The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [95]
I popped the last two pills.
“Are you supposed to be doing that?”
I’m doing what the surgeon told me, I said.
I realized at some point that I had been scratching my nose for five hours straight. A terrible sign. I drifted off.
Hours later I woke in a panic. I had had a microseconds-long dream in which my tiny girlfriend turned into a jackal and was gnawing my face off.
Her eyes clicked open to find me looming.
“How are you feeling?” she said, very quietly.
I lay awake the rest of the night. In the morning the tender sleet had turned into a dismal curtain, the radio into a resentful drone. It was what life was two years before: a terrible grey grind, just an interval to suffer until the next time I got high. The desolation, two years gone, took twelve hours to come back nearly at full power.
I had to audition a drummer that day, a guy I played with in college, a jazz fusion guy who, back then, was exasperated by my elementary musical notions. Now that I was a rock star, he had this kind of nervous, forced niceness. We went through a few songs—I freaked him out by not explaining what I wanted, which is what I always do—in between, he’d ask, manically, How was that? Did you like that?
Inside, I was wretchedness itself.
I caught up with friends in the rooms. I hugged them, I told them. The day before, as I popped the first pill, I wondered if, after my medically sanctioned relapse, going back to the abstinent life would be depressing. Actually, I was deeply grateful for the reminder of what a life spent needing to stay high was actually like.
A guy who sat with me in that meeting and told me his own tale of a creepy painkiller episode passed away a few years later. He was out on Long Island, helping a friend get clean. He went surfing and was stung by a wasp, had an allergic reaction, and died. I learned about it in Cambodia: I was sitting in a restaurant with wi-fi, and my friends had posted all these videos of him. He was, I suddenly learned, a pioneer skateboarder in New York—I knew he skated, I knew he built skate parks, but he never mentioned that he was quasi-famous. Huh. Weird. Why’s everybody putting all these videos up?
Oh, no.
I had a dream a few months later, back home in New York. I went to a meeting and saw him there. “You’re not really here, are you?” I asked.
“No,” he said, smiling.
I did an interview with a punk-rock-porn-pinup website: tattooed women give the camera slatternly looks. The guy who ran the site was a fan of mine; he gave me a free lifetime membership. I parlayed my minor rock-stardom to befriend a couple of the models; I photographed one of them on my roof for the site.
I learned that when photographers say they don’t notice the naked sexiness in front of them, they’re not just telling a lie to be infuriating: I was panicked as I shot her, trying to take decent pictures. I tried hard to make her laugh; her default setting was a robotic porny face with sucked-in cheeks and lightless eyes, an unintentional lampoon of sexiness. So I made stupid jokes and imitated the barking Japanese photographer in Lost in Translation, and she laughed, goofily, with a big horsey grin.
She was missing the top part of her left ring finger, from the knuckle up. I asked her how she lost it.
“It’s a body modification,” she said.
You mean, in the same category as tattoos, piercing?
Her ex-boyfriend held her hand down while her current boyfriend whacked it off with a hammer and chisel. Afterwards, she wallowed in a pit of opiates for a year; ghost pain maddened her. She knew the finger was gone but she felt it there and it hurt.
She’d been abstinent for a year, but I felt that addict energy, that force of denial, emanating from her. I brought up the rooms with careful offhandedness. She bristled.
After the shoot, we sat at a café going through the pictures on my laptop. I begged her to not make me throw away the pictures with the horsey grin. I tried not to say that her porny-face looked un-human.
She leaned pliantly into me. I could’ve turned her around and