The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [85]
I had come up with a new chord progression, and I was messing with melodies in my head as I drove. I pulled into Northampton in the rain. I stood outside in the drizzle before the show; there was a church across the street with people standing around a back door, smoking and drinking coffee from paper cups. Clearly, a twelve-step meeting.
I was opening the shows with a Soul Coughing song, the first line of which was:
A man
Drives a plane
Into the
Chrysler building
So sick of that song, I thought. Need an excuse to stop playing it.
I fell asleep to thunder, and woke up to a brilliant day. Green leaves scraped the motel window. I turned on the TV. Ann Curry was interviewing Tracey Ullman on the Today show.
I had been clean a little more than a year, and I was still doing the thing where I woke up early every morning to watch the day come on, in love with light. I kept myself company with the TV, so I was accustomed to the rhythms of the Today show; it starts at 7 AM with hard news; the news goes until 8, when the cookbook authors show up. It was just past 7:30; that Tracey Ullman was being interviewed so early meant it was an uncommonly slow news day. Tracey Ullman, in fact, had draped her legs over the arms of her chair and batted at Ann Curry’s questions breezily. It was such a slow news day that even Tracey Ullman couldn’t plug herself in earnest.
I like news, not celebrity corn. I switched it off, mildly bummed. Reproachfully, I told myself the old Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times.
I got Starbucks; the sky was wholly blue, in a cloudless condition that happens after strong storms called “severe clear.” I drove south listening to the BBC. They said a small plane—a one-passenger plane, like a Piper Cub or something—had crashed into the World Trade Center. “Foul play is suspected,” said the Brit reading the news.
My brother called and left a message. Two planes had hit the World Trade Center, could I see them from my place? My living room window had a direct view of the towers. The Brit hadn’t said anything about a second plane. Two planes, ridiculous, I thought. Rumors are so weird.
The Brit acknowledged the second plane. “Foul play is suspected,” he said again.
The BBC sputtered and faded. I hit the seek button and landed on Howard Stern. The first tower fell. Then Howard’s signal sputtered away, and I switched to a station that had just put a feed from a local TV station on. The anchor’s vantage was exactly that of Howard Stern: sitting in a studio, looking at a monitor.
A friend called. She had a gig at the fashion shows in Bryant Park that week: her job was to scratch the bottoms of the models’ shoes with scissors, so they didn’t slip on the runway. She said the White House had been bombed.
The second tower fell. It became clear that if I drove back to New York, they wouldn’t let me in. So I drove over the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge on I-84, turned around, drove back. Howard came back on. Howard was howling. I turned again, the local anchor came back, just trying to fill up the air with authoritative anchor-ese, but clearly halfway into a freakout. He faded; back to Stern howling.
I wanted to call my parents. The cell-phone lines were jammed up, so I stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts and tremblingly asked if I could use the phone: I lived near the towers and wanted to call my family, I said. “It’s a local call, right?” said the Dunkin’ Donuts guy.
Apparently my mom, a guidance counselor, spent the day making sure none of the kids used the attacks as an excuse to skip class.
I got through to a friend who’d just gotten out of a rehab in Connecticut and was living in a small apartment near the hospital, working at a record store—she blew the mind of the record store manager, having a résumé with heavy music management companies on it but applying for a job stocking the racks in this tiny