The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [8]
We, the adults in authority who are concerned about you, want you to know that other ways to deal with emotional pain certainly won’t provide the sudden cure that a noseful of drugs will. They take more time, more effort, and you may be extremely discouraged along the way. But they may be worth it, especially considering that drugs can be a form of suicide.
I took acid on Halloween, and I ended up in my room with this black kid I barely knew, who had painted his face white to look like the moon. The acid came on stronger and stronger and I became deathly afraid of the moon-faced man: I hadn’t met many black people in my life, and the face paint seemed to be bubbling on his cheeks. He left. A roommate gave me a giant rubber band to play with; I tangled myself in it for a few hours. Then I became seized with an idea: the universe was a fabric. Everything was a fabric. My life’s key moment of enlightenment. I fumbled for a cassette recorder.
I listened to it the next day and heard this manic voice intoning, half laughingly, “The universe is a fabric. Everything. Is a fabric. A fabric. A fabric.”
So of course I realized that I had had one of those ridiculous moments one has on drugs, those embarrassing epiphanies that are really stupid and meaningless. I didn’t even remember what I meant by that.
Years later, my friend the rock legend kept hipping me to all these quasi-Buddhist, quasi-Hindu nebulous spirituality guys, as a means of grasping for a power greater than myself. One of them—and I can’t for the life of me locate the text—wrote something like: The entire universe and everything in it is kind of a fabric, where everything is stitched to everything else, and nothing is a truly independent entity.
“You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing,” Alan Watts wrote.
I had a friend named Peter Mack. Peter Mack’s version of being a punk was to dress like a middle manager, circa 1960. He wore grey suits, skinny ties, and a fedora. He actually owned a pair of jodhpurs, the kind worn by British officers of the Raj, with the weird wings sticking out by the hips. Everybody called the teachers by their first names; Peter called them Professor———and Dr.———.
Peter Mack and I would get high in his dorm room, then put on a recording of the chimes at Notre Dame. We’d blast it and yell, “THE BELLS! THE BELLS! THE BELLS!”
The next Halloween, Peter Mack and I went to a different college for their famous hallucinogen-fueled Halloween shindig. We took acid. We got separated. He got into what he thought was a bathroom line, and kept following it, his mind zooming every which way at once. Suddenly he found himself on a stage, in a spotlight, and a guy in a vampire costume thrust a mic in his face.
“So what are you supposed to be?”
Peter Mack paused. “I’m an art fag,” he said.
The crowd erupted with cheers, and Peter Mack won the Halloween costume contest.
I got a funny haircut—a semi-Mohawk-mullet, shaved on the sides. I dyed the floppy front part black. “You look like a queer,” my dad said to me one holiday I had come home for, as he opened a beer can.
I told people I was bisexual. I identified intensely with being gay; I felt ostracized, disparagingly feminized. I tried making out with dudes, and I didn’t dig it, but I kept trying. There was this one guy named Alfred. He was a black kid, from Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, where life couldn’t have been easy for him. “Are you bisexual? I’m bisexual, too,” he said. He was fake-bisexual in the other direction; he was gay, and was very slowly admitting it to himself. I kissed him once, and from then on he’d come knock on my dorm room door every now and then, sit on the bed, and say things like, “Have you ever