The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [82]
I’m so grateful for these listeners. Maybe that’s you: I’m grateful for you.
I was playing in Vancouver in 2000, only four months after the band’s death, three months after I’d drunk my last drink. I was alone at the mic with an acoustic guitar. Some guy shouted, “Do you miss the other guys?”
No, I said. Do you?
“Yes,” he said, from somewhere in the crowd.
Ooooooh, the crowd went.
I peered out, but he didn’t reveal himself.
You should go get your money back, I said. They’re not hiding behind the curtain. They’re not coming out later.
I almost pulled out my wallet to offer a ten-dollar bill right out of my pocket.
There was much unkindness on the internet. “Doughty’s gonna end up with a gun in his mouth when he figures out the solo career isn’t going the way he thought he would,” somebody said.
“Fuck Doughty selling out,” said another. “I miss the old Doughty, who ate E’s like candy!”
I played a show in New Orleans. I was selling CDs off the front of the stage afterwards. A woman came up, grabbed my hand, held it to her breast.
“You have to get back together with your friends,” she said.
My friends, I said. Bewildering—but, of course someone who loves a band thinks it must be a roving party of merry compatriots.
I tried to sound gentle, though I felt punched in the gut. That’s not gonna happen, I said.
“But how are you going to play ‘Casiotone Nation’?” she said shrilly, as if the fact it was her favorite song meant it was an integral spoke in the universe, and she was helping me—poor, misguided man—to understand my true mission.
How am I gonna play ‘Casiotone Nation’? I’M NOT. I yelled in her face.
The look of shock on her face suggested she felt screamed at by someone she had tried to helpfully, compassionately steer in the right direction.
I was shaking as I packed my guitar, wrapped up my cables. Tipsy guy walked up.
“That was my girlfriend. She’s a dancer, she wants the beat, that’s all,” he said.
Uh-huh, I said, wanting to get the hell out of there, go somewhere to be alone.
“That was the most honest show I’ve ever seen,” he rhapsodized. “Every note you played was like magical blar blar blar et cetera et cetera.”
I have to go, I mumbled, and hotfooted towards the door.
He was suddenly furious. “BUT I’M NOT DONE COMPLIMENTING YOU,” he barked after me.
Fandom is often not altruism. Effusive praise, in these cases, isn’t meant to make you feel good, but to get something out of you. He wanted me to provide him with, appreciatively, dutifully, a gratifying encounter. So, in lionizing me, he felt he was extracting from me an unquestionable obligation.
I did a gig at a college. The next day, I plodded near-blindly around the campus, in a quest for espresso that got more daunting by the minute.
I was barely looking up from the sidewalk, lurching among students carrying books who careened, in all directions, around me.
A kid walked up in front of me and just stopped there, blocking my way. He was beaming. He started to speak.
I stopped him. “Hey, hi, uh, I can’t really talk right now, I have to . . . go do . . . uh . . . see you later . . . ” I hastened clumsily away.
Months later, I searched my name. This is a terrible thing to do to yourself if you’re lonely and hoping for munificent admiration as a balm for loneliness. You will always, always, always find something horrible. If your mind works similarly to mine, one spiteful sting will ring truer than ten pages of accolades.
I found a review of the show at that college. The gig was described shruggingly, by a student who, later in that issue, wrote an editorial about hockey. In the comments beneath the article, there was one that said, “I bumped into M. Doughty near the humanities building and he was an asshole, I’M GOING TO THROW AWAY ALL HIS ALBUMS AND I’M NEVER GOING TO GO TO HIS SHOWS AND I’M NOT GOING TO GIVE HIM ANY MONEY.”