The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [12]
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