The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [57]
Every week: I’m not gonna smoke today, I’m gonna finish the column and then I’ll get high. But every Monday I ended up with a pipe in my mouth, and the excruciating struggle to write.
I got a video camera and became obsessed with it. I started making this endless, aimless movie on tour; I’d record something for three seconds, then cut to the next arbitrary, oddly beautiful thing: a tour of randomness.
I was in Amsterdam, and I spent the day videotaping Dutch snippets, then took a break to get stoned. I went to a coffee shop called GOA, where I flirted with the bespectacled bartendress. As is de rigueur for arty Americans in Europe, I tried to bond with her by ridiculing Americans. I smoked some weed—purple-threaded, sparkly-crystal-dusted—and fell into paranoia, and then I was unable to speak to the cute bartendress anymore.
There was a guy sitting alone in the corner of the coffee shop with a bong. He looked to me like an American who had come to Amsterdam on vacation to get high for a week or two. He took bong hits and lolled back in his chair. A Portishead record was playing, and every time a chorus soared, he pumped his fist in the air, oblivious to those around him, anguished joy on his face.
I went videotaping in the red light district. All the whores sit on stools, behind glass doors, in gaudy pink light. You knock on the glass to see what the price is, and the whores age fifteen years immediately upon opening the door. I was shooting the empty windows, making an elegiac reel of empty stools sitting in pink-lit doorways, meaning the whore was in the back with a client.
I wandered the endless alleys, door after door. You could select a woman of any possible combination of attributes—a plump redhead? A skinny Latina? A tattooed black woman? How weird to think that, if I wanted to buy sex, I’d have to decide on my type. It was like the Strand bookstore in New York, where the shelves are so numerous that you shouldn’t go if you’re looking for something specifically, but rather in the hope you’ll stumble on something unexpectedly. Otherwise, you’d be cursed to wander the aisles forever.
So I kept videotaping the empty glass booths. “Hey!” I heard a voice behind me. I turned to find a gigantic black woman glaring at me.
“Are you crazy?”she said.
I blinked. Then I said: Yes. I am crazy.
“Give me camera,” she said through gritted teeth.
No, no, I’m not shooting people, just the doorways—no people.
“Give me camera.”
No, please, look, I said, flipping the viewscreen around. I played the footage back. Empty doorway after empty doorway.
See? I said. No people.
She laughed a forced laugh. “Huh!” she said. “Maybe you want to take picture of some of this now, right?” She squeezed her tits together with a vicious look on her face.
Sure, I said, and raised the camera.
She glared confusedly. Then she spun around and marched away.
I was walking around Chicago, taking minuscule videos of architectural details, when I dropped the camera. It burst. Wire guts boiled out of it.
I took it to my guitar tech, J.D., back at the hotel. We sniffed iffy yellow cocaine and drank the minibar as he tinkered with it. It ended up deader than before, the metal skeleton and transistors exposed.
“What is that?” the sampler player asked when he saw it.
“That’s the yellow coke,” J.D. said.
J.D. hooked us up with better cocaine; he knew a guy who knew the guy that was allegedly Metallica’s coke hookup. “He said ask for the ’80s stuff !” J.D. reported gleefully.
I stayed up all night sniffing it after a gig in Texas. Each of my bandmates peeled away, one by one, until it was just me sitting there, packing my face with cocaine. I made myself stop as the sun came up, and took an aching walk around the lake. I went to the airport shaking slightly, in growling pain, as the coke worked its way out.
“I can’t believe you made it all day without doing more,” said an astonished