by Mike Doughty
“I’m not going to tell you my name,” she said, with a tight smirk.
We sat around a coffee table, passing the joint around, but she sat at a dining table just outside the perimeter. I kept looking at her, and she looked back with that same frank, sexy regard. She cocked her head a little, as if to say, Why aren’t you taking me by the hand and walking me back to your hotel?
I was scared of the judgment of everybody in the room. I felt ludicrous. I pretended to follow the conversation, but my heart was pounding and I was desperately scheming for a way to get out of there with her. Maybe suddenly everybody would get absorbed in something, and I could escape unnoticed.
At last I said something stupid about having to leave. Stanley Ray looked at me with daggers in his eyes. He hated it when I went off with a girl. I managed to get up, walk over to the Dutch girl, whisper in her ear, and leave. Feeling burning eyes on my back.
So what’s your name? I said as we crossed a footbridge.
My head was spinning from the weed. I kept stumbling into the bike path, and I’d hear jingling bells and think, How pretty, but they were the bells on bicycles, ringing at the idiot in their way.
“I’m not going to tell you my name,” she said.
We came to our cheap hotel. I didn’t know how to say, Hey, want to come upstairs? I coughed up some topic, Did you like the show? Or, What’s up with the weird breaded cheese sticks you can buy at automats here?
“I think I will come up to your room,” she said.
We made out in the elevator, and tumbled into my room. I had her blouse off and was trying to remove the beige bra from her plump, drooping tits, fumbling with the hook. Her pale skin was constellated with dark moles. I unbuttoned her jeans and slipped my hand beneath the beige panties—What is this old-fashioned underwear doing on such a sexy girl?—and my hand grazed the soft hair on her pussy’s mound. She sat on the bed—a tiny twin bed facing a tiny television set, in a room half the size of a starlet’s closet—and pulled me down onto it. She had another joint in her purse, and we smoked it, and then I was just utterly obliterated. My tongue was puffed up, filling my mouth.
Look, I said. Tell me your name. You have to tell me your name.
“It’s ugly,” she said. “It’s Dutch, and you won’t like it.”
Dutch has a kind of mish-mish-mush-mush quality to it, punctuated with long, phlegmy, rolling consonants in the back of the throat. But how bad could it be?
“My name is Bregggggkkkkkgggggggya,” she said.
We fucked for a long time, an hour or more. I got that oceanic feeling of being extremely high; she became just a notion of femaleness. My cock was barely hard. It kept slipping out of her. Finally I came inside her, risk be damned.
I was staring at the ceiling, following the floaters in the liquid of my eyes, and she was talking. And kept talking. She went into a long and dull description of a dream.
“Don’t you think that’s funny?” she said. “I find this dream to be very funny.”
I mumbled something, but I was entirely disinterested.
The sampler player caught a semipermanent fake Dutch accent with which he spoke to everybody he met in Europe, haltingly describing mundane things as if they were American phenomena. “In my country? We have? Something which is called? Cable television? We have? Many channels? And some of them? Show what are called? Music videos?”
I fell in love with a picture of a singer named Dusha Arangu, from a second-string British band, in Spin magazine. She looked like an alien, with long arms and huge black eyes. Her brown skin looked silver in black-and-white photographs. I wrangled a chance to meet her, and sometimes when her band would tour through New York I’d see her.
She had a night off and was staying at a hotel up on Lexington Avenue. It was one of those faceless, beige hotels. I went up to her room; she was lying on her bed. Her shirt rode up, and I could see a sliver of her back above the belt loops of her jeans. I asked her if she wanted to go downtown and eat, see some of the actual New York, but the idea unnerved her—New York’s storied scariness? Distrust of me?
Suddenly Dusha Arangu was talking about how she needed a shag, really that’s all she needed was a shag, a shag would mitigate her blues, sometimes you just really need a shag, you know?
I rolled up a joint and we smoked. I brought the weed because I thought we might have sex. I could shake off reality and be there. Why fuck a goddess not-stoned?
