The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [77]
There was this kind, sagacious Jamaican guy named Wayne. He grew up in the projects, the only black kid there who was into rock music. He got beat up by the kids in the projects for wearing a The Who Long Live Rock jacket, and beat up by the white kids at the school he was bused to for being black. He had sometimes bought drugs at a Harlem record store called Da Hardest Hard. (Hardest heart? “No, hard.”) I thought of his old self as Theoretical Wayne. Theoretical Wayne carried multiple knives, robbed crackheads, smoked angel dust, lived on cinnamon buns—they came in a package of two, so he’d eat one, throw the other one to the rats in the alley, whom he thought of as friends—and Nutrament, had a mom who dealt weed—her house on Long Island was once subject to a drive-by shooting. Somehow Theoretical Wayne, the dust-smoking knife-fighter, had turned into Compassionate Wayne, a guy who rode out on a motorcycle to South Dakota every summer to visit a Lakota Sioux tribe that had adopted him.
Barely a few months clean, he was asked what he wanted from recovery. “To stop the noise in my head,” he said.
One thing I kept hearing in the rooms was, “If you don’t use, you won’t get high.” But I got high all the time. I got really into getting up early in the morning to watch the light come on. I’d walk to get coffee and be stopped in my tracks when I saw the Manhattan Bridge against a pink sky, framed by tenements.
As a teenager, I scoffed at the TV stars in pastel sweaters, on the cover of People magazine, I’m-off-the-drugs-and-high-on-life! But here I was. Off the drugs and high on life.
I was awakening to what was around me, and in doing so, realized I’d had no idea just how shut off I was. One evening I had the TV on, and the weatherman said, “It was unseasonably cool today.” Yes it was! It was unseasonably cool. I was there!
I was desperately trying to figure out how to pray. I felt lucky that I’d had that romance with Sam Cooke’s gospel records—my flimsy link to the universe of faith.
I saw an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer is shanghaied into missionary duty in the South Pacific. “But I don’t even believe in Jebus!” he says. As the plane takes off, he’s told that there’s no alcohol on the island. “SAVE ME JEBUS!!” he screams.
I was leaving a meeting, feeling utterly out of focus and purposeless, and I walked around a corner and found a liquor store. I looked past the towering god-bottle of champagne, the absinthe posters with devils on them, the gallons of Georgi vodka, and found the bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Stared at it.
Save me, Jebus! I said. I laughed.
Thus began my spiritual awakening.
Every morning I poured out a stream-of-consciousness prayer into my notebook: please help me, what am I doing, help me, be with me, and on and on for pages and pages. It looks crazy when I read it back. But it was scraping the ugly veneer off myself like scratching a lottery ticket with a coin to see the number.
I felt that the Cosmos was communicating to me through my lucky number: twenty-seven. As a kid, I picked twenty-seven because I felt I ought to have a lucky number, and it was the one that sounded best when spoken and was the most interesting to me, graphically. That first year clean, I saw it on license plates, on bus-stop placards, on receipts. When I was dwelling on a depressing fantasy of relapse, or feeling hopeless, twenty-seven would appear. I was reading a guidebook for Southeast Asia, and I came to a passage that was something like, “If you want to try opium, and you’re in X town, go to N restaurant and look for one of the desperate-looking guys in grimy clothes, and . . . ” Suddenly Snoop Dogg walked onto my TV, across the set of MTV’s Total Request Live with a giant twenty-seven on his jersey. I took them as messages from the Almighty that I should feel bolstered and backed by forces beyond my comprehension.
(I did a poetry reading with a guy wearing the very same jersey and tried to bond with him