by Mike Doughty
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
So, this is important:
Copyright Page
For many good friends at 2nd Ls, Int. Act., and Norfsyde
Twice
You burned your life’s work
Once to start a new life
And once just to start a fire
—The Long Winters, “Be Kind to the New Girl”
So, this is important:
This is what I remember, and how I remember it—although I’ve changed some names, and amalgamated some people, and some places.
I’m certain that some people in this book remember things differently, or remember things I don’t remember. Some people probably have no recall of events that are vivid, and crucial, to me.
I’m scared not just of subjectivity, but of losing people I love.
In life, I’m meticulously honest, but my default is to feel like a fraud. I walk through customs thinking I’ll get busted for drugs I’m not carrying. I walk out of stores afraid to be caught with things I haven’t stolen. So, of course, I’m terrified of a common scenario: a memoirist is dogged, exposed, and denounced.
I’m telling my memories with scrupulous precision, while scared that the mind is unreliable. Maybe every person on the planet is equally susceptible to errors and contortions of remembrance—whether or not they consider their minds to be suspect. Does that make memory itself an act of imagination?
I wrote my ideas on Post-It notes and stuck them on the wall by the desk. Lyrics, ideas for poems, ideas for newspaper pieces, preposterous diagrams for joysticks and wired-up boxing gloves that would work as sound-effects triggers. These are two notes I left for myself in November 1999:
I’m mostly writing drug stories. I have them. People read them.
I know a famous actor who was a regular on Page Six, going in and out of nightclubs, in the heyday of the Hilton sisters and the Olsen twins. He struggled with cocaine and painkillers but was embarrassed to talk about it. “Addiction stories are clichéd,” he said.
You’re a storyteller, I told him. You know how few essential stories there are. This one is new, how often does that happen? It’s up there with Boy Meets Girl Boy Loses Girl, Man Challenges the Gods and Is Punished, Rags to Riches. Joking cynically with friends, I’ve called this book a JADN: just another drug narrative. We, the addicts, keep writing them, but nearly everything we have to say has already been expressed just in the title of Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story.
I can’t renounce drugs. I love drugs. I’d never trade the part of my life when the drugs worked, though the bulk of the time I spent getting high, they weren’t doing shit for me. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t do the drugs first. This part of my life—even minus the bursts of euphoria—is better, sexier, happier, more poetic, more romantic, grander.
And if heroin still made me feel like I did the first time, and kept making me that way forever—kept working—I might’ve quite happily accepted a desolate, marginal life and death.
I’ve heard from so many people who got clean, then went out and got wasted again, that, bewilderingly, they were exactly at the same place they were when they left off, immediately. It’s just the bizarreness of addiction, which waits patiently, no matter how long you go without drugs. Who knows, maybe I am, in fact, unlike the aforementioned relapsers, but I have no desire to try the drugs again, and see if things go differently. I don’t want to test this life’s durability.
None of this guarantees I won’t go out and get fucked up. It happens, often to people who’ve made enthusiastic public declarations of recovery. I watch Celebrity Rehab and think: My people!
Caroline Knapp, it bears mentioning, was also addicted to nicotine, and died of lung cancer.
I loathe myself in a lot of these stories. I feel compelled to tell you now that eventually I turn into a kind, loving person who struggles to live the first line in Saint Francis’s prayer: “Make me a channel of your peace.” Not to demand peace, but to transmit it.
Maybe that’s not what you’re interested in—maybe you want salacious tales of the debased guy: the cleaned-up guy is intolerably corny. Maybe you just want to read drugs heroin heroin drugs over and over again. When I was getting high, that’s what I read these books for.
My dad’s dad was the town drunk in Tullos, Louisiana. In the mid-1950s, when everybody else’s family had gotten a car, my dad’s family still had a horse. Because the horse knew how to get home. My grandfather would get wasted at the bar, slump on the horse when his money was gone, and the horse would take him home.