That’s probably just a part of it. There’s something about me that when I experience an intense feeling, any feeling, good or bad, I have to do something to mitigate it. I have an innate urge to smother exhilaration with medicine. Were I to get a phone call right now saying that I had hit the Lotto, I would immediately need to eat a gallon of sorbet and drink four cups of coffee.
The weed gnawed my confidence. Is that what she meant, shagging me? That’s what she meant. But how could she mean that? Look at yourself, Doughty: like somebody could want you? I was saying all the wrong things as fast as I could say them, and then trying to backpedal and saying more wrong things, and I could have flopped onto the wide beige bedspread and kissed her—probably I’d have missed her face on the first two passes, that’s how high I was—but I stayed in the chair, and when the long silences had erased any trace of a vibe in that hotel room, she suggested we go out to eat with her manager.
I ate tasteless Tom Kha in a nondescript Thai restaurant. I tried not to look at her. Baffled that I didn’t make a move. Thinking that the waitress, the manager, every person in the place was thinking, “Look at this creature. We hate him.”
Dusha and I stayed in touch with biennial e-mails for a while; in the last one, she joked about the record company dropping her band. “I’ve discovered what I was put on this Earth to do, and nobody’s trying to help me do it!” she wrote, cheerfully irate. I knew that her band was neither good nor famous enough to survive the cultural sea change. It terrified me.
There was a lull as I typed this, during which I clicked from the word processor over to the browser, and typed her name into one of the social-networking sites: I found five Dashu Garangas, a Shusha Malangu, and a Dasu Ashangu.
I fucked somebody every time I got the chance. The sheer range of women I slept with on tour is striking to me, now: breathtaking women, and women that a desperate man on a lot of speed wouldn’t consider as the bar closed at 4 AM.
I fucked an acne-scarred Irish girl in a Nashville Radisson for two hours straight.
I fucked a Danish girl, so fantastically beautiful that I was dumbfounded to be with her, for two minutes.
I fucked a woman from Milwaukee who described her job as “homeopathic oncologist.”
I fucked a sandy-haired, pudgy woman who sold t-shirts for reunited classic rock bands; she cornered me at a club in New Orleans, fed me mushrooms, and we fucked, tripping; as I hotfooted out, she cried, “Don’t you want to go fuck in the City of the Dead?”
I fucked a hirsute, angular Frenchwoman whose enthralling moans sounded for all the world like an oboe.
I fucked a fat Canadian journalist with a pin-up’s face on her obese body.
I fucked another French woman who wore a rubber dress, had a full back-piece tattoo of The Scream, called me “zee byoo-tea-fall blond-uh angel,” and had a notebook of pencil sketches of the other guys from bands she’d invited home.
I fucked a woman in Boston who, to turn herself on, spoke Russian the entire time.
I fucked a stewardess in Seattle who wouldn’t take off her motorcycle boots.
I fucked a black woman nearly half a foot taller than me—I’m six foot one—backstage at a hockey arena in Minnesota; when I complained I was blind wasted, she took me by the wrist and led me to the bathroom, where, kneeling across the toilet from each other, we stuck our fingers down our throats and puked together.
I fucked a gangly, dazzling woman whom I recognized from an episode of The X-Files. Though insanely gorgeous, she spoke with the nerdiest voice I’ve ever hear
d.
I fucked a girl in Pittsburgh, in the back of a bus, with a boyish seventeen-year-old’s body and a middle-aged senator’s jowls.
I fucked an Italian woman in Paris who was almost but not quite beautiful enough to be a model; she kept talking, brightly, pathetically, about her future on the runways, and later became the traveling concubine of one of the Backstreet Boys.
I fucked a strawberry-haired girl in a billowing hippie skirt with a Fargo accent who, afterwards, pushed upon me a cassette tape of her terrible sludge-rock band.
I fucked the hostess of a country-music video countdown show, whose shoes I complimented; thus, she thought I was a foot fetishist, and mailed me snapshots of her feet for months after— poolside, with “My Feet on Vacation” written in red marker on the back.
