The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [53]
I kept sniffing the lines, and she, nervously, kept sniffing them alongside me, trying to keep up. As we were fucking, I noticed she was frowning. I came, and she ran to the bathroom, where she lay on the cool floor moaning.
What do I do if this girl dies? I thought.
No compassion.
“I’ll be OK,” she kept saying.
I went up on my roof, naked, freaked out on the E, feeling radiant under the New York sky, which had been turned green by the city’s ambient light.
When we went to Los Angeles to make our third record, I had more or less given up. In Pensacola, I’d taken recordings of the drummer, made in rehearsal, loaded them into a sampler, looped them, and wrote songs to them. In the studio, I laid the loops down as a scratch track, recorded my vocal over it, and then went back to the Magic Hotel, a place of dingy apartments around a pool—there were porn shoots in the suite next to mine—next door to the magicians’ clubhouse, the Magic Castle. The rest of the band came up with parts and recorded them to the track while I was gone. I mostly didn’t care.
I was beset with migraines, almost daily. In the midst of recording, I’d see a spot in my vision, shaped and colored like a diamond, shimmering. It gave me a psychedelic blind spot—I’d look at my hands and see fingers missing, look at myself in the mirror and the left side of my face would be blank. Over an hour or so, the diamond spot would grow, I would get blinder, eventually the whole world would look strobe lit. Then the pain and nausea came on. I spent much of the sessions lying in my dark room in the Magic Hotel, trying not to focus on the horrendous throb in my temples, popping Valiums and Ambiens. Occasionally getting up for dry heaves.
An L.A. friend took me to the Formosa, a shabby Hollywood bar left over from a ’40s heyday as a star magnet. She introduced me to a gorgeous friend; we went out for drinks, then parked her Nissan in front of the Magic Hotel and made out. The next time we were meant to go out, I had a migraine. I called her with regrets. Then the next time: the same. The third time our plans were preempted by a migraine, I didn’t even call her. I was too embarrassed. She came to the Magic Hotel and called my room; I unplugged the phone. She left a bewildered message, called the next day, called the next.
I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard, which I did every day to the studio, just to confound conventional Los Angeles behavior. I was stopped on the corner, waiting for the light, and a powder-blue pickup truck with three Mexican guys came screeching to a halt directly in front of me. “Hey, clown! Clown! You fucking clown! Ha ha, fuck you, you fucking clown!”
I turned around and saw a guy in a clown suit standing there looking embarrassed.
Stanley Ray didn’t believe in my migraines. “They’re not that bad. It’s just an excuse for you to get out of the studio,” he said.
We went out to see a band we both adored, after the session. When I walked into the club, I saw that the head of the opening act’s singer was missing. It had been blanked out in my brain by an oncoming migraine. I told Stanley Ray.
“Well, we’re already here, don’t even think I’m going to drive you home,” he said, indignantly.
I waited for an hour in front of the club for a taxi, the diamond spot in my eyes slowly growing.
Stanley Ray and I went to a comedy show at Largo, on Fairfax, every Monday night when we were in Los Angeles making the record. Patton Oswalt, David Cross, Paul F. Tompkins, Sarah Silverman, Todd Barry, all these amazing comedians playing this small room. The then-unknown Jack Black’s Tenacious D would debut at that show, alas, the week after I left California.
Stanley Ray and I got stoned before the show in the car. We were both at the point where getting high barely got us high: we just got paranoid and groggy. “Why do we do this?” said Stanley Ray. “It doesn’t make anything better. Isn’t that what addiction is, when you keep getting high, but it doesn’t do anything, and you don’t want to,