The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [47]
I did a vocal on a song by a techno band from Manchester (do you call it a band when all the music making is done in the studio, and live, it’s three guys standing behind machines, watching data turn into music, like Laverne and Shirley watching the bottles on the quality control line?). They flew me to Britain to shoot a video.
The set was an abandoned airstrip. The German lady directing the video made me chase a truck, until I was wheezing, lip-synch in front of flame jets, and lie on the cold, wet asphalt. All the band had to do was stand in a triangular formation in their mod jogging suits, looking past the camera, regally.
They had a potbellied guy named Rufus with them, who didn’t dress groovily and had an unfashionable mustache. “Do you want some pyooaah?” Huh? “Some pyooaah, mate.” Oh, pure. Pure what?
“Whizz, mate, pure whizz.” Rufus held up a bag of white powder. I didn’t know what “whizz” was, but I sniffed some anyway. It was something other than cocaine—probably speed? My displeasure at lying on an airstrip in the drizzle dispelled.
There was a girl cast as the girl in the video. I wasn’t that attracted to her. She was, in fact, the German lady’s pinch-hitter for the girl role—the model who was originally cast dropped out, and this woman was somebody who worked in a production company the German director was affiliated with. She was a half-Chinese girl with an extremely snooty-sounding English accent, incongruously named Françoise. Her friends called her by the last syllable of that name: Swaz.
How do you say that name when making love to her? Well, it’s sexier than the phlegmy charms of Bregggggkkkkkgggggggya.
We were taken to a trailer, where a gay guy with an Afro and circular glasses wielding blush and eye shadow had transformed Swaz into a glamour icon. Her sudden transformation into a beauty was disquieting.
In the makeup chair, I said, They want me made up to look like a dead man.
“Really?!”
No, I said, not really.
He got sullen.
We were seated in the cab of the truck I had chased, for shots in which I lip-synched while Swaz pretended to drive. They shot one angle, then another from the side, then one from the front, then a close-up. Then the German lady said, “And now it is time you and Swaz vill have a snog.”
We were startled. Did they tell us beforehand that the job description included making out with a stranger? Cameras rolled.
I leaned in and gave her a real kiss. My lips brushed hers, and I budged in closer. Her mouth yielded. A long, soulful, all-enveloping kiss.
In the car back to London we talked about poetry, and then we met the next day; she came over to my hotel room and took a shower with the bathroom door open. I watched her soap herself up, scrub herself off.
At some point in the six hours we hung out, it was decided that I was going to abandon New York and come live with her in London.
I went back to Brooklyn. She called me, blind drunk, when I was throwing my stuff into boxes, and slurred over and over, “Are you going to save me? Are you going to save me?” Unnerving. I told her to stop, she kept repeating it, I pleaded with her, Stop, please stop, but she kept saying, “Are you going to save me? Are you going to save me?”
I boxed up my life and went anyway.
Swaz and I would get high and say words back and forth to each other.
Swear, I said.
“Swah,” she responded.
There, I said.
“Thah,” she responded.
We went to see a refurbished version of Star Wars. I learned that the English put sugar on their popcorn, and they ran a parade of arty commercials before the previews.
The movie started. “Is Han Solo Luke’s brother?” Swaz asked. “Or was it—Obi Wan Kenobi is Luke’s uncle? . . .”
No, I said. Darth Vader is Luke’s father.
“DARTH VADER IS LUKE’S FATHER?!” cried Swaz in the middle of the theater.
I was a terrible boyfriend. I’d get home from tour and not want to do anything but lie on the couch—of