cure that a noseful of drugs will. They take more time, more effort, and you may be extremely discouraged along the way. But they may be worth it, especially considering that drugs can be a form of suicide.

 

I took acid on Halloween, and I ended up in my room with this black kid I barely knew, who had painted his face white to look like the moon. The acid came on stronger and stronger and I became deathly afraid of the moon-faced man: I hadn’t met many black people in my life, and the face paint seemed to be bubbling on his cheeks. He left. A roommate gave me a giant rubber band to play with; I tangled myself in it for a few hours. Then I became seized with an idea: the universe was a fabric. Everything was a fabric. My life’s key moment of enlightenment. I fumbled for a cassette recorder.

I listened to it the next day and heard this manic voice intoning, half laughingly, “The universe is a fabric. Everything. Is a fabric. A fabric. A fabric.”

So of course I realized that I had had one of those ridiculous moments one has on drugs, those embarrassing epiphanies that are really stupid and meaningless. I didn’t even remember what I meant by that.

Years later, my friend the rock legend kept hipping me to all these quasi-Buddhist, quasi-Hindu nebulous spirituality guys, as a means of grasping for a power greater than myself. One of them—and I can’t for the life of me locate the text—wrote something like: The entire universe and everything in it is kind of a fabric, where everything is stitched to everything else, and nothing is a truly independent entity.

“You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing,” Alan Watts wrote.

 

I had a friend named Peter Mack. Peter Mack’s version of being a punk was to dress like a middle manager, circa 1960. He wore grey suits, skinny ties, and a fedora. He actually owned a pair of jodhpurs, the kind worn by British officers of the Raj, with the weird wings sticking out by the hips. Everybody called the teachers by their first names; Peter called them Professor———and Dr.———.

Peter Mack and I would get high in his dorm room, then put on a recording of the chimes at Notre Dame. We’d blast it and yell, “THE BELLS! THE BELLS! THE BELLS!”

The next Halloween, Peter Mack and I went to a different college for their famous hallucinogen-fueled Halloween shindig. We took acid. We got separated. He got into what he thought was a bathroom line, and kept following it, his mind zooming every which way at once. Suddenly he found himself on a stage, in a spotlight, and a guy in a vampire costume thrust a mic in his face.

“So what are you supposed to be?”

Peter Mack paused. “I’m an art fag,” he said.

The crowd erupted with cheers, and Peter Mack won the Halloween costume contest.

 

I got a funny haircut—a semi-Mohawk-mullet, shaved on the sides. I dyed the floppy front part black. “You look like a queer,” my dad said to me one holiday I had come home for, as he opened a beer can.

I told people I was bisexual. I identified intensely with being gay; I felt ostracized, disparagingly feminized. I tried making out with dudes, and I didn’t dig it, but I kept trying. There was this one guy named Alfred. He was a black kid, from Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, where life couldn’t have been easy for him. “Are you bisexual? I’m bisexual, too,” he said. He was fake-bisexual in the other direction; he was gay, and was very slowly admitting it to himself. I kissed him once, and from then on he’d come knock on my dorm room door every now and then, sit on the bed, and say things like, “Have you ever thought about blow jobs? I mean, hmm, isn’t that interesting, blow jobs? Hey! I just got an idea! Why don’t I try giving you a blow job?”

I never let him. But I always let him kiss me goodnight. A soul kiss. One day we lay around spooning, cuddling each other. He nuzzled my neck. I wished somebody would’ve come in and seen us—I wanted my bisexuality proven. I also felt a strange peace, even though I was uncomfortable—I was receiving real affection from a man. I didn’t know how I yearned for a man to show love for me.

 

(I met one other guy who said he was bisexual. It was when I was working at a McDonald’s on a summer vacation. He had just gotten out of prison. He kept asking me if I wanted to hang out in his car and listen to Kraftwerk.)

In the room next door was this short, pig-nosed guy from Westchester who played metal guitar: he did that wheedly-wheedly-wheedly superfast Eddie Van Halen stuff—in fact, he wanted to start a band also named after his last name: Ruckman. He wore big square Cazal glasses in the style favored by members of Whodini. He had a butterfly knife, and did tricks, spinning and flipping it. “Better keep my ass turned to the wall around you,” he said, like anybody at all would want to fuck him. When he discovered weed, he became one of those guys so indebted to the profundity of stonedness that he wrote songs called, “Stoned Again,” and “Getting Stoned,” and “Get Everybody Stoned Again.”

We were sitting around, high, and I asked Ruckman the Cazals kid if I could play his guitar. He said, “Nobody touches my axe but me. My axe is like my woman.”

 

Somebody told me Paul Simon was sitting in the admissions office; his kid was thinking about applying. I went, shamelessly sat on the couch across from him, and bothered him for an hour. He asked me if I had a notebook; I didn’t. He chided me. He gave me a list of poets to read—the only name I remember was Seamus Heaney. He meant this list as a take-my-wisdom-and-begone thing, but I didn’t take the hint. I asked him if he’d heard the band Firehose. He hadn’t. I told him that all good songs had to be political, which is a pretty fucking brazen thing to announce to Paul Simon. He mentioned Lou Reed.

I like his work, I said.

 

I wrote some plays. I was desperately searching for something I wanted to be, other than a rock star. I was OK at it, so I applied to the NYU dramatic-writing program—I thought my clumsy junior-avant-garde stuff would compel them to take me in and teach me to write for sitcoms. It didn’t. Bitter at the rejection, I ended up at Lang College at the New School. I just needed to be in New York, where there was music.

 

I met Mumlow in an acting class. We were supposed to bring in monologues; she brought an American flag as a prop. She folded the flag deftly while doing her monologue in a Southern accent. She was clearly brilliant, but the shtick was irksome.

There was another guy in the class named Seth. He had a lazy eye. The gaze of his good eye was bracing, while the other eye shot off to the periphery. He did a monologue taken from a layman’s physics book, standing on two chairs, leaping between them, talking about the constant stream of molecules or light waves or something like that. We shared a glance of mutual annoyance at Mumlow’s flag shtick.

Mumlow’s apartment was called the universe. She called it that because her downstairs neighbor, an aged flower child, had come up to ask her to turn her music down, telling Mumlow that she knew that she created her own universe and thus the problem wasn’t really Mumlow’s loud music, it was that she created a universe wherein this music was disturbing her.

It was a studio apartment on the eleventh floor of a building overlooking Sheridan Square, bigger and cleaner than anything anybody I knew could afford. She lived alone. So she was a rich girl. Seth and I ended up at the universe doing something for the acting class: Mumlow’s energy was crazy but alluring. I wasn’t attracted to her, but her eyes were gigantic and blue.

I wrote a script in which two people sat across from each other in a diner, arguing in fake David Mamet language:

MUMLOW: I came here. From space.

SETH: From space.

MUMLOW: That’s RIGHT.

SETH: So you say you came here from space.

 

We ran the script competitively. They wrote down who they thought won each scene. At the end of the play, the winner got a dime bag of weed. Seth added a comparison to fabric: “I won. Give me the weed. Wet gabardine.”

 

Ani DiFranco went to Lang. She had her thing utterly together. I was half formed as a songwriter; her songs were acute, her deployment of them wickedly agile. She made me want to get good.

She came to New York from Buffalo, where she was packing clubs. New York was a jungle of shitty bands; she gained no audience except us kids listening to her, astonished, in the dorms. She went back to Buffalo, discouraged and aggrieved. Oh well, I thought. We’ll never hear from her again.

 

Ani and I were in a class called “The Shape and Nature of Things to Come,” taught by an African American poet named Sekou Sun-diata. He taught us to cut our writing pitilessly. We pleaded the purity of our precious compositions as he cut words, cut whole verses, and as we sat there dazed, beaten up, he’d pause, and say, “Is it soup yet?”

He would press the poet in question until he or she mumbled what the poem was supposed to be about. “That’s great,” he’d say. “Why isn’t that in the poem?”

He taught me not to pretend to be black. “They call it soul because it’s the truest version of yourself.”

We read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Sekou analyzed Malcolm’s life spellbindingly, using the paradigm of the universal hero’s journey as a lens.

 

He asked one kid where he was from. “Outside Boston,” the kid said.

“Outside Boston where?” Sekou asked.

“Uh, the suburbs?”

“No, no,” Sekou said, “where are you from?”

“Town’s called Braintree?”

He wrote BRAINTREE in huge letters on the blackboard and spent the rest of the class speculating on the roots of the name. Often, we didn’t even get to our poems; we sat, transfixed, as he zoomed off on rapturous tangents.

 

Some things Sekou said in class:

“Do you talk to yourself? You should.”

“You speak to the poem, and sometimes the poem says, ‘You’re trying to build a house, but I’m not a house, I’m a bird.’”

“This poem is a life-support system for one killer line. Lose the poem, use the line somewhere else.”

 

I walked in the graduation ceremony, but never got my diploma: I owed the library $11. I thought it was more poetic to not get your diploma for being $11 short. Plus, I needed the $11. My bank balance was usually under $10, which meant I couldn’t get money out of the ATM, so, humiliatingly, I had to go up to the teller’s window and withdraw $4.50. At least once a week I had to decide between a pack of cigarettes and a container of hummus. Usually I chose the smokes and stayed hungry. I figured out that if I could just fall asleep, I wouldn’t be hungry when I woke up the next day. Sometimes I gave in and bought a sandwich, but when I was sated I would be overcome with buyer’s remorse.

Seth and I considered doing the dine-and-dash at a tourist trap known for its tub-sized blue drinks and signature charred mass of onion rings, but we argued for an hour about which one of us would get to stroll out of the restaurant first, and anyway, we got lucky, and were taken out by a girl from school with a credit card. She bought us Indian food and two packs of Marlboros; she wanted friends.

 

I fell in love with a girl named Betty with a superabundance of red curls. She was my idea of perfect. It wasn’t so much ardor as a feeling that I’d arrived. At last, I was with an unimpeachably beautiful girl! I meant something in the world! But there was something about the keenness of my love for her that freaked her out; she dumped me the night before we went on a trip to Jamaica with her two roommates.

“Thanks for the great sex,” she said, offering a handshake.

The four of us went to the evil little tourist town of Negril; me and three beautiful girls. We were broke: what we didn’t spend on marijuana and a windowless one-room, two-bed shack we spent on a single shared plate of french fries each day. The two roommates slept in one bed, Betty and I in another. Lying there, blasted on the cheap weed, it was torture to feel her presence. I felt as if every tiny budge I made in the tiny bed was followed by a tiny budge from her, shifting away from me, as if it disgusted her to brush against my hip bone.

We spent the days drinking mushroom tea, tripping, wandering the beach; hustler dudes came up to the three girls and me, singsonging to me in gorgeous Jamaican accents, “You have t’ree! Give me one!”

Negril ran on two grey economies; one involved selling stuff on the beach to people who were too high to protest. They’d grab you by the arm and pull you towards their little stand selling shell necklaces. Fat ladies on the beach would grab the hair of passing white girls, starting to braid Bo Derek braids without a prompt. If the girl tried to pull away, they’d cry something like, “You have no respect for the Jamaican people!” There were a lot of white girls wandering around the beach with Bo Derek braids.

Dudes with intense gazes would block your path as you were strolling and say, “I come from the hills. I got the good bud.” The weed was generally terrible—dry, yellow, and stemmy. We smoked a lot of it anyway, rolling massive spliffs of shitty pot that we told ourselves was the world’s greatest, we’re in Jamaica, right?

The other industry was kids who came down from the hills to fuck middle-aged tourist women. The women rented them scooters and bought them clothes. These were less pure sexual transactions than sham romances; you’d see a flabby German tourist walking hand in hand with some washboard-abbed, nineteen-year-old guy pretending to be a Rastafarian. How desperately did they need this, that they’d buy into the fantasy?

 

(Years later, I came back with my friend Sally. We told everybody we were brother and sister, despite the fact that we looked nothing alike, so she could fuck Jamaican dudes without suffering questions. She charged everything to an American Express card that her mom had gotten her strictly for emergencies. Every morning at 7 AM a girl claiming to be the sister of the fake-Rasta she was sleeping with—and renting a scooter for—would knock on the door, claim that she worked at the place they ate at the other night, and will you please sign this AmEx slip again, I messed it up again, please sign the slip again or I’ll lose my job? Blearily, Sally always signed. She discovered a month later, when she got the bill, she’d been taken for five grand.)

 

I had gotten a job driving an ice cream truck. It started on Monday, so I came back a Sunday earlier than the three girls. I decided to smuggle some of this terrible weed back in my sock.

At JFK, we deplaned into a hallway. The cops told us to stand single file. A flight from Lithuania landed right behind us, and its passengers ambled down towards customs unmolested. In the furthest reaches of this endless corridor, a door opened, and a cop with a tiny dog came out. The panting terrier scuttled down the line, stretching the leash to its utmost. The dog passed me. Stopped a few feet behind me. It barked.

“Good boy!” said the cop.

The terrier bounded a few yards ahead of me and barked again.

“Good boy!” said the cop.

They let us through. I was almost tearful with gratitude. I went to pick up my guitar at baggage claim and went up to a cop to ask where the luggage for the Air Jamaica flight was.

The cop was leaning against a wall. When I said, “Excuse me,” he straightened up with a start. He pointed towards a carousel, looking me directly in the eyes.

I was chatting with a middle-aged lady about where I went to school when a fat guy in a black t-shirt, flanked by uniformed cops, walked up to me holding a badge. They took me into a side room.

Good vacation tale for that tourist lady, I thought. The teenager she was chatting with turned out to be a drug smuggler.

I envisioned myself getting raped in jail.

They opened my rucksack and shook the contents out. My guitar case was bound with silver duct tape; they took a box cutter and cut through the tape, slicing the clasps off with it. The fat guy in the black t-shirt patted me down, grabbed my balls. As his hands moved down to my ankles, my sight went blurry. The bag of weed had gathered in the arch of my foot.

“Take off your hat,” he said. He shook it out, smelled it.

“Take off your shoes,” he said. Banged them against a table to shake whatever was in there loose.

A long blank space of fear. Then:

He didn’t ask me to take off my socks.

“The dog makes mistakes,” he said.

 

Delirious with my luck, hugging the guitar case with the sliced-off clasps so the guitar wouldn’t fall out, I went back to Betty’s place, where Seth was crashing. She lived on East Tenth Street, which at the time was an open-air market for dime bags of weed. On every stoop were four guys whispering: smoke, sinse, smoke smoke, sinse, smoke.

Seth demanded the weed. We packed it into Betty’s roommate’s bong and allowed ourselves to believe it was the best weed we’d ever smoked.

 

That summer, I’d get up at 5 AM and drive the delivery truck, heading up First Avenue as the sun came up, listening to the Stone Roses, or Toots and the Maytals’ Funky Kingston. I was bringing gourmet ice cream to restaurants before they opened.

Heartbreak, new to me, was surreal. I was in tremendous pain, which I regarded in disbelief. How can this be happening to me? Can something really hurt this much?

When Betty got back, she and Seth split on a bus trip, traveling through the South, then the Midwest, then over to California. Seth called from Wichita to tell me that the yellow terrain was so flat you could see the rain coming from miles away. They called me from a pay phone on the grounds of Graceland and left a jovial message. I was sitting at home, staring at the answering machine, stoned, too paranoid to pickup the phone.

The other record I favored in the ice cream truck was Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True. I identified intensely with his vindictiveness. I read somewhere that the working title was Revenge and Guilt.

My aim was not true. I fantasized about beating the shit out of Seth, though I had never thrown a punch. I fantasized that I’d go to the Port Authority bus terminal, pick them up in the ice cream truck, and as they fell asleep in the shotgun seat—she on his lap, his head lolling on her shoulder—I’d take them through the Lincoln Tunnel to New Jersey, push them from the moving vehicle, abandon them in the reeds of the Meadowlands.

 

I was supposed to meet somebody at the Knitting Factory. She stood me up, but the bartender knew me and said they needed somebody to bartend that night. I said I didn’t know how to make any drinks. She said if I didn’t know, I should ask, “What’s in it?” As it happened, the bartenders at the Knitting Factory had the least professional aptitude of those at any bar I’ve ever been to.

The band that night was a trio: Joe Lovano, Bill Frisell, and Paul Motian. I strolled through the club in a trance, amazed by the music, though I didn’t know anything about jazz. The next night Bob Mould played acoustically; he let the audience sit Indian-style around him on stage. The night after that the Lyres played, with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion opening—their first gig ever.

The sound guy got me high every night. Then he’d complain for hours about how he wanted to be a recording engineer and nobody appreciated him. There was a tiny recording booth upstairs from the stage that he’d go into, get baked, and twiddle with the knobs while the band played, leaving the mixing board unmanned. Feedback howled every night.

The bartenders were mostly dope fiends, and the customers foreign tourists. Japanese jazz nerds would wander in, stunned that the legendary club was a dive, run by surly malcontents. Europeans would pretend they didn’t know they were supposed to tip in America; as they walked away, the bartenders hurled fistfuls of change at them, cursing.

The Knit was a magnet for a certain type of dissatisfied upper-class Japanese girl—there was a steady stream of them showing up at the club, having moved to New York seeking gritty adventure. One by one, they were scooped up by one of three guys—an avant-garde saxophone player, a drummer, and a guy who worked at record companies, doing some kind of job I couldn’t fathom. “Oh, she’s with D———? I thought she was with T———.”

