The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [55]
Now I was in a constant state of shivering rage.
Stanley Ray brought us up to a meeting at the record company offices in Rockefeller Center. Our manager was there.
“Before we continue with this, Doughty,” said the manager, “we want to be clear that you want to be a part of this.”
“Things are really good, and you don’t care, it’s like you want to be a problem,” said Stanley Ray. “You can’t be unhappy. I’m the one who’s allowed to be unhappy.” He actually said this.
“Don’t be stupid, G,” said the drummer, “you don’t know how good you have it. We don’t want to hear you complain anymore.”
The other two band guys glared at me with their arms crossed.
I stood up, wobbling. Tears were coming on. I couldn’t break down in front of these hateful people. I stumbled towards the door. Stanley Ray followed me. “You can’t leave,” he said, urgently, kind of bug-eyed.
I went to the bathroom, got in a stall, and let the sobs out. It was a marble bathroom; the sobs pinged off the marble at outrageous volume. I heard somebody come in. I didn’t want, like, the new guy in the marketing department, or whoever it was, to hear me. So I pulled the sob in, and gulped it down, and my eyes went dead. I sat through the rest of the meeting, waxen, lifeless.
So here I was in this universe where I was the problem; I was the devil’s asshole at the center of Hell. Stanley Ray, the manager, Encyclopedia Brown, even the roadies, were, like, What the fuck is wrong with Doughty? Why can’t Doughty just get it together? Wouldn’t everything be fine if Doughty just chilled the fuck out?
None of these guys considered that, maybe, if I called it a day, maybe they’d be out of a job. It didn’t occur to me, either.
After that meeting, they got me to a shrink. I went up to one of those doorman buildings on the Upper West Side with shrinks in every nook on the first five floors. If you go to a certain part of the Bowery, around Delancey Street, every other building has a lighting store; there’s a part of Hell’s Kitchen that’s all wholesale gardening supplies; there’s an area on Broadway around Twentieth Street filled with stores selling hair for weaves. As there is the lamp district, the flower district, and the wig district, so there is the shrink district.
I mentioned casually, within the first fifteen minutes, that I smoked weed: not problematically, I just needed it to make music and have sex.
“Oh,” she said. “There’s twelve-step meetings down on St. Mark’s Place. You might be interested in what goes on there.”
What? What the fuck? Is this what shrinks do, just immediately assume anybody into drugs is an addict? Recommend the corny self-help jive without the slightest understanding of your nuances?
I kept showing up for therapy, even as I was becoming ever more disconnected to my life. She’d ask me what was going on, and I’d say, Nothing. Oh, wait, tomorrow I’m flying out to go on tour for a couple months.
“Tomorrow?! Where are you going?!”
I don’t know.
“You don’t know?”
No, I’m getting picked up at one, and then I’m flying to—um—Arizona? I think.
“Where do you go after Arizona?”
I don’t know.
“You really don’t know?”
No.
I was waking up in the morning, trying to figure out where to get coffee; I’d lie in bed until the late afternoon, unable to decide.
I forgot how to take out the trash. A city of trash grew around the wastebasket, empty bags of Chinese delivery food that I used as supplemental garbage receptacles. They surrounded the trash can, five bags deep.
How do people do this? I thought. How do people take out the garbage?
My shrink got out of her chair and sat on the floor. “I’m a bag of Chinese food,” she said. “What am I trying to tell you?”
I laughed. She persisted.
“Talk to me, I’m the Chinese food, what am I saying?”
They sent me to the shrink because they figured that, naturally, she’d go, How can this guy not realize what a fantastic band he’s in? Why would he ruin everybody’s fun? Let’s cheer him up and set him right.
She did nothing of the sort.