The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [14]
I never wanted to fuck Mumlow. I stayed because her mind was so wonderfully strange, she was so much fun to get high with, and because I was broke. The old joke: What do you call a musician without a girlfriend? Homeless.
She paid for the Domino’s pizza we ordered twice a day (“How many ICE-COLD COKES do you want with that?” the Domino’s guy would yell enthusiastically, on every call. How about no ice-cold Cokes, thanks), and my contribution was to get the weed, the funds for which I embezzled at the Knit. Every tenth ticket, I’d put the cash in my pocket, rather than input the money into the computer.
I was meeting girls at the club, getting them high, and fucking them in their living rooms while their roommates slept. They’d ask for my number and I’d say I didn’t have a phone.
Mumlow was getting churlish and horny. She binged on porn, buying stacks of gruesome magazines with titles like “Black Plungers,” “Preggo Sluts,” and “Shaved Asian Snizz.” She spread them out in a porn-rainbow fan on the bed and plied her vibrator on herself for hours, grunting, never having an orgasm. I kept my back to her, typing lyrics on her beige, boxy Macintosh.
My friend Wind-Him-Up-and-Watch-Him-Go Joe introduced me to a weed source. He called the proprietors Smokey and the Toastman. They worked out of a shop on East Ninth Street, onto which they had painted, in shaky letters, RECORD-A-RAMA.
Smokey stood behind a glass counter inside of which maybe four or five dusty twelve-inch singles—vinyl records—lay. There were a few nailed onto the walls, too. The Toastman would be sitting a few feet behind him, staring blankly. Both were Caribbean dudes in Hawaiian shirts, with red, slitted eyes.
“What do you want?”
Um, a $50 bag?
“Who are you? I don’t know you.”
I bought from you last week.
With a wary gaze, Smokey walked backwards towards the Toastman, who handed him something, and then Smokey palmed it to me. I put it in my pocket.
“Put it in your waist, man! Put it in your waist!” he hissed.
I stuffed it down by my cock, embarrassedly.
Smokey looked side to side, as if there might be cops suspended from the walls of the Record-A-Rama. “Take this.” He handed me one of the dusty twelve-inches. I walked out with the record, ostensibly looking like I’d bought it.
There was a collection of misbegotten twelve-inches leaning against the wall in the universe. All these third-rate reggae and house singers, their dreams of fame having resulted in being the decoy record for Smokey and the Toastman.
Mumlow had a bunch of heroin friends she knew from the arty-groovy Northeastern college from which she’d dropped out the previous year. One of them abandoned a cat named Big Bunny in the universe. Big Bunny radiated angst. We’d throw a stuffed duck on the floor and Big Bunny would hump it—obediently, bleakly, neurotically—while we cackled.
The heroin friends came down for the weekends; one of their parents had a pricey loft in the West Village. I looked down on them. One of them came over and, without asking, ripped open a bag of dope and cut lines on a CD. I kicked him out, yelling.
I got a terrible fever. Mumlow wanted me to take a bath to cool off, but the water, though lukewarm, was icy to me. She had a bag of dope that had been sitting in her purse for weeks, after an evening with the heroin kids. “If you take a bath, I’ll let you have this,” she said.
Wrapped in towels, I sniffed the dope.
Wonderful. Peace. Warmth.
“Another one of the heroin faith-healed,” Mumlow said.