 

They took me off the bar and made me the doorman. I did two nights a week, then five, then the freaked-out dope-fiend rockabilly guy who did weekends quit, and suddenly I was working seven nights a week. Naturally, I began to hate the job, but in my half-cocked military-bred mind I didn’t think it was my place to tell the owner he had to get somebody else for Mondays and Tuesdays. So I started stealing.

Nearly everybody in the place was stealing. The bartenders would put the dough for two beers in the register and the third in their tip jar. The beer was always running low before its time, but nobody got fired. The would-be recording-engineer sound guy would order Chinese food at the ticket desk and stare at me incredulously when I called him down to pay for it. He expected me to take the money from the till as a matter of course.

I seethed with frustration—when applying the hand stamp that audience members got in lieu of a ticket, I’d bang the stamper down on their wrists so hard they’d yelp in pain. One night a saxophone player known for his assholery—an ’80s icon due to some suave roles in black-and-white indie movies—had packed the joint. He called up and said petulantly that he was considering canceling the gig. My guess: he wanted to hear the club plead with him.

Do it, I said. I want to go home.

And I slammed the phone down.

 

Mumlow was in love with me, until I started hanging out at her place constantly, because I was desperately lonely, at which point her love blended with contempt. Then I moved in. Mumlow kept the door unlocked; we’d come home to find random friends sitting on the bed, smoking cigarettes. One of these was our friend Sally. We treated her like a pedigreed dog. Mumlow would stroke her sandy-blonde hair. Mumlow had a video camera; we’d get high, videotape ourselves having a conversation, then watch the tape and laugh and be fascinated by our own conversational nuances. We’d beg Sally to stay; she’d sleep on the couch. She stayed for four or five days at a time; when she finally left, we nearly clung to her legs.

Sally’s father was dying of AIDS in North Carolina. As he got sicker, dormant mental illness stirred in her. She called from our friend Dottie’s parents’ house, deep in Queens. She was having delusions. She wasn’t sleeping for days at a time. She was planning a party, with cheerless determination, for which she was writing a ten-page guest list of rappers and movie stars.

Dottie was a committed party girl. Despite having flunked out, she somehow walked in the NYU graduation ceremony; she paid a guy who could do calligraphy to forge a diploma for her parents’ wall. Her mom looked like Peggy Lee—just shy of elderly, with platinum wig and gigantic sunglasses that covered half her face.

In Queens, Sally sat on Dottie’s mom’s ottoman, by turns motionless and creepily agitated. Dottie’s mom brought Sally crackers and cheese on a platter with sweetness, “Do you want another snack, honey?” Then she went back into the kitchen and barked in a stage whisper, “What’s the matter with this girl, what’s wrong with this girl?”

I called a car service to get Sally back to Manhattan. En route, she kept hallucinating family members on the streets of Rego Park. Back at the universe, Mumlow was calling Sally’s mother.

We went to her apartment to pick up her things. She whirled around on the steps. “I’m Madonna,” she yelled, “and you’re all going to be in my movie!”

 

My friend Luke, from West Point, came down to Manhattan to audition for some drama schools and stayed with us. We had removed the cable (telling an incredulous cable company guy that, no, we weren’t in fact moving, we just didn’t want cable anymore) and had just a VHS tape of Goodfellas to watch. We put it on every night; Ray Liotta pistol-whipped Lorraine Bracco soundlessly, flickering in the corner like a fireplace. The other VHS tape we had was called Taste My Juices. We never watched it. We got Luke high—he was unaccustomed to it—and left him alone in the apartment. Paranoid and agitated, sitting on the bed, he put it on; the opening scene was a man fucking somebody in a rainbow wig, with a dubbed voice—Japanese-monster-movie style—going, “Aw. Aw. Aw. Aw. Aw. Aw. Aw. Aw. Aw. Aw.”

 

I never wanted to fuck Mumlow. I stayed because her mind was so wonderfully strange, she was so much fun to get high with, and because I was broke. The old joke: What do you call a musician without a girlfriend? Homeless.

She paid for the Domino’s pizza we ordered twice a day (“How many ICE-COLD COKES do you want with that?” the Domino’s guy would yell enthusiastically, on every call. How about no ice-cold Cokes, thanks), and my contribution was to get the weed, the funds for which I embezzled at the Knit. Every tenth ticket, I’d put the cash in my pocket, rather than input the money into the computer.

I was meeting girls at the club, getting them high, and fucking them in their living rooms while their roommates slept. They’d ask for my number and I’d say I didn’t have a phone.

Mumlow was getting churlish and horny. She binged on porn, buying stacks of gruesome magazines with titles like “Black Plungers,” “Preggo Sluts,” and “Shaved Asian Snizz.” She spread them out in a porn-rainbow fan on the bed and plied her vibrator on herself for hours, grunting, never having an orgasm. I kept my back to her, typing lyrics on her beige, boxy Macintosh.

 

My friend Wind-Him-Up-and-Watch-Him-Go Joe introduced me to a weed source. He called the proprietors Smokey and the Toastman. They worked out of a shop on East Ninth Street, onto which they had painted, in shaky letters, RECORD-A-RAMA.

Smokey stood behind a glass counter inside of which maybe four or five dusty twelve-inch singles—vinyl records—lay. There were a few nailed onto the walls, too. The Toastman would be sitting a few feet behind him, staring blankly. Both were Caribbean dudes in Hawaiian shirts, with red, slitted eyes.

“What do you want?”

Um, a $50 bag?

“Who are you? I don’t know you.”

I bought from you last week.

With a wary gaze, Smokey walked backwards towards the Toastman, who handed him something, and then Smokey palmed it to me. I put it in my pocket.

“Put it in your waist, man! Put it in your waist!” he hissed.

I stuffed it down by my cock, embarrassedly.

Smokey looked side to side, as if there might be cops suspended from the walls of the Record-A-Rama. “Take this.” He handed me one of the dusty twelve-inches. I walked out with the record, ostensibly looking like I’d bought it.

There was a collection of misbegotten twelve-inches leaning against the wall in the universe. All these third-rate reggae and house singers, their dreams of fame having resulted in being the decoy record for Smokey and the Toastman.

 

Mumlow had a bunch of heroin friends she knew from the arty-groovy Northeastern college from which she’d dropped out the previous year. One of them abandoned a cat named Big Bunny in the universe. Big Bunny radiated angst. We’d throw a stuffed duck on the floor and Big Bunny would hump it—obediently, bleakly, neurotically—while we cackled.

The heroin friends came down for the weekends; one of their parents had a pricey loft in the West Village. I looked down on them. One of them came over and, without asking, ripped open a bag of dope and cut lines on a CD. I kicked him out, yelling.

I got a terrible fever. Mumlow wanted me to take a bath to cool off, but the water, though lukewarm, was icy to me. She had a bag of dope that had been sitting in her purse for weeks, after an evening with the heroin kids. “If you take a bath, I’ll let you have this,” she said.

Wrapped in towels, I sniffed the dope.

Wonderful. Peace. Warmth.

“Another one of the heroin faith-healed,” Mumlow said.

 

(I loved the Stones’ song “Gimme Shelter”: “Rape, murder: it’s just a shot away.” Rape and murder? Heroin imparts a soothing warm and fuzzy feeling.)

 

After that, I got excited when the kids from the arty-groovy school came to town on a heroin excursion. I still disdained them—they were junkies—but I always connived a bag of dope out of them. Mumlow didn’t like it. She forbade me to use heroin in the universe. I myself thought it was better for me to avoid it; I had so much I wanted to do. I figured that I could get high every other month or so. I wouldn’t go where the groovy-liberal-arts-school kids were going. Their faces were a little greyer each time they came to town.

 

I was going out and doing open-mic nights, doing poetry at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe’s Friday night slams. I was a desperate and ambitious kid; at twenty-one, I felt like I was almost too late for stardom. I slogged through my notebooks of club bookers’ numbers and record companies’ addresses, sending demo cassettes, repeatedly calling the gatekeepers of New York nightlife.

The most feared booker was Louise from CBGB. CBGB let unknown bands play on Sunday and Monday nights; the sound guys, who could be relied upon to not give a fuck, would write down what they thought of the band—and if the band had brought a significant number of beer-buying friends—and maybe you’d get a real gig after that.

I played a Monday night, then anxiously waited. The call never came. I called up Louise, nearly hyperventilating.

“Call me next Wednesday at 3 o’clock,” she said, and hung up the phone.

Next Wednesday I called promptly at three.

“Call me next Wednesday at five.” Click.

Next Wednesday: Hi, is this Louise, this is M. Doughty, I . . .

“Call me on Tuesday at noon, on this number.” She gave me a number different from the one I called on. I fumbled madly for a pen and took it down.

Tuesday: “Call me next Tuesday at one.”

Next Tuesday: “Call me on Friday at this number:———.”

I called dutifully on Friday. An unfamiliar voice answered. “CB’s.”

Hi, uh, I’m looking for Louise . . .

“She’s not here right now,” he said, “but you’re calling the right number.”

 

Louise wouldn’t book a solo guy in the main room—massively disappointing—but she gave me a gig at the space next door, CB’s Gallery. I lugged an amp all the way up the Bowery—I was skinny as hell, it took forever. A car pulled up—a bunch of drunk girls from out of town looking for Bleecker Street. I told them I’d show them the way if they gave me a ride. I put my amp in the trunk, and they drove me—just a few blocks—to CB’s. They were incredibly impressed that I was a musician, in New York, no less, who wrote his own songs, no less, and actually had a real show to play.

There were two guys at the bar. I played some songs. Another guy showed up. Another guy left. Then the other guy left. It was just me, playing to the bartender. What do you do? I had a meticulously conceived set list at my feet, and I couldn’t figure out anything to do but stick with it.

The bartender went out front and brought down the steel grate over the big window. She came and stood in the center of the empty room. “I think I’m gonna close down now,” she said.

Years later, she was the manager of a big band on the hippie circuit. I bump into her at music festivals and tell everybody near us the story of her shutting down the club on me. I’m trying to be good-naturedly funny, but she winces.

 

We took acid and went to a dance club. It was me, a couple of friends, Wind-Him-Up-and-Watch-Him-Go Joe, and another, a cute blonde girl who had played the ingenue in this cult movie that everyone had seen.

We spent the night jiggling and wobbling wildly in front of a speaker. We knew we looked like idiots.

We left as the sun came up, and sat on the curb. Wind-Him-Up-and-Watch-Him-Go Joe ate a piece of pizza; the slice devolved into an indistinct mass of cheese that he held in both hands and gnawed at like a dog. We went back to another friend’s place. Everybody went up to his roof, and I lay in bed with the blonde ingenue. She started telling me intimate things about her life, how she’d fucked a creative-writing teacher and read the stories she wrote about it aloud in class, how she gave a lighting guy on the cult movie a hand job every night after shooting ended. I kept waiting for the moment that I would kiss her, but she bolted up and went to the bathroom. I heard her puking, and crying.

Wind-Him-Up-and-Watch-Him-Go Joe burst into the room behind his fuming girlfriend, pleading, trying to placate her. She stopped in the middle of the room, heard the ingenue crying, turned on her heels, and went to the bathroom. She knocked on the door lightly, saying, “Honey, are you OK? Are you OK? Honey?”

I stayed on the futon for an hour, hoping the ingenue would come back to get cozy again. Eventually, I got up and walked home in the ashen daylight.

 

The Knit’s manager yelled at me that I’d get fired if I didn’t do a better job sweeping up at the end of the night. Then Wind-Him-Up-and-Watch-Him-Go Joe showed up telling me he had some Ecstasy and had found a Discover card lying on the ground someplace—he and some friend of his were going to drop the E’s and call a whore. I gulped the E as I closed up the desk and left without touching the broom.

(I once found a credit card on the street; I would’ve bought stuff with it, too, if it hadn’t been in the name of Yuka Kaneko. Instead I sent it to the address in Tokyo printed on the back, promising REWARD. Four months later, I got an embroidered towel in the mail.)

Joe’s credit card was in the name of Ann Hill. How are we going to convince an escort agency that your name is Ann Hill?

“I’ll tell them I’m from England,” Joe said.

Wind-Him-Up-and-Watch-Him-Go Joe was intent on getting a black girl. “I don’t want a black girl, why would we get a black girl?” whined the friend. Mumlow was out of town. We went to her place.

“Hello? Yes, how much does it cost? Yeah. Do you take the Discover card?”

Nobody took the Discover card.

Ten calls later, somebody finally did. “The name is Ann Hill.” Pause. “Yes. Ann Hill. I’m from England.” He said this in his regular, suburban-Illinois accent.

They bought it. “We’re young and handsome, so send somebody really good,” he said.

I drew second. So I went out into the stairwell and waited. I was coming up on the drugs. The stairwell was a cold, hollow chamber, painted institutional pale green. Every fidget echoed eleven stories down. I don’t think it was really E—actually, I think every E I took was not in fact E until roughly 1996.

I puked a rainbow on the landing.

I sat there, staring ahead, getting paranoid, hoping nobody would come up the stairs. A ring in my ears became an insectoid buzz. Years passed. I stared at the pool of rainbow puke. Finally Joe came out and knocked on the stairwell door.

The whore wasn’t beautiful. She spoke with an elegant accent that suggested she was from somewhere like Côte d’Ivoire. Her frank gaze scared me. I didn’t get hard. “Have you been doing cocaine?” she asked pleasantly.

In the end I rubbed my soft cock between her ass cheeks as she lay there placidly. I came, she pulled out a massive credit-card charging device, and suddenly I was alone.

Joe’s whiny friend got nothing.

I was paranoid for weeks. I didn’t dare to look in the stairwell; I didn’t know whether the puke had been cleaned up. It was a fancy building, who took the stairs? I feared a knock on the door from a wrathful superintendent, and then Mumlow would kick me out.

I feared lupine pimps nabbing me as I left the building. I feared Pinkerton men sent by the Discover card people. I feared Ann Hill, whoever she was, and whatever she made of that unexpected $400 charge.

 

There was a Rollerblading German cocktail waitress named Ilsa. She thought herself a soul singer, and when she went down to the basement at the end of the night to replenish the beer—she carried the heavy cases on sturdy shoulders—she sang flamboyantly in a faux-Memphis Germanic accent. She Rollerbladed from the bar to the tables by the stage, the Rollerblades slamming on the wooden floor during the band’s gentlest passages.

I saw her on Avenue A on a night when I was going to cop dope for the first time. I was always afraid to go there—every time I got high, somebody else went to buy it—but I resented being beholden to them. Mumlow had told me she’d kick me out if I got high in the universe, but she was in Texas seeing relatives. Ilsa was walking in a stream of people towards a place called the Laundromat, where you’d stick your money through a hole in the wall and get heroin or cocaine in return. There was a guy placed near the corner trying to mitigate the very obvious flow of customers, “They’re gonna take you off the line,” he sang gently, tut-tutting. “They’re gonna take you off the line.”

I gave Ilsa my money. Ten bucks. “Just one? Really?” she said.

I stood there thinking she’d stolen my money, but she returned and gave me the single bag of heroin, an envelope an inch and a half long, the size of two razor blades held together. We walked past her place, a storefront on Seventh Street with futons on the floor and tie-dyed sheets hanging on the walls. There were a couple of other Germans there, who looked like they were just beginning to tip into real junkiedom; they looked like tourists in shiny European clothes, but there was something drawn and desperate in their faces. They were surprised that I didn’t want to hang out and get high with them.

The bag of dope was tiny, but I felt its every contour in my pocket.

I had started moving the furniture around the universe earlier in the day, wanting to change my brain by rearranging the physical world. So the place was a mess; it didn’t suit my visions of effete drug use. I tapped the little quantity of powder onto a book anyway. I sniffed up a line, sat there, decided I wasn’t high yet, sniffed up another line, thought the same, and suddenly had sniffed the whole bag within five minutes. The high walloped me.

I nodded out, then came to. I had bought a Charlie Parker tape—some live recording. I put a Walkman on and lay back on the bed in the jumble of shoved-about furniture. I didn’t know much about bebop, except that I wanted its sophistication. I wrongly thought that Charlie Parker would be a soothing, heroin-genic drug soundtrack. I passed out again.

I had some kind of frenetic nightmare that I can’t remember. I sat up in a panic. The wild music was shrill in my ears.

 

Sun Ra’s Arkestra played the Knitting Factory soon before Sun Ra died. He’d recently had a stroke. The band wheeled him onstage for sound check, then left him there, alone, as they all went to dinner before the show. After the first set, they left him onstage again. I walked up with my notebook and Sun Ra signed it with a shaking hand, his autograph like that of a third-grader just learning cursive.

The guitar player Marc Ribot was a regular; I idolized him for the biting, bitter leads he played on Tom Waits’s Rain Dogs. Somebody said that he’d been at the bar speculating that the next musical revolution would be led by a band featuring the white-rapper version of Kurt Cobain. I buttonholed him. I am that kid! I said. Let’s start a band! He politely declined.

A fellow doorman named Gordon and I started an improvised-music band called Isosceles; we grabbed slots from the boss on off-nights and asked twenty musicians to play. Seven or so would show up, hopefully a drummer among them. We played to stragglers who hung around after the night’s first set. Gordon bawled on a tenor sax; I bayed poetry out of a notebook. Once, all twenty players showed up. We literally couldn’t fit on the stage.

They say if the band could beat up the audience, cancel the show.

