The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [34]
And you know what? He got away with it. Nobody paid anybody seven hundred francs. We got in the van.
He was often on the phone—no, that’s an egregious understatement. He was on the phone at every truck stop, in every hotel lobby, every restaurant. I think he had a network of women he badgered into talking dirty. It seemed that in every city, he met a woman but never actually brought them back to the hotel, and they were all of a type; none of them were attractive. I cringe as I type that, but I don’t know how else to put it. He liked women who didn’t have options.
He didn’t have a phone, only a voice mail number, the kind that used to be common for struggling actors in New York to have, so they could call in obsessively and see if they’d scored auditions. He saw himself as super-erotic-man, and his outgoing message, accordingly, was so smarmy that I recoiled from the receiver every time I called him. Sometimes I held the phone at arm’s length until I heard the beep.
“Leave me a message,” he said in a porn-star voice. “A detailed message.”
We did the radio sex advice show Lovelines once, with Dr. Drew and the hair-metal gadfly Rikki Rachtman. It was the policy of the band that for any media appearance, all four members had to be there, even though it was customary for the singer to go, because otherwise somebody might think that I was more important than anybody else. (Once, on the French iteration of MTV, an interviewer directed the questions to me, but when I began to speak, they’d all yell answers at the same time, to drown me out; when we showed up for photo shoots, somebody would loudly say, two or three times, pointedly, “We’re not the kind of band where the singer stands in the front of the picture.” Though the magazines would always use the ones where I managed to be in front, because people look at any picture of any band and think, Which one’s the singer?)
But Lovelines was done from a studio with only two microphones.
“Please let me do this,” said the bass player. “Please. I’ll never ask for anything again if you let me do this.”
The sampler player and the drummer assented, possibly because they knew it would make me supremely uncomfortable. The bass player and I had done an interview in D.C. with a tiny Korean girl from a college paper, and he boasted at length about not wearing underwear.
We were on the show, and there was a call from somebody talking about a threesome and how watching her boyfriend fuck another woman had messed up her relationship irrevocably.
“I’ve been in a threesome!” the bass player piped in. Like he’d been waiting to say this.
“What was your experience?” asked Dr. Drew.
“It’s nice work if you can get it!” said the bass player.
A discomfited pause, and then Dr. Drew moved on from the dead joke. “Many people in relationships experience blah blah blah something something something,” he said.
“It’s nice work if you can get it!” said the bass player, loudly, as if the joke, repeated, would be funny.
He often spoke in cartoon voices. When he was nervous, he would only speak in funny voices. It made for history’s most excruciating conference calls. He would do it in interviews, too. He seemed to believe that somebody would think, “Oh, I love that band! The one with the bass player who does impressions!”
The very saddest thing about the guy was the way he smoked weed. He said that he had once smoked prodigiously, completely giving his life over to stoner’s limbo; then, he had actually given it up for years. But, one day, the sampler player and the drummer and I were smoking in rehearsal, and he took the pipe and said, quite gravely, “If I get really messed up on something serious, you’re responsible.”
From then on, he smoked near constantly. Before and after shows; just offstage right before we played the encore. Before and after eating. Before and after watching a movie. Upon