I fucked a publicist for hip-hop acts who wept as I went down on her.
I fucked a curvy goth princess who made squeaking noises.
I fucked a gamine Iowan; I begged her to wear her green-framed glasses while she went down on me.
I fucked a radio programmer who could’ve dashed my career, but I never called her again, anyway.
I fucked a girl with a high-school-pep-rally sort of personality who ten years later was managing a band with the number one record in America.
I fucked a serene Native American girl who smiled, noiselessly, as she rode me; she made me come, then she made herself a cup of tea and split.
I fucked a woman in a broom closet at the Paramount Theater.
I fucked a girl who picked me up with a friend at an after-party in London; the three of us went back to my suite, drank shitty champagne, then each said, “Yawn, time to go to sleep,” then one went and feigned slumber on the couch, the other feigned sleep on the bed, and I had to choose which one to fake-wake-up and have sex with.
I fucked two girls in stairwells within a single week—one in a hotel, one in a mall. When I was with one of them, a pair of stoic tourists passed us as they headed down the stairs; I had my entire hand shoved up her pussy.
I fucked a woman in a limousine in Miami; we swigged tequila, mid-fuck, as the driver lectured us on the social history of Coconut Grove.
Mostly, though, I didn’t fuck anybody. The above litany is uninspired compared to that of the average singer of a band that had a video on MTV in the ’90s. I was usually too high to pickup girls. Every night that I spent alone, cotton-mouthed, in a hotel room, I loathed myself for loneliness itself.
On the scarce occasions where there was sex without weed, my disappointment was such that I felt I wasn’t having sex at all.
In the last days of my drug life, I was unable to fuck, and uninterested besides. When I got clean, I started up again. Immediately, the stripe of women improved markedly. But I was itchingly dissatisfied, dogged by unfamiliar self-reproach. Flippant sex is a wasted man’s pastime. At least, I was unable to do it without a basic desire to want to talk to, hang out with, the woman I was with.
I got through it, unaccountably, without an STD, or a vengeful boyfriend wielding a lead pipe outside a motel room.
We did our second record with this producer named Saul Mongolia. Weirdly, he had been the engineer on the James Brown session with the turbine-cave man, where James yelled “New WAVE!” He was a reserved man who wrote his own Zen koans, but he emitted a thorny, gloomily stubborn energy. He looked like a Botticelli portrait of Richard Nixon.
I liked him because he produced pop songs with weird stuff in them—odd sounds and expertly deployed discordances. He had a bunch of tunes all over the radio and MTV, strange and funny songs riding on big, wobbly bass parts, crisply produced and buoyant. He liked to mix things in mono, which I found rakishly eccentric. I met with him before we hired him, and enthused, tangentially, about George Jones records. “Oh, that’s what you like,” he said. “Drama.” He said the way I sang reminded him of a soul singer—my phrasing, my approach. By saying this he won my heart forever.
My band didn’t say much; the sampler player spoke of him with resentful deference, like he was talking about a hated, but talented, rival. “The most important thing,” he said, “is that Saul Mongolia doesn’t play piano on any of our songs.” Cryptic portent that I didn’t catch.
The other guys mumbled, frowning.
We recorded at the Power Station—I saw Russell Simmons on the street before the first session, and I wanted to ask him where the Power Station was, because Russell Simmons would actually know—in a massive room, wooden and vaulted like a Scandinavian church. Somebody told me that Michael Jackson had recorded in another studio, down the street, and had rented out this room just for his dinner break; they installed a circus tent and a banquet table. Currently, in the studio next door, guitar overdubs were being recorded for a Meatloaf record. Meatloaf was not in attendance.
We were loading amplifiers into the studio and the sampler player turned to me with his rattled-animal eyes. “Here we are,” he said. “I can’t believe we’re making a second record.”
I gave him a bewildered look. What? Who wouldn’t make a second record? Who cares about hate and wretched time spent in a van, this is the most important thing in the world.
