The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [99]
When I was in school, all my friends were artists. As I reached my thirties, they began to drop away; they weren’t able to make any money doing what they used to dream of doing. I feel embarrassed, not lucky: when I see them, I play up the hard part of my job—demanding travel, persistent rejection—but a claim of hardship is absurd.
People who got successful doing what they want to do tend to disbelieve in luck. Got here by working hard, we say. I did, indeed, work like a motherfucker. I credit myself, in particular, for sticking it out with Soul Coughing until I had enough of a career to go out on my own. But maybe I was just fortunate to be the right kind of insane.
A shrink friend of mine from the rooms had a good definition for fear of success. There was a poetic, elderly crank in the soap-opera-star meeting, given to wearing berets, who drank himself to death. He had relapsed repeatedly, always coming back to much affection. The story about him was that he was a brilliant painter who never caught a break. Not true, my shrink friend said. Breaks came, but he didn’t take them. If he took them, he’d cease to be an undiscovered genius and become just a very good painter.
(I’m afraid of that right now: I’ve loudly vowed to write a book for years. I’m also trying to avoid the paralysis that begins with, Now, just exactly how much better is Nabokov than me?)
Prosperous artists tsk-tsk at the talented but hapless, and almost invariably diagnose a fear of success. To acknowledge that there may be such things as fortune and flukes is terrifying.
My former bandmates turn up from time to time. Usually on old Soul Coughing internet bulletin boards. The bass player posts that I never actually had a drug problem; I made it up to be glamorous. “Ask Doughty how he wanted to be Lou Reed when he grew up,” he typed.
I did a song with the techno producer BT, using some fragments from a song I brought into Soul Coughing that never turned into anything interesting. But because there was a rudimentary recording of a Soul Coughing version of the song, they called my publisher and my lawyer and I had to pay them.
The sampler player talked to my manager. “I bet Doughty told you he was a drug addict, too,” he said.
Sometimes, when my bandmates say it—as with the songs they say I didn’t write—I’m convinced that they’re correct, I’m lying, and I have to go look at the two Post-Its that I put at the beginning of this book to convince myself that I’m not a hoax.
I never used a needle. I always had an apartment, and money. I never ran out of drugs—I was assiduous about that, because if I were to run out of drugs that would mean I had a problem. I have more than a few friends who’ve been to jail; I’ve never been arrested, except once for turnstile-jumping in the subway, and when I went to court, I was told that I was not, in fact, arrested, but detained. I have no record of bad-assery. Sometimes, this makes me feel like it doesn’t count.
(You learn something about bad-assery in the rooms: it’s not actually badass at all. Scared and pathetic people, whether with guns, or having guns pointed at them, or being thrown in jail, do not feel like badasses. They feel even more scared and pathetic than we on the outside can imagine.)
Long after the band broke up, the sampler player met Lou Reed in a studio. It turned out that Lou Reed was a Soul Coughing fan.
“Oh, thank you,” said the sampler player, “but the band was more than just me, you know.”
Someplace on the internet, the bass player was asked if there would ever be a reunion. “Not unless one of us dies,” he replied. There’s much to be said for having a life.
On good days, living is about acceptance. If I win the lottery, I’m a millionaire; if my leg gets chopped off, I’m