I heard the free-jazz prophet Charles Gayle every Monday. The same fifteen people came every week, so after they’d all gone in, I’d shut down the desk, get high with the sound guy, and watch. The sound was exquisite pandemonium. I learned how to hear this music; it was like seeing through the Matrix. Minuscule changes would flip the whole sound over.

John Zorn’s game piece “Cobra” was performed on the last Sunday of every month. It’s an ingenious system for structured improvisation: twelve players in a semicircle face a prompter at a table who administers multicolored cards that stand for various musical acts. The musicians signal their desired operation, using hand gestures, then the prompter picks up a corresponding card, bangs it on the table, and a musical change happens: players enter or exit, volume goes up or down, tempo goes up or down, players imitate other players, players trade phrases between each other.

A different avant-garde luminary picked the cast every month. (One month, there was a Cobra done by a bunch of layman avant-garde enthusiasts. They were given the night because they were the ones keeping the scene stoked; record-store guys, flyer-putter-uppers, habitual attendees. The show was wretched. The sampler pioneer Anthony Coleman was there. “It’s now proven that there’s such a thing as can play in this music,” he said.)

In March, it was all sampler players. There were a bunch of musicians pioneering new approaches to playing the sampler: they were playing it live, as an instrument, as opposed to chaining the sounds in a pattern using a sequencer, as hip-hop and techno producers did.

I was a solo acoustic guy in a magical time for hip-hop music. You heard it everywhere, booming from passing cars. It was before SUVs were called SUVs, so they called them Jeep beats. The bass Dopplered down Broadway. I tried to replicate the rhythms on guitar, and failed, but in an interesting way. At the Knit, I heard all this atonal, outside, beautifully messed-up music, and connected it to the dissonant textures and flourishes on the rap records. I saw LL Cool J’s glorious version of “Mama Said Knock You Out” on MTV, with a band instead of a DJ. In my head I heard huge rhythms, played live, shot through with surreal information.

The show was wonderful: unearthly noises, volleys of mayhem. You could barely tell who was doing what, as it was twelve guys standing next to machines. Post-show, I cornered them one by one. Each gave me the same spiel: there were two ways to play the sampler—either to trigger sound effects or as a more conventional keyboard. I hoped for something in between.

 

I was asked to do Cobra and felt like I’d arrived. The doorman takes the stage! To an audience! This one was all singers. One of them was this guy Jeff Buckley.

Jeff had been playing with the guitar player Gary Lucas, a jocular psychedelicist of Zorn’s generation. Gary had, incidentally, been a publicist at Columbia Records in the ’70s and came up with the Clash’s slogan, The Only Band That Matters.

Jeff ’s dad was Tim Buckley, whom I’d never heard of but who was apparently notable in the ’70s. (Everybody thought this meant Jeff was rich. From where I stand now, that’s hysterical; I’ve had a couple songs on the radio and receive a negligible check a few times a year. Everybody thinks I’m rich now, too.)

Alone among the Cobra singers, Jeff had presence on the stage. The show was quasi-disastrous: singers don’t like supporting roles. We fought to bellow loudest. Jeff soared over our ruckus.

Gary Lucas was quickly realizing that Jeff was en route to something spectacular. He tried to corner him, but he ditched Gary and began to play his own shows, accompanying himself on a Telecaster—that brittle, tight guitar sound. Jeff had a fantastic ear, could pick anything out. I saw him mostly play covers: Van Morrison, Edith Piaf, Morrissey, Shudder to Think, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Yeah, that’s right, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. He grew up on Kiss and Led Zeppelin and could play anything of theirs. “Detroit Rock City!” I yelled at him during his shows, and he’d doodle a bar of it, smiling.

Jeff happened to call me on the day Luke and I were moving from Brooklyn to an East Village tenement. “I’ll meet you there!” Uh, Jeff, it’s a six story walkup. He came anyway, ebulliently humping furniture up the stairs with us. We sat on the back of the U-Haul afterwards, eating plums and a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

A year later, Luke bumped into him in front of the Second Avenue Cinema, a gorgeous indie-celebrity songstress trailing him. He was snooty and aloof: “I’m sorry, what was your name, again?” Didn’t introduce Luke to the songstress.

The cutest girl in the room always beelined to him. So I hated him for that. We did a gig together; I shorted him his cut of the door money. “Thanks, this is my rent!” he said.

He was conscripted into playing the title role in a cheap production of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck by a friend of mine who saw him at that gig. It’s the story of a soldier forced to be the subject of cruel experiments. Woyzeck loses his mind, suffers terrible hallucinations, murders his girlfriend. In the last scene, he walks into a lake to wash the blood off, and drowns.

He did a weekly show at a bar on St. Mark’s Place. Even crazy people flocked to him; he played by a window, and this renowned maniac called Tree Man—he adorned himself in branches, looking like he was scowling from inside a bush—would come and glower. There was another guy, Camera Man: fake cameras made out of plastic bottles hung from his neck. He’d stop passersby and coax them to turn their chins in flattering directions as he pretended to take their picture. He’d lean over Jeff ’s shoulder to frame the audience of enraptured girls.

Soon St. Mark’s Place was lined with black Lincoln Town Cars. Jeff signed with Columbia Records. Columbia was a Sony subsidiary, run from a tower on Madison Avenue with a crown shaped like that of an antique cabinet. The label was renowned for ruthlessness, not for carrying out its artists’ creative impulses. There was a marketing person there who brought a big cardboard box into her office and sat in it with her phone for a month, not leaving until Alice in Chains’s “Man in the Box” was in the top ten. This was artistry as Columbia saw it.

Jeff was utterly crushed-out on Sony. He called it Sony, never Columbia. Before CBS sold it off, Columbia had been famous for its stable of iconoclasts—Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen. Sony, on the other hand, was a bloodless monolith. Jeff ’s lust for a conglomerate’s approval wasn’t uncharacteristic of the times. There were a lot of artists—myself included—who longed for acceptance by the entities of commerce. (Why? Being an artist wasn’t good enough? We chose bohemian lives and now needed to be patted on the head by somebody respectable?)

We saw each other on the street just as my band was being courted by labels. “Sony!” he enthused. He walked away backwards, yelling, “Sign to Sony!”

Years later, when I myself was on a big record label, my band toured America, opening for Jeff. He snapped, as ever, between eager self-deprecation and haughty self-regard. His managers had hired Soundgarden’s crew. They gave Jeff princely treatment—Jeff would walk to the side of the stage, playing guitar, and a tech would put a lit cigarette in his mouth; he’d puff once or twice before the guy took it back. But they hated being on a rinky-dink tour of clubs and took it out on my band. During our sound check, their stage guy rang out the monitors, discharging shrieks of feedback at us. They set up Jeff ’s band’s amps so close to the lip of the stage that we barely had any room for our stuff; my spastic, outburst-prone sampler player pushed them back and nearly got punched.

 

We were playing the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, a place that looks like a mirrored bordello in France. “Detroit Rock City!” I yelled from the crowd. Jeff obliged with a titter of the riff.

He had been selected as one of People magazine’s Fifty Most Beautiful People. He wasn’t happy about it. He went into a monologue about how he didn’t want to be People magazine’s idea of beautiful, and all the black movie stars they’d skipped over.

Jeff played a snippet of The Smiths’ “I Know It’s Over”:

If you’re so very entertaining
Then why are you on your own tonight?
If you’re so very good-looking
Why do you sleep alone tonight?

Then Jeff sang:

And since you’re Jeff Buckley
Why do you sleep alone tonight?

I muttered acridly: Poor you.

I was standing with a friend. “You should show up at sound check tomorrow with his page from People duct-taped to your chest,” he said.

Later he enthused about Jeff ’s hotness. “How old is he?”

Twenty-eight.

“Twenty-eight!” he said. “No way. I’m no chicken hawk, but that’s a chicken.”

 

Jeff and I sniffed dope in the Great American’s basement dressing room. It was powder heroin. You get black tar in California—it must have been a bitch to find this stuff. We walked back to the hotel together; a girl who looked like a Modigliani painting traipsed along. He kissed her on the cheek and she walked away.

?! I said.

“I can’t go spreading myself all over the country,” he said distastefully.

If you don’t want to spread yourself all over the country with a hundred different girls, what the hell are we doing here?

Really? I said.

“I’ve got a plan,” he said. He winked. Winked.

Yeah? What’s the plan?

He gave an agitated frown, and didn’t answer.

 

We played the Urban Art Bar in Houston, a tiny place with a decrepit sound system. Jeff’s crew parked their huge purple bus in front and obscured the whole building.

I talked to this beautiful Texan Indian woman. She was a doctor. I thought we were flirting; she just wanted me to take her backstage to meet Jeff. Devastating.

“He speaks French!” she said.

No, he doesn’t, I said.

“You haven’t heard his version of ‘Je n’en connais pas la fin,’” she said, imperiously. “Edith Piaf. His accent is impeccable.”

I don’t think so—he’s a really talented mimic, I said.

She huffed.

Eventually, she figured out that all you had to do to get into the dressing room at the Urban Art Bar was push the door open.

The next day Jeff said he’d been accosted by a crazy woman who said she was a doctor; she babbled at him in French. “I don’t speak French,” he said, exasperated.

 

I didn’t speak to Jeff again. I heard stories about Jeff nodding out in bars, deliriously high, and thought, Figures. I wanted him brought down.

 

My band played the WHFS HFStival at RFK stadium in D.C. Vivian from Luscious Jackson told me that he had walked out into the Mississippi River with his boots on, singing, was pulled under by the wake of a passing boat, and washed up dead at the foot of Beale Street in Memphis.

A perfect fable. You fucking cunt piece of shit asshole fucker, I thought. You’ll be a legend now.

 

Years later, I met a committee of producers at a coffee place. They had bought the rights to his story. I expounded about Jeff, and the’90s, and my grievances, and how, at some point, it had occurred to me that it was better to stay alive and make music than to be a dead legend; long past his death, I realized it was a horrible fate, and that he had once been my friend.

They told me about Jeff ’s journals, that he wrote something about me, how he admired my drive, and how hard I worked, and how he wanted to emulate me. I was shocked.

I told them my dubious theory that he’d gotten clean before he died. For one thing, a musicians’ recovery organization was thanked in some liner notes. For another, there was an article written by a Memphis acquaintance who said he’d found him walking around a shitty neighborhood in the rain; nonresidents mainly go to shitty neighborhoods to get drugs, but Jeff apparently wasn’t fucked up. Where there’s drugs, there’s twelve-step meetings.

I wondered if he was aping Woyzeck when he walked into the river. I gave them my friend the director’s e-mail, maybe she’d show them the VHS tape of the show.

I told them that on our tour together, my sampler player had put a pebble in the air tube of a tire on his bus, twisting the cap on over it; the air slowly leaked out as they drove. They were stranded on the roadside for twelve hours. They could’ve been killed. His other notable prank was re-arranging some letters on a marquee to read JEFFY O’BUCKLE.

I told them that I thought Jeff wasn’t a songwriter; I had asked him once if he wanted some songs that I wrote and he reacted indignantly—I’d touched a nerve. Few mention the songs he wrote when they rhapsodize about him; they adore his covers of “Hallelujah” and “Lilac Wine.” I thought he just got lucky with

“Last Goodbye.” In Memphis, making his final album, he was repeatedly pushed back to the drawing board by Sony; he journaled about how it made him feel cheap and crazy. The songs on the slapdash compilation of demos that Columbia released postmortem were weak, unmemorable. His enormous gift was interpretation, I told them. The problem was that the only real source of income if you’re a major label artist is publishing—songwriter’s royalties. The label makes sure you don’t recoup; you spend more on touring than you make. You write the songs on your albums, or you’re broke.

Walking away, I hated myself for how I pontificated. I nurtured a fear that when the movie was made, I’d be in it, cast as Jeff’s Salieri: Jeff played by some celebrated young movie star, and I a clown.

 

The place where Luke and I lived, after I broke up with Mumlow, was in the East Village at a cacophonous intersection. A hundred truck horns thundered every day at rush hour; the screen of the living room TV was filmed with a layer of exhaust soot. Our telephone number spelled out (212) CAT-BUKS.

CAT-BUKS became the destination for everybody we went to school with who lived outside the city. In the evening, the buzzer would ring, and a few random friends would climb up the steep six flights with beer and hang out doing bong hits until they had to take the Long Island Rail Road home. “What are you doing tonight?” “I don’t know, just going over to CAT-BUKS, I guess.”

Nobody ever brought women over.

Luke kicked me out of CAT-BUKS. We were both slovenly post-collegiate stoners, but I was just slightly more slovenly than he was, and it drove him spittingly unhinged. The night he sat me down and told me I had to go was the last time in my life I cried, openly, in front of a man.

I was replaced by a succession of roommates who lasted a month, two months, six months, nine months. I started arbitrarily showing up at CAT-BUKS, myself. I brought over a thumbnail-sized bag of Ketamine that I bought from a guy outside of Wetlands—I’d never had it before, and the moment the bag was in my hand I thought the guy had ripped me off—we sniffed it, and spontaneously, did a mirthless single-file parade, room to room, around CAT-BUKS, radiating that Ketamine whoom-whoom-whoom-whoom, like aliens had seized our bodies.

They never changed the phone book listing; it was under my name for years after I left. A French girl who was quasi-stalking me left messages on the machine. One of the replacement roommates told me, and I asked if she’d called before. “Yeah, like six times in the past four months, maybe.”

 

I started cadging off-nights, Mondays or Tuesdays, from my boss at the Knit and playing gigs as “M. Doughty’s Soul Coughing” with different guys I heard at the club. The saxophonist Tim Berne played once. I called him up cold, and he had no idea who I was. A friend asked what he was doing that week, and he apparently said, “Monday night I’m playing with this African cat—Emdodi.”

I booked the 11 PM slot on a Tuesday night five days after my twenty-second birthday. A month before the show, I had no band. I was worrying about it, talking to a bass player who worked a day job as a sound-effects guy on a soap opera. “Don’t worry, Doughty,” he said. “We’ll find you a band.”

I called him up two weeks before the show. He had forgotten. He couldn’t do it, because that week there was a fictitious hurricane in the soap opera’s fictitious town, so he had to work overtime.

There was this one amazing drummer around, an Israeli guy who could sound like a hip-hop record. There were drummers who could play those beats, but nobody who could sound like that. My only interaction with him was that he’d once walked into the Knit’s office and asked me to send a fax for him. I told him that I didn’t work in the office and didn’t know how the fax machine worked. He stayed silent for a minute and then asked me again if I’d send a fax for him.

I had nothing to lose, why not call up this amazing player at random, for the hell of it? He had nothing to do on a Tuesday night at 11 PM. Who would? He said yes. I was astonished.

I wanted an upright bass player; the record I wanted to emulate was A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory, powered by upright bass lines, some sampled, some played live by the master Ron Carter. There was this one upright player who was unsettlingly corny: he had long hair, wore pointy Night Ranger at the Grammys boots, and was often seen in the sort of pajama-like sultan pants associated with M.C. Hammer. But the drummer said he was good. I got his number from somebody; he, too, had nothing booked on a Tuesday at eleven. I learned later that he had no idea who I was; he showed up for the rehearsal, and thought, The door guy?

There was a sampler player who had done both the all-sampler and all-vocalist Cobras—he was brought on to the latter along with some other nonvocalists because he knew the piece. He was less intimidating than the other sampler players; they tended to be mavericks, but this guy was timid and high-strung. He was constantly wide-eyed, like the proverbial animal in headlights. He said yes, too.

 

Rehearsal studios in New York went by the hour. It was something like $12 per; insanely expensive for me. It was my gig, so the assumption was that I was hiring them, that it was my deal. They were, in fact, so busy that this was the single rehearsal I could grab them for.

Half an hour late, the bass player and the drummer arrived with bagels and coffee. I stood there with my guitar plugged in, gawking at them, as they joked and ate their breakfasts.

Can we play? My money’s running out, I said.

They laughed at me. A half hour later, they had finished their bagels.

“Yo, G,” said the drummer, who spoke a thickly Hebrew accented, broken Brooklynish, “it is time to pump. It is time that we must pump now.”

I was floored from the jump. I had tried to explain to other rhythm sections how to do the grooves I wanted. With these two, it was just there. That huge sound.

I started one tune by explaining I wanted the rhythm to be something like James Brown’s “Funky Drummer.”

“Yo, G,” said the drummer, “nobody want to play that there beat. Everybody done that beat already.”

We blasted through a bunch of songs in an hour. I was half elated, half panicked. Suddenly the sampler player walked in.

Where’s your sampler? I said.

“I brought this,” he said. He held up a video camera. “I’m going to record audio and practice to it later.”

 

To promote a gig, I’d call 200 people; basically, everybody I’d ever met in New York. I sat down at 3 PM, with a notebook with names and numbers anarchically scribbled in it, and made calls until 11. Every third person asked to be on the guest list.

Seventeen people came. One rehearsal wasn’t enough to really know the tunes, so transitions were sketchy, but I was dumbstruck. The bass player and the drummer seemed not to give a fuck that I was standing there, but they filled the room with an extraordinary rumble.

The sampler player didn’t start playing until about the last verse of each tune; it took him that long to load his hard drive. He clearly hadn’t listened to his videotape, but I loved his sounds. Peals from space and spectral voices.

There wasn’t much, but I divided the money four ways.

“Yo, G,” said the drummer. “This is not right. This isn’t enough. You pay for my cab. That’s how it’s done, G.”

