The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [45]
It mystifies me now that he’d want to give me a slap across the face, but I guess he just saw me as part of the despicable herd.
In the morning, the sampler player lectured me on being uppity, that it was selfish to have those clown pictures taken without my bandmates in them.
You’re not a star! I yelled at him.
The wife of the label president, the guy who wanted to build the turbine-powered cave-house, was installed in Henry’s place; she put together a stupefyingly ugly mishmash of the photos. The cover image was the top half of the bass player’s face. My bandmates approved it. Disgusted, defeated—thinking it right that the hideousness of the whole process be visible right there on the CD cover—I approved it, too.
We toured Europe. In Barcelona, I lay sleepless all night, obsessing about the horrible record cover; it could never be erased. This awful art was permanently lodged in my history. The window was open; I heard the chatter and joy of the Spanish carousers out in the street. I gritted my teeth and obsessed until it was dawn, and time to fly to Portugal.
I was a ball of anxiety and rage. If I had to be near the bass player, not on stage, I didn’t hide my repulsion. I treated the drummer like an idiot. I was sadistically condescending to the sampler player. I would have spells when I’d lie awake all night hating them. I railed to friends about how horrible the band was; when I got started, I wouldn’t stop, just going on and on, barking about what chronic fuckups they were, not noticing how weary my friends became.
(That’s exactly how my mom’s rage worked, and how I responded to her. The realization devastated me.)
Gus called my rage-self “Fat Doughty.” Because when it gripped me, it was as if I blimped out to three times my size.
I got a chest cold on a European tour, and thought this would be a good excuse to quit smoking. The withdrawal turned me into a monster. The bass player said something bratty, and I screamed GO EAT SOMETHING! four inches from his face. Onstage in Italy, a song was skipped, and I took it as a slight; I threw my guitar down, started screaming, kicked the stage door open and ran into the street, yelling curses.
We played on a prestigious French talk show called Nulle Part Ailleurs. I fucked up a guitar part, and thought it was because my bandmates had sabotaged me musically. (Honestly, maybe they had.) I knew I couldn’t blow up in the middle of a TV show, but it had so seized me that I was actually shaking. I started cursing; I couldn’t stop cursing. I tried to keep it under my breath, but some words I would just bark, involuntarily. The French record company people were staring at me incredulously.
We stopped for a day off in a sun-soaked town by the sea. I was walking down a cobblestone alley, flowers on the balconies, pretty women strolling, and I was filled with hate. I kept thinking, Look where you are, don’t you see where you are? Stop the hate, stop it, stop it. But I couldn’t.
My bandmates were talking about making a video. I had spent a month exchanging e-mails with the video person at the record company. But, utterly disregarding the work I’d done, they had suddenly landed on some half-baked idea. I filled with so much rage that I shut down. I could barely speak. I had to control my movements severely. I felt that if I were to let a little bit of the rage out, my body would explode. We went around to radio stations all day, and at each of them I sat in the corner looking like a chimp shot with a tranquilizer dart. The record company guy ushering us around made desperate, forced jokes to the radio people to draw attention away from the singer’s bizarre comatoseness.
“It’s scary when you yell,” said Stanley Ray. “But it’s scarier when you’re quiet.”
In the midst of recording an album, we went to meet with the head of the art department at Warner Bros.; she was going to show us the portfolios of photographers and graphic designers. In the car on the way over, the sampler player said, in a noble