The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [76]
“That’s gooooood,” he said. His smile glowing.
After the meeting, I followed him around like a puppy as he received people; he was like the mayor. I stood there feeling dumb and ugly.
He took me to the park and told me, in his fantastically gravelly Staten Island accent, the twelve-step creation myth. Grinning, he spoke of revered figures in twelve-step history as “drunks” and “degenerates.” He told of his own drunken miseries. How could alcoholism, a behavior, be a disease? I asked him, and he told me the old parable of the jaywalker: guy’s really into jaywalking, his friends are all like, ha ha funny, then he gets hit, they figure he’s done, he does it again, this time gets both legs broke, the friends are like, whoa that’s weird, and then he does it again and they’re bewildered, and he does it again, and they abandon him, and he does it again, and he does it again.
“You can wear life like a loose garment,” the rock legend said. He was plainly serene.
I wanted what he had. I called him every day. He pontificated. I bleated complaints.
“I got two words for you,” he said. “Books.”
He buried me under a pile of them, spiritual tomes on every level of user-friendliness. Alan Watts, Thomas Merton, Autobiography of a Yogi, the Upanishads, Jorge Luis Borges’s poem “Everything and Nothing,” a loopy, ass-pocket-sized book called Metaphysical Meditations, a slim, wry volume called How to Be an Adult.
He told me that I could have an idea of something bigger than myself without narrowing into a set dogma, that I could hold entirely contradictory ideas about god—an iteration of what George Carlin mockingly called “the invisible man that lives in the sky,” some of the quasi-Buddhist quasi-Hindu stuff, some cluster of weirder notions—simultaneously, and in fact, not really understand what it was I believed in, and that this addled, playful version of god-consciousness could be genuinely useful.
“If we had true knowledge of the cosmos, our skulls would burst,” he said. “You’re like a flea contemplating the Empire State Building.”
He lived in a weird time warp in regard to the New York City subway system. There’s a certain brand of lifetime New Yorker who refers to the 4, 5, 6 trains as the IRT and the B, D, F as the BMT, after their names when the subways were operated by independent companies. He was beyond even that. I invited him somewhere. “What train?” he asked. The F. “No way I’m taking that! The broken wicker chairs, the straps banging against the windows . . . ” Um, that’s the way the F train was in the early ’70s.
He quoted Saint Francis and Casey Stengel. He was given to non sequiturs.
“Do you ever see some degenerate passed out in a doorway and think, ‘I could do that’?”
“I shot dope when I was sixteen. My mom thought I was sick and made me chamomile tea.”
We were sitting at a picnic table in the park, in midwinter, eating sandwiches. Suddenly he said, “Did I ever tell you about the time I made Buddy Hackett cry?”
You never heard anybody’s last name in the rooms, so there was nickname upon nickname: Larry T., Larry C., Larry G., Quaalude Wayne, Howdy Wayne, Jersey Dave, Miracle Dave, What’s-Cookin’ Dave, Weepy Rita, Dave the Magic Man, Bill the Wizard, X-man, Todd the Painter, Pool-hall Ria, Big Anthony, Hardcore Tommy, Stick-and-Stay Scott, Mikey Bagels, Scottish Craig, Ian the Goat-Sacrificer, Rocker Mike, Ed the Buddha, Nine-Year Bobby, Five-Year Bobby, and Fucking Chris, who would say, “I hate it when they call me Fucking Chris, I don’t want to curse, I’m not going to fucking curse anymore.”
(I know three people named Barclay in the rooms. Two men, one woman. Three people named Barclay.)
There was this one guy, a gangly, sinewy guy, maybe my age, who came to meetings on a blazing chrome bike with handlebars so high he dangled from it, like a medieval prisoner. He wore a silver helmet with a row of Germanic spikes lined front to back. He had about a year clean. It seemed incredible to me that somebody could put down drugs for a year. If a guy like this