The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [67]
I snarled at her all night. She kept trying to be nice, to have a good New Year’s. But I was intractable. Finally, she said, “Fuck it, I give up.” She pushed me towards the bathroom, where she had been sniffing dope off a random book—a coffee-table book depicting buses in Hong Kong—all night.
I sniffed some, but the Naltrexone worked, and I didn’t get high. Alas.
One day she called and said, “It’s my birthday. You forgot my birthday. You don’t want me anymore. You’re going to break up with me.”
I said, You know what? You’re right. I’m breaking up with you, right now.
“What?!” she said.
By the end of that month I wanted her back. I needed to nuzzle the back of her neck and smell her shoulders. So I went uptown and met her at a decrepit sports bar, and we got drunk.
I tried to kiss her and she pulled away. “You broke up with me on my birthday,” she said.
That was your birthday? I said.
It turned out that on her birthday, on the very day I dumped her, she went out to a bar, saw a band, and made out with the guitar player. They moved in together by the end of the weekend.
“When you broke up with me, I was stunned,” said the unsingable girl. “It came out of nowhere.”
I never asked her to come back to me again, but I was obsessed. I had disdained her, but now she had become perfect. When I got clean, the longing became more acute, partially because she was still out there in the world getting high, like my drug life had just gone on after I left it.
After I was clean, I started writing songs again: they were all about her. I didn’t realize, as I wrote them, that they were in fact lost-love songs addressed to heroin. When I met her, I realized that her beautiful, strange name would make an excellent song title. I tried and tried, but there was something maddening and elusive about it—the accent was on the wrong syllable for the melody, or the sequence of vowels was a clumsy fit on the bar. Every song I wrote for a year was either a song about her, or a song that began as a song about her. In each song there’s some three-syllable point, usually a descending three-note thing of a certain scansion, where her name was. One began with the lyric, “That girl that brought me low.” (As if it were me, not her, who got the boot!) Another was built around the name Madeline, a stand-in name. Another was called “Unsingable Name.”
Stanley Ray called me, speaking in a grave whisper. “Don’t think I don’t know exactly what you’re doing,” he said.
Uh-huh, I said. Gotta go.
That was the last time I spoke to him. Soon after that, he lost his job at Warner Bros.; a new president took charge of the label and sent him a few CDs that he, as an A&R guy, was to review. Stanley Ray found this insulting and fucked-up, refused to surrender his punk rock vainglory, and was fired.
I heard years later that he would rage about what an ingrate I was, how I had once been rad but was now an asshole, didn’t even call him when I was in L.A., that I’d used him and dropped him.
I was still showing up for therapy. It was the only thing I had to do other than write Sanchez, which provided my drug budget.
I didn’t realize how my appearance was changing; I was hollowing, greying out. I became aware that the doormen in my shrink’s office building were alert to me as I waited at the elevators; soon they would stop me and ask where I was going. I was affronted.
I sat in the high-back chair across from her; I nodded out midsentence. I awoke to find her smiling at me. “There are twelve-step meetings down on St. Mark’s Place,” she said.
What?! I said. Are you listening to me?!
I figured the messed-up state of my lungs was asthma. I never had asthma before—even when I was smoking three packs a day. Why me? I kept thinking. I still didn’t connect it to the daily two bundles of heroin.
I went to a peculiarly foul-mooded physician recommended