The Book of Drugs by Mike Doughty Read Free Book Online Page A

Joe burst into the room behind his fuming girlfriend, pleading, trying to placate her. She stopped in the middle of the room, heard the ingenue crying,
turned on her heels, and went to the bathroom. She knocked on the door lightly, saying, “Honey, are you OK? Are you OK? Honey?”
    I stayed on the futon for an hour, hoping the ingenue would come back to get cozy again. Eventually, I got up and walked home in the ashen daylight.
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    The Knit’s manager yelled at me that I’d get fired if I didn’t do a better job sweeping up at the end of the night. Then Wind-Him-Up-and-Watch-Him-Go Joe showed up telling me he had some Ecstasy and had found a Discover card lying on the ground someplace—he and some friend of his were going to drop the E’s and call a whore. I gulped the E as I closed up the desk and left without touching the broom.
    (I once found a credit card on the street; I would’ve bought stuff with it, too, if it hadn’t been in the name of Yuka Kaneko. Instead I sent it to the address in Tokyo printed on the back, promising REWARD. Four months later, I got an embroidered towel in the mail.)
    Joe’s credit card was in the name of Ann Hill. How are we going to convince an escort agency that your name is Ann Hill?
    â€œI’ll tell them I’m from England,” Joe said.
    Wind-Him-Up-and-Watch-Him-Go Joe was intent on getting a black girl. “I don’t want a black girl, why would we get a black girl? ” whined the friend. Mumlow was out of town. We went to her place.
    â€œHello? Yes, how much does it cost? Yeah. Do you take the Discover card?”
    Nobody took the Discover card.
    Ten calls later, somebody finally did. “The name is Ann Hill.” Pause. “Yes. Ann Hill. I’m from England.” He said this in his regular, suburban-Illinois accent.

    They bought it. “We’re young and handsome, so send somebody really good,” he said.
    I drew second. So I went out into the stairwell and waited. I was coming up on the drugs. The stairwell was a cold, hollow chamber, painted institutional pale green. Every fidget echoed eleven stories down. I don’t think it was really E—actually, I think every E I took was not in fact E until roughly 1996.
    I puked a rainbow on the landing.
    I sat there, staring ahead, getting paranoid, hoping nobody would come up the stairs. A ring in my ears became an insectoid buzz. Years passed. I stared at the pool of rainbow puke. Finally Joe came out and knocked on the stairwell door.
    The whore wasn’t beautiful. She spoke with an elegant accent that suggested she was from somewhere like Côte d’Ivoire. Her frank gaze scared me. I didn’t get hard. “Have you been doing cocaine?” she asked pleasantly.
    In the end I rubbed my soft cock between her ass cheeks as she lay there placidly. I came, she pulled out a massive credit-card charging device, and suddenly I was alone.
    Joe’s whiny friend got nothing.
    I was paranoid for weeks. I didn’t dare to look in the stairwell; I didn’t know whether the puke had been cleaned up. It was a fancy building, who took the stairs? I feared a knock on the door from a wrathful superintendent, and then Mumlow would kick me out.
    I feared lupine pimps nabbing me as I left the building. I feared Pinkerton men sent by the Discover card people. I feared Ann Hill, whoever she was, and whatever she made of that unexpected $400 charge.
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    There was a Rollerblading German cocktail waitress named Ilsa. She thought herself a soul singer, and when she went down to the
basement at the end of the night to replenish the beer—she carried the heavy cases on sturdy shoulders—she sang flamboyantly in a faux-Memphis Germanic accent. She Rollerbladed from the bar to the tables by the stage, the Rollerblades slamming on the wooden floor during the band’s gentlest passages.
    I saw her on Avenue A on a night when I was going to cop dope