by Mike Doughty
I played a gig in Rochester with this miniature Scottish singer-songwriter. He entered the dressing room and said, in a Scots burr, “We’ll get along fine if ye’ll drrrrink with me!”
Uh, actually I don’t.
“Oh, then do ye smoke weed?”
Nope.
He looked kind of scared. “Are ye in the prrrogram?”
We drove to Philly together the next day. He spent the whole drive making unsolicited excuses. “I trrrried cocaine once and I didn’t like it. I don’t drrrrink before shows, I don’t drrrink as much as my frrriends. I didn’t smoke any weed at all last Febrrruary. I’ve never done herrroin, I don’t . . . ”
The litany was ceaseless.
I asked if usually he got stoned on long drives. Yes. I pulled into a Shell station; he walked behind it and got high. We talked about other means of getting fucked up as we drove. What’s your favorite drug? Opium. Opium? Was it a squishy black lump? Yes. Did you smoke it off a piece of tinfoil? Yes.
It’s very unlikely that’s opium—it’s probably black tar heroin.
He was appalled. But haven’t you ever taken Vicodin? Percocet? That’s the same shit. I mean literally the same. In your brain, it’s exactly the same chemical—it’s morphine. It’s like saying “Well, I like gin, of course, but I’d never drink whiskey.”
On September 10, 2001, heavy clouds were over New York. I walked over to my manager’s office to pickup a box of CDs to sell at my gig that night in Massachusetts. My last view of the World Trade Center was directly down West Broadway; clouds gathered at the midpoint, obscuring the tops of the towers.
I had come up with a new chord progression, and I was messing with melodies in my head as I drove. I pulled into Northampton in the rain. I stood outside in the drizzle before the show; there was a church across the street with people standing around a back door, smoking and drinking coffee from paper cups. Clearly, a twelve-step meeting.
I was opening the shows with a Soul Coughing song, the first line of which was:A man
Drives a plane
Into the
Chrysler building
So sick of that song, I thought. Need an excuse to stop playing it.
I fell asleep to thunder, and woke up to a brilliant day. Green leaves scraped the motel window. I turned on the TV. Ann Curry was interviewing Tracey Ullman on the Today show.
I had been clean a little more than a year, and I was still doing the thing where I woke up early every morning to watch the day come on, in love with light. I kept myself company with the TV, so I was accustomed to the rhythms of the Today show; it starts at 7 AM with hard news; the news goes until 8, when the cookbook authors show up. It was just past 7:30; that Tracey Ullman was being interviewed so early meant it was an uncommonly slow news day. Tracey Ullman, in fact, had draped her legs over the arms of her chair and batted at Ann Curry’s questions breezily. It was such a slow news day that even Tracey Ullman couldn’t plug herself in earnest.
I like news, not celebrity corn. I switched it off, mildly bummed. Reproachfully, I told myself the old Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times.
I got Starbucks; the sky was wholly blue, in a cloudless condition that happens after strong storms called “severe clear.” I drove south listening to the BBC. They said a small plane—a one-passenger plane, like a Piper Cub or something—had crashed into the World Trade Center. “Foul play is suspected,” said the Brit reading the news.
My brother called and left a message. Two planes had hit the World Trade Center, could I see them from my place? My living room window had a direct view of the towers. The Brit hadn’t said anything about a second plane. Two planes, ridiculous, I thought. Rumors are so weird.
The Brit acknowledged the second plane. “Foul play is suspected,” he said again.
The BBC sputtered and faded. I hit the seek button and landed on Howard Stern. The first tower fell. Then Howard’s signal sputtered away, and I switched to a station that had just put a feed from a local TV station on. The anchor’s vantage was exactly that of Howard Stern: sitting in a studio, looking at a monitor.
A friend called. She had a gig at the fashion shows in Bryant Park that week: her job was to scratch the bottoms of the models’ shoes with scissors, so they didn’t slip on the runway. She said the White House had been bombed.
The second tower fell. It became clear that if I drove back to New York, they wouldn’t let me in. So I drove over the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge on I-84, turned around, drove back. Howard came back on. Howard was howling. I turned again, the local anchor came back, just trying to fill up the air with authoritative anchor-ese, but clearly halfway into a freakout. He faded; back to Stern howling.
I wanted to call my parents. The cell-phone lines were jammed up, so I stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts and tremblingly asked if I could use the phone: I lived near the towers and wanted to call my family, I said. “It’s a local call, right?” said the Dunkin’ Donuts guy.
Apparently my mom, a guidance counselor, spent the day making sure none of the kids used the attacks as an excuse to skip class.
I got through to a friend who’d just gotten out of a rehab in Connecticut and was living in a small apartment near the hospital, working at a record store—she blew the mind of the record store manager, having a résumé with heavy music management companies on it but applying for a job stocking the racks in this tiny shop. I picked her up, and we immediately went to Starbucks, which had a sign in the window that said CLOSED DUE TO THE NATIONAL EMERGENCY.
