The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [78]
I started feeling connected to everything. Looking back on how earnestly I believed in the benevolent number-spirits, I wonder just how insane I was. I wish I had an ounce of that irrationality today. My irrationality took care of me.
Still, I fantasized about fleeing. I’d run home after meetings—I had the urgent business of isolating to attend to—and get online, dial up travel sites, look up fares. I set up itineraries to Tashkent or Caracas or Kolkata, luxurious travel and accommodations, fantasized about going to those places and just getting high. To lie back on a plush bed in a mysterious faraway city, and just be high. When I came to the page where you type your credit card information in, I clicked on “cancel.”
My spiritual guide Homer was succeeded by John Coltrane. I first heard his music on WBGO the day I moved to New York in 1989; when the chant of “a love supreme, a love supreme, a love supreme,” came in, I realized that I might find an entrance into jazz, which had never interested me. I read the liner notes to A Love Supreme:
During the year 1957, I experienced by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music.
There happen to be some twelve-step codes in there: “grace of God,” “spiritual awakening,” “gratitude,” “humbly asked.” Phrases used not just in the recovery books, but in the actual twelve steps. I have no idea if Coltrane was a twelve-step dude, but I clung to it.
I listened to, and got lost in, Transition, Sun Ship, Afro Blue Impressions, New Thing at Newport, Kulu Sé Mama, One Down One Up. Coltrane is beyond classification: he’s beyond jazz, he’s a spiritual force. He kept pushing, until his death in 1967, getting wilder, scarier, more powerful, more hallucinatory, more transcendent with each recording.
I saw a video of a performance he did with Eric Dolphy: first Dolphy solos, and it’s amazing; the man was a giant for sure. Then Coltrane comes in and explodes the music with the power of the ecstatic. Next to Coltrane, even a giant is just playing the saxophone.
Before the late ’50s, Coltrane was a fair-to-middling sort of workaday jazz guy. Roughly around his cited date of 1957, he got inspired. I was used to the People magazine pieces about artists getting clean and becoming blandly cheerful paragons of lite rock. Like I said, no idea if Coltrane really had a twelve-step thing going on or not, but with him in mind, I became determined to be clean and chase art.
I’m on a cocktail of pills for bipolar disorder. Briefly, when I was newly sober, I got on an antidepressant, and it helped, but I was conflicted about leaning on a drug. I thought of the old canard “Better living through chemistry” and thought that I wanted to be able to say, “I’ve achieved better chemistry through living.”
I couldn’t. I felt like an aircraft carrier was on my chest.
After much anguish and second-guessing, I went to a psychiatrist—meaning he had an M.D. and could prescribe drugs. He was a rabbinically bearded guy with a Texan accent. It took a year and a half for him to dial in a working combo—he put me on two pills, increased the dosage of one, removed another, replaced it, decreased the dosage on one, et cetera. Now I feel pretty sturdy. The drugs are a huge part of that, but so is talk therapy, the rooms, friends both of the rooms and not, songwriting, eating the occasional vegetable, moving around in sunlight. Sometimes I’m disappointed that I need a pill, but I can accept that there’s an element of my whole thing—not, by any means, the whole shebang—that’s a physical part of my body.
Personally, I think the appellation “bipolar” is a shuck. It’s a trendy diagnosis; it doesn’t even mean you oscillate between two poles anymore. That’s not uncommon—for instance, “borderline personality disorder” is still a valid