The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [58]
Somebody J.D. knew brought some heroin from Los Angeles. Black tar, which came wrapped in a blue party balloon. He took a pen and removed the ink cartridge, so the pen was just a plastic tube. He put the dark nugget on a piece of foil and held a flame under it as I sucked up the fumes with the pen-straw.
“Git it! Git it!” J.D. enthused as I chased the plume of smoke around the foil.
Then I turned to the coke. Very stupid. I should’ve done the coke all night and then used the dope to come down. But J.D. was so proud of his heroin—he went into loving, racist detail telling how one buys dope in Los Angeles—“A taco comes and spits it right out of his mouth!” he said—that I couldn’t deny his parental delight.
Again, the four of us sat there, taking turns on the coke. Out the window, by the pool, a woman was going down on a fratty-looking guy. He came, his body jolting. She sucked down his come maniacally until she was hurting him: he pushed her head away. Then she lay back in the lawn chair, and he went down on her.
I got out my new video camera and started taping. I held my breath as I taped, thinking that outside and three stories down they could hear me breathing.
His head bobbed up and down between her legs ineptly. He would work up momentum; she arched in the chair; you could see her twitch, getting close to the plateau before coming; then his stamina seized up, he lost control of his head and slowed down involuntarily.
Behind me—again—each of my bandmates stood up, at intervals, and left the room. I stayed up for hours, the tape rolling—he almost gets her off, he falters, he dives in again—sniffing the cocaine, holding up the camera until my wrists shook.
I got a number for a dentist from some friend of my manager’s. She ticked off a list of all the band guys who had gone to him. “He’s great with the gas,” she said.
Indeed he was. I lay back on the dentists’ chair, he strapped the little pig-nose gas-purveyor onto my face, and cranked the nitrous. He put a radio Walkman on me, tuned to a classic rock station; as the gas came on, I realized I wanted to listen to Hot 97 instead. My thumb twitched on the tuner-knob. The music became less and less recognizable as the gas was taking over; it turned the music to abstract mush.
What kind of music is this? I thought. Is it classical music? Salsa? I was intellectually thrilled that the drugs had erased genre lines, suddenly I was free of prejudice, listening to music just as it was—at last, I could hear!
The dentist snatched the headphones off me, giggling. “You’re listening to static,” he said. I had maxed the volume; the white noise blasted so loudly that he and the hygienist could hear it over the drill.
He had a sort of sniveling mien. Maybe his eagerness to give you all the gas you could want came from a need for those who passed beneath his drill to like him. He gave me a prescription for fifty Percocets.
I gulped three or four pills and logged on to AOL instant messenger. I had set the privacy settings so anybody could see I was online; the moment I was signed in, it went ding ding ding, as a dozen chat windows filled the screen. There were scary chatters who typed, in all caps, “IS THIS THE SINGER OF SOUL CAUGHING?” I ignored an all-caps guy and he went berserk. “FUCK U I HATE UR BAND U THINK UR SO GRAT U SUCK UR BAND SUX.”
Someone would type, “Hello, I saw you in my friend list but I don’t remember who you are? . . .” I knew this was a cutesy set up, that I was supposed to say, It’s me, Soul Coughing guy, and they’d go “No way, what a coincidence!” and I’d go, No, really, it’s me!
Nice try, I typed back, then hit the block button.
I wasn’t capable of going somewhere to meet actual people, so my social world was this series of random instant messenger windows. I couldn’t keep track of who was who and which window was which, so I was tossing out disjointed communications at random. I smoked a bowl, took more Percocet, and