The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [56]
When I first saw the shrink, I demanded antidepressants. My shrink sent me to this guy uptown whom I loathed, but he gave me drugs. I even duped him into prescribing some Xanax. The antidepressants worked, but I lost the ability to have orgasms. It was worth the trade: for a good long moment, the crushing depression slightly eased. I could function, with the raging shake downgraded to a quieter ticking.
I got a gig writing a pseudonymous column called Dirty Sanchez for the New York Press. It was a venting of the ugly things I’d learned about the music business, an expression of self-hatred, of how cheated I felt that, in attaining my dream of rock stardom, I ended up in this horrible band of torturers and cockroaches. Mostly, though, I did it because I needed the money. Despite our putative success—playing to 2,000 people a night, selling hundreds of thousands of CDs—when I moved back to New York I wasn’t making enough money to get by in Manhattan.
It was a good time to be a satirist. The music world had gone goofy and bizarre: this was the golden era of the boy bands. I went to Times Square for an NSYNC appearance on MTV’s Total Request Live, amazed by the sound of the girls screaming. One girl would start screaming on some high-pitched note, then another would up it to a higher note, then another higher, and all the screaming girls gravitated to the same note, while some ultra-screamer in the bunch found a note even higher than that, to waver above the din. The most inspired avant-garde oratorio I ever heard.
I exulted over the triumph of choreographed fluff over angsty, earnest alternative rock. The diminishing rock stars whined about the death of realness; I always felt trivialized or ignored by them, so I dashed off column after column reveling in their self-pity.
The New York Press was started in 1988 by a guy who wrote a column called Mugger; in menacing ’80s New York, this was audacious, but in clean, peppy ’90s New York—where screaming teenage girls could gather safely in a Disney-renovated Times Square—it was an anachronism. He was a mean-spirited Republican from Long Island who grew up a Red Sox fan—to grow up a Red Sox fan on Long Island bespeaks a long career of calculated assholery. The editor was John Strausbaugh, who wrote about UFOs, maverick artists, angelically insane fringe-theorists, defiantly weird old-guard downtowners, blackface minstrelsy, and the emergence of Elvis-ism as a legitimate faith. He wrote a spellbinding allegory of alien abduction as the experience of a trout, caught, then thrown back into the lake. He coached me in the delicate art of interviewing the insane before I went out to Crown Heights to interview an old man who wrote a book listing the 223 ways to tell whether someone is possessed by demons. Strausbaugh was the heart of the thing. The joy of it was the friction between him and the incongruous Republican-ness, but most people identified the paper simply with Mugger’s gleeful repugnance.
“The New York Press? I don’t read that, who does?” said Peter Mack, sniffily. He’d grown up to own a company making video games.
I write this column called Dirty Sanchez, I said.
“YOU’RE DIRTY SANCHEZ?!” he yelped.
We had released our third album; our shows had gotten bigger, and our video was now on MTV. There was a modicum of actual fame in my life. But every Monday I had to shut the curtains in my hotel room, type up the column and e-mail it.
We had a day off in Santa Barbara. Everybody else went to the beach; I sat in a room banging out the column. It was only 800 words, and all I had to do was look up some piece of music news online—usually just grabbing it off MTV.com—and riff on it bile-fully. An hour’s work? Two hours? There was a bag of weed sitting at the edge of the desk. I told myself I wasn’t going to smoke until I had finished the column, but, of course I smoked, and then I was lingering, stoned, half-lidded, over the keys,