The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [1]
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