by Mike Doughty
“Marijuana is not addictive,” he said, with some hostility.
He told me he had a ’68 Fender Stratocaster once owned by Minnie Pearl.
I put up a notice on my blog that I was looking for a bass player. This one guy sent an MP3 of an esoteric free-jazz jam from which I could discern almost nothing about his playing. His e-mail read: My name is Andrew Livingston. I have a Ph.D. from Brooklyn College in composition. I live in Brooklyn with my wife and child and dog. I’m diabetic. Sometimes I cry at commercials.
There’s no way this is the guy, I thought, listening to his MP3. But man, I wish this guy could be the guy.
I went to his place. He was wiry, wore octagonal Ben Franklin spectacles, and was dressed like a homeless golf coach. He was a deft and responsive player. He was indeed the guy.
After our first rehearsal with the full band, we were taking the F train downtown, and our drummer turned to him and said, “You don’t look like an Andrew. You need a nickname.” Rubbed his chin. “Scrappy.” More chin rubbing. “No, Scrap.”
Thus was Andrew “Scrap” Livingston named. I’ve been touring with him for years—sometimes he plays the upright bass, sometimes cello, sometimes electric guitar (I lent him a solid-body Silvertone that was lent, in turn, to me by Molly Escalator years ago, when we were going out).
“Aw, word, B,” he’ll say, in his Mississippi drawl, to assent. “That’s how I’m living today.”
His self-description in an online profile reads: “I like many things, and mini things. I like to check my blood sugar. I like to speak when it’s appropriate.”
He’s preternaturally gentle. As there is a Theoretical Wayne, so there is a Theoretical Scrap. He was a Dallas street kid as a teenager, shooting dope, driving around with a gun in his glove compartment. He once nodded out and fell asleep while placing an order at the drive-through window in a Whataburger.
He concocts nicknames. He calls our friend Daniel Old Tin Rummy. He calls our drummer McBible. He calls our electric piano player Benjack Ladstack. He calls his best friend from Mississippi Tumpy. He calls his daughter Larry. He called his daughter’s mother Funticus, which perhaps bespoke the fate of the relationship. None of these have any discernible logic to their etymology, except my nickname, which is Foss: my middle name is Ross, but there’s a typo on my Social Security card.
He uses the word friends instead of things: “We should move these friends over there.” Or, “I think I’m gonna eat those friends for lunch.” I’ve heard him call chicken carbonara “chicken carbon-friends.”
He calls a street a “scrump.” He calls Starbucks “Whorbitron’s.” He calls cigarettes “dodecahedrons.”
If you ask something like, Do you think we can make it over the Throg’s Neck bridge before rush hour? Or, Can we stop for chicken sandwiches? He’ll answer, “We can do all things through Christ.”
Examples of Scrap utterances:
“If we were cartoon characters, don’t you think I’d be a moth?”
“This doughnut is right in the eyes of the Lord.”
Upon being asked what he’s doing: “I’m just learnin’ about my body.”
“You can turn a spider into food, but you can’t turn food into a spider.”
While driving: “That guy yielded! If he needed a mechanical pencil, I’d be like, Hey, take mine.”
“There might be people here that look like Steven Spielberg. I don’t know much about Connecticut, but I know that.”
“If a unicorn is more than a pentacorn, maybe they just call it a multicorn.”
“If this airport turned into a straight-up dance party, I’d be stoked.”
Several times daily, unpredictably, I’ll say “goddamn it!” out loud. Sometimes under my breath, sometimes audibly. Sometimes in public: on the subway, in a store. It’s because I’m flogging myself, internally, for something I’ve done: last week, two years ago, ten years ago, when I was fifteen. In my head, it’s all still in the present.
Sometimes I’ll yell out, MOTHERFUCKERS! Plural. Not that I know who the motherfuckers are.
I tried to type out a shopping list of grievances against myself to put here, and I couldn’t. Even seeing each episode as an absurd banality—how can I be angry at myself for a faux pas committed as an eight-year-old? How can I not have sympathy for myself committing shitty behavior under duress? How can I hate myself for writing some corny, contrived lyric that I didn’t even use in a song? How can I punish myself, relentlessly, for things I thought about but didn’t actually do?—I couldn’t sit through the singe of discomfort long enough to type out the incidents.
