The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [36]
There were people who disgusted his wife, and she couldn’t—or didn’t try to?—hide it. Our manager, for instance. In his presence, she’d wear a face, looking like he’d just puked on her.
The sampler player believed himself to be in a psychic death-war with me, with no incident too petty to be part of the struggle. We did a radio commercial, and I remarked that I was surprised that the ad lady made me do so many takes. “That’s because you’re naïve!” he yelled. “You’re naïve, you’re totally naïve!”
At the airport, I stubbed out a cigarette on the lid of a trash can and left it there.
“Litterbug!” he hollered.
We were in the back of a limousine, headed from a radio show in Queens. I said something innocuously arrogant.
“Do you need me to wipe your ass for you?” the sampler player asked. My face went slack. I told him once that this was something my dad used to yell to embarrass me. The sampler player was using it as a psyche-obliterating emotional weapon.
If I disagreed with something, he’d yell at me that I was afraid. “You’re afraid! You’re so afraid! Just admit you’re afraid!” And if I remarked that something he did was unusual, he’d yelp that he had always done it, as if I were trying to catch him in an inconsistency and damn him. Late in the band’s life, he stopped wearing the mom-bought polo shirts, bleached his hair, and wore an opulent Prada overcoat everywhere, even indoors.
You’ve really changed how you dress, I said.
“I’VE ALWAYS BEEN A CLOTHESHORSE!” he yelled.
We were having an argument on whether the personality was encoded in DNA. I believed mostly in nurture rather than nature. “That’s because you’re afraid! You’re afraid!” the sampler player yelled at me. I tried to say, No, I just think that... “Why are you so afraid?!”
Laughing, I put my arm around him: Now why won’t you let me answer you? He shrank, trembling, as if I were going to punch him.
He believed himself to be a wise patriarch among us. “Doughty, sometimes I’m afraid that the only things you’re learning from me are about music,” he said, solemnly. Once I had yelled at the bass player onstage, and he issued Solomonic punishment in the van, the next day, raising his index finger. “Doughty, you can’t speak between songs at the show tonight.”
Doing some preproduction, he punished me for an incident I’d be smarter not to recount. It had something to do with the dif - ference between smoking weed and smoking cigarettes. I had just quit smoking, and he chain-smoked—he wasn’t a smoker—for the entire session. “Doughty, this is how I’m going to teach you a lesson,” he said. I didn’t say that it might behoove him to help me quit smoking, as the entire band was sick of me fouling every dressing room, every vehicle, every studio with noxiousness.
Our first tour manager was this guy Gus. He was massive and tall—a high school linebacker who blew off football for punk rock—with thick black glasses. His left eye went a little funny; he told me later that a stepbrother had attacked him in his sleep with a hammer.
The first gig was in D.C. How far is it? I asked.
“Two hundred miles,” he said.
Yeah, but, how far is it?
If you don’t spend a lot of time driving, you measure travel in hours. If your life is spent mostly on the road, you think in miles. I was new.
How far to Austin? I asked.
“You’re soaking in it,” Gus said.
First thing in the morning, at the airport check-in desk.
How are you? I asked.
“Pretty horny!” Gus yelled.
After his stepbrother took the hammer to his face, Gus had no sense of smell. When asked what he liked to eat, Gus said: “I