He lost their house in a card game—I mean, he literally lost their house in a card game. He came home and said, get up, everybody, we have to leave.
My dad got into West Point. When he came back on vacations, his dad made him go to the bar with him in uniform so he could show him off, which my dad hated. He went to Vietnam, where he served as an adviser to a South Vietnamese tank unit, not with an American unit, possibly because the officers doing the assigning disliked him: he was too uptight, too intense.
I spoke to my dad about Vietnam just once when I was a kid.
Dad, what’s that citation from the South Vietnamese government that’s hanging on the wall of your study?
“Well, we were at———, and we were surrounded by———of them, and there were only———of us.”
So, it was a battle?
“It was a battle.”
Did you win?
“No,” said my dad. “But we killed a lot of them.”
He was interviewed by the New York Times in 2000, about how the war’s legacy is taught at West Point—a salient point, being that the Vietnamese were so fanatical, or so patriotic, that they leaped heedlessly, or courageously, into death.
“Lord, I saw them die by the hundreds,” my dad told the Times reporter.
I think what he saw in Vietnam amplified, demonically, what he learned as a child: terrible things could happen, unexpectedly, at any time. His became a life of hypervigilance. He tightened like a fist.
He drank beer at night and on weekends. I don’t remember him drunk—not in the way he told me my grandfather was drunk—but on the weekend, if you had done something wrong—(failed Algebra, neglected to mow the lawn)—you had to tell him early. At 11 AM, he would be disappointed. At 2 PM, he would be angry. At 4 PM he would leap out of his chair, red-faced, in a rage, and whip his belt out, threatening to finally beat me the way his dad beat him.
My dad never hit me. I waited, and waited, but he never did. He reminded me often how lucky I was; that he grew up in a house with an openly, constantly drunk father who actually beat him. I did feel lucky.
My younger brother, a matchless student who eased virtuously through school, began to have strange episodes when he went off to college. He stopped going to class, and, for reasons he found to be perfectly sensible, started sleeping only every other night. He’s brilliant, and odd; when he turned thirty, I congratulated him. He shrugged: “It’s only significant because we have a base-10 number system.”
My mom had unpredictable manias when she’d yell at you for something someone else did. “Your brother doesn’t have a plan he doesn’t have a plan he needs a plan a person needs a plan!” she screamed. OK, Mom, I’m not him, so . . . “How can you live without a plan he’s an adult he needs a plan!”
He moved home and spent his days hanging out in the garage playing chess on the internet. I gave him my old laptop when his died; he would drive his car to a riverbank and spend the day writing code on it, in antiquated computer languages like COBOL and FORTRAN. He got a job, at night, sitting in the basement of a bank counting things. She still yelled at him. “When are you going to get a job?
”
“Mom, I have a job.”
“When are you going to get a job, you little shit?!”
Eventually my brother was living in his car. It’s harder, post-9 /11, to live in your car—they won’t let you just park and sleep just anywhere, anymore. So he’d come home for interludes.
He developed delusions. He thought somebody had broken into his car and moved things around. He stayed up all night gripping a kitchen knife, believing people were coming for him. He was institutionalized and medicated, then got out, didn’t take his meds, went back home, went out and lived in his car again, went back home, etc. He seemed better off when he was homeless.
I see my brother as the guy I should’ve been. I have the same disorder: I down four pills every morning to stay rational. But he’s the guy whose illness was exacerbated to the point where he became homeless and delusional. He was once the family star and I was the fuckup.
I had something he didn’t have: an obsession.
When I was eleven or twelve, I’d pull up a folding chair to the jukebox at the teen center and listen to the same songs repeatedly: “Tainted Love,” by Soft Cell, “For Those About to Rock, We Salute You,” by AC/DC, “The Stroke,” by Billy Squier. Mostly older kids came there, to play pinball and that formalist masterwork of vector-graphic arcade games, Tempest. They taunted me, I think because my intensity scared them. An adult staffer saw me pulled up so close to the jukebox that my head rested on the grille, and said, encouragingly, “There’s a piano in the other room, do you want to go play it?” What? What made her think, so mistakenly, that I actually had within me the capacity, the potential, to make music?