On the way out, the goddamn it! or the motherfuckers! is the voice in my head saying, How dare you _______? By the time it’s out in the air, the goddamn it boomerangs: it’s my voice, saying, Fuck you, voice in my head, for constantly torturing me for my mistakes.
My shrink told me the diagnostic term for this voice is an introject. The introject is like a malevolent district attorney, forever presenting evidence against me. Each piece of evidence goes bang! as he throws it on the table.
Just being able to know that this voice is a voice is a victory. In shrink-speak, my introject the evil D.A. is ego dystonic, rather than ego syntonic. Ego syntonic, which it used to be, means, basically, that I didn’t recognize it as a voice in my head at all; whatever ancient trespass popped into my mind, I saw it as something that occurred to me innately and reasonably.
I was driving around with Scrap. Goddamn it!
Startled him. “What’s wrong?!”
Just punishing myself for something that happened years ago that I can’t do anything about, I said.
I went up to Schenectady to see Luke in a touring production of South Pacific. I said I was writing a memoir. “Yeah, I know,” he said, glaring at me in worry and consternation. My editor—the guy editing this very book—used to play bass in a band with him.
In his prestigious grad acting school, he played the leads in all the productions: the directors didn’t operate on an elementary-school-soccer-team everyone-should-get-to-play system. He was the best. When he graduated, he went from Hamlet, and Berenger in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, to trying out for minuscule roles as Latino hoodlums: “I’ll cut you, ese!” Some of his classmates became movie stars or took iconic TV roles. He worked as a bellhop between parts in Spanish-language cable commercials. Now he does some Broadway and touring musicals. Twice, he’s been replaced by ex-contestants from American Idol.
He seems bitter. Maybe I’m projecting: it’s just my guilt for being more successful than he is (am I? I have no idea how much money he makes). We were born a week apart. One year I gave him the June 1970 issue of Life—Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in evening wear on a rocky beach—as a birthday present. The current issue in the month we were born—it was probably on a chair in the waiting rooms of the hospitals we were born in. The year we both turned forty, I wrote him and didn’t hear back.
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 t
o 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 a one-legged man. They’re not all good days, but the good days are very good—sometimes the days are very good when things are very bad, if that makes any sense.
I prefer where I’m at to where I was; the general serenity and satisfaction of my life is better than the brief surges of euphoria that were all I used to have. I wouldn’t want to go back to the drugs even if they concocted a pill that would allow me to use casually, like a non-addict does. (The joke goes: If there were a cure for alcoholism, I’d go get wasted!) But I don’t discredit the drugs. I wouldn’t be where I am now if I wasn’t where I was, then.
(I don’t recommend drugs, either: if you have the addict thing, you’re more likely to die, or live a sad grey life, than get to where I got.)
I do stuff, the way I used to envy Molly Escalator’s ability to do stuff. All the travel I’ve done. I learned how to speak German, just for the joy of it. (I’m of the minority opinion that it’s a beautiful language; more people might dig it if we heard it anywhere other than being yelled in movies; even French sounds ugly yelled.) I went to a meeting in Germany and spoke, although what came out probably sounded like: “Drug is no happy, I make bad! To stop, many times meetings, I go fine! Good the life-ing is!”
I struggle with a notion of god-consciousness. I need both reverence and irreverence. I chafe at the word god, and I chafe at self-important atheists. I don’t believe in God-the-dude, who lives somewhere, but I don’t pray to a gaseous ball of energy, either, but to something with compassion in the way a human being has compassion.
A guy in the rooms said, “I call it god because it’s easy to spell.”
By pray—and I wish I could express the act with a word other than that one—I mean, mostly, speaking out loud to the darkness. Sometimes, just thinking at the darkness. Some people like the on-the-knees gambit—it’s been recommended to me, and I’ve tried, but couldn’t get with it. (Do you lean back on your ankles? Or sit up, Dorf on Golf style, putting the weight on your knees?) Scrap and I go to meetings out on tour; sometimes the Lord’s Prayer is said at the end of them, rather than the serenity prayer, and it fills me with resentment: I won’t say it. Scrap sighs at me, annoyed, like, Come on, man, it’s not a big deal, just accept it as its own thing.
Sometimes, in a freakout on the subway, in a theater, in the park, I’ll type long stream-of-consciousness prayers into my phone.
