The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [0]
Title Page
Dedication
So, this is important:
Copyright Page
For many good friends at 2nd Ls, Int. Act., and Norfsyde
Twice
You burned your life’s work
Once to start a new life
And once just to start a fire
—The Long Winters, “Be Kind to the New Girl”
So, this is important:
This is what I remember, and how I remember it—although I’ve changed some names, and amalgamated some people, and some places.
I’m certain that some people in this book remember things differently, or remember things I don’t remember. Some people probably have no recall of events that are vivid, and crucial, to me.
I’m scared not just of subjectivity, but of losing people I love.
In life, I’m meticulously honest, but my default is to feel like a fraud. I walk through customs thinking I’ll get busted for drugs I’m not carrying. I walk out of stores afraid to be caught with things I haven’t stolen. So, of course, I’m terrified of a common scenario: a memoirist is dogged, exposed, and denounced.
I’m telling my memories with scrupulous precision, while scared that the mind is unreliable. Maybe every person on the planet is equally susceptible to errors and contortions of remembrance—whether or not they consider their minds to be suspect. Does that make memory itself an act of imagination?
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: