The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [49]
I thought: As coffee is a vehicle to help me transport from the sleeping state to the waking state, maybe alcohol is something to carry me from waking back to sleep again.
I flew to East Lansing for two weeks’ opening shows for Dave Matthews.
I put one of Alfonso’s pills on my amp during sound check at the Boston Garden. Halfway through the set, between songs, I stepped back to the amp and gulped. I wanted to be coming up as soon as the show was over.
We played to a crowd that had mostly not shown up yet. There were pockets of people in the chairs on the arena’s floor—people who paid big bucks for the good seats—who mostly drank their beer, looking bored. The people in the cheap sections were more likely to show up for the opening act: after the tunes, we’d hear a muted roar from the back of the hall.
I began to feel the glow. We clambered down the stairs and into the strange middle ground behind the stage, with big road cases gathered together like cattle, cables running from the stage to generators somewhere, Dave Matthews’s techs in states of distraction. By the monitors there was a tiny TV screen hooked up to a camera, currently showing an empty drummer’s stool. The guy’s kit was so huge, jungled with cymbals, chimes, tom-toms, that they needed the TV screen to communicate.
There was one lonely guy sitting at a computer. His job was to feed lyrics into the teleprompter. I thought: Who does this guy drink with when he gets on the tour bus at night?
Our dressing room was a visiting-team locker room. There were empty massage tables and stationary bikes; the lockers had been covered with white sheets. A guy from Warner Bros. stood by the sandwich platter. He had horn-rimmed glasses and an aw-shucks, kid from the cul-de-sac, Encyclopedia Brown demeanor. The high ratcheted up and I started to think he realized I was oozing into another state of being. He seemed weirdly menacing. He engaged me in some good-show-excited-for-New-York-tomorrow? chat; my eyes must’ve been ping-pong balls.
I got more googly-eyed as he chatted; I hopped up on one of the stationary bikes and started pedaling. Idly, then furiously. I stopped pedaling, and the force of the exertion shot an intense blast of drugs—when you’re on E, and you move intensely, then stop, you feel like you’ve ignited. This is why E goes so perfectly with dancing. My body shook in pleasure and disorientation. Encyclopedia Brown was still talking. I dismounted and walked off midsentence.
Dave Matthews took the stage to grand hurrahs. I walked out of the barricades and into the crowd, looked up at the people in the stands, the spotlights tracing over them. The whole place seemed to be breathing in unison.
I was grabbed by a girl in a hippie dress and pulled into the seats. “Dance with us!”
Are you on E? I asked idiotically.
“No! We’re drunk!” she said. My bones were noodles.
I felt like a vice-presidential candidate. I walked the rings of the stadium, slapping hands with fans here or there who recognized me. I was by myself, on drugs, grinningly holding up the all-access pass on a lanyard around my neck to security as they stepped up to block my way. They parted resentfully. This is what I wanted to do with my life. Be outrageously high, be absolutely alone except for the random high fives and yelped You’re awesome’s.
Our bus was parked with a dozen other buses in a concrete chamber beneath the stadium. One weirdness of an arena tour is that you go to sleep on the bus at night as it heads to the next show, and then wake up inside a hockey stadium, in a giant grey room—some of them big as a double football field—lit with yellow fluorescence, neither in daytime nor night, in the loud thrumming of all the buses’ generators. Once you had your coffee in you, you had to clamber all over the arena searching for an exit to see what kind of day it was.
Our bus was rented from a company that painted the same murals on all their buses—a beach scene, in a purple sunset, with gentle waves, driftwood, and a beached rowboat—with subtle variations of the elements in the picture,