The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [10]
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.