The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [70]
I called the drummer and told him I was quitting. “That’s OK, you can go make a solo record, and then in a year we’ll tour.”
No. I’m breaking up the band.
“That’s cool, you can do that there acoustic thing and we’ll make another record next year.”
I yelled, I’M LEAVING THE BAND.
“Yo, G,” he said, “you’re making a mistake.”
Somebody told me that he had a hard couple of years after the band split. Nobody else would put up with “Yo, G, it’s the same beat.”
I called the bass player’s voice mail and left a message saying I was out. Next, I called the sampler player. He was upstairs putting the kid to bed, his wife said. Have him call me back, I told her.
I got an e-mail from the sampler player an hour later. He said: “The bass player called right after you did and said you were quitting. I didn’t call you back because I don’t want to talk unless it’s important.”
The next day, I made the rounds, calling people to tell them before they heard it elsewhere. I pretended it was courtesy, but I was really just overjoyed to relay the news. At last. At last. At last.
I called Luke. He was cagey, said he had to go. It turned out that the bass player and the drummer were sitting in his living room, talking about what a selfish asshole I was; they were waiting for the tackle box man.
We pulled into Pittsburgh in a white Buick. When I got up to the hotel room, I opened two minibar bottles of Jack Daniel’s and poured them into a glass. I brought the glass to my face and was instantly repelled by the smell. Piss. Somebody drank the whiskey, then pissed it back into the tiny bottles.
The next day, I was wearing the DANGER!! BEWARE MINES!! t-shirt from Cambodia and suddenly realized it was way too tight. My jeans and coat, too. I realized that I’d been downing booze and drunkenly ordering mashed potatoes for months. When that angry physician who gave me the inhaler gave me a checkup in the fall, he weighed me at 135 pounds. My dope-fiend fighting weight. Skeletal. The Cambodia t-shirt rippled off me like a flag in the wind. When I weighed myself months later, I weighed 220. Assuming I was up around that weight that day in Pittsburgh, I’d gained eighty-five pounds in five months.
I was on my first solo tour in North America, with a tour manager driving me from town to town. I got drunk before the shows—onstage, I felt like I was playing the songs with a three-foot barrier of liquid between me and the world—and got drunker afterwards.
I felt so elatedly relieved that I’d finally cut the band loose, but everywhere I went, people talked to me as if someone had died. I saw my gigs as a triumphant emergence, they saw a postmortem.
One morning, driving out of Toronto, I realized my body was shaking. Having been a dope fiend, it was instantly recognizable: withdrawal. I went to a gas station looking for beer. No beer. We drove a couple hours to the border, where I bought an extra-large bottle of Jack Daniel’s at the duty-free.
For the rest of the tour I stayed as close to the drunk/not-drunk line as possible, the border between functional and shit-faced. I pissed the bed every night. I flipped the mattress before the maid came, and if we were staying somewhere for more than one night, I would throw a bottle of water on the bed, like the maid might mistake piss for spilled Evian.
As we drove to Cleveland, I said, “I think I’m an alcoholic.”
“Oh yeah, you’re an alcoholic!” the tour manager said. I expected a reaction of surprised concern. “You drank that entire bottle of Jack in four days!”
That was actually two bottles ago.
I played a basement club that night, at one of the universities: the college pub, in a student life center. A blackboard advertised that night’s student-spirit activities: “Beer, Wings, and M. Doughty.”
I awoke in piss. Then I ordered a pizza from room service. Thirty minutes later, there was a knock on the door. I stumbled up to open it and found a gay white guy in a vest and bow tie, standing next to a tiny black girl in pigtails, maybe eight years old. She held the