The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [74]
I met a guy named Leon, who knew the moment he looked at me that this was my first meeting. He gave me his number and a meeting list, and told me to call him the next day. I went to a diner and sat in the window, amazed to feel hopeful. I found another meeting to go to, late night, far on the West Side.
There was a deranged man in headphones dancing obliviously in the middle of the room; somebody shooed him away. Homeless guys slept in the back. There were two glamorous women, dazzlingly made up, in dresses and heels. Two men spoke: the first talked about how he had spent his life fantasizing about having a farm to grow his own weed and mushrooms, but then, bafflingly to him, had become a crack addict. The second guy had recently been homeless and had worked as a gravedigger before his life went haywire. His story went like this: “I went back to the shed and had a couple of belts. Then I went back to digging the grave. Then I went back to the shed, and had a couple of belts. Then I went back to digging the grave. Then I went back to the shed . . . ”
Back at my apartment, I put the beer in front of my neighbor’s door and went to the roof. I pitched the bottle of Valium; it arced upward, barely missed the streetlight on its way down, and exploded dramatically in the intersection, whereupon it was run over by a taxi.
It was the fifth of May—Cinco de Mayo. The day the Mexicans defeated the French. In the years to follow, I would think of Cinco de Mayo as my day of surrender. The beer industry celebrates the anniversary every year with commercials about boozing up on Mexican beaches.
That night in Pittsburgh when I almost drank the bottles of piss, I had gone drunkenly online and bought a ticket to Laos, adjacent to the Golden Triangle: you know, the place where they make the heroin.
In the reading they did at the top of the first meeting I’d ever gone to, there was a part that went something like, “If you’re new, we suggest you make ninety meetings in ninety days—if that sounds like too much, make a meeting a day and the ninety will take care of itself.” My addled mind didn’t hear that as, Go to a meeting every day for three months—I heard it as if you could do ten meetings a day for nine days and you’re set. I’ll make forty-five meetings this month, I thought, go to Laos, then come back and do the latter half.
I told Leon the plan. He did not tell me it was insanely dumb. Instead, he took me to his apartment on Duane Street, rummaged around, found a photocopied guide to meetings all over the world, and copied out for me a phone number in the Laotian capital, Vientiane.
If the rooms were about people shaking a finger in my face, telling me what I must and must not do, maybe I wouldn’t have stayed clean. I know some people who were told rigidly what to do, but that wasn’t my experience. The people I met must’ve been experienced in defiance—what addict isn’t? I was chock-full of terrible ideas. Nobody told me they were terrible. Somehow they disarmed me, and I dropped them.
Two days clean, I had this weird show to do; a symposium on New York musical history, thrown by the New York Press. A bunch of éminences grises were to do onstage interviews, and then a few locals would play.
I called Leon in a panic. How did I do this, in a bar, not drinking? He told me that somebody he knew was one of the guests. Who? He said the name of a rock legend, the singer of a band that more or less invented both punk and glam rock at the same time in the ’70s. Wait. Who? Really?
I went to a meeting in the West Village, on Perry Street, a clubhouse that held meetings around the clock. It was an undecorated storefront surrounded by spendy bistros. The interior was painted pink. The guy who spoke was an actor; he’d just played a drunken hobo on a cop show. “It’s amazing what the Russians can do with a potato,” was one of his lines, delivered while gazing admiringly at a vodka bottle.
I walked all the way across town, past NYU, through SoHo, through Chinatown, to the Bowery Ballroom. My editor, Strausbaugh, was out front, taking