And it works. Atheists, your points are often impeccable—but, for me and a bunch of my friends, at least, it works. Or, maybe I should say, it can work. You want data. I don’t have any. You might want me to quantify the effects of prayer on—what?—pulse rate, income level, serotonin secretion, indices of satisfaction. You probably can’t take me seriously if I don’t have a solid hypothesis on who/what/why god is, a firm set of givens, but that’s not possible for me—my version of god is one thing one day, another thing the next, yet another thing an hour later. My faith in the usefulness of prayer fluctuates from the prompting of cosmic intervention to a very slight easing of stress. Even to call myself agnostic is to presume a lot more sense and rigor than I could muster.
Key to me is what the rock legend said: You’re like a flea contemplating the Empire State Building. What’s there is too vast for a human being to get his or her head around. The only shred of a rational justification—and I mean justification to myself, I’m not presenting an argument here—is this: if you believe in evolution, and thus believe that dogs aren’t as smart as pigs, which aren’t as smart as dolphins, which aren’t as smart as humans, you must believe there’s an evolutionary step—millions of years down the line—beyond the current state of humanness. There must be things we aren’t sophisticated enough, as animals, to comprehend—to perceive, even.
(To believe we’re the pinnacle of evolution—that no facet of reality could elude our understanding—might be thought of as along the lines of the book of Genesis: god made man in his own image. God gave man dominion over the animals.)
This is deplorably shoddy proof of a personified, interventionist deity; what it more likely proves is that even the most expansive, nebulous, and mysterious idea of god-consciousness depicts what may be the true nature of the cosmos with less accuracy than a three-year-old’s finger painting of a mountain. What I’m trying to say is that we’re all—from cub scouts to Nobel laureates—viewing existence through our humanity. Which is to say: in metaphor. Some of our metaphors—and our metaphorical systems—are much, much more sophisticated, and meticulous, than others.
Yet. Half an hour ago, I spilled a cup of coffee. My automatic thought: the universe is directly intervening, to tell me I don’t need more caffeine.
I believe in the twelve-step thing about making amends. Making amends doesn’t mean to apologize, and it doesn’t mean obtaining forgiveness. I go to somebody I’ve hurt and express that what I did haunts me. I once wrote something mean and vengeful about that Spin reviewer who scorned my voice; I wrote an e-mail telling him of my remorse. He was receptive, not to mention surprised. There are other people who haven’t even returned my call. All I’m able to do is put it out there, and let go of whatever I want to get back. I wrestle with making amends to people who’ve hurt me. How do I express my regrets to someone who’s done something worse to me? How do I just take responsibility for what I’ve done, and move on?
My closeness to the rooms waxes and wanes. I’m often ambivalent in the real sense of that
word: I believe as much as I disbelieve. I’ll blow off meetings even though I know that just going and sitting in one will make me feel better. Sometimes much better, sometimes a little bit better, sometimes just a speck better, but always better.
I have friends. I recommend having friends. Were they in trouble, I’d help them, and I wouldn’t hesitate to ask for help myself. The question, How are you? posed to someone in recovery gets an actual account of how one is, and one actually hears what the other guy is saying.
This stuff sounds corny, right? I don’t want to be corny. But it’s all true.
I’m typing this to you from Los Angeles on Labor Day. I broke up with my girlfriend last month, during a vacation to Cambodia (my advice to you is, should your relationship implode, don’t be 5,000 miles from home). Since coming back, I’ve been spending money madly, trying to alter my feelings via consumption. I paid to fly out here business class; I’m staying in a pricey hotel. The business class flight didn’t make me feel better; there was a movie star sitting a row ahead of me; I sat there feeling like I didn’t measure up to the movie star, who held hands with a handsome boyfriend and was thus mocking me as boring and unlovable. The expensive hotel room isn’t doing it for me, either. I need a bigger room, I need to spend more money. I need to throw more material into this weird hole in myself.
The night before I was doing a track with a producer who smoked weed continually. The kind that you get at dispensaries in California, in pharmacy bottles, with their varietal names—White Widow, Northern Lights, Pancake Throatjam—printed on the labels. As a friend to the demimonde, I can’t fault the racket, but I don’t buy the medicinal-value thing, other than helping chemotherapy patients gain weight by giving them the munchies.