The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [40]
We came to our cheap hotel. I didn’t know how to say, Hey, want to come upstairs? I coughed up some topic, Did you like the show? Or, What’s up with the weird breaded cheese sticks you can buy at automats here?
“I think I will come up to your room,” she said.
We made out in the elevator, and tumbled into my room. I had her blouse off and was trying to remove the beige bra from her plump, drooping tits, fumbling with the hook. Her pale skin was constellated with dark moles. I unbuttoned her jeans and slipped my hand beneath the beige panties—What is this old-fashioned underwear doing on such a sexy girl?—and my hand grazed the soft hair on her pussy’s mound. She sat on the bed—a tiny twin bed facing a tiny television set, in a room half the size of a starlet’s closet—and pulled me down onto it. She had another joint in her purse, and we smoked it, and then I was just utterly obliterated. My tongue was puffed up, filling my mouth.
Look, I said. Tell me your name. You have to tell me your name.
“It’s ugly,” she said. “It’s Dutch, and you won’t like it.”
Dutch has a kind of mish-mish-mush-mush quality to it, punctuated with long, phlegmy, rolling consonants in the back of the throat. But how bad could it be?
“My name is Bregggggkkkkkgggggggya,” she said.
We fucked for a long time, an hour or more. I got that oceanic feeling of being extremely high; she became just a notion of femaleness. My cock was barely hard. It kept slipping out of her. Finally I came inside her, risk be damned.
I was staring at the ceiling, following the floaters in the liquid of my eyes, and she was talking. And kept talking. She went into a long and dull description of a dream.
“Don’t you think that’s funny?” she said. “I find this dream to be very funny.”
I mumbled something, but I was entirely disinterested.
The sampler player caught a semipermanent fake Dutch accent with which he spoke to everybody he met in Europe, haltingly describing mundane things as if they were American phenomena. “In my country? We have? Something which is called? Cable television? We have? Many channels? And some of them? Show what are called? Music videos?”
I fell in love with a picture of a singer named Dusha Arangu, from a second-string British band, in Spin magazine. She looked like an alien, with long arms and huge black eyes. Her brown skin looked silver in black-and-white photographs. I wrangled a chance to meet her, and sometimes when her band would tour through New York I’d see her.
She had a night off and was staying at a hotel up on Lexington Avenue. It was one of those faceless, beige hotels. I went up to her room; she was lying on her bed. Her shirt rode up, and I could see a sliver of her back above the belt loops of her jeans. I asked her if she wanted to go downtown and eat, see some of the actual New York, but the idea unnerved her—New York’s storied scariness? Distrust of me?
Suddenly Dusha Arangu was talking about how she needed a shag, really that’s all she needed was a shag, a shag would mitigate her blues, sometimes you just really need a shag, you know?
I rolled up a joint and we smoked. I brought the weed because I thought we might have sex. I could shake off reality and be there. Why fuck a goddess not-stoned?
That’s probably just a part of it. There’s something about me that when I experience an intense feeling, any feeling, good or bad, I have to do something to mitigate it. I have an innate urge to smother exhilaration with medicine. Were I to get a phone call right now saying that I had hit the Lotto, I would immediately need to eat a gallon of sorbet and drink four cups of coffee.
The weed gnawed my confidence. Is that what she meant, shagging me? That’s what she meant. But how could she mean that? Look at yourself, Doughty: like somebody could want you? I was saying all the wrong things as fast as I could say them, and then trying to backpedal and saying more wrong things, and I could have flopped onto the wide beige bedspread and kissed her—probably I’d have missed her face on the first two passes,