I lived with this desperate feeling: no access to anywhere that bands played, no friends who played guitar. When I should’ve been doing homework, I would be lip-synching to Thin Lizzy and Dio records. “You don’t think we hear you jumping around up there?!” my mom yelled. “You think you’re gonna be a rock star? Well, rots of ruck!” She liked the racist faux-Chinese put-down.
I tried to stop wanting it, but I couldn’t. As life went on, I pursued my dreams, for sure, but not in joy: I was harangued by them. I pursued them in dread.
My mom told me she’d buy me a guitar if I got on the honor roll. So I did—by a tenth of a point, and I had to go and argue with a gym teacher for it. I got a guitar—an Aria Pro II, and a Marshall practice amp, from a guitar store in Paramus, where the Jersey-metal sales guy yelled at me for touching the instruments hanging on the wall—and returned to fuck-up-hood.
I picked up simple chords and coarse riffs here and there, and watched the British New Wave how-to show Rockschool on PBS. I invented a song every time I learned something new.
The army sent my dad to UCLA—also paying to send my mom and my infant self to California with him—after he came back from Vietnam, so he’d get a degree and return to West Point as a professor. He lived in L.A. when Joan Didion was writing screenplays there, when John Phillips and David Crosby were up in the hills chuffing mounds of cocaine. He went on to get a Ph.D. and became an authority on French history, particularly the period between World Wars I and II, and France’s failure to stop the invading Germans. He’s written books, including one called The Seeds of Disaster, which sounds to me sometimes like a dark joke about his sons.
He taught at West Point for a few years, was sent to Germany, where American tank divisions prowled moodily up and down the Iron Curtain, worked for a year as a speechwriter for a NATO general in Belgium, then came back to West Point and was made head of the History Department.
West Point was so orderly, it was in a chokehold: an enforced family atmosphere. Divorce was a scandalous rarity. Neighborhoods were segregated by rank, each subdivision of identical houses having its own strange name: lieutenants and their families lived in Grey Ghost, captains in New Brick, majors in Stony Lonesome, lieutenant colonels in Lee Area, colonels in Lusk. There was a tiny crescent of houses for members of the military band called Band.
This was the early ’80s. Most of the adult men had been to Vietnam; essentially, everybody’s dad. There was an undercurrent of stress and rage—sometimes barely controlled panic—which I thought was the nature of adulthood. Most of them joined the army in an America still in the glow of World War II’s victories; many of them had themselves gone to the military academy, were inculcated in West Point’s resonant motto, Duty, Honor, Country, and a host of other sacred words chiseled into the arches of the castle-like barracks and academic buildings. They came back, carrying the horrifying things they saw—having killed other people—to a country that disdained them. I subbed on a friend’s paper route and was screamed at by a man in a baby blue bathrobe for being a half hour late; I was raking the yard and a man walked by, barking, as if it were my fault, “The leaves will always win! You try, but the leaves will always win!”
There were plaques on the steps of each house with movable letters telling the name of the officer within. Most of the nameplates said something like “LTC Matthew J. Jones,” or “MAJ Simmons and Family,” or sometimes “The MacDonald Family,” which to me seemed manic in its profession of familial unity. I had a friend named Luke, whose dad was Mexican and taught Spanish to the cadets, a civilian; this gave him a certain liminal status, an outsider’s authority. Luke and I would sneak out at night and change the movable letters in the nameplates around, so they said “Captain Shit” or “Fuck My Ass.” Military police cars, painted pale green, cruised by every few minutes. We dove into bushes and behind cars, breathing fast, eyes bulging with delight at the danger.
