The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [38]
I lit a cigarette. (I smoked three packs a day. A morning pack, an evening pack, and then another pack rationed through the intervening hours; I had ashtrays placed at five-foot intervals in my house.) I put it in the ashtray, then got down on the floor to pick out a CD. Flipping through the rack, I decided I wanted to smoke; lit a cigarette; put it in an ashtray on a speaker as I got out my copy of Sign ‘O’ the Times. The girl I was getting high with asked if I still had those Pringles from before. Sure, I said. I walked to the kitchen, lighting a cigarette on the way. When I got to the kitchen, I put the cigarette in an ashtray by the sink and opened the fridge. Blinked at the fridge’s innards for a second. I got out a grape soda and walked back towards the couch.
Want some grape soda? I asked the girl.
“The Pringles?” she asked.
Oh, right, right. I went back to the kitchen, got the Pringles, came back, handed the canister to the girl, sat down, then decided I wanted to smoke, lit a cigarette, and, upon ashing, discovered the first of the four cigarettes I’d lit in the past three and a half minutes still burning in the ashtray on the end table.
There are a number of people in the world who believe that in this state I could drive better.
Weed was sustenance. We were never without it. Really and truly never. My bandmates were high constantly, and I resented the hell out of them for it, because weed fucked up my singing, thus limiting my intake. We had terrible days when all we had was shitty weed, shwag weed. Dark agitation would come over us; the other three would actually fight among themselves.
Purportedly, weed isn’t what people call physically addictive—the expression implies bodily withdrawal when you stop using—but to me, the distinction is more or less superfluous. To me, addiction is mostly a state of being inherent in the addict that can translate to things that stimulate the brain’s pleasure centers which most people can pick up and put down at will, like sex, sugar, gambling. I have no expertise in the biology of weed withdrawal. I do know that just having bad weed discombobulated us in the extreme.
Weed addicts are alone among drug users in that they think their shit is cute. I heard an anecdote once about a guy working in a studio, and there was somebody sleeping under a blanket on a couch; the guy whips off the blanket and gets up, and it’s a legendary outlaw country music star. The storyteller goes on, like, “He fired up a joint and whoohoo! Wake-and-bake! Whoohoo awesome!” I don’t think that story would go, “The first thing he did when he was awake was chop out a line of blow!” Or, “He downed a shot of tequila when he woke up, ’cause he had the shakes!”
We pulled into New Orleans at 3 AM, and it took the indifferent desk person half an hour to check us in. The drummer and I were rooming together. We went up to the room; the key didn’t work. We called downstairs; it took twenty minutes for the maintenance guy to get there, and all he did was jiggle the doorknob and shrug. We went down to the desk to get another room, which took another half hour.
Finally we got into a room; I flopped on the bed. The drummer sat in a chair. “I think I might go to Café du Monde,” he said. “For some of them there beignets.”
I got under the covers.
“But then, I think, no, it’s so late, maybe I’m tired, I should sleep.”
Uh-huh, I said.
“But, those there beignets are so good, and I didn’t eat almost nothing for dinner.”
Yeah, sure.
“But then I think, no, we got the show tomorrow . . . ”
OK, I said, through gritted teeth. Whatever you decide to do, I’m shutting off this light and going to sleep.
“Yo, G,” he said, genuinely affronted, “there’s two people staying in this room.”
Later I roomed with our sound guy, Lars. His name wasn’t Lars, but Gus thought he looked like his name was Lars, and we called him Lars so often that he had