We tracked everything as a live band, playing all at once. Saul would stop us, and we’d go to the lounge while he tried to get the drummer to play the same beats he’d played in rehearsal. The drummer was changing them—of course—on a whim. Not telling Saul he was changing them—of course—and, as usual, pretending he was playing the same thing as before. Saul complained, when the drummer was out of earshot, that there was no forward motion to his beats. “That weird up-and-down feel that he has,” Saul said. In fact, he talked copious trash about each guy when they weren’t in the room—sometimes when they were overdubbing; behind the glass in the studio, where they couldn’t hear him.
Couldn’t tell you if he talked trash about me, too.
Saul spoke incessantly about singles. “I hear this as a single,” he would say. Initially this was exciting. We’re cutting a hit record, at last! I thought. But he said this about every track. He’d want us to play an overdub, and we’d be skeptical; “But I hear this as a single,” he’d whine.
Tracking was fraught but efficient. At the end of eighteen days we had all the songs down. I was exultant. I had envisioned our grooves rendered with a sort of New Wave tightness, and here it was. From then on, my job was to keep everybody from wrecking it.
I failed. And I’m a hapless archivist; were I better at it, I would have made sure I walked out of the Power Station on day eighteen with a tape in my hand. I could’ve put it in a drawer for years, and then released the director’s cut.
We mixed the album at Sony Studios, far on the West Side of Manhattan, next door to a hulking, windowless building topped with satellite dishes that served to house machinery for the phone company. Behind the studio was a room that Mariah Carey had furnished when she was mixing there. Couches deep as queen beds, tasseled pillows, gold-filigreed wallpaper. The band lurked in there, getting high, as I sat next to Saul at the console.
Saul was a gossip. He was a compulsive gossip; sometimes the candor made me uneasy, and I tried to change the subject, but he was relentless. He told stories about record company presidents’ mob ties, which label president had been excoriated by his Japanese corporate suzerains for the raggedy waywardness of his wife, which singer had a meth habit, which radio executive liked to get high on coke at his country house and shoot a pistol at imaginary rabbits, which singer fucked every guitar player she ever worked with—thus, any producer who wanted to finish a record with her had to keep her from fucking the guitar player until tracking was done—which R&B superstars had begged their labels, to the point of tears, to let them step outside racial and musical boundaries and make a rock record or a country record, story upon story of singers who were abject idiots, and, uncomfortably, stories about black artists whom he’d call, “So smart. So smart.”
I thought he was taking me into his confidence. He wasn’t. I
bumped into the drummer from Sugar Ray a year later, and he asked, “Is it true your bass player once———?”
We did a song for a sound track during a break in mixing. I had us work with a producer guy who had done some fantastic lo-fi recordings with some outlandish indie bands; I wanted that scratchy sound. “Who is this guy? You didn’t ask us,” the band guys barked, about a month after his hiring was confirmed.
Contrary to my scheme, the producer guy was taking this opportunity to use a major label budget to up his game and leave his lo-fi rep behind. He booked five days at an expensive studio to record one song. I told him we needed one day, and he laughed me off.
The assistant engineer on the session was a wild ass-kisser. “I can’t believe I’m working with Soul Coughing!” he kept saying. “You are the most incredible band I’ve ever worked with. You sound incredible!”
We did the sound-track song in a day. Like I told the guy. Then, as I was packing up to split, I heard the band playing one of the tunes we had already recorded with Saul.
What’s going on? I asked, my heart rate speeding up.
“I just want to play,”said the bass player. “For the first time in months, I just want to play.”
I got in the vocal booth, queasy, and we did a take. My bandmates were whoohooing. “Oh my God, that’s the take, that’s the take!” said the assistant engineer. “I can’t believe how good that sounded.”
The band started talking shit about Saul Mongolia; we never wanted to work with that guy! Fuck that guy! He doesn’t know shit about this band! They talked about how Saul made them change things, like beats, like phrasing, how he asked for things to be done over and over again. “That’s fucked up!” said the assistant engineer. They had this conversation as I stood there. They didn’t look at me.