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

for the first time. I was always afraid to go there—every time I got high, somebody else went to buy it—but I resented being beholden to them. Mumlow had told me she’d kick me out if I got high in the universe, but she was in Texas seeing relatives. Ilsa was walking in a stream of people towards a place called the Laundromat, where you’d stick your money through a hole in the wall and get heroin or cocaine in return. There was a guy placed near the corner trying to mitigate the very obvious flow of customers, “They’re gonna take you off the line,” he sang gently, tut-tutting. “They’re gonna take you off the line.”
    I gave Ilsa my money. Ten bucks. “Just one? Really?” she said.
    I stood there thinking she’d stolen my money, but she returned and gave me the single bag of heroin, an envelope an inch and a half long, the size of two razor blades held together. We walked past her place, a storefront on Seventh Street with futons on the floor and tie-dyed sheets hanging on the walls. There were a couple of other Germans there, who looked like they were just beginning to tip into real junkiedom; they looked like tourists in shiny European clothes, but there was something drawn and desperate in their faces. They were surprised that I didn’t want to hang out and get high with them.
    The bag of dope was tiny, but I felt its every contour in my pocket.
    I had started moving the furniture around the universe earlier in the day, wanting to change my brain by rearranging the physical
world. So the place was a mess; it didn’t suit my visions of effete drug use. I tapped the little quantity of powder onto a book anyway. I sniffed up a line, sat there, decided I wasn’t high yet, sniffed up another line, thought the same, and suddenly had sniffed the whole bag within five minutes. The high walloped me.
    I nodded out, then came to. I had bought a Charlie Parker tape—some live recording. I put a Walkman on and lay back on the bed in the jumble of shoved-about furniture. I didn’t know much about bebop, except that I wanted its sophistication. I wrongly thought that Charlie Parker would be a soothing, heroin-genic drug soundtrack. I passed out again.
    I had some kind of frenetic nightmare that I can’t remember. I sat up in a panic. The wild music was shrill in my ears.
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    Sun Ra’s Arkestra played the Knitting Factory soon before Sun Ra died. He’d recently had a stroke. The band wheeled him onstage for sound check, then left him there, alone, as they all went to dinner before the show. After the first set, they left him onstage again. I walked up with my notebook and Sun Ra signed it with a shaking hand, his autograph like that of a third-grader just learning cursive.
    The guitar player Marc Ribot was a regular; I idolized him for the biting, bitter leads he played on Tom Waits’s Rain Dogs. Somebody said that he’d been at the bar speculating that the next musical revolution would be led by a band featuring the white-rapper version of Kurt Cobain. I buttonholed him. I am that kid! I said. Let’s start a band! He politely declined.
    A fellow doorman named Gordon and I started an improvised-music band called Isosceles; we grabbed slots from the boss on off-nights and asked twenty musicians to play. Seven or so would show up, hopefully a drummer among them. We played to stragglers
who hung around after the night’s first set. Gordon bawled on a tenor sax; I bayed poetry out of a notebook. Once, all twenty players showed up. We literally couldn’t fit on the stage.
    They say if the band could beat up the audience, cancel the show.
    I heard the free-jazz prophet Charles Gayle every Monday. The same fifteen people came every week, so after they’d all gone in, I’d shut down the desk, get high with the sound guy, and watch. The sound was exquisite pandemonium. I learned how to hear this music; it was like seeing through