The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [13]
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