The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [9]
I never let him. But I always let him kiss me goodnight. A soul kiss. One day we lay around spooning, cuddling each other. He nuzzled my neck. I wished somebody would’ve come in and seen us—I wanted my bisexuality proven. I also felt a strange peace, even though I was uncomfortable—I was receiving real affection from a man. I didn’t know how I yearned for a man to show love for me.
(I met one other guy who said he was bisexual. It was when I was working at a McDonald’s on a summer vacation. He had just gotten out of prison. He kept asking me if I wanted to hang out in his car and listen to Kraftwerk.)
In the room next door was this short, pig-nosed guy from Westchester who played metal guitar: he did that wheedly-wheedly-wheedly superfast Eddie Van Halen stuff—in fact, he wanted to start a band also named after his last name: Ruckman. He wore big square Cazal glasses in the style favored by members of Whodini. He had a butterfly knife, and did tricks, spinning and flipping it. “Better keep my ass turned to the wall around you,” he said, like anybody at all would want to fuck him. When he discovered weed, he became one of those guys so indebted to the profundity of stonedness that he wrote songs called, “Stoned Again,” and “Getting Stoned,” and “Get Everybody Stoned Again.”
We were sitting around, high, and I asked Ruckman the Cazals kid if I could play his guitar. He said, “Nobody touches my axe but me. My axe is like my woman.”
Somebody told me Paul Simon was sitting in the admissions office; his kid was thinking about applying. I went, shamelessly sat on the couch across from him, and bothered him for an hour. He asked me if I had a notebook; I didn’t. He chided me. He gave me a list of poets to read—the only name I remember was Seamus Heaney. He meant this list as a take-my-wisdom-and-begone thing, but I didn’t take the hint. I asked him if he’d heard the band Firehose. He hadn’t. I told him that all good songs had to be political, which is a pretty fucking brazen thing to announce to Paul Simon. He mentioned Lou Reed.
I like his work, I said.
I wrote some plays. I was desperately searching for something I wanted to be, other than a rock star. I was OK at it, so I applied to the NYU dramatic-writing program—I thought my clumsy junior-avant-garde stuff would compel them to take me in and teach me to write for sitcoms. It didn’t. Bitter at the rejection, I ended up at Lang College at the New School. I just needed to be in New York, where there was music.
I met Mumlow in an acting class. We were supposed to bring in monologues; she brought an American flag as a prop. She folded the flag deftly while doing her monologue in a Southern accent. She was clearly brilliant, but the shtick was irksome.
There was another guy in the class named Seth. He had a lazy eye. The gaze of his good eye was bracing, while the other eye shot off to the periphery. He did a monologue taken from a layman’s physics book, standing on two chairs, leaping between them, talking about the constant stream of molecules or light waves or something like that. We shared a glance of mutual annoyance at Mumlow’s flag shtick.
Mumlow’s apartment was called the universe. She called it that because her downstairs neighbor, an aged flower child, had come up to ask her to turn her music down, telling Mumlow that she knew that she created her own universe and thus the problem wasn’t really Mumlow’s loud music, it was that she created a universe wherein this music was disturbing her.
It was a studio apartment on the eleventh floor of a building overlooking Sheridan Square, bigger and cleaner than anything anybody I knew could afford. She lived alone. So she was a rich girl. Seth and I ended up at the universe doing something for the acting class: Mumlow’s energy was crazy but alluring. I wasn’t attracted to her, but her eyes were gigantic and blue.
I wrote a script in which two people sat across from each