After paying for cabs, I had lost the precious (for me) sum of $25. But I was sold: if I could hold on to them, this was my band.

 

They showed up for the gigs I booked, usually looking sort of bored, sometimes en route to other, more profitable gigs later in the evening. Their lethargy was a little contagious. For one gig, I didn’t call those 200 people beforehand to hawk the show. Too exhausted. Fuck it, if seventeen people was the norm, what difference would it make if it was ten?

Fifty-five people showed up anyway. Fifty-five people. Something was actually happening.

 

“There’s two ways to play the sampler,” the sampler player said, “as a conventional keyboard, or to trigger sound effects.” I hoped I could convince him otherwise.

I brought some CDs over to his house. There were a bunch of sounds I wanted him to use: Howlin’ Wolf, the Andrews Sisters, Toots and the Maytals, The Roches, Raymond Scott, Grand Puba, a cast recording of Guys and Dolls.

His house was so organized, it made me feel weird. He had a master’s degree in composition from an uptown conservatory and was well inculcated in the conservatory mind-set—he called rock drummers “percussionists” and used terms like sforzando when discussing how best to approach a rhythm that I’d ripped off from Funkdoobiest. There was an oddness to his look; it was as if he only wore those clothes that middle-class moms buy at department stores and lay on the childhood bed when their kid comes home for Christmas. Which, it turned out, was exactly the case.

He was a protégé of Anthony Coleman, who brought him into the messier world of the Knit and at whose goading he switched from writing jokey orchestral pieces with scatological titles to electronic-collage pieces, stitched from recordings of his own music school recitals.

The sampler player got me high. Despite his square look and academic pedigree, he was a gluttonous stoner. He had a job editing radio commercials in a windowless studio; he stayed up all night mousing and clicking at a monitor, getting high (next to the computer was a briefcase-sized hard drive with an utterly impressive four gigabyte capacity), alone but for his boss’s yellow canary. The weed made the sampler player so jumpy that sometimes he seemed deranged.

He played me a thing that he’d done with a few horn notes from a recording of his chamber-music pieces. He played slowed-down and sped-up versions of it simultaneously. It was aching, and cyclical, and it was gorgeous. I recited a poem over it, and it became the Soul Coughing song “Screenwriter’s Blues.”

The repetitions of dance music were foreign to him. “You mean, you want me to play this over and over again?” he asked in rehearsal.

“Yo, G,” said the drummer, “just hold down that there key with some duct tape.”

He was too proud for the duct-tape maneuver, but he became OK with the repetition. He bought a copy of Parliament’s Chocolate City and practiced to it. He learned how to load his hard drive faster. He idolized the bass player, who had wizardly ears—he could hear what you were going to play before you played it, and could complement or contradict your part with a bass line, concocted on the spot, of great force and ingenious simplicity.

After a rehearsal, we ate at a diner. The waitress took the plates away, and the check was passed around. I got some change and put down $12. The sampler player got out his wallet, pulled out $10, put it on the table. The drummer got out his wallet, took out $20, put it on the table, took the $10 back.

Then the check got to the bass player. He held the check in his hand, and took out his wallet. Opened his wallet. Then he put the check down and put his wallet back.

The guy had just mimed paying the check.

When the sampler player counted up the money, we were short exactly what the bass player owed. The check was passed around again. The drummer put in a couple extra bucks. He gave it to the bass player. The bass player rubbed his chin, acting stumped by the discrepancy.

The sampler player saw it, too. We didn’t confront him. The sampler player was too in awe of the guy; I couldn’t believe somebody would actually do that.

 

At that moment, the bass player was thirty-four years old. I didn’t occur to me until I was myself thirty-four that this kind of trickery wasn’t something most adults did.

I was twenty-three, the drummer was thirty, and the sampler player, thirty-one. My idea was that guys older than me would know what they were doing. Musically, I was correct. On every other level, I had no idea what I’d stumbled into.

 

I talked Louise at CB’s into giving us a Monday night residency at the Gallery. There was a club night—clubs were not buildings but branded parties that migrated between venues—called Giant Step in New York. It was a cauldron for the sort of stuff that Pete Rock and CL Smooth and DJ Premier were doing: old jazz records, cut up and played over big beats. They had saxophone players and trumpeters come in and play along with the records. I envisioned a Knitting Factory version of Giant Step, with more strangeness: a tinge of the avant-garde. It would be us and a DJ. I invited some Knitting Factory types to come in and jam along.

It was mostly a bust. We played a decent set, but the Knit guys just lingered for a minute at the bar and then left, confused. While the DJ spun a Beatnuts instrumental, I went to the mic and yelled: SLAW! SLAW! SLAW! SLAW!

 

(I should’ve called the band Slaw. Soul Coughing is a wretched band name.)

 

A guy named Joel, just out of film school, showed up and wanted to do a video. A mere five grand, he said. Yeah, great, but unfortunately I left my wallet in the penthouse. Undeterred, Joel told me that he was going to call up a bunch of major labels; one of them would sign Soul Coughing and pony up the five grand. I listened in amused disbelief.

They showed up.

As I left the stage, a woman came up and introduced herself as being from a record company. Yeah? I sneered. Want to put out my record?

“Yes,” she said.

 

I went to a luxuriously wood-paneled office on West Fifty-seventh Street, next door to Carnegie Hall. Huge black-and-white photos of the label’s stars, broodingly lit, loomed in the reception area. I met the label’s tanned, British president in an opulent office. We sat on couches made for a pasha. A lavish platter of sushi was brought in—but it was his lunch, he wasn’t planning on sharing it with me. He lectured me, in the tones of a loony, upper-class limey, about how I should fire the band—saying this without having seen the band—use the band’s name as a brand, continue alone. No, no, I said. The band is important, the sound is important.

He was a rich, tan fool. But he was right.

There had been an awkward pause in the show, for the sampler player to load sounds onto the tiny hard drive of his sampler. “You should tell jokes or something there,” he said irritatedly.

I heard that he appeared in Bob Dylan’s Don’t Look Back; he was the bespectacled student whom Dylan goaded, “Why should I get to know you, maaaaan?” The bespectacled possible-future-label president: “Why, because I’m a very good person!”

 

I went back to the band, agog, and told them.

“Why didn’t you invite us?” they asked.

 

Slaw became just a weekly Soul Coughing show. I had posters made, with a slogan I meant to emulate The Who’s inspired descriptive phrase “Maximum R&B.” It was “Deep Slacker Jazz.” The manager of the venue, CB’s Gallery—CBGB had annexed the stores flanking it, making one a pizza parlor and the other a gallery/performance space—knew this junkie guy who put up posters for her. I gave him a stack of posters and some cash.

The bass player came in the next week complaining he never saw posters. Fine, I said. Here’s the posters—you put them up. For the next show, there were even fewer posters. The bass player had hired the very same junkie guy, on the same manager’s recommendation.

“I see my posters all over the place!” he said, outraged, when I brought it up.

I divvied up more responsibilities; the sampler player agreed to advance a show. When we got there, there was an art opening; the place was jammed; there was no way to do a sound check.

“I can’t believe this,” said the sampler player, showing a glimpse of the juddering rage under his frightened surface.

Huh? I said. This is your fault!

“My fault?!”

Yeah, I said. That’s what ‘Call them up and ask if everything’s OK for us to show up at 4’ means.

The drummer refused any other duties. “I play the drums, that’s enough, G,” he snorted. But soon, in what I took to be a sign of surprisingly deepening engagement, he started arranging the rental of a supplemental speaker—just one, a big subwoofer, that’s all we could afford—every week. Two sketchy-looking dudes would come in a hatchback, load the thing into the club, and I’d pay them $100.

Eventually I figured out that the drummer had set it up so the only thing in that subwoofer was his kick drum.

 

People from labels kept coming. We got a lawyer. His assistant called up and left on the answering machine a sprawling guest list of A&R execs, which we ignored. Admission was $4, who could kvetch? The lawyer called up, apoplectic. “These people need to feel important,” he said.

We went, all of us together, to offices and had magnificent lunches. There were certain business-y phrases that every exec at every label used. “At the end of the day,” and “bring to the table.” “It’s about———at the end of the day.” “———is what———brings to the table.” “At the end of the day, it’s———that we bring to the table.”

We went to meet the head of Columbia Records—Jeff Buckley’s cherished Sony—at his office. He looked like a longshoreman in beige Armani.

“GENTLEMEN!” the president of Columbia yelled. “YOU—CAN DO—ANYTHING!—YOU WANT!—ON—COLUMBIA!—RECORDS!” This must’ve been his pitch to artist-y type artists. Even as many of us yearned for corporate love, it was barefacedly uncool to want to be on a major label.

“ISN’T THAT RIGHT, MICKEY!”

“That’s right, Johnny!” smarmed a henchman.

“You look like serious young men!” Johnny yelled. “Look behind you!”

We turned to see a monumental burnished-sterling Columbia logo on the wall.

“COLUMBIA RECORDS!—IS THE BIGGEST!—LABEL!—IN—THE—WORLD! Isn’t that right, Mickey?

“That’s right, Johnny!” Mickey said.

“Now look at this!” Johnny said. “This is the new Sony minidisc player!”

He slammed a minidisc into a desk-side console.

“Look! The title is RIGHT THERE ON THE L.E.D. DISPLAY!”

“Thunder Road” scrolled across the console in digitized yellow letters. Bruce Springsteen blasted at enormous volume. In the din, Johnny beamed, shaking his head up and down like an overstimulated dog.

 

We played on Halloween. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion played the main room at CBGB; their show was packed. Ours was nearly empty. An A&R guy from a small label attached to a bigger label, tired and sweaty, wandered in, sat down, and fell in love with me. He was an obese, closeted-gay guy named Stanley Ray.

The tale of the ’90s is sometimes told as the tale of underground bands thrown into the mainstream and showered with integrity-threatening lucre. This is partially true—certainly true in the case of the imperial grunge bands—but in general, artists’ advances were sucked up by recording costs, and the best they could seek was a reliable source of tour support—that is, somebody to pay for the van rental. Real money was made by people who worked at labels.

Labels were selling shitty CDs at insane markups. It was cheaper to manufacture a CD than a vinyl record, but, on a pretense of technological sophistication, CDs cost more than twice as much.

Many contained just one good song. There were CDs by bellicose hardcore bands with one lilting lounge-y sing-along tune, CDs whose song played on the radio was the lone song written and sung by the bass player, funk-metal bands with one incongruous acoustic ballad. The job of an A&R person—it stood for the antiquated description “artists and repertoire”—had transmogrified into mostly just trying to nab bands and sign them, abandoning the repertoire part entirely. Nobody’s job was to say, “Hey, guys, why don’t we take another six months so the bass player can write more tunes like that one.”

The labels stopped selling singles, in the traditional radio-song-plus-a-B-side format; fans, assuming that the rest of the album would be in the same vein of the song they’d heard on the radio, had to shell out for the whole CD. Nobody saw this as a con.

So the labels were drowning in cash.

(The tanking of the labels, en masse, circa the 2000s, messed up my career a little. I might’ve been richer. Maybe substantially so. I still don’t feel sorry for them.)

Alternative music’s popularity meant the labels were trafficking in a genre in which they were almost wholly nonconversant. So they went on a hiring spree. People who worked at fanzines, people who ran “labels” out of apartments and sold only seven-inch vinyl oddities, people who booked bands at dive bars, friends of bands, people who just went out a lot were flying first class—not business class, first class—and being paid executive-magnitude salaries.

Many of them embraced end-of-the-day-bring-to-the-table-ese; others fooled themselves into insouciant contempt for the bosses signing their enormous paychecks. They signed band upon band upon band.

The story of Nirvana—the band that wrought the cultural sea change—was perceived like this: Nirvana was friends with Sonic Youth, asked them which label was best, and Sonic Youth said, “Our label!” Bands were signed because they might be friends with other bands, or they carried a whiff of prestige that might attract more profitable acts. Some bands were pursued as trophies by the labels, pelted with cash in bidding wars, and shrugged off nonchalantly when their CDs tanked.

Nobody worried. They were tax write-offs for companies with much tax to write off. Plus, who knows what this stuff is, what it means? Any of these bands could fluke into a hit.

A hit! What major labels did, above all else, was seek a hit; a song that gets played on the radio, and then, once MTV was assured by radio of its hit-ness (MTV’s reputation as a tastemaker being altogether undeserved) on cable TV. The fanzine-bred label people didn’t know what hits were, or how to get bands to make them; many of them were unaware that hits were the heart of the enterprise at all. Eventually the bands-that-were-friends-with-bands, the bands-with-artistic-merit—and, alas, that new guard of A&R people, who couldn’t just go play in bars and thus had to find other ways to make a living—discovered that they had wandered into a car dealership and sniffily announced they were shopping for boats.

 

Corpulent, delicate Stanley Ray used to work in the stockroom at his label but was promoted to A&R when another guy quit. He got the job because he went out to clubs every night, compulsively (if he spent a night at home he’d jabber neurotically about how he must be missing out on something). He was bald on top, with two dirty-blond dreadlocks tied into a ponytail.

He met with us in the revolving restaurant atop the Marriott in Times Square and charmed us comprehensively. He hinted at stories about bands getting fucked by labels, said, “No, I should stop, I can’t tell you that story.” We begged, and with a theatrical sigh, he said, “I shouldn’t tell you this,” then told the sordid tales, with names coyly omitted.

His boss was an ex-football player who’d fluked into putting out singles by L.A. punk rock bands in the ’70s. He was a grey-haired man in big glasses—sort of Harry Caray–looking—who liked to wear a sport jacket over cutoff jeans. He flew out to New York, met us at a Japanese restaurant, sketched out a diagram on a napkin of how his label meshed with its major label parent, Warner Bros. Then he told us, at length, about how he was going to leave the record business and build a house, in a cave, powered entirely by turbine engines.

 

(This guy told a story about once having signed James Brown, incongruously, to his then-minuscule punk rock label. He said that James’s contract specified that he be given three Cadillacs; one went to a woman in Kentucky, another to a woman in Ohio, and one was for James. The sessions were wretched. Having given up on finishing a usable tune, the guy told James, sarcastically, “Why don’t you try something New Wave on the chorus?” When the chorus came around, James shrieked, “New WAVE! New WAVE! New WAVE!”)

 

Stanley Ray had a pattern: he’d fall in love with a singer, pursue his band, sign them, then hate him. His charm was powerful. The other side of it was a whining, griping passive-aggressiveness that snarled out if a singer expressed some measure of positive self-regard. His stories invariably went back to how———from ———had once been so rad and they’d been close and he’d told Stanley Ray all his secret hopes, but then suddenly the singer had changed, had only hard-hearted interest in his career, and hadn’t called him, in fact actively avoided him, can you believe that?

I saw this immediately, and made, half-consciously, a resolution: I was the guy who would never let Stanley Ray down.

 

We were flown to Los Angeles so Stanley Ray and the turbine-cave guy could further woo us. They put us up at the Mondrian on Sunset Boulevard; our suites looked out over twinkling Hollywood. I’d never stayed somewhere so posh, and they were paying for everything. Remembering the nights I had to decide between spending my $3 on cigarettes or food, I opened the minibar and ate all the candy. They took us out for dinner, and when I got back to the room, stoned and stuffed, I immediately ordered a pizza from room service that I could barely take a bite of.

I called the front desk and asked if I could call a dominatrix and charge it to the room.

“Uh, no sir,” the front-desk guy said, contemptuously.

“Dude!” said the turbine-cave guy the next day. “Let’s go to the Bu!”

The Bu?

“The Bu! Malibu!”

He drove us there in his black BMW, enthusing about the frozen margaritas at some seaside restaurant. We passed a pipe around. I put on a cassette of A Tribe Called Quest that I’d brought along. It came to the song “Show Business,” on which five rappers take turns denouncing record company executives. Q-Tip calls them fakes, snakes, shady, says the business is a cesspool; Sadat X talks about smarmy, “palsy-palsy” A&R people that materialize when you’re riding high; Phife kvetches about “bogus brothers making albums when they know they can’t hack it”; Diamond D tells the listener to get a good lawyer, and a label that’s “willing and able to market and promote.”

Lord Jamar’s verse is the most devastating. “You’re a million dollar man that ain’t got no dough,” he says. He describes being at a restaurant with a label guy, asking him when he’ll get paid. Just as a label guy tells him he won’t get paid, because he hasn’t recouped his advance yet, a waitress arrives. “More soup with your meal?”

“All you want to do is taste the fruit,” Lord Jamar says, “but in the back they’re making fruit juice.”

Turbine-cave guy laughed and laughed.

 

Nonchalantly, Stanley Ray lived in peripatetic luxury. He came to New York a few times a year and stayed at the Rihga Royal Hotel, on Fifty-fourth Street, for a month, taking me or some other friend out to dinner every night. When I briefly lived with (and, perhaps, off of) a girlfriend in London, he came out and stayed in a cushy place he called the Disco Arab Hotel for three weeks.

In the ’70s, Stanley Ray was the obnoxious guy at the L.A. punk shows, getting in people’s faces and telling them off. (Maybe, says your armchair shrink friend Mike Doughty, he was preempting mockery for his fatness by cutting everybody else down first?) Somebody at Warner Bros. complimented him for niceness and he was glum. Seriously.

There were cards made for A&R guys to send out with CDs. He had his altered from “with compliments of . . . ” to “with complaints.”

