The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [2]
I see my brother as the guy I should’ve been. I have the same disorder: I down four pills every morning to stay rational. But he’s the guy whose illness was exacerbated to the point where he became homeless and delusional. He was once the family star and I was the fuckup.
I had something he didn’t have: an obsession.
When I was eleven or twelve, I’d pull up a folding chair to the jukebox at the teen center and listen to the same songs repeatedly: “Tainted Love,” by Soft Cell, “For Those About to Rock, We Salute You,” by AC/DC, “The Stroke,” by Billy Squier. Mostly older kids came there, to play pinball and that formalist masterwork of vector-graphic arcade games, Tempest. They taunted me, I think because my intensity scared them. An adult staffer saw me pulled up so close to the jukebox that my head rested on the grille, and said, encouragingly, “There’s a piano in the other room, do you want to go play it?” What? What made her think, so mistakenly, that I actually had within me the capacity, the potential, to make music?
I lived with this desperate feeling: no access to anywhere that bands played, no friends who played guitar. When I should’ve been doing homework, I would be lip-synching to Thin Lizzy and Dio records. “You don’t think we hear you jumping around up there?!” my mom yelled. “You think you’re gonna be a rock star? Well, rots of ruck!” She liked the racist faux-Chinese put-down.
I tried to stop wanting it, but I couldn’t. As life went on, I pursued my dreams, for sure, but not in joy: I was harangued by them. I pursued them in dread.
My mom told me she’d buy me a guitar if I got on the honor roll. So I did—by a tenth of a point, and I had to go and argue with a gym teacher for it. I got a guitar—an Aria Pro II, and a Marshall practice amp, from a guitar store in Paramus, where the Jersey-metal sales guy yelled at me for touching the instruments hanging on the wall—and returned to fuck-up-hood.
I picked up simple chords and coarse riffs here and there, and watched the British New Wave how-to show Rockschool on PBS. I invented a song every time I learned something new.
The army sent my dad to UCLA—also paying to send my mom and my infant self to California with him—after he came back from Vietnam, so he’d get a degree and return to West Point as a professor. He lived in L.A. when Joan Didion was writing screenplays there, when John Phillips and David Crosby were up in the hills chuffing mounds of cocaine. He went on to get a Ph.D. and became an authority on French history, particularly the period between World Wars I and II, and France’s failure to stop the invading Germans. He’s written books, including one called The Seeds of Disaster, which sounds to me sometimes like a dark joke about his sons.
He taught at West Point for a few years, was sent to Germany, where American tank divisions prowled moodily up and down the Iron Curtain, worked for a year as a speechwriter for a NATO general in Belgium, then came back to West Point and was made head of the History Department.
West Point was so orderly, it was in a chokehold: an enforced family atmosphere. Divorce was a scandalous rarity. Neighborhoods were segregated by rank, each subdivision of identical houses having its own strange name: lieutenants and their families lived in Grey Ghost, captains in New Brick, majors in Stony Lonesome, lieutenant colonels in Lee Area, colonels in Lusk. There was a tiny crescent of houses for members of the military band called Band.
This was the early ’80s. Most of the adult men had been to Vietnam; essentially, everybody’s dad. There was an undercurrent of stress and rage—sometimes barely controlled panic—which I thought was the nature of adulthood. Most of them joined the army in an America still in the glow of World War II’s victories; many of them had themselves gone to the military academy, were inculcated