Back in the hotel room — after some Glenfiddich, Caesar salad and vaporizing — Mayer and I are laughing about B.B. King's sex life. Mayer is serious enough about his blues scholarship to have read King's 1996 autobiography — though not serious enough to actually have finished it. "I got to, like, chapter three, and he'd bedded, like, 600 girls," he says, shaking his head. "It's like an erotic novel written from the point of view of an eighty-year-old: 'She was sweeter than molasses. I sampled her sweet molasses in January. We would go on up to the top of that maple tree. . . .'"
Mayer's own sexual adventures are less exotic. Six years ago, on one of his first tours, he decided it would be "fun" to sleep with some fans. "I slept with, like, three girls in a week," he remembers. "I thought that's what you did, but there was one girl, I don't remember anything about her, but I left my own body and looked down at myself and said, 'Nuh-uh. Not you.' I stayed up all night and didn't sleep." He never had sex with a fan again — though that doesn't rule out voyeurism. "Totally different. There's ways to have fun with people without ever worrying about violating somebody." Mayer has plenty of platonic female friends, but he finds himself seeing a lot less of them when they find boyfriends. "If your girlfriend knows me, she's really not allowed to see me," he says. "Guys assume that 'Wonderland' guy wants to take their girl." (Later that night, Mayer shares a list of rules on "How to be John Mayer's girlfriend." Jessica, you can clip this out: "One: You've got to be really careful with me on the phone. Distance makes the brain grow more maniacal. Two: Twenty-four-hour phone-sex assistance. If there's a cute girl in the front row, I'm gonna run offstage and call you. Three: You have to run every single fantasy you've ever had through me. You'll never cheat. You see a cute guy at the gym, I'll be him. Or we'll get him. I don't care.")
Mayer knows that he doesn't have the blues birthright of B.B. King or Buddy Guy. But he's had his version of hard times. When Mayer was seventeen years old, his heart started beating irregularly — an episode of arrhythmia that sent him to the hospital for a weekend. Until they found the right combination of medicines to fix the problem, his doctors were ready to stop his heart and restart it. "It was so frightening at the time to be seventeen and have heart monitors hooked up to you," says Mayer. "That was the moment the songwriter in me was born. I discovered a whole other side of me. I came home that night and started writing lyrics. I discovered it all at once: It was like opening up a lockbox, and inside was a depth that I didn't even know I had as a person, or a writer — incredible creativity and vision and neurosis, complete neurosis. They all go together in a package." Afterward, Mayer started having crippling anxiety attacks, which he's only conquered in the past two years — to this day, he keeps a Xanax in the small pocket of his jeans at all times as an insurance measure.
Very little of this turmoil is evident in Mayer's music, which shuns noise and aggression. "It's not a part of my personality," he says. "I was a mild kid, man. I don't yell. There's some people who don't like me, just because I represent a certain kind of normalcy that people see as a waste of a music gig." He laughs, gets up to pour more water for his scotch and keeps talking. "I roll with the same truth as to who I am as the hardest-core punk rocker or the worthiest rapper," he says. "I am as John Mayer as 50 Cent is 50 Cent or Eminem is Eminem. And I think that's why I am where I am: Know who you are and be who you are. All the way. All the way to the hilt."
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