The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [86]
We ate pizza, then hoagies, then Mexican food. Every indulgent thing we did, we joked, “It’s for the war effort!”
I actually saw the collapses, for the first time, on a small TV in a gas-station convenience store. Before that, having no idea what it looked like when massive buildings came down—or how long 110 stories actually was, measured in city blocks—I wondered if they’d fallen on my building.
I slept at her place for a few days, then drove back to the city. I was somewhat surprised to find that Avis charged me a penalty for the extra rental time.
Every lamppost, every door, nearly every flat surface, was covered with MISSING flyers: photocopied images of a smiling relative at a BBQ or a graduation. Hundreds of them, rippling in store windows, coming loose from their Scotch tape and floating gently to the street. As if these people had wandered out of the towers just before they’d fallen and were wandering around Manhattan in states of half sleep.
There were papers strewn on my roof, memorandums and printed e-mails and other business-type communications. They had fluttered out of the towers and were collecting on every roof within a half mile.
I knew that the unsingable girl worked serving drinks at a private club down by where the towers were. It was up in an office building, a place for alcoholic day traders who came to drink all day and watch the numbers ticking past on the monitors above the bar. I wondered if she’d been caught up in it. I finished that new chord progression as a song about her. “Call me back when the war is over,” went one line. “Call me back when your boyfriend’s gone.”
I went to a meeting. I buttonholed a guy and started to babble the tale of my September 11th, but his face went slack, and it was clear that the notion of hearing yet another’s person story made him weary. I met a kid with a pair of drumsticks in his pocket who’d just gotten out of a detox center on Long Island; he caught the last train into Penn Station and was wandering around in that newly clean shaky state, looking for a meeting, when he saw the towers come down. He’s still clean.
We, the addicts, were lucky to have the meetings. We had someplace to talk. We had people to be with. We had a tenuous defense against an overwhelming urge to blot it out—it seemed like everyone in the city was getting wasted. I heard a guy talk about how, upon realizing New York was under attack, he bolted from work, resolving to immediately smoke some crack—if he was going to die, what the hell, right? He’d been clean for years; he had no idea where to cop. He found a homeless dude and offered him $20 if he’d lead him to a spot. The homeless dude talked him out of it.
After a meeting, a friend and I—the friend from the fashion show—bought miniature flags on the street. Conspicuous patriotism was mostly unfamiliar to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. We kept holding our flags up to each other and saying “America” in bad redneck accents. Uh-murr-kuh. Uh-murr-kuh. Uh-murr-kuh.
I did get back to Southeast Asia when I had a year clean. I got to the last page on the travel site and clicked “purchase” instead of “cancel.”
I was alone in Phnom Penh. All I did was go to the riverside, eat Khmer pizza, read, journal, drink coffee. Normalcy was somehow easier, transposed on an exotic city.
I went to an English-speaking meeting in an internet café on a shabby lane. I walked up to a bearded white guy. “Are you a friend of Bill’s?” A code for somebody in the rooms.
He looked surprised. “I am Bill,” he said.
I got on the back of a moto-cab.
“So,” the driver said, “you like girl?”
No thanks.
“Ohhhh,” he said, “you like boy.”
I’m afraid not.
“You like dreenk?”
No.
“You like smoke opium?”
No, no.
“You like shoot gun?”
I paused.
Yeah! Yeah, I can do that!
He drove me to a place at the city’s edge. There were some Brits hanging out, drinking beer and shooting every pistol on offer. For $20, the