The Book of Drugs (4 page)

 

Somebody told me Paul Simon was sitting in the admissions office; his kid was thinking about applying. I went, shamelessly sat on the couch across from him, and bothered him for an hour. He asked me if I had a notebook; I didn't. He chided me. He gave me a list of poets to read—the only name I remember was Seamus Heaney. He meant this list as a take-my-wisdom-and-begone thing, but I didn't take the hint. I asked him if he'd heard the band Firehose. He hadn't. I told him that all good songs had to be political, which is a pretty fucking brazen thing to announce to Paul Simon. He mentioned Lou Reed.

I like his work, I said.

 

I wrote some plays. I was desperately searching for something I wanted to be, other than a rock star. I was OK at it, so I applied to the NYU dramatic-writing program—I thought my clumsy
junior-avant-garde stuff would compel them to take me in and teach me to write for sitcoms. It didn't. Bitter at the rejection, I ended up at Lang College at the New School. I just needed to be in New York, where there was music.

 

I met Mumlow in an acting class. We were supposed to bring in monologues; she brought an American flag as a prop. She folded the flag deftly while doing her monologue in a Southern accent. She was clearly brilliant, but the shtick was irksome.

There was another guy in the class named Seth. He had a lazy eye. The gaze of his good eye was bracing, while the other eye shot off to the periphery. He did a monologue taken from a layman's physics book, standing on two chairs, leaping between them, talking about the constant stream of molecules or light waves or something like that. We shared a glance of mutual annoyance at Mumlow's flag shtick.

Mumlow's apartment was called the universe. She called it that because her downstairs neighbor, an aged flower child, had come up to ask her to turn her music down, telling Mumlow that she knew that she created her own universe and thus the problem wasn't really Mumlow's loud music, it was that she created a universe wherein this music was disturbing her.

It was a studio apartment on the eleventh floor of a building overlooking Sheridan Square, bigger and cleaner than anything anybody I knew could afford. She lived alone. So she was a rich girl. Seth and I ended up at the universe doing something for the acting class: Mumlow's energy was crazy but alluring. I wasn't attracted to her, but her eyes were gigantic and blue.

I wrote a script in which two people sat across from each other in a diner, arguing in fake David Mamet language:

MUMLOW: I came here. From space.

SETH: From
space.

MUMLOW: That's RIGHT.

SETH: So you say you
came here
from space.

 

We ran the script competitively. They wrote down who they thought won each scene. At the end of the play, the winner got a dime bag of weed. Seth added a comparison to fabric: “I won. Give me the weed. Wet gabardine.”

 

Ani DiFranco went to Lang. She had her thing utterly together. I was half formed as a songwriter; her songs were acute, her deployment of them wickedly agile. She made me want to get good.

She came to New York from Buffalo, where she was packing clubs. New York was a jungle of shitty bands; she gained no audience except us kids listening to her, astonished, in the dorms. She went back to Buffalo, discouraged and aggrieved.
Oh well,
I thought.
We'll never hear from her again.

 

Ani and I were in a class called “The Shape and Nature of Things to Come,” taught by an African American poet named Sekou Sun-diata. He taught us to cut our writing pitilessly. We pleaded the purity of our precious compositions as he cut words, cut whole verses, and as we sat there dazed, beaten up, he'd pause, and say, “Is it soup yet?”

He would press the poet in question until he or she mumbled what the poem was supposed to be about. “That's great,” he'd say. “Why isn't that in the poem?”

He taught me not to pretend to be black. “They call it soul because it's the truest version of yourself.”

We read
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
and Joseph Campbell's
Hero with a Thousand Faces
, and Sekou analyzed Malcolm's life spellbindingly, using the paradigm of the universal hero's journey as a lens.

 

He asked one kid where he was from. “Outside Boston,” the kid said.

“Outside Boston
where?
” Sekou asked.

“Uh, the suburbs?”

“No, no,” Sekou said, “where are you
from?
”

“Town's called Braintree?”

