The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [6]
Before your sophomore year at the military academy, you can quit, no questions asked. After that, you owe the government five years in the army. If you flunk out, or mess up, you have to enlist as a private. Chad called his dad at the midpoint of his West Point stint, in tears, begging his dad to let him drop out, he didn’t want the car. His dad said no.
Chad Ficus came to a gig of mine twenty years later. After his service, he had become a snack food magnate. He gave me one of the warmest, most loving and kind hugs I have ever received.
There were, like, fifteen black kids, total, at my high school, but one of them owned the only sound system. DJ DRE IS ASSKICKING! was stenciled on the side of a speaker cabinet. At the dances in the cafeteria, he spun twelve-inch rap records that he got in New York; a dozen black kids danced, did the chants—“The roach! The roach! The roach is on the wall! We don’t need no Raid, let the motherfucker crawl!”—on a nearly empty dance floor, while the white kids stood at the walls. Then, a blonde cheerleader from the senior class took Luke—we were freshmen, so it was shocking, but Luke was, even by then, the star of the school musicals, Guys and Dolls, Damn Yankees, etc.—by the hand, as Kurtis Blow’s “Basketball” played, and pulled him out to dance. The white kids trickled out after them, reluctantly.
I was fourteen, listened to Judas Priest—I probably wouldn’t have danced to the music those white kids liked, anyway, Billy Idol, The Outfield, Kenny Loggins, whatever—and would have had no idea what a great rap record was, were it pitched like a throwing star and lodged in my head. It was 1984. I can’t imagine how good those records must’ve been.
(There are two lines in the song “Rapper’s Delight” that fascinate me: one is, “Guess what, America? We love you,” which has to be the only time that sentiment was expressed in a hip-hop song. The other is, “Now what you hear is not a test: I’m rapping to the beat.” Because it was necessary to say, I know you’re out there thinking, hey, that guy’s not singing, he must be just making sure the mic’s on, but, in fact, what I’m doing is called rapping to the beat. )
(Another moment in the history of rap’s emergence: Stanley Ray, whom I’ll tell you about later, went to see George Clinton in the early ’80s—Stanley Ray was flying on LSD—and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five opened. A lady behind him sputtered, “He’s just playing the record! He’s just playing the record!”)
I talked my parents into sending me to Simon’s Rock, a tiny experimental college in Massachusetts that admitted students after their sophomore year in high school. It was half kids who wanted to be in med school by age twenty and half fuckups like me who wanted to play guitar and find out what drugs were like. I talked to the admissions guy about Sartre; I told him that I also thought hell was other people. I didn’t really think hell was other people, but it was a fantastic teenage pose. I had, however, actually read the play, which wasn’t the case with most of the literary and filmic works I stole my poses from. My grades were wretched, but my precociousness quotient got me in.
(Again, the baffling ambiguity: my parents berated me nearly to suicide the same year, but they paid for this weird school in full.)
I sat at the punks’ table my first day at Simon’s Rock; everybody had a piece of their hair missing. That was the identity I was most interested in adopting. I didn’t meet orthodox punk standards. “I’m a goth, and———’s a punk, but you’re not anything,” said a girl they called Laura Morbid. I was in love with her. She had seen Pretty in Pink the summer before, and, in her head, wrote a goth Molly Ringwald script for herself; she’d have a Ducky figure, hip but geeky, chasing her, while she crossed clique lines to be with a rich kid. The rich kid turned out to be gay—not to mention deranged: he had weekly dorm-room-trashing fits—so she ended up with me. She was mean. The first snowfall came in November,