I went to summer camp. There was an ostracized kid in my cabin called Jumpin’ Josh MacIntosh. He wanted to be a comedian, and he told weirdly pointless stories meant to be jokes: his sister’s bike hit a twig and she fell over the handlebars; one time he was walking to school and he was late; one time his cable TV went out. No punch lines. A cruel prank was started: whenever he told one, everybody in the cabin would burst out in fake laughter.
Jumpin’ Josh exulted.
The ruse spread. Even the first-graders were in on it. At the camp talent show, Jumpin’ Josh MacIntosh stood in front of the bonfire and told this joke:I got detention, and I was sitting alone in class after school. Somebody had drawn football goals on the blackboard. A teacher came in and said, “Did you draw those football goals?” And I said, “No, I didn’t draw those football goals.” [In falsetto] “I think you did! I think you did! I think you did draw those football goals!”
A hundred kids broke out in fake hysterics. The camp director stood horrified. Jumpin’ Josh MacIntosh walked off, and we chanted, JUMPIN’ JOSH! JUMPIN’ JOSH! He came back and told another. The fake laughter doubled in intensity. The camp director walked up as Jumpin’ Josh started another, turned to us with a glare and said, “That’s enough!” He put his arm around Josh and said, “Let’s go; come on, Josh, let’s go.” Jumpin’ Josh MacIntosh burst into tears in front of the entire camp, struggling to pull away from the camp director, squawking, “But they want me!”
My parents expressed vicious grudges against each other openly, daily. We listened to them yowl at each other, and as years of shrieking fights passed, my terror that they’d divorce turned into Will you please, please just get divorced?
Much of the terror and the anger was focused on me. I was a fuckup for sure, but that’s not why. It was because the awfulness needed a place to go.
My mom screamed at me until I broke down in tears. My dad would pass by, get a beer from the fridge, glare at me, and then walk back to his TV. I made a couple of pitiable suicide attempts. I tied a guitar cable to a shower curtain rod and jumped off the side of the tub, bringing the shower curtain crashing down; I chugged a bottle of completely benign medication. Instead of taking me to the hospital, my dad made me stick my fingers down my throat to puke it up. He didn’t want to become the officer whose kid tried to kill himself.
He took me to a military shrink—all of our doctors were military, free to us because we were an army
family—and loudly filled out my questionnaire at the nurse’s desk. “Drug use? No. Homosexual behavior? No.”
The military shrink told me my problem was that my parents were pushing my buttons.
I thought this was how it was everywhere. I thought everyone feared and hated their parents like I did. I saw TV shows with teenaged kids who behaved affectionately, and thought: How weird that our society feels compelled to pretend that children love their parents. In the 2000s, after being demolished by a pitiless rant from my mom about what my brother was doing, I removed myself from my family. I told them not to call unless somebody was ill. My mom called anyway, and again yelled about something going on in somebody else’s life. I changed my number.
My mom found me on Facebook seven years later. My parents have unquestionably changed. There’s compassion there. My mom used to yell at me—as a man in his thirties!—about failing Algebra in the seventh grade, like it happened last week. In seven years, she learned how to live in the present. My parents love each other now, which is strange, nearly implausible. I have empathy for them. I know their brains a little, because I know how my brain is like theirs. We had a long talk about the grief and rage of my teenage years. “But did you know we loved you, Mike?” my mom asked, pleadingly.
Yes, I said.
I lied. I didn’t want to hurt her. I saw on her face that, despite her cruelty to me as a teenager, what she remembered was loving me.
I remember my dad fixing my guitar after I dropped it on the kitchen floor and broke the headstock off. I was despondent, thinking my only hope of ever being a musician had perished. My dad meticulously applied wood glue and fashioned a brass plate to reinforce the crack. Days before, there had been some event of screaming and threatened violence and abrading blame for my nonfulfillment, but now I stood there, watching him in this very practical demonstration of love. I couldn’t make my hate and fear go away, but how could I not be grateful? I stood there, bewildered at life inside and outside of me, watching him mend the guitar neck.