The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [98]
He calls a street a “scrump.” He calls Starbucks “Whorbitron’s.” He calls cigarettes “dodecahedrons.”
If you ask something like, Do you think we can make it over the Throg’s Neck bridge before rush hour? Or, Can we stop for chicken sandwiches? He’ll answer, “We can do all things through Christ.”
Examples of Scrap utterances:
“If we were cartoon characters, don’t you think I’d be a moth?”
“This doughnut is right in the eyes of the Lord.”
Upon being asked what he’s doing: “I’m just learnin’ about my body.”
“You can turn a spider into food, but you can’t turn food into a spider.”
While driving: “That guy yielded! If he needed a mechanical pencil, I’d be like, Hey, take mine.”
“There might be people here that look like Steven Spielberg. I don’t know much about Connecticut, but I know that.”
“If a unicorn is more than a pentacorn, maybe they just call it a multicorn.”
“If this airport turned into a straight-up dance party, I’d be stoked.”
Several times daily, unpredictably, I’ll say “goddamn it!” out loud. Sometimes under my breath, sometimes audibly. Sometimes in public: on the subway, in a store. It’s because I’m flogging myself, internally, for something I’ve done: last week, two years ago, ten years ago, when I was fifteen. In my head, it’s all still in the present.
Sometimes I’ll yell out, MOTHERFUCKERS! Plural. Not that I know who the motherfuckers are.
I tried to type out a shopping list of grievances against myself to put here, and I couldn’t. Even seeing each episode as an absurd banality—how can I be angry at myself for a faux pas committed as an eight-year-old? How can I not have sympathy for myself committing shitty behavior under duress? How can I hate myself for writing some corny, contrived lyric that I didn’t even use in a song? How can I punish myself, relentlessly, for things I thought about but didn’t actually do?—I couldn’t sit through the singe of discomfort long enough to type out the incidents.
On the way out, the goddamn it! or the motherfuckers! is the voice in my head saying, How dare you _______? By the time it’s out in the air, the goddamn it boomerangs: it’s my voice, saying, Fuck you, voice in my head, for constantly torturing me for my mistakes.
My shrink told me the diagnostic term for this voice is an introject. The introject is like a malevolent district attorney, forever presenting evidence against me. Each piece of evidence goes bang! as he throws it on the table.
Just being able to know that this voice is a voice is a victory. In shrink-speak, my introject the evil D.A. is ego dystonic, rather than ego syntonic. Ego syntonic, which it used to be, means, basically, that I didn’t recognize it as a voice in my head at all; whatever ancient trespass popped into my mind, I saw it as something that occurred to me innately and reasonably.
I was driving around with Scrap. Goddamn it!
Startled him. “What’s wrong?!”
Just punishing myself for something that happened years ago that I can’t do anything about, I said.
I went up to Schenectady to see Luke in a touring production of South Pacific. I said I was writing a memoir. “Yeah, I know,” he said, glaring at me in worry and consternation. My editor—the guy editing this very book—used to play bass in a band with him.
In his prestigious grad acting school, he played the leads in all the productions: the directors didn’t operate on an elementary-school-soccer-team everyone-should-get-to-play system. He was the best. When he graduated, he went from Hamlet, and Berenger in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, to trying out for minuscule roles as Latino hoodlums: “I’ll cut you, ese!” Some of his classmates became movie stars or took iconic TV roles. He worked as a bellhop between parts in Spanish-language cable commercials. Now he does some Broadway and touring musicals. Twice, he’s been replaced by ex-contestants from American Idol.
He seems bitter. Maybe I’m projecting: it’s just my guilt for being more successful than he is (am I? I have no idea how much money he makes). We were born a week apart. One year I gave him