He wrote BRAINTREE in huge letters on the blackboard and spent the rest of the class speculating on the roots of the name. Often, we didn't even get to our poems; we sat, transfixed, as he zoomed off on rapturous tangents.

 

Some things Sekou said in class:

“Do you talk to yourself? You should.”

“You speak to the poem, and sometimes the poem says, ‘You're trying to build a house, but I'm not a house, I'm a bird.'”

“This poem is a life-support system for one killer line. Lose the poem, use the line somewhere else.”

 

I walked in the graduation ceremony, but never got my diploma: I owed the library $11. I thought it was more poetic to not get your diploma for being $11 short. Plus, I needed the $11. My bank balance was usually under $10, which meant I couldn't get money out of the ATM, so, humiliatingly, I had to go up to the teller's window and withdraw $4.50. At least once a week I had to decide between a pack of cigarettes and a container of hummus. Usually I chose the smokes and stayed hungry. I figured out that if I could just fall asleep, I wouldn't be hungry when I woke up the next day.
Sometimes I gave in and bought a sandwich, but when I was sated I would be overcome with buyer's remorse.

Seth and I considered doing the dine-and-dash at a tourist trap known for its tub-sized blue drinks and signature charred mass of onion rings, but we argued for an hour about which one of us would get to stroll out of the restaurant first, and anyway, we got lucky, and were taken out by a girl from school with a credit card. She bought us Indian food and two packs of Marlboros; she wanted friends.

 

I fell in love with a girl named Betty with a superabundance of red curls. She was my idea of perfect. It wasn't so much ardor as a feeling that I'd arrived. At last, I was with an unimpeachably beautiful girl! I meant something in the world! But there was something about the keenness of my love for her that freaked her out; she dumped me the night before we went on a trip to Jamaica with her two roommates.

“Thanks for the great sex,” she said, offering a handshake.

The four of us went to the evil little tourist town of Negril; me and three beautiful girls. We were broke: what we didn't spend on marijuana and a windowless one-room, two-bed shack we spent on a single shared plate of french fries each day. The two roommates slept in one bed, Betty and I in another. Lying there, blasted on the cheap weed, it was torture to feel her presence. I felt as if every tiny budge I made in the tiny bed was followed by a tiny budge from her, shifting away from me, as if it disgusted her to brush against my hip bone.

We spent the days drinking mushroom tea, tripping, wandering the beach; hustler dudes came up to the three girls and me, singsonging to me in gorgeous Jamaican accents, “You have t'ree! Give me one!”

Negril ran on two grey economies; one involved selling stuff on the beach to people who were too high to protest. They'd grab you by the arm and pull you towards their little stand selling shell necklaces. Fat ladies on the beach would grab the hair of passing white girls, starting to braid Bo Derek braids without a prompt. If the girl tried to pull away, they'd cry something like, “You have no respect for the Jamaican people!” There were a lot of white girls wandering around the beach with Bo Derek braids.

Dudes with intense gazes would block your path as you were strolling and say, “I come from the hills. I got the good bud.” The weed was generally terrible—dry, yellow, and stemmy. We smoked a lot of it anyway, rolling massive spliffs of shitty pot that we told ourselves was the world's greatest, we're in
Jamaica,
right?

The other industry was kids who came down from the hills to fuck middle-aged tourist women. The women rented them scooters and bought them clothes. These were less pure sexual transactions than sham romances; you'd see a flabby German tourist walking hand in hand with some washboard-abbed, nineteen-year-old guy pretending to be a Rastafarian. How desperately did they need this, that they'd buy into the fantasy?

 

(Years later, I came back with my friend Sally. We told everybody we were brother and sister, despite the fact that we looked nothing alike, so she could fuck Jamaican dudes without suffering questions. She charged everything to an American Express card that her mom had gotten her strictly for emergencies. Every morning at 7 AM a girl claiming to be the sister of the fake-Rasta she was sleeping with—and renting a scooter for—would knock on the door, claim that she worked at the place they ate at the other night, and will you please sign this AmEx slip again, I messed it up again, please sign the slip again or I'll lose my job?
Blearily, Sally always signed. She discovered a month later, when she got the bill, she'd been taken for five grand.)