He called our manager incompetent every time we spoke, and then said, “No, no, I shouldn’t talk shit about your manager, he’s your manager, after all,” and we’d say, No, Stanley, please, we want to hear it, then he’d talk about how insulted he was that we hadn’t asked him to quit the label and become our manager, but he didn’t want to be our manager, he was just insulted that we didn’t want him to be our manager. If I pointed out that perhaps management, involving math and planning, required skills other than alternately charming and alienating people at nightclubs, he’d say, “What, like it’s hard to manage a band or something?!”

He didn’t do anything a traditional A&R guy was supposed to do; he didn’t help bands find producers, though he often complained, “Your manager isn’t doing anything to find producers,” and he didn’t help us to develop songs, other than alluding to his displeasure at them. He did sign bands, but after signing Soul Coughing, in 1993, he barely signed anybody for the next seven years—he signed bands that he openly said he didn’t take seriously. He was eventually bumped up from the smaller Warner Bros. imprint to vice president at Warner Bros. proper (not so impressive: every other person you met there was a vice president) and was making a quarter million dollars a year. His key mission was to make Soul Coughing feel too guilty to break up.

We sat tensely at brunch. A deranged Frenchman in a clown wig wandered between the tables playing the accordion. Our lawyer had gotten us a publishing deal—that meant songwriting. I had exhorted the guys in my band, when they were disinterested, that they should think of it as their band, as well as mine. It didn’t really work at the time. But now it became clear that they expected every bit of money to be split even-steven.

I’d spent eight hours the night before typing out a screed explaining what I thought I had done, how it was significant that I put the band together; twelve dense pages of loopy argument. When I woke up, I realized I was just typing the same thing over and over again, in fact barely saying anything at all. I deleted it. My head spun, trying to devise a way to state my case.

Let’s think about what songs actually are, I said.

They sat scowling.

The drummer spoke: “Yo G, you don’t write the beat. I write the beat. Just because you do the vocal doesn’t mean you’re better than me. Listen to them hi-hat parts there. Nobody told me to do that, that’s my hi-hat part, G.”

Could I disagree?

“Don’t be greedy,” the drummer said.

“We were all doing something else, and then this came along. So this is like a side project for each of us,” said the bass player.

I thought, but didn’t say: This isn’t a side project. This is my life. Everything I’ve ever written I’ve poured into this band. You feel like this is just some fluke you fell into, because for you it is.

But I was ten years younger than these guys, and they were much better at their instruments than I was.

The sampler player pulled out a sheaf of papers. “Look at this,” he said. It was sheet music, with notes, actual super-fancy Western notation notes, written on staves with clefs and the whole respectable-composer package.

“This,” he said, “is music.”

I thought, but didn’t say: You’ve contributed basically one keyboard part, brilliant, amazing keyboard part though it is, around which a song is based—and I put it together, laid it out, I made it into a song.

But I was ten years younger than these guys, and they were all much better than I was.

“I’m not saying we don’t have good lyrics, G,” said the drummer. “Everybody’s going to know we’re one of those bands with good lyrics.”

One of those bands with good lyrics? As if to say, we’re one of those bands with interesting art on their CD covers?

The sampler player pointed at the bass player. “He’s been playing for years. He’s played in so many bands, he’s played with ———” and here he mentioned an ornery avant-jazz legend. “Do you think that guy would even think of playing with you?”

“You act like you’re the only one whose dream it is to be a rock star,” said the bass player. “It’s my dream, too.”

But, I thought, what did you do about it? In your entire life, what have you done? I paid for those rehearsals when I barely had a dime—booked those gigs with those spiteful club people—called everybody I’d ever met in New York to gather a measly crowd for our gigs—

“You play the same riff over and over again, Doughty,” said the bass player, putting a cruelly condescending emphasis on my name.

Yes. Just as some of the great rhythm guitarists and songwriters do, having a style that they modify and return to for their entire careers, I’m not great, but I live by the example of the greats, I could’ve said.

But I was ten years younger, and they were all much better than I was.

Finally, I said, You all sound like yourselves, and you’re all amazing, but I knew what this band was going to sound like before I got you guys together.

They threw up their hands and scoffed, but it was true. I’d sat and imagined it for years, and it sounded as I intended it to. I could’ve said: It doesn’t occur to you that I’m better than you think I am, that I have a vision that you’ll never give me credit for—maybe you do know it, and you don’t want to admit it to yourselves, because this would mean accepting that your future lay in following this guy, this annoying skinny kid from the suburbs with the weird lyrics, who can barely sing, and is such a primitive guitar player he might as well be a novice. Admitting this guy was a whiz kid meant admitting you were never a whiz kid yourself.

I wasn’t going to say it. Because I didn’t believe it. In my early morning stonedness, writing songs, bass lines, dreaming up rhythms, I thought myself a genius. But in the light of day I had no confidence.

“That’s just boring. That’s really boring,” said the sampler player. “I studied music. And this man”—motioning to the bass player—“is the most talented musician in New York, and this man”—motioning to the drummer—“everybody wants to play with. You’re lucky that he’s playing with you. Do you have any idea how lucky you are?”

“You have to ask what key you’re playing in, you don’t even know the names of the chords you’re playing, Doughty,” said the bass player.

Long silence.

“We should split the money equally,” said the bass player.

“That’s what we’ll do. That’s the right thing to do,” said the sampler player.

“Nobody should be more important than anybody else,” said the drummer.

It was as if the solution suddenly occurred to everybody. They smiled these Eureka! smiles.

“Great! We’ve decided! What a relief.”

Our food came. They chatted; I sat there stunned.

Something occurred to me, fifteen years later. Since I had actually written the songs, I owned them. As we sat there, those songs belonged to me. Legally and actually. If we went before a judge, and the judge was told, He wrote the melody, and the chords, and the rhythm, and the lyrics, but I wrote the hi-hat part, the judge wouldn’t split up the songs even-steven.

I didn’t realize this for fifteen years.

“You think you chose us, Doughty,” said the bass player, observing my dazed state, “but after you chose us, we chose you.”

 

I wanted each of my bandmates to have a big cut of the songwriting: what I wanted was 40 percent. The idea was that splitting it four ways was 25 percent per man; I wanted it split five ways, because I was doing one extra job. A five-way split meant twenty per man. Twenty for me as an equal band member; another twenty for me as songwriter. I had no problem divvying up the proceeds from ideas I prodded them into actualizing when they were barely participating in the band. I had no problem giving each of them a sizable, permanent stake—ownership—in the songs. I thought I was being modest. One extra job.

I tried one more time. We had a meeting after hours in our manager’s office. The sampler player showed up drunk, with an open can of Guinness, and unbuttoned his shirt to his belly. His head lolled back like he’d been punched. “You stabbed me in the back,” he said.

My request for 40 percent—everybody’s got one job, but I’ve got two—was met with howls. That meant I was making double what each of them would!

I got whittled down to 33 percent.

“But that’s a third,” said the sampler player. “That number has too many implications for me.”

It became clear that if they felt the slightest bit unequal, these guys would actually walk on this, the best opportunity that had ever showed up in their faces. I had a terrible feeling that even as I conceded this, this huge thing, it wouldn’t be enough; they’d never really be happy. I’d always be a little bit too elevated. They’d always be aggrieved.

I got 31 percent—an extra 6 percent—but only on the first album. It’d be 25 percent each on the next one. All for one and one for all, huh? Some of these were songs I wrote a couple of years before I laid eyes on any of them—songs about Seth and Betty and my post-teen grief.

They told me that they’d give me a little extra money from our publishing deal. It was a six-figure sum—initially quite exciting-sounding—that would pay our lawyer, our manager, a long list of commensurate expenses, and provide a very little bit of income to live on for the next two years or so. “It’ll be more than you think it will be,” the sampler player reassured.

This reward turned out to be—the sampler player told me, smiling magnanimously—that I wouldn’t have to pay my share of a $5,000 fee for a demo we’d done a year earlier, which meant $1,250.

 

I called the lawyer and told him about the deal we cut.

“Are you sure?” the lawyer asked.

Yes, I said, very quietly.

I’d try to convey to the drummer the beat I wanted for a song by referencing a hip-hop tune. I was totally green, so I had no language to express it otherwise. When I hazarded musical jargon, he and the bass player laughed.

(Sometimes I’d ask what some musical term meant, and they’d look nervously at each other, doing a higher-pitched, more nervous version of the laugh. It appeared that they didn’t want me to learn anything. Years later, I went through a torturously complex explanation of a beat, and the drummer I was working with said good-naturedly, “Oh, you want the snare on the two and the four.” Yes! Exactly! If somebody had taught me the language, maybe I wouldn’t have felt helpless at rehearsals.)

He’d sneer, “Yo, G, that beat is played” (played meaning used up, out of style). I’d cajole him, and maybe he’d play it. Early in the life of the band, he’d roll his eyes and do something kind of in the neighborhood of what I’d asked him for, like he was thinking, Whatever, who cares about this kid? As the years went by, he would gravitate towards something self-consciously complicated, rarely funky. Uniqueness was more important to him than making the song better.

I stopped trying to tell him what to do. At rehearsals, I sat in the corner, reading the newspaper as he played permutations of these beats he found acceptably original, but were never particularly good. I waited him out. At some point, almost despite himself, he’d start doing something that was along the lines of what I needed for a song. I leaped up and began strumming the chords, and it would all start falling into place. I’d stop and say, Let’s play that again.

We took it from the top and suddenly the beat was different.

Stop stop stop, I said. Hey, could you play the beat you were playing before?

“It’s the same beat,” he said.

Bewildering. Maybe I’d heard it wrong. We began again. I started in with my chords, and the beat would be even further removed from what I wanted. I stopped playing.

Hey, that beat that you were doing when we first started this—that was really great—could you try that again?

“Yo, G,” he said, “It’s the same beat.”

One time I insisted with a little more intensity, and he stood up, threw his sticks, and left the room, cursing at me, telling me he’s a drummer, and I can’t even play guitar, and he’s played all over the world, and what the fuck do you know?

It’d be cool if you played something a little less space rock, a little firmer, I said, one time.

“You stole that there from Mary J. Blige, don’t think everybody don’t know you steal from other singers, G,” he replied.

We were playing a college festival at a track stadium. I was way up in the bleachers, watching the drums get sound checked. Suddenly he played a beat that I had wanted in a song for years; this kind of shuffly hip-hop beat with a buoyant triplet in the kick drum part. I ran down the bleachers. I ran like hell. All my songs ran through my mind, which one do I start playing when I get there? Because once a song was played to a beat, there was no way to say, Hey, that doesn’t quite work there, can we try a different song with that beat? “We already have a song with that there beat,” he’d say.

I bolted down the bleachers to the field, I madly ran across it, ran up the stairs to the stage, pushing tech guys out of my way. I grabbed my guitar—it wasn’t plugged in—I untangled the cable, frantically, ran to the amp—

He stopped playing the beat.

I saw him rehearse with a singer-songwriter; a song for a benefit show. There was a line that went, “I’ll play the drums for you.”

“Hey,” she said, “when I sing that line, could you play a little roll on the toms?” A very corny idea, indeed.

They went through to the end; he didn’t play the roll.

“Hey,” she said, “that was great, but you forgot to play that roll after I go, ‘I’ll play the drums for you.’ OK?”

He nodded. They went through it again; again, he didn’t play the roll. Again she told him. Again they played, and again, no drum roll.

I left.

 

Once I got together with the drummer and Jeff Buckley. I had a notion that maybe we could form a band together. (In retrospect, it would’ve been hell for me to be second banana to a man I envied so bitterly.) Jeff wasn’t interested, on account of the drummer. “He lags, man,” said Jeff. He was right. When the drummer got excited, he hit the drums harder, and the effort made him slow down. In rehearsal, if the drummer lagged too much, the bass player would shut off his amp and stomp away, without explanation, muttering.

Rehearsals were dreadful when the bass player was in a bad mood. I’d sing a part to him, and he’d play back, looking me straight in the eyes, something different than what I just sang. “You think that works, huh?” he taunted.

His moods were ruled by food intake. “I have low blood sugar,” he told us one day. He was telling us that, from then on, it was our responsibility to make sure he ate. If not, dark brattiness would come over him, and he would sit sulking. He had the sort of darkness that could stink up a room.

I’m going to get a bag of apples, so I can give one to you when you have low blood sugar, I said, once, when he was brooding.

“I hate apples,” he replied imperiously.

Rather than communicating his feelings, he’d frown exaggerated frowns, and do these violent exhales until somebody noticed he was angry about something; he truly expected that somebody would be obliged to do something about it once they heard him puffing.

I’m sick of your blood sugar, I said, after enduring months of his blood sugar’s reign.

“Do you know what it’s like to have low blood sugar, Doughty?” he said, as if conveying a lesson in tolerance towards the handicapped. No, I said. Why don’t you just deal, and eat?

 

There was some event that he took to be a crisis; he wanted Stanley Ray to intervene. “Somebody better call Stanley Ray! Somebody better call Stanley Ray!” he kept saying. He was ignored. “Somebody better call Stanley Ray!”

 

The drummer wanted to be the loudest thing in the mix. To accomplish this, he’d play quietly during sound check, so the sound guy would turn him up, and then bash the hell out of everything during the show. This infuriated the bass player. Playing the upright bass is difficult with a loud drummer; the boom of the drums would shoot straight into the F holes of the bass, causing hoots of feedback. If he hadn’t eaten, he would throw his bass down and stalk out of the room. I noticed something—though I can’t be sure I saw it—usually he’d play facing the audience directly, but sometimes, when he was in a mood, he’d rotate just a little bit towards the drummer, causing feedback, creating an excuse for a tantrum. We made our first record in Los Angeles. I landed there on the day Kurt Cobain died. We stayed in the Hollywood motel where John Waters’s transvestite muse Divine had died a few years earlier.

The producer was this wild individualist named Tchad Blake. He’s the closest I’ve ever seen an engineer come to really being an artist. He put vocals through a big bullhorn on a stick that he’d bought in India; put microphones in old mufflers and recorded sounds through them; ran sounds recorded with $10,000 microphones through effects pedals he’d bought for $10 at garage sales. He had this spooky grey plastic microphonic head mounted in front of the drummer, staring at him; it had a brow, a nose, and ears, and microphones mounted in the spots where they’d be in the human skull.

He really didn’t give a fuck about how the music sounded anywhere other than the beat-up ’60s-vintage pickup truck he drove between home and the studio. It always sounded amazing there.

I loathed my fucking voice. Some of the tracks sounded amazing—that song with the looped horns that I mentioned earlier, “Screenwriter’s Blues”—but hearing the vocals, I swelled up with enmity for myself.

The other guys used to take the rental car out at night, smoking weed and listening to Duke Ellington. I stayed in my room, clutching my head in my hands, obsessed with the record, hating my voice. Then I’d get high and my head would fill with fanciful ideas, and I’d feel better.

I used to write record reviews for the New York Press. My old editors there were overjoyed that their scrawny music critic kid had done good; they put a cartoon of me on the cover. They faxed the cover—my giant head—to the studio. The assistant engineer Scotch-taped it to the studio wall. The next day, it had been ripped down, scraps of ripped fax paper still hanging on the tape.

 

While we were mixing the songs, O.J. Simpson rode in the back of a white Bronco, moving at a steady, deliberate speed, followed by a formation of cop cars, through the streets of Los Angeles. The TV reporters said he was holding a pistol to his head. People gathered on street corners and overpasses, cheering and waving signs. We watched the helicopter footage of the stately pursuit, just a mile away from where we sat.

 

The record came out on the same day as REM’s Monster; there was a line outside Tower Records of REM fans waiting to buy it at midnight. Stanley Ray and I went in. I found our CD stuck in some non-glorious spot at the back of the new releases rack. I was crestfallen.

“What, you think you should have a line of people waiting to buy your record?” sniffed Stanley Ray.

I bought a copy and listened to it at home. It sounded like shit to me.

I got high, and listened again. It sounded better.

 

There were some good reviews. Four stars in Rolling Stone. I was eager to read to the review in Spin, because I actually read Spin. The Spin critic talked about the psychedelic production, the depth, the texture, the robustness of the sound. “In fact, Ruby Vroom might have been one of 1994’s most inviting sonic spaces.”

Paragraph break; next paragraph was one sentence long:

“If it weren’t for the vocals.”

It went on to call me white; a kind of irredeemable whiteness, white without consciousness, not the arch whiteness of Beck or the Beastie Boys. They’re doing something interesting, but this guy, he’s just white.

I felt it. I took it into my heart. At last I knew I was right; my band was a great band, and I was a lowly thing attached to it.

 

We played a big Warner Bros. showcase at a ballroom on Thirty-fourth Street. There were four bands from the label, and in between they projected clips from Warner Bros.–produced sitcoms. A guy in a Bugs Bunny suit wandered in the crowd. Backstage, they had me do a chat room thing, which I’d never done before. There were three or four chatters, and they all wanted to talk to the lead singer from Saint Etienne: hello? is this sarah? sarah are you there?

(Chat room appearances became faddish. Usually they wanted you to call somebody sitting at a terminal somewhere, and they’d read the questions to you and type your answers out. I refused to do them, because I was snooty about my spelling and punctuation, which they always bungled. It’s an abuse of the medium, I told the stupefied publicists.)

I met a dark haired, quasi-goth girl from Hackensack with fishnet stockings and an elaborate Italian name. We ended up backstage with my hand up her dress. We sniffed some heroin. I got her number but never called her, because I knew she’d come back with heroin every time, and I had too much at stake to become a junkie.

