The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [79]
Actually, I find the term “maniac” to be more accurate. And fun.
Whatever it is, I can’t dispute that the rabbinically bearded guy from Texas has dialed me in. The cocktail of meds has wrought amazing relief. There aren’t any notable side effects, sexual, soporific, or otherwise. Though I sometimes feel naggingly inauthentic. As if it were cowardly to need medical help.
Leon, who had maybe fifteen years clean when I met him, relapsed. He had a cold and started using Robitussin for it, and in time he was drinking the equivalent of a six-pack a day of it. He did a circuit of different pharmacies on different days, buying only a single bottle at each stop. (If I were into cough medicine, I’d go to the same place every day and be matter-of-fact about it, a way of saying, If this was a real problem, I’d be trying to hide it.) I was sitting next to Leon at a meeting and all of a sudden he said, “Is it ridiculously hot in here or is it just me?”
It was just him. I didn’t think anything of it. Maybe he had too many layers on.
At some point he realized what was happening. Those who scoff at the concept of addiction as a disease, I have no comprehensive argument to present, but please note that he was drinking six big bottles of Robitussin daily without realizing something weird was going on.
I chased a princess around the rooms. She was a Slavic girl of noble birth, her swank family displaced by a revolution. I had no purpose, and when I saw her, I thought she might as well be it. She was thirtyish, like me; Hockney-pool-eyed, citrine-yellow-haired, ever so slightly weathered. I had fantasies of being with a thirtyish woman like this. It seemed proper. At the time when I had twenty days or so, she was approaching a couple of months.
I went to this one meeting uptown, near a studio where they shot soap operas. It was peppered with TV-handsome alcoholics, with that sheen of blazing health common to people who’ve been in recovery for a couple of years. The meeting was once populated with movie stars: it was some kind of agreed-upon movie star hang. The movie stars drifted away, leaving the B list. Eventually, the soap stars would move on, too. Years later, one would occasionally see a baffled movie star walking in, looking for his tribe.
The drama of my every day was whether or not the princess would be there. I never spoke to her; sometimes I’d be standing adjacent to a conversation between her and a mutual friend. She spoke of a glamorous life of beaches in France and jet-setting. I hoped one day she’d talk about the politics of her homeland, that I could maybe jump in and show off my brain.
I heard rumors about her—that she was a sort of concubine to a certain husky-jawed movie star, renowned for his prodigious drug intake, that she kept drifting back to him. That her strange cross-addiction was sucking off strange men, that she’d find some man in public and take him around the corner, moments after meeting him. I lamented never finding a way to be caught alone with her near a bathroom, but realized that I would’ve fallen in love with her the moment I was in her mouth.
I felt a little lowly around her, because she was a few weeks ahead of me, but that changed. I had two months, and then she relapsed, and the next time I saw her, she had five days. I had four months, she had four days. I had six months, and she had two weeks. I had ten months, and she had eight days. I saw her picture in a restaurant review: she sat at a table with other glamorous types, a drink in front of her. I saw her again: I had two years, she had a month. On it went, until I didn’t see her around anymore.
The first time I spoke at a meeting was that soap-opera-star one. I was up in front of everybody behind a table, rambling about whatever, and I got to when I was pissing the bed