 

I had gotten a job driving an ice cream truck. It started on Monday, so I came back a Sunday earlier than the three girls. I decided to smuggle some of this terrible weed back in my sock.

At JFK, we deplaned into a hallway. The cops told us to stand single file. A flight from Lithuania landed right behind us, and its passengers ambled down towards customs unmolested. In the furthest reaches of this endless corridor, a door opened, and a cop with a tiny dog came out. The panting terrier scuttled down the line, stretching the leash to its utmost. The dog passed me. Stopped a few feet behind me. It barked.

“Good boy!” said the cop.

The terrier bounded a few yards ahead of me and barked again.

“Good boy!” said the cop.

They let us through. I was almost tearful with gratitude. I went to pick up my guitar at baggage claim and went up to a cop to ask where the luggage for the Air Jamaica flight was.

The cop was leaning against a wall. When I said, “Excuse me,” he straightened up with a start. He pointed towards a carousel, looking me directly in the eyes.

I was chatting with a middle-aged lady about where I went to school when a fat guy in a black t-shirt, flanked by uniformed cops, walked up to me holding a badge. They took me into a side room.

Good vacation tale for that tourist lady,
I thought.
The teenager she was chatting with turned out to be a drug smuggler.

I envisioned myself getting raped in jail.

They opened my rucksack and shook the contents out. My guitar case was bound with silver duct tape; they took a box cutter and cut through the tape, slicing the clasps off with it. The fat guy
in the black t-shirt patted me down, grabbed my balls. As his hands moved down to my ankles, my sight went blurry. The bag of weed had gathered in the arch of my foot.

“Take off your hat,” he said. He shook it out, smelled it.

“Take off your shoes,” he said. Banged them against a table to shake whatever was in there loose.

A long blank space of fear. Then:

He didn't ask me to take off my socks.

“The dog makes mistakes,” he said.

 

Delirious with my luck, hugging the guitar case with the sliced-off clasps so the guitar wouldn't fall out, I went back to Betty's place, where Seth was crashing. She lived on East Tenth Street, which at the time was an open-air market for dime bags of weed. On every stoop were four guys whispering:
smoke, sinse, smoke smoke, sinse, smoke.

Seth demanded the weed. We packed it into Betty's roommate's bong and allowed ourselves to believe it was the best weed we'd ever smoked.

 

That summer, I'd get up at 5 AM and drive the delivery truck, heading up First Avenue as the sun came up, listening to the Stone Roses, or Toots and the Maytals'
Funky Kingston
. I was bringing gourmet ice cream to restaurants before they opened.

Heartbreak, new to me, was surreal. I was in tremendous pain, which I regarded in disbelief.
How can this be happening to me? Can something really hurt this much?

When Betty got back, she and Seth split on a bus trip, traveling through the South, then the Midwest, then over to California. Seth called from Wichita to tell me that the yellow terrain was so flat
you could see the rain coming from miles away. They called me from a pay phone on the grounds of Graceland and left a jovial message. I was sitting at home, staring at the answering machine, stoned, too paranoid to pickup the phone.

The other record I favored in the ice cream truck was Elvis Costello's
My Aim Is True.
I identified intensely with his vindictiveness. I read somewhere that the working title was
Revenge and Guilt.

My aim was not true. I fantasized about beating the shit out of Seth, though I had never thrown a punch. I fantasized that I'd go to the Port Authority bus terminal, pick them up in the ice cream truck, and as they fell asleep in the shotgun seat—she on his lap, his head lolling on her shoulder—I'd take them through the Lincoln Tunnel to New Jersey, push them from the moving vehicle, abandon them in the reeds of the Meadowlands.

 

I was supposed to meet somebody at the Knitting Factory. She stood me up, but the bartender knew me and said they needed somebody to bartend that night. I said I didn't know how to make any drinks. She said if I didn't know, I should ask, “What's in it?” As it happened, the bartenders at the Knitting Factory had the least professional aptitude of those at any bar I've ever been to.