 

It was the advent of the dial-up modem, and our manager had gotten us an AOL account; each of us had a screen name we could sign in under. One day my phone rang; I picked up, and heard click. I dialed *69, a recent innovation in prank-call prevention; you’d dial it and it’d connect you to the number that just called.

The bass player picked up. “Hello?” he said, with a kind of exaggerated casualness.

Um, did you call me?

“No? . . .”

I just dialed *69, I said.

“That’s weird,” he said.

It seems like you called me to see if you got a busy signal, to tell whether or not I was online and you could use the AOL account.

“Doughty,” he said, “you’re so paranoid.”

The AOL account was mostly for fan e-mail. I checked the sent messages and found a response to a German guy’s message suggesting an alternate guitar tuning for me.

“Thanks,” the bass player had written back, “but Doughty doesn’t know how to tune his own guitar.”

 

It seemed to me that strange things would happen if he was mad at you. Things would go missing; I’d come onstage to find that my guitar was suddenly out of tune, even though I hadn’t touched it since sound check; the little foam-whatsits on my headphones would be ripped out and tossed on the floor; in the dressing room, somebody’s bottle of red wine would have mysteriously fallen off the table and shattered; my takeout lunch that I had left on my amp while I went to grab a napkin would suddenly be gone, reappearing in the room he happened to be practicing in.

What the fuck? I said.

“Hmm?” he said. “What’s the matter?”

There was a tape of Bollywood wedding music, Vivah Geet, that I’d bought in a bodega and treasured—Bollywood was a mystery before the 2000s, something you heard emanating from cab radios and nobody could help you find. I left it in the van, and when I went to retrieve it, it had vanished.

Anybody seen that Indian music tape?

“I packed it,” said the bass player.

You packed it, I repeated. Can you grab it out of your bag and give it to me?

“Aren’t you going to thank me for making sure you didn’t forget it?” he said.

It took me a month to get it. When he gave it back to me, it was just the case—the cassette was missing.

 

We were in France. I walked into the hotel after a gig and saw the bass player in an alcove, on a hotel phone. He had a grim, secretive look on his face. An hour later, I walked out; he was still on the phone. I came back a couple hours later; he was still on the phone.

In the morning, I was sitting in the lobby, groggy, as the tour manager was checking out. He motioned me over.

“Zair ees a long-deestance phone call for Room 210,” said the desk guy.

I had called the States the night before, dialing up the AT&T long distance to punch in my calling card number. It must cost something to call even a toll-free number. These greedy hotel fuckers.

I looked at the bill. It was something in the hundreds. I had no idea what the number meant. This was before the euro; every country had different money. English roadies had a charming tradition of mocking the confusion of currencies by calling every country’s money shitters. In Germany, a cup of coffee cost five shitters; in Denmark, fifteen shitters; in Belgium a hundred and fifty shitters; in Italy, astonishingly, three or four thousand shitters; in Holland—and I must point out here that the Dutch guilder was once the world’s most magnificently psychedelic cash—twenty or thirty shitters. So, whatever it was, I wasn’t paying attention—I was just going to pay it and worry about exchange rates when I was broke. I pulled out a multicolored fistful of sooty bills.

The tour manager looked over my shoulder at the bill for the phone call and his eyes bugged out. “That’s seven hundred francs!” he said. “How long was your phone call?”

Ten minutes?

“Ten minutes! That’s not right.” He began to argue with the front desk guy. I was just standing there wondering where I could get coffee.

The front desk guy was yelling at the tour manager. He picked up the phone. “He’s calling the employee that was working last night.”

Holding the phone to his ear, the desk guy repeated his description; long hair, striped shirt, pointy boots, long grey coat.

We turned to the bass player, dressed in precisely the same clothes as last night.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

My interpretation: before he made the call, the front desk had asked for his room number, and the bass player had given them mine. The bass player got on the phone with the guy and pretended to be clueless. I believe that I’ve never known a man so committed to his lies; somebody who could serenely look you in the eye while he told you something that clearly, unambiguously, wasn’t true.

And you know what? He got away with it. Nobody paid anybody seven hundred francs. We got in the van.

He was often on the phone—no, that’s an egregious understatement. He was on the phone at every truck stop, in every hotel lobby, every restaurant. I think he had a network of women he badgered into talking dirty. It seemed that in every city, he met a woman but never actually brought them back to the hotel, and they were all of a type; none of them were attractive. I cringe as I type that, but I don’t know how else to put it. He liked women who didn’t have options.

He didn’t have a phone, only a voice mail number, the kind that used to be common for struggling actors in New York to have, so they could call in obsessively and see if they’d scored auditions. He saw himself as super-erotic-man, and his outgoing message, accordingly, was so smarmy that I recoiled from the receiver every time I called him. Sometimes I held the phone at arm’s length until I heard the beep.

“Leave me a message,” he said in a porn-star voice. “A detailed message.”

 

We did the radio sex advice show Lovelines once, with Dr. Drew and the hair-metal gadfly Rikki Rachtman. It was the policy of the band that for any media appearance, all four members had to be there, even though it was customary for the singer to go, because otherwise somebody might think that I was more important than anybody else. (Once, on the French iteration of MTV, an interviewer directed the questions to me, but when I began to speak, they’d all yell answers at the same time, to drown me out; when we showed up for photo shoots, somebody would loudly say, two or three times, pointedly, “We’re not the kind of band where the singer stands in the front of the picture.” Though the magazines would always use the ones where I managed to be in front, because people look at any picture of any band and think, Which one’s the singer?)

But Lovelines was done from a studio with only two microphones.

“Please let me do this,” said the bass player. “Please. I’ll never ask for anything again if you let me do this.”

The sampler player and the drummer assented, possibly because they knew it would make me supremely uncomfortable. The bass player and I had done an interview in D.C. with a tiny Korean girl from a college paper, and he boasted at length about not wearing underwear.

We were on the show, and there was a call from somebody talking about a threesome and how watching her boyfriend fuck another woman had messed up her relationship irrevocably.

“I’ve been in a threesome!” the bass player piped in. Like he’d been waiting to say this.

“What was your experience?” asked Dr. Drew.

“It’s nice work if you can get it!” said the bass player.

A discomfited pause, and then Dr. Drew moved on from the dead joke. “Many people in relationships experience blah blah blah something something something,” he said.

“It’s nice work if you can get it!” said the bass player, loudly, as if the joke, repeated, would be funny.

 

He often spoke in cartoon voices. When he was nervous, he would only speak in funny voices. It made for history’s most excruciating conference calls. He would do it in interviews, too. He seemed to believe that somebody would think, “Oh, I love that band! The one with the bass player who does impressions!”

 

The very saddest thing about the guy was the way he smoked weed. He said that he had once smoked prodigiously, completely giving his life over to stoner’s limbo; then, he had actually given it up for years. But, one day, the sampler player and the drummer and I were smoking in rehearsal, and he took the pipe and said, quite gravely, “If I get really messed up on something serious, you’re responsible.”

From then on, he smoked near constantly. Before and after shows; just offstage right before we played the encore. Before and after eating. Before and after watching a movie. Upon waking and before sleeping. He’d smoke and do interviews in cartoon voices, as I cringed. I invited him over to go through some songs, and he showed up too stoned to play, and without his instrument. We’d land in Copenhagen or Frankfurt or Manchester, and he’d whip out a bag of weed, leading me to believe he’d risked the tour by smuggling drugs across a border. He had a tiny wooden pipe. When he smoked, he sucked at it so hard that his body shook. Literally.

 

I was backstage in France, talking to somebody about the bass player. “I just have absolutely no respect for the guy,” I said.

Then I saw that he was just outside the door.

That night he played the best show I ever heard him play; on every song, he abandoned the usual bass lines and improvised something fierce, you could say persuasive, seizing the music, flipping keys upside down, bashing around in weird spots in the rhythm. He didn’t always play like this. Sometimes he showed up without his talent—sometimes he seemed to be trying to tell us about his blood sugar by playing badly. At this gig, he killed. Wholly in control.

 

“You think you write songs?” said the sampler player. “If you want people to know your poetry, stick with us. We make something out of your naïve musical explorations.”

There’s an old interview out there that I can’t find on the internet in which he says (I’m paraphrasing, but you remember insults near verbatim, don’t you?): “Doughty’s not a musician. He’s a wordsmith.”

Not a musician. On my worst days, comparing my rough guitar scribbles to my bandmates’ mastery, I believe this myself. I brought in the chords, the rhythm, the melody, the form, but still: not a musician. Years later, despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary, I still beat myself up for not being a real musician.

There’s another interview out there that I can’t find: the interviewer mentions the Howlin’ Wolf sample, the Andrews Sisters sample, the Raymond Scott sample, and then asks the sampler player what makes for a great sample. The sampler player answers at length, and quite pedantically, about how he selects and manipulates them. But wait—though certainly the guy’s fantastic at what he does, no question—the interviewer guy’s talking about samples that I came up with.

There’s a difference between the sampler player and the other two, in terms of how I had my songwriter’s rights hustled out from under me. He really believed that on every single song—every one—he’s just as much the author as I am. There’s certainly a lot of songs that began with loops or parts that he came up with, but that’s not the full gist of it. Later in the same interview, he was asked about the songwriting process. He said that he plays samples in the rehearsal room and it does something to us. Does something to us. Puzzling. Like I said, sometimes he brought gorgeous loops into rehearsal and songs were derived from them, but that’s not what he’s saying. In fact, most of the time in rehearsal, he was playing so quietly we could barely hear him; we were always asking him to turn it up. Between songs, he’d be hunched in the corner playing near inaudibly.

At some point I came to believe he was saying he provoked us subliminally into making music.

I’d bring in songs that I’d written completely, and he seemed to believe, quite innocently, that I’d improvised them in the room, as he’d improvised his accompanying parts. Like you’d walk into a room, see a lamp, and think: I saw the lamp, therefore I created the lamp.

He was prone to tantrums. He’d throw chairs, turn over tables. Once he was driving and the tour manager said he’d accidentally told the sampler player to make a wrong turn; the sampler player went into a rage, swerved immediately, sent the van jolting over the island in the median and into oncoming traffic.

 

The sampler player’s wife worked in a corporate accounting department; she harangued him about money. She would travel with us sometimes. I’d find her with the tour manager’s briefcase open, going through our receipts. The sampler player would show up at meetings with our manager and say perplexingly random things: we have to make some obscure financial move; we have to incorporate in Delaware, for instance, because they don’t tax companies. But we’re not from Delaware, we said, how do we justify it to the IRS, if we don’t, like, have an office down there or something? He’d sit there blinking, in a panic, and answer in fragments he didn’t really understand. His wife had made him memorize something to say in the meeting that he’d recited verbatim.

There were people who disgusted his wife, and she couldn’t—or didn’t try to?—hide it. Our manager, for instance. In his presence, she’d wear a face, looking like he’d just puked on her.

 

The sampler player believed himself to be in a psychic death-war with me, with no incident too petty to be part of the struggle. We did a radio commercial, and I remarked that I was surprised that the ad lady made me do so many takes. “That’s because you’re naïve!” he yelled. “You’re naïve, you’re totally naïve!”

At the airport, I stubbed out a cigarette on the lid of a trash can and left it there.

“Litterbug!” he hollered.

We were in the back of a limousine, headed from a radio show in Queens. I said something innocuously arrogant.

“Do you need me to wipe your ass for you?” the sampler player asked. My face went slack. I told him once that this was something my dad used to yell to embarrass me. The sampler player was using it as a psyche-obliterating emotional weapon.

If I disagreed with something, he’d yell at me that I was afraid. “You’re afraid! You’re so afraid! Just admit you’re afraid!” And if I remarked that something he did was unusual, he’d yelp that he had always done it, as if I were trying to catch him in an inconsistency and damn him. Late in the band’s life, he stopped wearing the mom-bought polo shirts, bleached his hair, and wore an opulent Prada overcoat everywhere, even indoors.

You’ve really changed how you dress, I said.

“I’VE ALWAYS BEEN A CLOTHESHORSE!” he yelled.

We were having an argument on whether the personality was encoded in DNA. I believed mostly in nurture rather than nature. “That’s because you’re afraid! You’re afraid!” the sampler player yelled at me. I tried to say, No, I just think that... “Why are you so afraid?!”

Laughing, I put my arm around him: Now why won’t you let me answer you? He shrank, trembling, as if I were going to punch him.

 

He believed himself to be a wise patriarch among us. “Doughty, sometimes I’m afraid that the only things you’re learning from me are about music,” he said, solemnly. Once I had yelled at the bass player onstage, and he issued Solomonic punishment in the van, the next day, raising his index finger. “Doughty, you can’t speak between songs at the show tonight.”

Doing some preproduction, he punished me for an incident I’d be smarter not to recount. It had something to do with the dif - ference between smoking weed and smoking cigarettes. I had just quit smoking, and he chain-smoked—he wasn’t a smoker—for the entire session. “Doughty, this is how I’m going to teach you a lesson,” he said. I didn’t say that it might behoove him to help me quit smoking, as the entire band was sick of me fouling every dressing room, every vehicle, every studio with noxiousness.

 

Our first tour manager was this guy Gus. He was massive and tall—a high school linebacker who blew off football for punk rock—with thick black glasses. His left eye went a little funny; he told me later that a stepbrother had attacked him in his sleep with a hammer.

The first gig was in D.C. How far is it? I asked.

“Two hundred miles,” he said.

Yeah, but, how far is it?

If you don’t spend a lot of time driving, you measure travel in hours. If your life is spent mostly on the road, you think in miles. I was new.

 

How far to Austin? I asked.

“You’re soaking in it,” Gus said.

First thing in the morning, at the airport check-in desk.

How are you? I asked.

“Pretty horny!” Gus yelled.

After his stepbrother took the hammer to his face, Gus had no sense of smell. When asked what he liked to eat, Gus said: “I like orange food. Sometimes I like brown food.”

“She’s soft,” Gus said, describing his girlfriend. “She’s small. I like her parts.” His shorthand for finding girls was, “Let’s go look at some shirts.”

 

Gus drove the van, and I sat shotgun, for most of the tour. We had a two-man pop-culture retrospective. There was an M.C. Hammer song sampling the old ballad “Have You Seen Her?” that began: “Aaaaaww yeah, I’m glad I put this tape on.”

“Aaaaawww yeaaaah, I’m glad I ate that sandwich.”

Aaaaaaaawww yeaaaaaah, I’m glad I read that local alternative weekly.

“Aaaaaaaaw yeaaaaah, I’m glad I wore that Green Day shirt.”

Aaaaaaawwww yeaaaaaah, I’m glad I bought that Trapper-Keeper.

 

We had this prank call tape that we loved. A guy called the numbers in the classified ads, seeking musicians for metal bands, in the back of an L.A. paper. The prank caller got drunker and weirder as the tape went on. We quoted the nonsensical lines endlessly. “Don’t be all high and mighty just ’cause you’re from Illinois, Chris!” and “I just want to get my cock fucked and play some guitars with some strings on ’em!” and “That’s what I want to rock about!”

At one point, the guy is asked for his phone number, and he says, “My number is seven.” This became our answer for everything. What time is sound check? “Sound check is at seven.” The stylist for the video called, she’s buying wardrobe, what’s your shoe size?” “My shoe size is seven.”

I was standing outside the 40 Watt Club in Athens, Georgia. There was a tattoo shop next door; I was looking at the flash in the window.

“You’re not gonna get another tattoo, are you?” said Gus, disparagingly.

I’m gonna get a seven, I said.

He reached into his pocket, grabbed a hundred dollar bill, and slapped it in my hand.

“Get a receipt,” he said.

The seven, in a blue-black circle, is on my left arm, between some Khmer script and a Dahomey image of a bull.

 

We rode to the Frankfurt airport with a cabbie wearing an ur-German walrus mustache. “Vair are you from?” he asked.

America, I said.

“OH! AMERICA!” he said. “I LOVE AMERICA! Cowboys! Montana! Giddy-up!”

“I can tell you really know how to party,” Gus said.

 

Gus and I could feel the hate burning into our backs from the eyes behind us in the van. We bonded over a mutual childhood in punk rock, and played cruddy punk tapes to annoy them. We’d search out whatever the local alternative rock station was—music so rote and featureless it might as well have been air-conditioning—and blast it.

The first time we toured Europe, it was without Gus. I didn’t speak in the van for the entire three weeks of the tour.

 

The first tours were continuous slogs. The record label was too stingy to pay for a trailer, so the instruments and amps and drums crowded us. We stayed at Red Roof Inns on the outskirts of town, sometimes so close to the airport that the landing-signal lights strobed in our room windows.

One morning I got into the back bench of the van, where the sampler player usually sat.

“That’s my seat, Doughty!” he said, sounding unstable.

I looked at him.

“It’s very important that I sit in the same place every day!” he yelled. “My routine is very important!” He elbowed in beside me, and sat on the wheel well, jammed in between me and the window, arms folded, grimacing with tremendous agitation.

 

The sampler player drove the van sometimes. He’d get particularly stoned for this. Nobody paid any thought to it, because we all assumed that you drove better high. People still believe this. I have friends in their late thirties who believe, genuinely, that weed makes you more perceptive at the wheel. I read about some study on some blog the other day presenting data that, at the very least, it was just as safe as driving not-stoned.

