The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [21]
“Last Goodbye.” In Memphis, making his final album, he was repeatedly pushed back to the drawing board by Sony; he journaled about how it made him feel cheap and crazy. The songs on the slapdash compilation of demos that Columbia released postmortem were weak, unmemorable. His enormous gift was interpretation, I told them. The problem was that the only real source of income if you’re a major label artist is publishing—songwriter’s royalties. The label makes sure you don’t recoup; you spend more on touring than you make. You write the songs on your albums, or you’re broke.
Walking away, I hated myself for how I pontificated. I nurtured a fear that when the movie was made, I’d be in it, cast as Jeff’s Salieri: Jeff played by some celebrated young movie star, and I a clown.
The place where Luke and I lived, after I broke up with Mumlow, was in the East Village at a cacophonous intersection. A hundred truck horns thundered every day at rush hour; the screen of the living room TV was filmed with a layer of exhaust soot. Our telephone number spelled out (212) CAT-BUKS.
CAT-BUKS became the destination for everybody we went to school with who lived outside the city. In the evening, the buzzer would ring, and a few random friends would climb up the steep six flights with beer and hang out doing bong hits until they had to take the Long Island Rail Road home. “What are you doing tonight?” “I don’t know, just going over to CAT-BUKS, I guess.”
Nobody ever brought women over.
Luke kicked me out of CAT-BUKS. We were both slovenly post-collegiate stoners, but I was just slightly more slovenly than he was, and it drove him spittingly unhinged. The night he sat me down and told me I had to go was the last time in my life I cried, openly, in front of a man.
I was replaced by a succession of roommates who lasted a month, two months, six months, nine months. I started arbitrarily showing up at CAT-BUKS, myself. I brought over a thumbnail-sized bag of Ketamine that I bought from a guy outside of Wetlands—I’d never had it before, and the moment the bag was in my hand I thought the guy had ripped me off—we sniffed it, and spontaneously, did a mirthless single-file parade, room to room, around CAT-BUKS, radiating that Ketamine whoom-whoom-whoom-whoom, like aliens had seized our bodies.
They never changed the phone book listing; it was under my name for years after I left. A French girl who was quasi-stalking me left messages on the machine. One of the replacement roommates told me, and I asked if she’d called before. “Yeah, like six times in the past four months, maybe.”
I started cadging off-nights, Mondays or Tuesdays, from my boss at the Knit and playing gigs as “M. Doughty’s Soul Coughing” with different guys I heard at the club. The saxophonist Tim Berne played once. I called him up cold, and he had no idea who I was. A friend asked what he was doing that week, and he apparently said, “Monday night I’m playing with this African cat—Emdodi.”
I booked the 11 PM slot on a Tuesday night five days after my twenty-second birthday. A month before the show, I had no band. I was worrying about it, talking to a bass player who worked a day job as a sound-effects guy on a soap opera. “Don’t worry, Doughty,” he said. “We’ll find you a band.”
I called him up two weeks before the show. He had forgotten. He couldn’t do it, because that week there was a fictitious hurricane in the soap opera’s fictitious town, so he had to work overtime.
There was this one amazing drummer around, an Israeli guy who could sound like a hip-hop record. There were drummers who could play those beats, but nobody who could sound like that. My only interaction with him was that he’d once walked into the Knit’s office and asked me to send a fax for him. I told him that I didn’t work in the office and didn’t know how the fax machine worked. He stayed silent for a minute and then asked me again if I’d send a fax for him.
I had nothing to lose, why not call up this amazing player at random, for the hell of it?