The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [39]
Lars had this thing about Asleep at the Wheel, the Texas swing band. At the beginning of every tour, he’d find a greatest-hits cassette in a truck stop, and listen to it every time he drove. “I’ve got miles and miles of Texas!” and “I’m going to boogie back to Texas!” and “Texas something, blah blah something Texas.” He’d slip the tape surreptitiously into someone’s luggage at tour’s end.
(There was this piece of graffiti, by some astute band guy/ existentialist, that you’d see in the dressing rooms of shitty rock clubs all over America—Madison, Des Moines, Lawrence, Champaign, Tucson—expressing perfectly that feeling of dislocation you felt on tour: “I hate this part of Texas.”)
The band didn’t drink beer—we just smoked weed, and were insufferable snobs about it—but clubs always supplied it in the dressing room, so Lars hoarded it. Eventually we were traveling on a sleeper bus; Lars filled the fridge with beer. Annoyed that he was hogging all the space, we made him take it out; he started storing it in his bunk. He slept on piles of cans.
I journaled in the van to kill time. I left my notebook under the seat. Personally, when somebody I know has a journal, even if they left it under my pillow, I wouldn’t read it. The sampler player, however, would take it out and read it when I wasn’t around. I’d get in the van, and he’d confront me, saying, intensely, “How dare you say that we———?”
We did a photo shoot. The bass player had slipped my journal into his pocket when I wasn’t looking. In the photos, he was standing just behind me with the journal open, holding it up, with an exaggerated look of fake shock on his face.
Warner Bros. gave us a small budget for gear—new amps, etc. I used my cut to buy a laptop—circa 1995, about as thick as a Tolstoy novel. The sampler player wanted to borrow it for some reason. I blew him off. He kept asking. Finally, I said: That’s kind of like asking to borrow both my guitar and my journal, isn’t it?
Somebody chided him for not answering an e-mail. “I would have, but Doughty won’t let anybody else use that computer that we bought for him,” he said.
I slept with a girl in Amsterdam who refused to tell me her name. We played a place called the Melkweg—the Milky Way. The crowd was sparse. She was leaning on a column near the front. Her brown eyes floated upward to me as I sang.
Stanley Ray was following us on tour, riding in the same vehicle but staying at cushy hotels. We went back to his room after the show and got high. She followed us.
What’s your name? I asked her.
We were walking along a canal. Lurid light was reflected on the water.
“I’m not going to tell you my name,” she said, with a tight smirk.
We sat around a coffee table, passing the joint around, but she sat at a dining table just outside the perimeter. I kept looking at her, and she looked back with that same frank, sexy regard. She cocked her head a little, as if to say, Why aren’t you taking me by the hand and walking me back to your hotel?
I was scared of the judgment of everybody in the room. I felt ludicrous. I pretended to follow the conversation, but my heart was pounding and I was desperately scheming for a way to get out of there with her. Maybe suddenly everybody would get absorbed in something, and I could escape unnoticed.
At last I said something stupid about having to leave. Stanley Ray looked at me with daggers in his eyes. He hated it when I went off with a girl. I managed to get up, walk over to the Dutch girl, whisper in her ear, and leave. Feeling burning eyes on my back.
So what’s your name? I said as we crossed a footbridge.
My head was spinning from the weed. I kept stumbling into the bike path, and I’d hear jingling bells and think, How pretty, but they were the bells on bicycles, ringing at the idiot in their way.
“I’m not going to tell