The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [75]
When the rock legend arrived, I stumbled up and told him who sent me. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of fax paper; on it was a few lines from a Sufi poem:
Look to this day, for it is life!
The very life of life
The paper had gotten stuck in the fax machine; the remaining lines were distended like phantoms, illegible.
Somebody snapped a picture. It was in the paper the next week, with other photos of the event: the rock legend, handing me a poem, the very moment I met him.
His interview was hilarious. A story about being thrown in jail in Memphis. “I was dressed like Liza Minnelli at the time.” A story about stalking Janis Joplin, stealing a Pepsi can she drank from at the Pink Teacup, which he used as an ashtray; how he obsessed over her like gay guys stereotypically obsess over Judy Garland. A story about standing next to Jim Morrison in Max’s Kansas City: Morrison drank a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in three guzzles and said, “Takes the edge off the acid.” A story about being up for three days doing coke with David Bowie—“He was giving me the stink-eye!”—and discovering that his nose had bled all over his face and soaked his shirt. A story about tripping so severely at Altamont that he didn’t know anything weird went down. A story about seeing Led Zeppelin play at the Central Park Zoo—“I thought they were a joke!” (surely he’s the last of the late-’70s hipsters to have regarded Led Zeppelin as a crass enterprise)—and his distaste for the Beatles—“You’d get beaten up if you listened to that in my neighborhood.”
The interviews went long, and the two acts that stuck around—me and a neo-hair-metal band in pink leather—played to ten people. The singer from Spacehog was there with Liv Tyler, as well as a renowned ’70s groupie who walked around the Bowery Ballroom shoving her fantastic tits into rock dudes’ backs, then smirking salaciously when they turned around. I made snide jokes at Ms. Tyler and the Spacehog guy, because I was an envious, sneering, bitter fuck.
I went to the bar afterwards for a Coke. They gave me a huge glass with the straw’s wrapper curled gaily above the lip, like a flag, declaring, This man isn’t drinking, there’s something wrong with him. I met a redheaded girl whom I had seen in the crowd lip-synching my songs. She pretended she’d never heard my music before, gave me her number, asked if I wanted to come out to Bay Ridge next week and watch the series finale of Beverly Hills 90210? It just so happens I used to write a 90210-summation-blog called Peach Pit Babylon, I told her, pretending like she didn’t know this, and she pretended to be surprised. She left, and I met another girl who said she’d flown in from Denver, and would I like to take her back to my apartment and fuck her? Yes. We went to my place, a fetid disaster of a drunk’s burrow; she pushed me onto the bare mattress and rode me. I’m going to come, I said, within a minute. “Don’t look at my tits, and just breathe through it,” she said.
I came instantly.
Something lingered after she split. Guilt? Loneliness? Embarrassment? I couldn’t tell. I was used to crushing that stuff with something. Without mitigating substances, sex involved feelings.
(I saw a parody of Mad Men on Sesame Street: Muppets in suits, in a conference room, enacted emotions: “We’re mad! We’re mad men! Now we’re glad—glad men! Now we’re sad men!” I needed this; I had a toddler’s emotional-identification skills.)
The next day I went to the Upper West Side. I wandered into the meeting late, blundering my way through rows of people. I sat down in the first empty plastic chair I found. A guy sat next to me, eating an unripe banana and drinking bodega coffee. I didn’t see his face.
“How you doing?” he asked. I turned. The rock legend.
I feel like