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By Root 138 0

that’s how high I was—but I stayed in the chair, and when the long silences had erased any trace of a vibe in that hotel room, she suggested we go out to eat with her manager.

I ate tasteless Tom Kha in a nondescript Thai restaurant. I tried not to look at her. Baffled that I didn’t make a move. Thinking that the waitress, the manager, every person in the place was thinking, “Look at this creature. We hate him.”

Dusha and I stayed in touch with biennial e-mails for a while; in the last one, she joked about the record company dropping her band. “I’ve discovered what I was put on this Earth to do, and nobody’s trying to help me do it!” she wrote, cheerfully irate. I knew that her band was neither good nor famous enough to survive the cultural sea change. It terrified me.

There was a lull as I typed this, during which I clicked from the word processor over to the browser, and typed her name into one of the social-networking sites: I found five Dashu Garangas, a Shusha Malangu, and a Dasu Ashangu.

I fucked somebody every time I got the chance. The sheer range of women I slept with on tour is striking to me, now: breathtaking women, and women that a desperate man on a lot of speed wouldn’t consider as the bar closed at 4 AM.

I fucked an acne-scarred Irish girl in a Nashville Radisson for two hours straight.

I fucked a Danish girl, so fantastically beautiful that I was dumbfounded to be with her, for two minutes.

I fucked a woman from Milwaukee who described her job as “homeopathic oncologist.”

I fucked a sandy-haired, pudgy woman who sold t-shirts for reunited classic rock bands; she cornered me at a club in New Orleans, fed me mushrooms, and we fucked, tripping; as I hotfooted out, she cried, “Don’t you want to go fuck in the City of the Dead?”

I fucked a hirsute, angular Frenchwoman whose enthralling moans sounded for all the world like an oboe.

I fucked a fat Canadian journalist with a pin-up’s face on her obese body.

I fucked another French woman who wore a rubber dress, had a full back-piece tattoo of The Scream, called me “zee byoo-tea-fall blond-uh angel,” and had a notebook of pencil sketches of the other guys from bands she’d invited home.

I fucked a woman in Boston who, to turn herself on, spoke Russian the entire time.

I fucked a stewardess in Seattle who wouldn’t take off her motorcycle boots.

I fucked a black woman nearly half a foot taller than me—I’m six foot one—backstage at a hockey arena in Minnesota; when I complained I was blind wasted, she took me by the wrist and led me to the bathroom, where, kneeling across the toilet from each other, we stuck our fingers down our throats and puked together.

I fucked a gangly, dazzling woman whom I recognized from an episode of The X-Files. Though insanely gorgeous, she spoke with the nerdiest voice I’ve ever heard.

I fucked a girl in Pittsburgh, in the back of a bus, with a boyish seventeen-year-old’s body and a middle-aged senator’s jowls.

I fucked an Italian woman in Paris who was almost but not quite beautiful enough to be a model; she kept talking, brightly, pathetically, about her future on the runways, and later became the traveling concubine of one of the Backstreet Boys.

I fucked a strawberry-haired girl in a billowing hippie skirt with a Fargo accent who, afterwards, pushed upon me a cassette tape of her terrible sludge-rock band.

I fucked the hostess of a country-music video countdown show, whose shoes I complimented; thus, she thought I was a foot fetishist, and mailed me snapshots of her feet for months after— poolside, with “My Feet on Vacation” written in red marker on the back.

I fucked a publicist for hip-hop acts who wept as I went down on her.

I fucked a curvy goth princess who made squeaking noises.

I fucked a gamine Iowan; I begged her to wear her green-framed glasses while she went down on me.

I fucked a radio programmer who could’ve dashed my career, but I never called her again, anyway.

I fucked a girl with a high-school-pep-rally sort of personality who ten years later was managing a band with the number one record in