The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [37]
“She’s soft,” Gus said, describing his girlfriend. “She’s small. I like her parts.” His shorthand for finding girls was, “Let’s go look at some shirts.”
Gus drove the van, and I sat shotgun, for most of the tour. We had a two-man pop-culture retrospective. There was an M.C. Hammer song sampling the old ballad “Have You Seen Her?” that began: “Aaaaaww yeah, I’m glad I put this tape on.”
“Aaaaawww yeaaaah, I’m glad I ate that sandwich.”
Aaaaaaaawww yeaaaaaah, I’m glad I read that local alternative weekly.
“Aaaaaaaaw yeaaaaah, I’m glad I wore that Green Day shirt.”
Aaaaaaawwww yeaaaaaah, I’m glad I bought that Trapper-Keeper.
We had this prank call tape that we loved. A guy called the numbers in the classified ads, seeking musicians for metal bands, in the back of an L.A. paper. The prank caller got drunker and weirder as the tape went on. We quoted the nonsensical lines endlessly. “Don’t be all high and mighty just ’cause you’re from Illinois, Chris!” and “I just want to get my cock fucked and play some guitars with some strings on ’em!” and “That’s what I want to rock about!”
At one point, the guy is asked for his phone number, and he says, “My number is seven.” This became our answer for everything. What time is sound check? “Sound check is at seven.” The stylist for the video called, she’s buying wardrobe, what’s your shoe size?” “My shoe size is seven.”
I was standing outside the 40 Watt Club in Athens, Georgia. There was a tattoo shop next door; I was looking at the flash in the window.
“You’re not gonna get another tattoo, are you?” said Gus, disparagingly.
I’m gonna get a seven, I said.
He reached into his pocket, grabbed a hundred dollar bill, and slapped it in my hand.
“Get a receipt,” he said.
The seven, in a blue-black circle, is on my left arm, between some Khmer script and a Dahomey image of a bull.
We rode to the Frankfurt airport with a cabbie wearing an ur-German walrus mustache. “Vair are you from?” he asked.
America, I said.
“OH! AMERICA!” he said. “I LOVE AMERICA! Cowboys! Montana! Giddy-up!”
“I can tell you really know how to party,” Gus said.
Gus and I could feel the hate burning into our backs from the eyes behind us in the van. We bonded over a mutual childhood in punk rock, and played cruddy punk tapes to annoy them. We’d search out whatever the local alternative rock station was—music so rote and featureless it might as well have been air-conditioning—and blast it.
The first time we toured Europe, it was without Gus. I didn’t speak in the van for the entire three weeks of the tour.
The first tours were continuous slogs. The record label was too stingy to pay for a trailer, so the instruments and amps and drums crowded us. We stayed at Red Roof Inns on the outskirts of town, sometimes so close to the airport that the landing-signal lights strobed in our room windows.
One morning I got into the back bench of the van, where the sampler player usually sat.
“That’s my seat, Doughty!” he said, sounding unstable.
I looked at him.
“It’s very important that I sit in the same place every day!” he yelled. “My routine is very important!” He elbowed in beside me, and sat on the wheel well, jammed in between me and the window, arms folded, grimacing with tremendous agitation.
The sampler player drove the van sometimes. He’d get particularly stoned for this. Nobody paid any thought to it, because we all assumed that you drove better high. People still believe this. I have friends in their late thirties who believe, genuinely, that weed makes you more perceptive at the wheel. I read about some study on some blog the other day presenting data that, at the very least, it was just as safe as driving not-stoned.
OK. So. I remember this one time doing bong hits with a girl. It was during the first Gulf War. The media were jazzed about there being a war—first real one in twenty years, right?—so they had canceled all the shows and had three anchors talking about the same unchanging information, sans commercials, until two in