We ate pizza, then hoagies, then Mexican food. Every indulgent thing we did, we joked, “It’s for the war effort!”
I actually saw the collapses, for the first time, on a small TV in a gas-station convenience store. Before that, having no idea what it looked like when massive buildings came down—or how long 110 stories actually was, measured in city blocks—I wondered if they’d fallen on my building.
I slept at her place for a few days, then drove back to the city. I was somewhat surprised to find that Avis charged me a penalty for the extra rental time.
Every lamppost, every door, nearly every flat surface, was covered with MISSING flyers: photocopied images of a smiling relative at a BBQ or a graduation. Hundreds of them, rippling in store windows, coming loose from their Scotch tape and floating gently to the street. As if these people had wandered out of the towers just before they’d fallen and were wandering around Manhattan in states of half sleep.
There were papers strewn on my roof, memorandums and printed e-mails and other business-type communications. They had fluttered out of the towers and were collecting on every roof within a half mile.
I knew that the unsingable girl worked serving drinks at a private club down by where the towers were. It was up in an office building, a place for alcoholic day traders who came to drink all day and watch the numbers ticking past on the monitors above the bar. I wondered if she’d been caught up in it. I finished that new chord progression as a song about her. “Call me back when the war is over,” went one line. “Call me back when your boyfriend’s gone.”
I went to a meeting. I buttonholed a guy and started to babble the tale of my September 11th, but his face went slack, and it was clear that the notion of hearing yet another’s person story made him weary. I met a kid with a pair of drumsticks in his pocket who’d just gotten out of a detox center on Long Island; he caught the last train into Penn Station and was wandering around in that newly clean shaky state, looking for a meeting, when he saw the towers come down. He’s still clean.
We, the addicts, were lucky to have the meetings. We had someplace to talk. We had people to be with. We had a tenuous defense against an overwhelming urge to blot it out—it seemed like everyone in the city was getting wasted. I heard a guy talk about how, upon realizing New York was under attack, he bolted from work, resolving to immediately smoke some crack—if he was going to die, what the hell, right? He’d been clean for years; he had no idea where to cop. He found a homeless dud
e and offered him $20 if he’d lead him to a spot. The homeless dude talked him out of it.
After a meeting, a friend and I—the friend from the fashion show—bought miniature flags on the street. Conspicuous patriotism was mostly unfamiliar to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. We kept holding our flags up to each other and saying “America” in bad redneck accents. Uh-murr-kuh. Uh-murr-kuh. Uh-murr-kuh.
I did get back to Southeast Asia when I had a year clean. I got to the last page on the travel site and clicked “purchase” instead of “cancel.”
I was alone in Phnom Penh. All I did was go to the riverside, eat Khmer pizza, read, journal, drink coffee. Normalcy was somehow easier, transposed on an exotic city.
I went to an English-speaking meeting in an internet café on a shabby lane. I walked up to a bearded white guy. “Are you a friend of Bill’s?” A code for somebody in the rooms.
He looked surprised. “I am Bill,” he said.
I got on the back of a moto-cab.
“So,” the driver said, “you like girl?”
No thanks.
“Ohhhh,” he said, “you like boy.”
I’m afraid not.
“You like dreenk?”
No.
“You like smoke opium?”
No, no.
“You like shoot gun?”
I paused.
Yeah! Yeah, I can do that!
He drove me to a place at the city’s edge. There were some Brits hanging out, drinking beer and shooting every pistol on offer. For $20, the proprietor handed me an AK-47, and I unloaded the whole clip on an archery target. He tried to show me how to aim, but I was content just to feel the metal shuddering against my shoulder.
This was a little after the 2000 election, when the Supreme Court awarded the presidency to George W. Bush. He hadn’t been inaugurated yet.
The moto driver was gassing up. I bought him a Pepsi.
“So,” he said. “George Bush is president now?”
No, next month, he’ll be president.
“My friend say that when George Bush is president, Al Gore leave?”
Yeah, that’s right.
“But now he is second?”
He’s the vice president.
“Second?”
Yes.
“He is second,” said the driver, “and he just leave?”
I went to Ethiopia in August 2004.
I saw an Olsen twin deplaning as I sat in the departure lounge. She was tiny, and wore chic, frayed clothes, and big sunglasses; she was flanked by matronly handlers. The airport newsstand was wallpapered with new issues of In Touch magazine that happened to have an Olsen twin on the cover, and the headline, “Is She Out Of Control?”
People sat in the lounge reading that issue. I think I was the only one who saw her.
Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, is sprawling, dusty, chaotic; there are big neighborhoods of tin and mud shanties next to high-rises ; haughty urbanites in Western suits-and-ties passing guys in shawls, with head wraps and walking staffs. Children yelped “Faranji! Faranji!”—Amharic for “foreigner,” actually a mangled version of the word “French”—at me. Donkeys and goats jostled with taxis on the streets; a guy in an Eminem t-shirt herded sheep. Amharic music was everywhere, a warped-sounding, cheesily orchestrated, careening, fascinating sound, in stuttered waltz-time.
There was an Ethiopian Airlines billboard over Meskel Square—a vast intersection of multilane roads, without traffic lights, with minibuses and old Soviet Lada sedans battling for lane changes and turns—that advertised “Stockholm: Savour the Old World Charm.” This, in Ethiopia, where the skeleton of one of the world’s most ancient hominids—called Lucy by the anthropologists who dug her up—was found.
I went to a cathedral, where the throne of Haile Selassie was strewn with plastic coffee cups. There was a ferocious hailstorm. The roof sounded like it was being assailed with gunfire.
Singing came through a loudspeaker at a church by the hotel all night. Ululating melodies unspooled as I lay trying to sleep. I got out of bed and turned on Ethiopian national television, which was broadcasting the Brendan Fraser vehicle Blast from the Past. It cut inexplicably to Olympic footage for fifteen minutes, then back to where we left off in the Brendan Fraser movie.
In the morning, there were rhythmic chants in the hotel gardens. From my balcony, I saw no less than five wedding parties: brides in Western-style white, bridesmaids in matching pastel prom dresses, relatives singing and chanting, stepping in circles. Pictures were taken: a trio of Japanese tourists with cameras and fanny packs were pulled into a shot by a fountain.
They sang their way to the limousines. The bride got in. The party danced its way around the limousine a few times, circling, switching direction. Then the limo pulled away, to cheers and applause, and the wedding party dispersed to waiting minibuses. Then another minibus would pull in and a new wedding party would disembark.
An Ethiopian guy sidled up. He told me it was the rainy season—the lucky time to get married—and that the wedding parties were chanting, “Teff, teff!”—a grain that’s the primary ingredient in injera, the spongy-bread staple of the Ethiopian diet.
The guy invited me to a party up the hill from the hotel. We walked to a concrete house, where we sat alone in a room with white couches and a coffee table. A stream of college-age girls filed in, each shaking my hand as they passed. They filled the couches, sitting on the arms of the furniture.
“We will show you traditional Ethiopian dancing.” They turned on a boom box and danced uninspiredly, arrhythmically. They grabbed my arms, trying pull me up to dance with them. Four bottles of honey wine were plopped on the table. “Drink some with us!” I’m sorry, I don’t drink alcohol. “There’s no alcohol in this!” I sniffed. Lies.
There was a Bob Marley poster. Something about the presence of a Bob Marley poster made me certain I was being scammed. But I wanted to be polite. I ordered a Coke.
A lab-coated waitress brought a bill on a silver plate: 453 Ethiopian birr. That’s $50. My overpriced dinner at the hotel cost 50 birr. I stood up, making a show of outrage. I wasn’t angry, but I thought it was the only thing that would get me out of there. I pulled a 10-birr note out and threw it on the silver plate. That’s for my Coke. I’m leaving.
A stout, older guy with a mean look came in. “Is there a problem here?” The problem is I’m not paying you 453 birr.
“Don’t worry, that’s Ethiopian, not U.S. dollars!” one of the girls chirped. “Don’t worry!”
I strode out. One of the girls followed me, looking genuinely baffled. The lab-coated waitress followed, too, pointing to the figure on the bill and holding up the 10-birr note like she didn’t understand.
I realized I’d left my umbrella on the white couch; I turned, probably quite foolishly, and walked back in. One of the girls handed me the umbrella, her left hand supporting her right elbow as she handed it to me—the polite way to hand something to somebody in Ethiopia.
(453 birr, $50, I thought, days later. I’ve spent more money on a shirt I ended up never wearing; what difference would it have made if I had just cheerfully let them bilk me?)
An Ethiopian band and dancers played in the hotel restaurant: a drummer, a guy playing a one-stringed fiddle, and two guys playing these lute-looking, guitar-sounding instruments called krars. The tone of the bass krar sounded for all the world like the bass on the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back.”
They were out of tune; after every song there was a long, only partially successful tuning pause. Then they played. Fantastic. Potent, fevered jams, the energy intensifying. They switched between waltz time and four-on-the-floor in the middle of tunes, suddenly switching the beat’s accent. The transitions felt like loop-the-loops.
Two white tourists picked tentatively at their shiro and injera; stoic waitresses in bow ties, with nameplates reading “TRAINEE No. 35” or “TRAINEE No. 8” solemnly took their empty glasses away.
I wanted to hear more. I g
ot into a taxi and told the guy I was looking to hear some Ethiopian music; he took me to a dim bar where a guy in a suit crooned into a wireless mic in front of a guy playing a Yamaha keyboard, with drum machine and automated bass line.