OK. So. I remember this one time doing bong hits with a girl. It was during the first Gulf War. The media were jazzed about there being a war—first real one in twenty years, right?—so they had canceled all the shows and had three anchors talking about the same unchanging information, sans commercials, until two in the morning. Eventually we tired of it; we turned the sound off and listened to CDs, loving the moments when the lips of the anchor synched, almost-kind-of, to the music.

I lit a cigarette. (I smoked three packs a day. A morning pack, an evening pack, and then another pack rationed through the intervening hours; I had ashtrays placed at five-foot intervals in my house.) I put it in the ashtray, then got down on the floor to pick out a CD. Flipping through the rack, I decided I wanted to smoke; lit a cigarette; put it in an ashtray on a speaker as I got out my copy of Sign ‘O’ the Times. The girl I was getting high with asked if I still had those Pringles from before. Sure, I said. I walked to the kitchen, lighting a cigarette on the way. When I got to the kitchen, I put the cigarette in an ashtray by the sink and opened the fridge. Blinked at the fridge’s innards for a second. I got out a grape soda and walked back towards the couch.

Want some grape soda? I asked the girl.

“The Pringles?” she asked.

Oh, right, right. I went back to the kitchen, got the Pringles, came back, handed the canister to the girl, sat down, then decided I wanted to smoke, lit a cigarette, and, upon ashing, discovered the first of the four cigarettes I’d lit in the past three and a half minutes still burning in the ashtray on the end table.

There are a number of people in the world who believe that in this state I could drive better.

 

Weed was sustenance. We were never without it. Really and truly never. My bandmates were high constantly, and I resented the hell out of them for it, because weed fucked up my singing, thus limiting my intake. We had terrible days when all we had was shitty weed, shwag weed. Dark agitation would come over us; the other three would actually fight among themselves.

Purportedly, weed isn’t what people call physically addictive—the expression implies bodily withdrawal when you stop using—but to me, the distinction is more or less superfluous. To me, addiction is mostly a state of being inherent in the addict that can translate to things that stimulate the brain’s pleasure centers which most people can pick up and put down at will, like sex, sugar, gambling. I have no expertise in the biology of weed withdrawal. I do know that just having bad weed discombobulated us in the extreme.

Weed addicts are alone among drug users in that they think their shit is cute. I heard an anecdote once about a guy working in a studio, and there was somebody sleeping under a blanket on a couch; the guy whips off the blanket and gets up, and it’s a legendary outlaw country music star. The storyteller goes on, like, “He fired up a joint and whoohoo! Wake-and-bake! Whoohoo awesome!” I don’t think that story would go, “The first thing he did when he was awake was chop out a line of blow!” Or, “He downed a shot of tequila when he woke up, ’cause he had the shakes!”

 

We pulled into New Orleans at 3 AM, and it took the indifferent desk person half an hour to check us in. The drummer and I were rooming together. We went up to the room; the key didn’t work. We called downstairs; it took twenty minutes for the maintenance guy to get there, and all he did was jiggle the doorknob and shrug. We went down to the desk to get another room, which took another half hour.

Finally we got into a room; I flopped on the bed. The drummer sat in a chair. “I think I might go to Café du Monde,” he said. “For some of them there beignets.”

I got under the covers.

“But then, I think, no, it’s so late, maybe I’m tired, I should sleep.”

Uh-huh, I said.

“But, those there beignets are so good, and I didn’t eat almost nothing for dinner.”

Yeah, sure.

“But then I think, no, we got the show tomorrow . . . ”

OK, I said, through gritted teeth. Whatever you decide to do, I’m shutting off this light and going to sleep.

“Yo, G,” he said, genuinely affronted, “there’s two people staying in this room.”

 

Later I roomed with our sound guy, Lars. His name wasn’t Lars, but Gus thought he looked like his name was Lars, and we called him Lars so often that he had to start introducing himself to club staff as Lars, lest they get confused. Lars would go out and get drunk every night, then stumble in, sounding for all the world like he was going around moving absolutely everything in the room a foot to the left.

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.

I got through it, unaccountably, without an STD, or a vengeful boyfriend wielding a lead pipe outside a motel room.

 

We did our second record with this producer named Saul Mongolia. Weirdly, he had been the engineer on the James Brown session with the turbine-cave man, where James yelled “New WAVE!” He was a reserved man who wrote his own Zen koans, but he emitted a thorny, gloomily stubborn energy. He looked like a Botticelli portrait of Richard Nixon.

I liked him because he produced pop songs with weird stuff in them—odd sounds and expertly deployed discordances. He had a bunch of tunes all over the radio and MTV, strange and funny songs riding on big, wobbly bass parts, crisply produced and buoyant. He liked to mix things in mono, which I found rakishly eccentric. I met with him before we hired him, and enthused, tangentially, about George Jones records. “Oh, that’s what you like,” he said. “Drama.” He said the way I sang reminded him of a soul singer—my phrasing, my approach. By saying this he won my heart forever.

My band didn’t say much; the sampler player spoke of him with resentful deference, like he was talking about a hated, but talented, rival. “The most important thing,” he said, “is that Saul Mongolia doesn’t play piano on any of our songs.” Cryptic portent that I didn’t catch.

The other guys mumbled, frowning.

We recorded at the Power Station—I saw Russell Simmons on the street before the first session, and I wanted to ask him where the Power Station was, because Russell Simmons would actually know—in a massive room, wooden and vaulted like a Scandinavian church. Somebody told me that Michael Jackson had recorded in another studio, down the street, and had rented out this room just for his dinner break; they installed a circus tent and a banquet table. Currently, in the studio next door, guitar overdubs were being recorded for a Meatloaf record. Meatloaf was not in attendance.

We were loading amplifiers into the studio and the sampler player turned to me with his rattled-animal eyes. “Here we are,” he said. “I can’t believe we’re making a second record.”

I gave him a bewildered look. What? Who wouldn’t make a second record? Who cares about hate and wretched time spent in a van, this is the most important thing in the world.

We tracked everything as a live band, playing all at once. Saul would stop us, and we’d go to the lounge while he tried to get the drummer to play the same beats he’d played in rehearsal. The drummer was changing them—of course—on a whim. Not telling Saul he was changing them—of course—and, as usual, pretending he was playing the same thing as before. Saul complained, when the drummer was out of earshot, that there was no forward motion to his beats. “That weird up-and-down feel that he has,” Saul said. In fact, he talked copious trash about each guy when they weren’t in the room—sometimes when they were overdubbing; behind the glass in the studio, where they couldn’t hear him.

Couldn’t tell you if he talked trash about me, too.

Saul spoke incessantly about singles. “I hear this as a single,” he would say. Initially this was exciting. We’re cutting a hit record, at last! I thought. But he said this about every track. He’d want us to play an overdub, and we’d be skeptical; “But I hear this as a single,” he’d whine.

 

Tracking was fraught but efficient. At the end of eighteen days we had all the songs down. I was exultant. I had envisioned our grooves rendered with a sort of New Wave tightness, and here it was. From then on, my job was to keep everybody from wrecking it.

I failed. And I’m a hapless archivist; were I better at it, I would have made sure I walked out of the Power Station on day eighteen with a tape in my hand. I could’ve put it in a drawer for years, and then released the director’s cut.

 

We mixed the album at Sony Studios, far on the West Side of Manhattan, next door to a hulking, windowless building topped with satellite dishes that served to house machinery for the phone company. Behind the studio was a room that Mariah Carey had furnished when she was mixing there. Couches deep as queen beds, tasseled pillows, gold-filigreed wallpaper. The band lurked in there, getting high, as I sat next to Saul at the console.

Saul was a gossip. He was a compulsive gossip; sometimes the candor made me uneasy, and I tried to change the subject, but he was relentless. He told stories about record company presidents’ mob ties, which label president had been excoriated by his Japanese corporate suzerains for the raggedy waywardness of his wife, which singer had a meth habit, which radio executive liked to get high on coke at his country house and shoot a pistol at imaginary rabbits, which singer fucked every guitar player she ever worked with—thus, any producer who wanted to finish a record with her had to keep her from fucking the guitar player until tracking was done—which R&B superstars had begged their labels, to the point of tears, to let them step outside racial and musical boundaries and make a rock record or a country record, story upon story of singers who were abject idiots, and, uncomfortably, stories about black artists whom he’d call, “So smart. So smart.”

I thought he was taking me into his confidence. He wasn’t. I bumped into the drummer from Sugar Ray a year later, and he asked, “Is it true your bass player once———?”

 

We did a song for a sound track during a break in mixing. I had us work with a producer guy who had done some fantastic lo-fi recordings with some outlandish indie bands; I wanted that scratchy sound. “Who is this guy? You didn’t ask us,” the band guys barked, about a month after his hiring was confirmed.

Contrary to my scheme, the producer guy was taking this opportunity to use a major label budget to up his game and leave his lo-fi rep behind. He booked five days at an expensive studio to record one song. I told him we needed one day, and he laughed me off.

The assistant engineer on the session was a wild ass-kisser. “I can’t believe I’m working with Soul Coughing!” he kept saying. “You are the most incredible band I’ve ever worked with. You sound incredible!”

We did the sound-track song in a day. Like I told the guy. Then, as I was packing up to split, I heard the band playing one of the tunes we had already recorded with Saul.

What’s going on? I asked, my heart rate speeding up.

“I just want to play,”said the bass player. “For the first time in months, I just want to play.”

I got in the vocal booth, queasy, and we did a take. My bandmates were whoohooing. “Oh my God, that’s the take, that’s the take!” said the assistant engineer. “I can’t believe how good that sounded.”

The band started talking shit about Saul Mongolia; we never wanted to work with that guy! Fuck that guy! He doesn’t know shit about this band! They talked about how Saul made them change things, like beats, like phrasing, how he asked for things to be done over and over again. “That’s fucked up!” said the assistant engineer. They had this conversation as I stood there. They didn’t look at me.

 

Soon the lo-fi guy was out, and the assistant engineer was producing the sessions.

We went about rerecording half the songs we’d already done with Saul. Saul was already on edge, because the sampler player—goaded by his wife, the receipt-obsessed former accountant, who made him sleep on the couch when she suspected him of wasting money—had called him up and screamed at him, and I mean screamed, for booking a little project studio to try out some sonic stuff without asking the sampler player first. His wife had screamed at him, in turn, about the money. Then Saul discovered that the band was rerecording half the album at a different studio with a different guy. Saul was obliged to show up and watch as the assistant engineer, who was after all an assistant and thus no maestro, enthuse, “This is the best record I’ve ever worked on!”

 

We hired a guy named Henry as an art director for the album. I was sleeping with his officemate, a rosy-cheeked, plump girl who smelled like rosewater and Kool-Aid; we got high and fucked, after hours, on the floor of her cubicle in the grey-carpeted corridors of the record company, Souls of Mischief crackling the woofers on her office stereo.

Henry had a personality like Eeyore. I think he was closeted and had a crush on me; he would call me, complain for an hour that no one at the record company understood his pristine vision, that they were diluting his art merely to promote bands. I’d try to get off the phone and he’d wait-wait-wait me into staying on for a moment, again and again; the litany of his complaints lasted for hours.

He put me in a lime-green seersucker suit and clown makeup, and had me photographed offering a bouquet of glass roses to the camera. Most of the photos were group shots of the band, taken in a suite at a honeymoon resort in the Poconos; there was a round bed and a heart-shaped tub that Henry filled with pink and white balloons. The sampler player took mescaline, was wandering off, bumping into walls, and staring fascinatedly at his hands. Sometimes he’d walk up to a piece of furniture and lick it. The makeup artist cajoled his tripping self into the makeup chair; the stylist cajoled him into one of the sleek, matching outfits Henry chose; Henry and the photographer cajoled him into the shots. He argued vociferously with Henry about socks; he refused to wear them on principle.

Weeks later, when we saw the proofs of the pictures, the sampler player became convinced that Henry was plotting to put my clown picture on the cover—as if Henry and I, in cahoots, could make the CD cover a picture of me under their noses—though, to be honest, I wouldn’t have complained. Henry denied it, but the sampler player called him a liar, repeatedly, and pressed him and pressed him until Henry quit in tears.

 

(Incidentally, the photographer wrote a video treatment for us: set at a house in Duchess County, the band played Frisbee in tall grass, drank iced tea, sat around a picnic table staring into space: inside, a teenage couple had graphic sex, detailed scrupulously in the treatment. Alas, this was when videos were meant to be on television, not online.)

 

Saul Mongolia was working at Columbia back when we met yelling Johnny. Apparently Johnny actually thought we were shit and didn’t want to sign us. He told Saul, “They’re not stars!”

Saul related this to me during mixing, vengefully, dropping an insult that wouldn’t bloom until later. It burst in my head when I was home, mourning the record, and it broke my heart.

It mystifies me now that he’d want to give me a slap across the face, but I guess he just saw me as part of the despicable herd.

In the morning, the sampler player lectured me on being uppity, that it was selfish to have those clown pictures taken without my bandmates in them.

You’re not a star! I yelled at him.

 

The wife of the label president, the guy who wanted to build the turbine-powered cave-house, was installed in Henry’s place; she put together a stupefyingly ugly mishmash of the photos. The cover image was the top half of the bass player’s face. My bandmates approved it. Disgusted, defeated—thinking it right that the hideousness of the whole process be visible right there on the CD cover—I approved it, too.

We toured Europe. In Barcelona, I lay sleepless all night, obsessing about the horrible record cover; it could never be erased. This awful art was permanently lodged in my history. The window was open; I heard the chatter and joy of the Spanish carousers out in the street. I gritted my teeth and obsessed until it was dawn, and time to fly to Portugal.

I was a ball of anxiety and rage. If I had to be near the bass player, not on stage, I didn’t hide my repulsion. I treated the drummer like an idiot. I was sadistically condescending to the sampler player. I would have spells when I’d lie awake all night hating them. I railed to friends about how horrible the band was; when I got started, I wouldn’t stop, just going on and on, barking about what chronic fuckups they were, not noticing how weary my friends became.

(That’s exactly how my mom’s rage worked, and how I responded to her. The realization devastated me.)

Gus called my rage-self “Fat Doughty.” Because when it gripped me, it was as if I blimped out to three times my size.

I got a chest cold on a European tour, and thought this would be a good excuse to quit smoking. The withdrawal turned me into a monster. The bass player said something bratty, and I screamed GO EAT SOMETHING! four inches from his face. Onstage in Italy, a song was skipped, and I took it as a slight; I threw my guitar down, started screaming, kicked the stage door open and ran into the street, yelling curses.

We played on a prestigious French talk show called Nulle Part Ailleurs. I fucked up a guitar part, and thought it was because my bandmates had sabotaged me musically. (Honestly, maybe they had.) I knew I couldn’t blow up in the middle of a TV show, but it had so seized me that I was actually shaking. I started cursing; I couldn’t stop cursing. I tried to keep it under my breath, but some words I would just bark, involuntarily. The French record company people were staring at me incredulously.

We stopped for a day off in a sun-soaked town by the sea. I was walking down a cobblestone alley, flowers on the balconies, pretty women strolling, and I was filled with hate. I kept thinking, Look where you are, don’t you see where you are? Stop the hate, stop it, stop it. But I couldn’t.

My bandmates were talking about making a video. I had spent a month exchanging e-mails with the video person at the record company. But, utterly disregarding the work I’d done, they had suddenly landed on some half-baked idea. I filled with so much rage that I shut down. I could barely speak. I had to control my movements severely. I felt that if I were to let a little bit of the rage out, my body would explode. We went around to radio stations all day, and at each of them I sat in the corner looking like a chimp shot with a tranquilizer dart. The record company guy ushering us around made desperate, forced jokes to the radio people to draw attention away from the singer’s bizarre comatoseness.

“It’s scary when you yell,” said Stanley Ray. “But it’s scarier when you’re quiet.”

 

In the midst of recording an album, we went to meet with the head of the art department at Warner Bros.; she was going to show us the portfolios of photographers and graphic designers. In the car on the way over, the sampler player said, in a noble tone, “Whenever we visit the record company, I realize that their jobs depend on us.”

Us? How about I break up this fucking band and you’ll see what the fuck us means? But I didn’t say anything. Again: trying to keep the rage from busting me apart. We went into the art director’s office, she passed around the books, I sat there shaking, scowling, unable to get it together to be the slightest bit cordial, professional. “Is there anything . . . wrong?” she asked.

I mumbled an answer that maybe wasn’t composed of actual words.

 

Stanley Ray took me to a club called Fez—in the lounge was a portrait of Oum Kalthoum in a gilt frame—in a basement on Lafayette Street so deep that the subway overpowered the music when it rumbled under the stage. A band called The Magnetic Fields was playing: never heard of them. Also, this guy Elliott Smith. Never heard of him, either.

The show changed my life. I mean, it actually changed my life.

The Magnetic Fields’s singer, Stephin Merritt, was sort of troll-like, with a low, croaking voice. The songs were transcendent and the lyrics cuttingly shrewd. I’d say it was an arch take on the best’80s pop, but imbued with huge, tragic heart—but, though apt, that description can’t capture the ineffable wondrousness of the songs. He kept giving the sound guy a death stare during the show for something messed up in the monitors.

Elliott Smith was a solo acoustic guy—as I used to be—with a wavering voice; gripping, stringent songs that seemed to unspool, lyrics radiating passion and desperation.

