The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [42]
I fucked a serene Native American girl who smiled, noiselessly, as she rode me; she made me come, then she made herself a cup of tea and split.
I fucked a woman in a broom closet at the Paramount Theater.
I fucked a girl who picked me up with a friend at an after-party in London; the three of us went back to my suite, drank shitty champagne, then each said, “Yawn, time to go to sleep,” then one went and feigned slumber on the couch, the other feigned sleep on the bed, and I had to choose which one to fake-wake-up and have sex with.
I fucked two girls in stairwells within a single week—one in a hotel, one in a mall. When I was with one of them, a pair of stoic tourists passed us as they headed down the stairs; I had my entire hand shoved up her pussy.
I fucked a woman in a limousine in Miami; we swigged tequila, mid-fuck, as the driver lectured us on the social history of Coconut Grove.
Mostly, though, I didn’t fuck anybody. The above litany is uninspired compared to that of the average singer of a band that had a video on MTV in the ’90s. I was usually too high to pickup girls. Every night that I spent alone, cotton-mouthed, in a hotel room, I loathed myself for loneliness itself.
On the scarce occasions where there was sex without weed, my disappointment was such that I felt I wasn’t having sex at all.
In the last days of my drug life, I was unable to fuck, and uninterested besides. When I got clean, I started up again. Immediately, the stripe of women improved markedly. But I was itchingly dissatisfied, dogged by unfamiliar self-reproach. Flippant sex is a wasted man’s pastime. At least, I was unable to do it without a basic desire to want to talk to, hang out with, the woman I was with.
I got through it, unaccountably, without an STD, or a vengeful boyfriend wielding a lead pipe outside a motel room.
We did our second record with this producer named Saul Mongolia. Weirdly, he had been the engineer on the James Brown session with the turbine-cave man, where James yelled “New WAVE!” He was a reserved man who wrote his own Zen koans, but he emitted a thorny, gloomily stubborn energy. He looked like a Botticelli portrait of Richard Nixon.
I liked him because he produced pop songs with weird stuff in them—odd sounds and expertly deployed discordances. He had a bunch of tunes all over the radio and MTV, strange and funny songs riding on big, wobbly bass parts, crisply produced and buoyant. He liked to mix things in mono, which I found rakishly eccentric. I met with him before we hired him, and enthused, tangentially, about George Jones records. “Oh, that’s what you like,” he said. “Drama.” He said the way I sang reminded him of a soul singer—my phrasing, my approach. By saying this he won my heart forever.
My band didn’t say much; the sampler player spoke of him with resentful deference, like he was talking about a hated, but talented, rival. “The most important thing,” he said, “is that Saul Mongolia doesn’t play piano on any of our songs.” Cryptic portent that I didn’t catch.
The other guys mumbled, frowning.
We recorded at the Power Station—I saw Russell Simmons on the street before the first session, and I wanted to ask him where the Power Station was, because Russell Simmons would actually know—in a massive room, wooden and vaulted like a Scandinavian church. Somebody told me that Michael Jackson had recorded in another studio, down the street, and had rented out this room just for his dinner break; they installed a circus tent and a banquet table. Currently, in the studio next door, guitar overdubs were being recorded for a Meatloaf record. Meatloaf was not in attendance.
We were loading amplifiers into the studio and the sampler player turned to me with his rattled-animal eyes. “Here we are,” he said. “I can’t believe we’re making a second record.”
I gave him a bewildered look. What? Who wouldn’t make a second record? Who cares about hate and wretched time spent in a van, this is the most important thing in the world.
We tracked everything as a live band, playing all at once. Saul would