The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [33]
“No? . . .”
I just dialed *69, I said.
“That’s weird,” he said.
It seems like you called me to see if you got a busy signal, to tell whether or not I was online and you could use the AOL account.
“Doughty,” he said, “you’re so paranoid.”
The AOL account was mostly for fan e-mail. I checked the sent messages and found a response to a German guy’s message suggesting an alternate guitar tuning for me.
“Thanks,” the bass player had written back, “but Doughty doesn’t know how to tune his own guitar.”
It seemed to me that strange things would happen if he was mad at you. Things would go missing; I’d come onstage to find that my guitar was suddenly out of tune, even though I hadn’t touched it since sound check; the little foam-whatsits on my headphones would be ripped out and tossed on the floor; in the dressing room, somebody’s bottle of red wine would have mysteriously fallen off the table and shattered; my takeout lunch that I had left on my amp while I went to grab a napkin would suddenly be gone, reappearing in the room he happened to be practicing in.
What the fuck? I said.
“Hmm?” he said. “What’s the matter?”
There was a tape of Bollywood wedding music, Vivah Geet, that I’d bought in a bodega and treasured—Bollywood was a mystery before the 2000s, something you heard emanating from cab radios and nobody could help you find. I left it in the van, and when I went to retrieve it, it had vanished.
Anybody seen that Indian music tape?
“I packed it,” said the bass player.
You packed it, I repeated. Can you grab it out of your bag and give it to me?
“Aren’t you going to thank me for making sure you didn’t forget it?” he said.
It took me a month to get it. When he gave it back to me, it was just the case—the cassette was missing.
We were in France. I walked into the hotel after a gig and saw the bass player in an alcove, on a hotel phone. He had a grim, secretive look on his face. An hour later, I walked out; he was still on the phone. I came back a couple hours later; he was still on the phone.
In the morning, I was sitting in the lobby, groggy, as the tour manager was checking out. He motioned me over.
“Zair ees a long-deestance phone call for Room 210,” said the desk guy.
I had called the States the night before, dialing up the AT&T long distance to punch in my calling card number. It must cost something to call even a toll-free number. These greedy hotel fuckers.
I looked at the bill. It was something in the hundreds. I had no idea what the number meant. This was before the euro; every country had different money. English roadies had a charming tradition of mocking the confusion of currencies by calling every country’s money shitters. In Germany, a cup of coffee cost five shitters; in Denmark, fifteen shitters; in Belgium a hundred and fifty shitters; in Italy, astonishingly, three or four thousand shitters; in Holland—and I must point out here that the Dutch guilder was once the world’s most magnificently psychedelic cash—twenty or thirty shitters. So, whatever it was, I wasn’t paying attention—I was just going to pay it and worry about exchange rates when I was broke. I pulled out a multicolored fistful of sooty bills.
The tour manager looked over my shoulder at the bill for the phone call and his eyes bugged out. “That’s seven hundred francs!” he said. “How long was your phone call?”
Ten minutes?
“Ten minutes! That’s not right.” He began to argue with the front desk guy. I was just standing there wondering where I could get coffee.
The front desk guy was yelling at the tour manager. He picked up the phone. “He’s calling the employee that was working last night.”
Holding the phone to his ear, the desk guy repeated his description; long hair, striped shirt, pointy boots, long grey coat.
We turned to the bass player, dressed in precisely the same clothes as last night.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
My interpretation: before he made the call, the front desk had asked for his room number, and the bass player had given them mine. The bass player got on the phone with the guy and pretended to