There was a blizzard the next day. I walked to Avenue A in a spooky, blank world. There were no cars. I walked in the middle of the white street. The racket of Manhattan was gone. Otherworldly. I heard my boots crunching in the snow, the wind. I went to a tiny record store, picked up an Elliott Smith CD and a Magnetic Fields CD.

It was just a few months after the nightmare of the second album: January 1996. It was time to do something where I only had to rely on myself. I took some songs that my bandmates had rejected—too normal—and wrote some new ones. I named it before I made it: Skittish.

There was a producer named Kramer who had made albums by two bands that I loved, Low and Galaxie 500. The spare music floated in a billow of reverb.

So I would abandon the Soul Coughing sound entirely.

Kramer’s studio was in an extravagant New Jersey suburb. He had bought a house once owned by a disco drummer of some renown who lost his fortune to a crack habit. There was a studio the size of half a gymnasium, bedecked in shag carpet—floor, walls, and ceiling—with concentric sun patterns set off in slightly beige-er shag.

We cut nearly twenty songs in a single day, just acoustic guitar and voice, me sitting in the darkness of the vast carpeted chamber. Kramer was invisible almost the entire time, seated below the control room window, smoking joints. An assistant did the work. Kramer’s one solid contribution was to disallow me from doing a second take on an electric guitar overdub. Yet it sounded exactly like I wanted it to sound. It was unmistakably a Kramer record. It was more than the reverb—which was achieved with big echo plates running down the sides of his garage—there was an eerie plaintiveness to the music. It wasn’t the assistant: he was a new guy. Kramer put some other parts on after I left, but mostly it’s just as it was laid down that day.

I walked with a tape. Later, I tried to get the master tape from him, and he equivocated weirdly. It turned out that Kramer only owned two reels of tape, erasing and rerecording on them, for every record, over and over again.

 

Stanley Ray was irritated when I played Skittish for him. He’d spent a lot of energy keeping us from breaking up. He certainly wasn’t going to help me get Warner Bros. to put the record out.

 

I make inexplicable decisions to get with a certain kind of woman. A short woman, a Latina, an Asian woman, an artist, a non-artist, a woman above twenty-nine but below thirty-three; it’s less than a fetish, more like an arbitrary criterion. Maybe my unconscious mind wants to limit my possibilities, and keep me lonely. Lonely is safer. I decided that what I wanted was an English girl: the accent.

 

I did a vocal on a song by a techno band from Manchester (do you call it a band when all the music making is done in the studio, and live, it’s three guys standing behind machines, watching data turn into music, like Laverne and Shirley watching the bottles on the quality control line?). They flew me to Britain to shoot a video.

The set was an abandoned airstrip. The German lady directing the video made me chase a truck, until I was wheezing, lip-synch in front of flame jets, and lie on the cold, wet asphalt. All the band had to do was stand in a triangular formation in their mod jogging suits, looking past the camera, regally.

They had a potbellied guy named Rufus with them, who didn’t dress groovily and had an unfashionable mustache. “Do you want some pyooaah?” Huh? “Some pyooaah, mate.” Oh, pure. Pure what?

“Whizz, mate, pure whizz.” Rufus held up a bag of white powder. I didn’t know what “whizz” was, but I sniffed some anyway. It was something other than cocaine—probably speed? My displeasure at lying on an airstrip in the drizzle dispelled.

There was a girl cast as the girl in the video. I wasn’t that attracted to her. She was, in fact, the German lady’s pinch-hitter for the girl role—the model who was originally cast dropped out, and this woman was somebody who worked in a production company the German director was affiliated with. She was a half-Chinese girl with an extremely snooty-sounding English accent, incongruously named Françoise. Her friends called her by the last syllable of that name: Swaz.

How do you say that name when making love to her? Well, it’s sexier than the phlegmy charms of Bregggggkkkkkgggggggya.

We were taken to a trailer, where a gay guy with an Afro and circular glasses wielding blush and eye shadow had transformed Swaz into a glamour icon. Her sudden transformation into a beauty was disquieting.

In the makeup chair, I said, They want me made up to look like a dead man.

“Really?!”

No, I said, not really.

He got sullen.

We were seated in the cab of the truck I had chased, for shots in which I lip-synched while Swaz pretended to drive. They shot one angle, then another from the side, then one from the front, then a close-up. Then the German lady said, “And now it is time you and Swaz vill have a snog.”

We were startled. Did they tell us beforehand that the job description included making out with a stranger? Cameras rolled.

I leaned in and gave her a real kiss. My lips brushed hers, and I budged in closer. Her mouth yielded. A long, soulful, all-enveloping kiss.

 

In the car back to London we talked about poetry, and then we met the next day; she came over to my hotel room and took a shower with the bathroom door open. I watched her soap herself up, scrub herself off.

At some point in the six hours we hung out, it was decided that I was going to abandon New York and come live with her in London.

I went back to Brooklyn. She called me, blind drunk, when I was throwing my stuff into boxes, and slurred over and over, “Are you going to save me? Are you going to save me?” Unnerving. I told her to stop, she kept repeating it, I pleaded with her, Stop, please stop, but she kept saying, “Are you going to save me? Are you going to save me?”

I boxed up my life and went anyway.

 

Swaz and I would get high and say words back and forth to each other.

Swear, I said.

“Swah,” she responded.

There, I said.

“Thah,” she responded.

 

We went to see a refurbished version of Star Wars. I learned that the English put sugar on their popcorn, and they ran a parade of arty commercials before the previews.

The movie started. “Is Han Solo Luke’s brother?” Swaz asked. “Or was it—Obi Wan Kenobi is Luke’s uncle? . . .”

No, I said. Darth Vader is Luke’s father.

“DARTH VADER IS LUKE’S FATHER?!” cried Swaz in the middle of the theater.

 

I was a terrible boyfriend. I’d get home from tour and not want to do anything but lie on the couch—of which Swaz had two, called the Major Couch and the Minor Couch. I sat on the Major Couch, smoked weed, and ate the Cumberland bangers that Swaz cooked for me.

Swaz was a terrible performance poet. There’s a certain kind of would-be artist who chooses poetry because of its materials: to make a film, you need a bunch of people, a camera, lights, a script; to write a song, you need a guitar or a piano, and you need to learn how to play; to write a poem, you need a piece of paper and half an hour. Swaz’s performance involved undulating while she intoned in a ridiculous sexy-fairy voice. In poetry, she found a way to vend her sexiness.

She performed around London, sometimes just a few blocks from our place. I could’ve gone and been good and clapped and kissed her. But I never went. Lousy, lousy boyfriend.

Since then, she’s become a kind of quasi-academic. She gives performance poetry workshops all over Britain, and the world: Bogotá, Sarajevo, Dublin. Vending your sexiness works in any medium.

 

At that time in Britain, it had become near impossible to find good drugs, unless it was cocaine. Swaz had the country’s last decent Ecstasy connection, a bug-eyed, chubby guy named Alfonso who seemed totally hapless and sometimes wore a bolo tie over a Hawaiian shirt.

I was in a club, sitting on the floor, rolling my jaw around and obsessively feeling my skull. A guy came up, shouting over the music.

“Whadeegetyapah,” he said.

Ha ha, what? Ha ha.

“Where did you get your pill,” he repeated.

Alfonso!

“What? Who?”

This guy named Alfonso. Ha ha ha.

“Where is he?”

He’s, ummm, I don’t know, he lives . . .

“Did you get it here?”

No, no, we called him. My eyes crossed and uncrossed.

“You don’t give a fuck, do you, you daft cunt?”

Ha ha ha.

“You fucking twat, you don’t even know where the fuck you are, do you?”

Ha ha ha. Eyes rolling and rolling.

 

(I don’t do E anymore. I’ll hang out with you when you’re on E. But if you start rubbing your face and telling me how amazing your face feels, I will make fun of you.)

 

Alfonso called, sounding coked up and disturbed. He said he wanted to be an artist, he wanted to design CD covers; you make CDs, can I design your CD cover?

Um, Alfonso, why don’t you bring some art over next time?

“Can I come over right now?”

Ah, no, right now we’re . . . um, we’re . . .

“I want to make a positive change in my life,” Alfonso said. You could hear his heart pounding in his throat.

 

Swaz told me that she heard voices. She had sudden, bug-eyed outbursts: she’d burst into tears and shriek at me. She had an evil streak. She’d say something innocuous that would devastate, and she pretended she wasn’t trying to hurt me.

I’d go back to North America to play shows, mostly in brown, cold cities on flat terrain; at the end I’d fly from Columbus or Cedar Rapids back to London. I would be exhausted by the weeks on the road with the band that hated me. I smoked lots of weed and barely wanted to move off the Major Couch. Swaz mocked me cruelly for being crippled. She was a versatile mocker.

We went out to clubs, taking Alfonso’s pills. We heard all the great jungle DJs of London, a scene in full flower. We dropped the pills, the high came up, and I desperately tried to get away from Swaz. I was frightened when my druggy eyes looked into hers. She reached out and pulled me to her face. She kissed me. She’d been dutifully swigging water, as a cautious E-taker is supposed to: the inside of her mouth was cold.

I fled, and went around asking for sips of peoples’ drinks, greeting everybody with ostentatious fake love, being the most annoying person on Ecstasy you could imagine. Particularly considering how unapologetically E’d-up I was, when everybody else in the place was probably on adulterated cocaine.

When I got back to Swaz’s, and the high was coming off, I hated myself for the idiotic, chemical affection.

 

She poured me a glass of Scotch to ease the internal clatter. I refused, but she was persistent. I drank.

It tasted like adulthood. This is really nice, I thought. The jitters smoothed.

I thought: As coffee is a vehicle to help me transport from the sleeping state to the waking state, maybe alcohol is something to carry me from waking back to sleep again.

 

I flew to East Lansing for two weeks’ opening shows for Dave Matthews.

I put one of Alfonso’s pills on my amp during sound check at the Boston Garden. Halfway through the set, between songs, I stepped back to the amp and gulped. I wanted to be coming up as soon as the show was over.

We played to a crowd that had mostly not shown up yet. There were pockets of people in the chairs on the arena’s floor—people who paid big bucks for the good seats—who mostly drank their beer, looking bored. The people in the cheap sections were more likely to show up for the opening act: after the tunes, we’d hear a muted roar from the back of the hall.

I began to feel the glow. We clambered down the stairs and into the strange middle ground behind the stage, with big road cases gathered together like cattle, cables running from the stage to generators somewhere, Dave Matthews’s techs in states of distraction. By the monitors there was a tiny TV screen hooked up to a camera, currently showing an empty drummer’s stool. The guy’s kit was so huge, jungled with cymbals, chimes, tom-toms, that they needed the TV screen to communicate.

There was one lonely guy sitting at a computer. His job was to feed lyrics into the teleprompter. I thought: Who does this guy drink with when he gets on the tour bus at night?

Our dressing room was a visiting-team locker room. There were empty massage tables and stationary bikes; the lockers had been covered with white sheets. A guy from Warner Bros. stood by the sandwich platter. He had horn-rimmed glasses and an aw-shucks, kid from the cul-de-sac, Encyclopedia Brown demeanor. The high ratcheted up and I started to think he realized I was oozing into another state of being. He seemed weirdly menacing. He engaged me in some good-show-excited-for-New-York-tomorrow? chat; my eyes must’ve been ping-pong balls.

I got more googly-eyed as he chatted; I hopped up on one of the stationary bikes and started pedaling. Idly, then furiously. I stopped pedaling, and the force of the exertion shot an intense blast of drugs—when you’re on E, and you move intensely, then stop, you feel like you’ve ignited. This is why E goes so perfectly with dancing. My body shook in pleasure and disorientation. Encyclopedia Brown was still talking. I dismounted and walked off midsentence.

Dave Matthews took the stage to grand hurrahs. I walked out of the barricades and into the crowd, looked up at the people in the stands, the spotlights tracing over them. The whole place seemed to be breathing in unison.

I was grabbed by a girl in a hippie dress and pulled into the seats. “Dance with us!”

Are you on E? I asked idiotically.

“No! We’re drunk!” she said. My bones were noodles.

I felt like a vice-presidential candidate. I walked the rings of the stadium, slapping hands with fans here or there who recognized me. I was by myself, on drugs, grinningly holding up the all-access pass on a lanyard around my neck to security as they stepped up to block my way. They parted resentfully. This is what I wanted to do with my life. Be outrageously high, be absolutely alone except for the random high fives and yelped You’re awesome’s.

Our bus was parked with a dozen other buses in a concrete chamber beneath the stadium. One weirdness of an arena tour is that you go to sleep on the bus at night as it heads to the next show, and then wake up inside a hockey stadium, in a giant grey room—some of them big as a double football field—lit with yellow fluorescence, neither in daytime nor night, in the loud thrumming of all the buses’ generators. Once you had your coffee in you, you had to clamber all over the arena searching for an exit to see what kind of day it was.

Our bus was rented from a company that painted the same murals on all their buses—a beach scene, in a purple sunset, with gentle waves, driftwood, and a beached rowboat—with subtle variations of the elements in the picture, like a puzzle in Highlights magazine. There were several buses from the company on this tour. After one night, early on, when I looked in panic from bus to muraled bus, not knowing which one was mine, I memorized an aggregation of seagulls to know which one to get into.

As the bus pulled out of the arena that night, I was in the back lounge of the bus. The E began to wear off, and in grief I gulped another. I came up as the sun came up. Not knowing what else to do, I took off all my clothes. I lay on the banquette, savoring the ever-diminishing buzz. Each time I felt it subside a level, I would get up and manically improvise weird calisthenics, causing a rush. Each rush less satisfying than the one before it.

 

In New York, we played Madison Square Garden. I had one E left. Dave brought me onstage to do something with the band—I improvised an onomatopoetic melody: frighteningly manic, scary fake joy. I danced circles around Dave—literally. I’m guessing now that every member of the band was staring at me with bayonets in their eyes, this freak who had seized their stage. I was oblivious. I introduced each of them in detail—though I couldn’t remember some of their last names—by their star sign and their affinity for hiking or swimming. The audience—fucking sold-out Madison Square Garden—looked like a sea of love lapping at the stage.

The second night I smoked weed: the jam was more contemplative. I scorned myself for wasting that one E on the drive out of Boston. Luke had come to the show, and I took him on my customary perambulation. We stopped on one of the upper levels to watch the music a little. There was a fifteen-year-old hippie girl dancing. She turned around and saw me. Her eyes lit up. I realized that I was wearing the same clothes I had worn onstage with Dave, and having essentially been in the Dave Matthews Band, I was a celebrity. I playfully shushed her: don’t reveal my secret identity. She screamed. In seconds I was dogpiled by fifteen-year-old girls. Like a Monkee. Luke yanked me to safety.

 

After a year of cold London rain, my heart was sick; I wanted to be in the sunshine. Gus was from Pensacola, so I went there to rejuvenate. He put me up with a guy named Nick, one of his henchmen. (Gus had dudes in Pensacola he called henchmen: Henchman Nick, Henchman Tim, Henchman Ramel.) So I went down to the Florida Panhandle to dry my soggy soul in Nick’s spare bedroom.

It’s said that Pensacola isn’t really Florida, but rather the part of Alabama that they put in Florida. The houses around the near-deserted downtown were battered shotgun shacks. Nick’s small house was under a giant pink overpass; the cars on I-10 whooshed towards Jacksonville or Mobile. I had mailed myself eight different varieties of weed on the Amsterdam stop of the European tour right before I moved there, so I had this little rainbow of marijuana—yellow-haired buds next to purplish ones next to ones with a sheen of silver crystals. I got stoned and sat on the porch writing songs, as the freight train rumbled past on tracks thirty yards from the house.

(A couple of years later, Nick briefly worked for Soul Coughing on tour, tuning instruments poorly. He remarked about one tune, “I remember that one—you wrote it on my porch!” My bandmates glared disgustedly.)

Nick’s name wasn’t really Nick. He had picked up some girl by pretending he was an English guy named Nick, and the lie snowballed. For years, he had to use the accent around her. Nick was a devoted cigarette smoker, merrily acknowledging the deadliness. This was when I was still smoking; hanging out with Nick was celebrating tar.

(I smoked three packs a day. Ridiculous. It was like a job. I woke up, and began the work of the first pack. It was a repetitive, manly task, like getting up early every day to chop down pine trees.)

Nick owned Sluggo’s, the punk rock bar in Pensacola. It was on Palafox Street, which was the main drag until the malls came along. Most of the storefronts were empty, except for a knickknack shop run as a vanity project for a navy officer’s wife, and a uniform store. Sluggo’s didn’t draw a sailor crowd; the sailors went to a bar done up as an ersatz New Orleans house with a wrought-iron balcony. Pensacola was a born-again stronghold; occasionally at the fake New Orleans there’d be demonstrations against moral turpitude. They held up signs with pictures of Hell and Bible citations. The protesters stayed politely across the street from the bar, obeying city ordinances. When 8 PM came around, they put down their signs and dispersed.

Sluggo’s was threadbare, dirty-carpeted, furnished with ratty couches, festooned with band stickers. Nick’s sound engineer and factotum was a guy who’d dropped out of the air force and drifted to Sluggo’s. His name was Ryan, but he went by the rapper-inspired handle Ry Moe Dee. The club survived on the local alternative community, which was oddly substantial, and the happenstance that when touring acts had a gig in Tampa, and then a gig in Birmingham or New Orleans, they needed someplace to play in between. You’d see British bands, feted in the hyperbolic U.K. music publications, bewildered to be playing this dingy joint in front of five people on a Tuesday night.