The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [50]
As the bus pulled out of the arena that night, I was in the back lounge of the bus. The E began to wear off, and in grief I gulped another. I came up as the sun came up. Not knowing what else to do, I took off all my clothes. I lay on the banquette, savoring the ever-diminishing buzz. Each time I felt it subside a level, I would get up and manically improvise weird calisthenics, causing a rush. Each rush less satisfying than the one before it.
In New York, we played Madison Square Garden. I had one E left. Dave brought me onstage to do something with the band—I improvised an onomatopoetic melody: frighteningly manic, scary fake joy. I danced circles around Dave—literally. I’m guessing now that every member of the band was staring at me with bayonets in their eyes, this freak who had seized their stage. I was oblivious. I introduced each of them in detail—though I couldn’t remember some of their last names—by their star sign and their affinity for hiking or swimming. The audience—fucking sold-out Madison Square Garden—looked like a sea of love lapping at the stage.
The second night I smoked weed: the jam was more contemplative. I scorned myself for wasting that one E on the drive out of Boston. Luke had come to the show, and I took him on my customary perambulation. We stopped on one of the upper levels to watch the music a little. There was a fifteen-year-old hippie girl dancing. She turned around and saw me. Her eyes lit up. I realized that I was wearing the same clothes I had worn onstage with Dave, and having essentially been in the Dave Matthews Band, I was a celebrity. I playfully shushed her: don’t reveal my secret identity. She screamed. In seconds I was dogpiled by fifteen-year-old girls. Like a Monkee. Luke yanked me to safety.
After a year of cold London rain, my heart was sick; I wanted to be in the sunshine. Gus was from Pensacola, so I went there to rejuvenate. He put me up with a guy named Nick, one of his henchmen. (Gus had dudes in Pensacola he called henchmen: Henchman Nick, Henchman Tim, Henchman Ramel.) So I went down to the Florida Panhandle to dry my soggy soul in Nick’s spare bedroom.
It’s said that Pensacola isn’t really Florida, but rather the part of Alabama that they put in Florida. The houses around the near-deserted downtown were battered shotgun shacks. Nick’s small house was under a giant pink overpass; the cars on I-10 whooshed towards Jacksonville or Mobile. I had mailed myself eight different varieties of weed on the Amsterdam stop of the European tour right before I moved there, so I had this little rainbow of marijuana—yellow-haired buds next to purplish ones next to ones with a sheen of silver crystals. I got stoned and sat on the porch writing songs, as the freight train rumbled past on tracks thirty yards from the house.
(A couple of years later, Nick briefly worked for Soul Coughing on tour, tuning instruments poorly. He remarked about one tune, “I remember that one—you wrote it on my porch!” My bandmates glared disgustedly.)
Nick’s name wasn’t really Nick. He had picked up some girl by pretending he was an English guy named Nick, and the lie snowballed. For years, he had to use the accent around her. Nick was a devoted cigarette smoker, merrily acknowledging the deadliness. This was when I was still smoking; hanging out with Nick was celebrating tar.
(I smoked three packs a day. Ridiculous. It was like a job. I woke up, and began the work of the first pack. It was a repetitive, manly task, like getting up early every day to chop down pine trees.)
Nick owned Sluggo’s, the punk rock bar in Pensacola. It was on Palafox Street, which was the main drag until the malls came along. Most of the storefronts were empty, except for a knickknack shop run as a vanity project for a navy officer’s wife, and a uniform