The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [20]
Later he enthused about Jeff ’s hotness. “How old is he?”
Twenty-eight.
“Twenty-eight!” he said. “No way. I’m no chicken hawk, but that’s a chicken.”
Jeff and I sniffed dope in the Great American’s basement dressing room. It was powder heroin. You get black tar in California—it must have been a bitch to find this stuff. We walked back to the hotel together; a girl who looked like a Modigliani painting traipsed along. He kissed her on the cheek and she walked away.
?! I said.
“I can’t go spreading myself all over the country,” he said distastefully.
If you don’t want to spread yourself all over the country with a hundred different girls, what the hell are we doing here?
Really? I said.
“I’ve got a plan,” he said. He winked. Winked.
Yeah? What’s the plan?
He gave an agitated frown, and didn’t answer.
We played the Urban Art Bar in Houston, a tiny place with a decrepit sound system. Jeff’s crew parked their huge purple bus in front and obscured the whole building.
I talked to this beautiful Texan Indian woman. She was a doctor. I thought we were flirting; she just wanted me to take her backstage to meet Jeff. Devastating.
“He speaks French!” she said.
No, he doesn’t, I said.
“You haven’t heard his version of ‘Je n’en connais pas la fin,’” she said, imperiously. “Edith Piaf. His accent is impeccable.”
I don’t think so—he’s a really talented mimic, I said.
She huffed.
Eventually, she figured out that all you had to do to get into the dressing room at the Urban Art Bar was push the door open.
The next day Jeff said he’d been accosted by a crazy woman who said she was a doctor; she babbled at him in French. “I don’t speak French,” he said, exasperated.
I didn’t speak to Jeff again. I heard stories about Jeff nodding out in bars, deliriously high, and thought, Figures. I wanted him brought down.
My band played the WHFS HFStival at RFK stadium in D.C. Vivian from Luscious Jackson told me that he had walked out into the Mississippi River with his boots on, singing, was pulled under by the wake of a passing boat, and washed up dead at the foot of Beale Street in Memphis.
A perfect fable. You fucking cunt piece of shit asshole fucker, I thought. You’ll be a legend now.
Years later, I met a committee of producers at a coffee place. They had bought the rights to his story. I expounded about Jeff, and the’90s, and my grievances, and how, at some point, it had occurred to me that it was better to stay alive and make music than to be a dead legend; long past his death, I realized it was a horrible fate, and that he had once been my friend.
They told me about Jeff ’s journals, that he wrote something about me, how he admired my drive, and how hard I worked, and how he wanted to emulate me. I was shocked.
I told them my dubious theory that he’d gotten clean before he died. For one thing, a musicians’ recovery organization was thanked in some liner notes. For another, there was an article written by a Memphis acquaintance who said he’d found him walking around a shitty neighborhood in the rain; nonresidents mainly go to shitty neighborhoods to get drugs, but Jeff apparently wasn’t fucked up. Where there’s drugs, there’s twelve-step meetings.
I wondered if he was aping Woyzeck when he walked into the river. I gave them my friend the director’s e-mail, maybe she’d show them the VHS tape of the show.
I told them that on our tour together, my sampler player had put a pebble in the air tube of a tire on his bus, twisting the cap on over it; the air slowly leaked out as they drove. They were stranded on the roadside for twelve hours. They could’ve been killed. His other notable prank was re-arranging some letters on a marquee to read JEFFY O’BUCKLE.
I told them that I thought Jeff wasn’t a songwriter; I had asked him once if he wanted some songs that I wrote and he reacted indignantly—I’d touched a nerve. Few mention the songs he wrote when they rhapsodize about him; they adore his covers of “Hallelujah