The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [94]
I was looking out the window when the power went out. The whole city suddenly went dark. A huge collective voice went AWWWWW!
The lights came back on. I could hear the city start to move around.
Then the electricity cut for a second time. Again, the entire town said, at once: AWWWWW!
On May 5, 2005—05/05/05, the fifth anniversary of my first meeting—I was serving jury duty in Manhattan. The first thing I started thinking about, perversely, was creative ways of smuggling drugs in there. A hollowed-out bagel, I considered.
I was made the chairman of a special grand jury exclusively hearing narcotics cases. There was a guy who recognized me from the old band and did a double take in amazement. My co-chair—sitting up at the head of the room, next to me, in the tall wooden Junta desk—was a girl who lived not in Manhattan but in Queens, but kept her legal address at her sister’s apartment in Harlem for an indeterminate, sketchy reason. She sat beside me, reading the African American–target-demographic porn novels of the prolific eroticist Zane, with a poised smile.
We let one guy walk. He had rolled up, in his wheelchair, to a lady cop and tried to sell her sticks of Xanax while she was handcuffing a guy. She laughingly showed him her badge and he zoomed away in the middle of St. Nicholas Avenue, hands pumping madly on his wheels, trying to throw a handful of Xanax down his gullet.
I don’t remember why we let him go. I do remember that we had to give each case a code name for reference purposes, and my dignified, porn-reading co-chair suggested we call this case “Scooter.” Upon hearing it, the assistant D.A. suppressed her giggles.
My teeth were fucked up. I had a couple years clean, and eating involved moving food around in my mouth, chewing it only on one side: dental acrobatics.
I got a tip on a sober dentist. He used to suck on his own nitrous tanks; now he fixed the teeth of dope fiends while radiating a charming benevolence. He intoned, Buddha-like, that you should take deep breaths as he sank the Novocain needle into your jaw. Leaving his office with a numb, puffy mouth and complimentary floss, you felt like you were leaving a meditation center.
But he was profane when eloquence required it. “That motherfucker’s getting ready to blow,” he said, as I lay in his chair under the light, his instrument on a molar.
I needed teeth extracted, so he sent me to a surgeon, a guy in his secret society of sober dentists, on Park Avenue. The profane Buddha-dentist wrote a prescription altering what they’d use to put me under, upping the Valium content and eliminating the opiates.
But his guy was on vacation. They put me with another guy. He examined the prescription like I was messing with his style.
“Is this what you want?” he said.
Uh, yeah, please.
“Well, OK,” he shrugged. He pulled a pad from the pocket of his blue scrubs. “Now, for afterwards, I’m gonna give you a prescription for thirty Vicodin . . . ”
No, that’s okay, no Vicodin.
He looked at me with an annoyed kind of puzzlement. “Well, I have to give you something.” He paused. “How about I write you one for five Vicodin, just in case you’re in pain?”
He’s a dentist, and I should listen to him, and after all, he’s compromising, right? I went under, the teeth got yanked, and I walked out of the place in a wooze with the prescription in my fist.
My girlfriend came over to tend to me. She was a tiny Bengali girl, a grad student at Columbia, thirteen years my junior. I wasn’t in pain, but I gulped the first pill and the wonderfulness came over me. The sleet outside was suddenly imbued with beauty and melancholy.
She went to the bodega. I lay on the couch, staring at the pill bottle.
What’s up, player? the pills said.
Spooky rockabilly played on WFMU: echoed twangs. Isn’t this stately grey day, the music, the girl who loves me, good enough without being high?
What’s up, player? the pills said.
I popped two more before she came back. I didn’t tell her. I became expansively self-revealing that night, showing her yearbook pictures and telling her sad