The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [51]
Sluggo’s was threadbare, dirty-carpeted, furnished with ratty couches, festooned with band stickers. Nick’s sound engineer and factotum was a guy who’d dropped out of the air force and drifted to Sluggo’s. His name was Ryan, but he went by the rapper-inspired handle Ry Moe Dee. The club survived on the local alternative community, which was oddly substantial, and the happenstance that when touring acts had a gig in Tampa, and then a gig in Birmingham or New Orleans, they needed someplace to play in between. You’d see British bands, feted in the hyperbolic U.K. music publications, bewildered to be playing this dingy joint in front of five people on a Tuesday night.
A San Francisco queer-punk band played. The bass player pulled out a floppy dildo and waved it around between songs, talking about how he hadn’t gotten laid, and thus it had gotten much usage on the tour. The audience squealed in delighted shock. I bumped into him after the show. He did a double take; he was a Soul Coughing fan. “What are you doing here?!”
Nick also had a rave bar around the corner called Bedlam, where in the early evenings a fat guy on Ecstasy would flop around, shirtless, on the empty dance floor, his folds jiggling in the mirrored walls. There was this weird thing where half the people in Pensacola called Sluggo’s “Sluggo,” and Bedlam “Bedlam’s.”
A guy named Kent lived in Nick’s garage. He was known around town because he’d done an airbrush portrait of David Lee Roth on a t-shirt and had given it to him backstage at a Van Halen show; D.L.R. actually wore it, with the sleeves cut off, in the video for “Jump.” Kent was quiet and strange, and was supposedly involved in twelve-step programs, which creeped me out. There was a picture of him tacked to the wall in Sluggo’s—among other pictures of the friends of the bar—twice his current size, bloated and red. He left a copy of Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story lying around, and I read it one afternoon, doing bong hits between chapters.
I met a lot of girls in Pensacola. Slept with some. None of them smoked weed, and were thus unsuitable for repeat visits. How many beautiful women did I blow off because they didn’t get high?
We did a package tour sponsored by a clothing company; they set up a little concourse of booths in the back with snowboarding gear on display, and complementary energy drinks. The booths were run by a crew of post-collegiate kids who were so excited to be traveling in a tour bus with a bunch of rock bands they could’ve shit themselves. Every night was a party on their bus; they’d entice off-duty strippers to come aboard and get drunk with them, then their alpha, the pack leader—so selected for his huge cock—would get one to suck him off while the fratty rabble applauded.
Naturally the bands used the concourse kids’ bus as the party salon, keeping the riffraff off their own buses. There I touched a set of fake tits for the first time.
Off-duty stripper: “I just got them!”
Me, taking them in my hands: They’re so FAKE!
I ended up in an irritating threesome with her and one of the concourse kids, a guy with a pharaoh’s beard and gigantic raver pants. He ate her out while I kissed her, and she made out with me, dully. Then we switched. I was better at eating her pussy than the other guy; she kissed him passionately, thrilled.
The headlining band had a reputation of self-righteous sobriety. The strongest item on their rider was a package of Pixy Stix, which they would rip open, downing the baby-blue powder in one gulp, while laughing at us as we stumbled, wasted, from our dressing room.
Their