Read Online The Book of Drugs by Mike Doughty - Free Book Online

musicians’ recovery organization was thanked in some liner notes. For another, there was an article written by a Memphis acquaintance who said he’d found him walking around a shitty neighborhood in the rain; nonresidents mainly go to shitty neighborhoods to get drugs, but Jeff apparently wasn’t fucked up. Where there’s drugs, there’s twelve-step meetings.
    I wondered if he was aping Woyzeck when he walked into the river. I gave them my friend the director’s e-mail, maybe she’d show them the VHS tape of the show.
    I told them that on our tour together, my sampler player had put a pebble in the air tube of a tire on his bus, twisting the cap on over it; the air slowly leaked out as they drove. They were stranded on the roadside for twelve hours. They could’ve been killed. His other notable prank was re-arranging some letters on a marquee to read JEFFY O’BUCKLE .
    I told them that I thought Jeff wasn’t a songwriter; I had asked him once if he wanted some songs that I wrote and he reacted indignantly—I’d touched a nerve. Few mention the songs he wrote when they rhapsodize about him; they adore his covers of “Hallelujah” and “Lilac Wine.” I thought he just got lucky with
    â€œLast Goodbye.” In Memphis, making his final album, he was repeatedly pushed back to the drawing board by Sony; he journaled about how it made him feel cheap and crazy. The songs on the slapdash compilation of demos that Columbia released postmortem were weak, unmemorable. His enormous gift was interpretation, I told them. The problem was that the only real source
of income if you’re a major label artist is publishing—songwriter’s royalties. The label makes sure you don’t recoup; you spend more on touring than you make. You write the songs on your albums, or you’re broke.
    Walking away, I hated myself for how I pontificated. I nurtured a fear that when the movie was made, I’d be in it, cast as Jeff’s Salieri: Jeff played by some celebrated young movie star, and I a clown.
    Â 
    The place where Luke and I lived, after I broke up with Mumlow, was in the East Village at a cacophonous intersection. A hundred truck horns thundered every day at rush hour; the screen of the living room TV was filmed with a layer of exhaust soot. Our telephone number spelled out (212) CAT-BUKS.
    CAT-BUKS became the destination for everybody we went to school with who lived outside the city. In the evening, the buzzer would ring, and a few random friends would climb up the steep six flights with beer and hang out doing bong hits until they had to take the Long Island Rail Road home. “What are you doing tonight?” “I don’t know, just going over to CAT-BUKS, I guess.”
    Nobody ever brought women over.
    Luke kicked me out of CAT-BUKS. We were both slovenly post-collegiate stoners, but I was just slightly more slovenly than he was, and it drove him spittingly unhinged. The night he sat me down and told me I had to go was the last time in my life I cried, openly, in front of a man.
    I was replaced by a succession of roommates who lasted a month, two months, six months, nine months. I started arbitrarily showing up at CAT-BUKS, myself. I brought over a thumbnail-sized bag of Ketamine that I bought from a guy outside of Wetlands—I’d never had it before, and the moment the bag was in my hand
I thought the guy had ripped me off—we sniffed it, and spontaneously, did a mirthless single-file parade, room to room, around CAT-BUKS, radiating that Ketamine whoom-whoom-whoom-whoom, like aliens had seized our bodies.
    They never changed the phone book listing; it was under my name for years after I left. A French girl who was quasi-stalking me left messages on the machine. One of the replacement roommates told me, and I asked if she’d called before. “Yeah, like six times in the past four months, maybe.”
    Â 
    I started cadging