The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [84]
There were songs in which I was speaking to a beautiful woman, listing all the reasons she’d be better off not loving me. I didn’t mean to be arch, or sardonic. This was just how I felt. The songs just fell out that way.
The new crowd grew from curious to fanatical. I’d start songs—new songs, songs that weren’t on albums yet—and within two seconds they’d recognize it and whoop. (“No offense intended,” said an amazed acquaintance, “but to me, your songs are kind of similar.” None taken. The guy was right. Happily, the four songs I repeatedly write are my favorite four songs, and, seemingly, some audience members’, too.) People asked me to sign their arms and then had the signature tattooed. I did a live recording; people yell out the between-song jokes at me.
I got stalkers. There was a woman who wrote me long e-mails to the fan-mail address on my website as if I had always been her boyfriend: I can’t wait until you come home, we’ll go to _______for dinner, go play cards at _________’s house, we’ll make love by the fireplace. There was a girl who got my phone number and would leave interminable messages, sometimes professing love, sometimes screaming at me for something imaginary I’d done to her brother. There was a girl I saw by the back door of a club in Philly. She was standing with a bunch of other fans, who were getting stuff signed. Do you want me to sign something? I asked. She stared at me, stunned. What is it? “Don’t you remember all those e-mails you wrote me?” What? No—what did I say in them? “All kinds of wonderful things,” she said. As is my pattern with crazy people, I thought it must be me: I wondered if I really had sent her e-mails and had forgotten about it. There were two stalkers from Maryland: one was a gorgeous nineteen-year-old with an unnerving look in her eye who looked like a Playboy model circa 1963. She showed up at gigs hundreds of miles away and then said she had nowhere to stay, could she stay with me? There’s a mountain of a blonde woman who drives a dump truck in Baltimore. She’s got my signature and the art from my first solo record tattooed on her massively flabby right arm. She writes e-mails asking if I want to meet for lunch, then, when I don’t respond, pleads: “I don’t understand, what have I done, why don’t you want to be friends with me?” She offers to buy me expensive gifts. She would hug me after the shows, her body twice the size of mine, and squeeze the air out of me. I had to struggle to get loose. She drives long distances, too, and stands in the center of the front row, never looking at me but glowering at the floor, lost in some distressing reverie.
I played a gig in Rochester with this miniature Scottish singer-songwriter. He entered the dressing room and said, in a Scots burr, “We’ll get along fine if ye’ll drrrrink with me!”
Uh, actually I don’t.
“Oh, then do ye smoke weed?”
Nope.
He looked kind of scared. “Are ye in the prrrogram?”
We drove to Philly together the next day. He spent the whole drive making unsolicited excuses. “I trrrried cocaine once and I didn’t like it. I don’t drrrrink before shows, I don’t drrrink as much as my frrriends. I didn’t smoke any weed at all last Febrrruary. I’ve never done herrroin, I don’t . . . ”
The litany was ceaseless.
I asked if usually he got stoned on long drives. Yes. I pulled into a Shell station; he walked behind it and got high. We talked about other means of getting fucked up as we drove. What’s your favorite drug? Opium. Opium? Was it a squishy black lump? Yes. Did you smoke it off a piece of tinfoil? Yes.
It’s very unlikely that’s opium—it’s probably black tar heroin.
He was appalled. But haven’t you ever taken Vicodin? Percocet? That’s the same shit. I mean literally the same. In your brain, it’s exactly the same chemical—it’s morphine. It’s like saying “Well, I like gin, of course, but I’d never drink whiskey.”
On September 10, 2001, heavy clouds were over New York. I walked over to my manager’s office