The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [68]
If he told me that my problem wasn’t asthma, but that I was overdosing almost daily, I didn’t hear it.
It helped, a little, when my lungs would seize up on the long trek to the bank machine. I ignored the two-pumps rule; nearly collapsed on the traffic island, I’d pump-pssht!-pump-pssht!-pump-pssht! -pump-pssht! the mist until I could almost stand upright.
The sampler player came over to pick up something. I sat in a chair, shriveled, all bones, while he rolled a joint of my weed. We smoked. I offered to tap out a line for him.
“I have things to do. I can’t do heroin,” he said, with a disdainful chuckle.
He called me later and asked me if my heroin guy could get some coke for him, and if so, could I give the guy a call?
I overdosed at Thanksgiving dinner. My parents and my brother and the family of one of my dad’s colleagues were there. Everyone said grace, and I pushed the cranberry sauce around the plate. I went into the bathroom, sniffed some dope, came back to the table, and my lungs started to close up. I pumped at the inhaler desperately, but to no avail. My brother drove me to the hospital. As I sat in the car, gagging, my dad looked at me from the doorway, unsettled, having no idea what was happening.
In the emergency room in Cornwall, I told them, genially, that I was a heroin addict. They strapped a mask to my face that emitted a spooky mist.
The last Soul Coughing show was at the Bowery Ballroom in 1999. It was a benefit for an illustrator at the New York Press who sent a prank e-mail in the guise of a more famous cartoonist, who sued.
I sniffed some dope before heading to sound check, got two cheeseburgers at McDonald’s en route, threw them up the moment I got to the dressing room. Sniffed some more before we went onstage.
In the second song, I felt my lungs spasming. My brother was stage-side, watching the show. Nearly unable to speak, I motioned him over to me, gasped that I needed my inhaler; it was in the dressing room, in my jacket. I leaned against the proscenium, struggling to breathe. Ages seemed to pass; the audience stared at me shocked and confused; I was trembling, unable to stand. The band vamped on the same groove; my brother came back with the inhaler, and I pumped the mist furiously. I finished the show, which, because it was a benefit with a bunch of bands playing, was mercifully abbreviated.
This guy kept e-mailing me about some festival in Antwerp called Die Nachten, Flemish for “the nights.” He wanted me to read poetry. The first time I read the e-mail I was high, and said sure, and after that I couldn’t get rid of him. Once he showed up backstage in Rotterdam—I walked into the dressing room, and he was just sitting there, which was infuriating.
Eventually he succeeded in confirming me. I was set up on a tiny tour that included a show in Amsterdam and Die Nachten.
I brought a couple bags of dope on the plane, sniffed them in the bathroom, and passed out in Premium Economy on Virgin Atlantic. When I landed in London to connect, I drank a beer at the first bar I came to in the airport; I puffed miserably along my way, barely able to walk. I took an insanely expensive ride all the way across town to London City Airport. I slumped in a black cab on a bright, beautiful day, through London traffic.
I was met in Antwerp by an English tour manager named Pete, an aging Yorkshire rock guy, very meek, who saw his job as making sure the band got where they needed to go, taking utterly no responsibility for anything after that. He’d done a bunch of Soul Coughing tours; once I walked onstage to find that my guitar wasn’t out there, and I ran backstage, scrambling among the road cases of all the other bands’ guitars looking for mine, and Pete just stood there, shrugging. The