Off to the Side: A Memoir

by Jim Harrison

  Everything I say about alcohol is deeply suspect but hopefully pungent. Suddenly life has become quite full of monoethic ninnies and nannies who address life solely as a problem to be solved. Just the other day on TV a man who lost a close relative to Tim McVeigh said after witnessing the execution that he didn’t feel any “closure or healing” afterwards. If someone doesn’t comprehend that this kind of language rape is brutally stupid there is nowhere to go with them. A life guided by inane psychologisms is scarcely a life, fresh evidence of the new Victorianism of the monoethic. Seeing this reminded me of several years ago in the depths of a particular Hollywood mudbath where late one evening I was watching part of a local late-night TV show wherein a rather attractive young woman wept tears of rage over the idea that people were smoking cigarettes. It developed that she was an aromatherapist and didn’t go to bars, nor did the vast majority of Californians who eventually voted to ban smoking in bars. What are we to make of this? I think that it was Christopher Hitchens who pointed out that the cigarette hysteria began at the time of the decline of communism. If they drink at all the embouchures of these monoethic types are locked permanently into the word “chardonnay,” though last November a lady who winced at my Sapphire martini and American Spirit cigarette managed to say “merlot” with muddy diction. Meanwhile, one must beware of the gaggle of amateur therapists who have of late come to life. Whether it’s your alcohol, cigarettes, or food, they are going to try and piss in it.

  Back to the personal drawing board, the brainpan herself, on whose delicate feminine tissue my memories are less than indelibly etched. Once after a very hard night up on Halibut Point in Massachusetts my young daughter told me that when I woke up flies were “dancing” in my mouth. I recalled a few lobsters with butter chased by cut-rate Old Thompson whiskey. Having lost several members of my family to drunk drivers and seen all around me the destruction caused to families by acute alcoholism in either parent I am quite aware of the dangers. Alcohol can be Bosnia or the Congo flaring with a million machetes while the proscribed marijuana is more on the order of the fabled Mary Poppins’s harmless first period. I was never good at getting stoned because it made me drink to get over the feeling of being stoned. Marijuana also gave me a desire for cheeseburgers, a food item I don’t normally touch more than once a year. Fatty foods and butter kill millions every year. It is clear why drunk driving, a crime I’ve never been convicted of, kills about twenty-five thousand people a year. It is less clear why sober drivers kill an equal number. Of course there are a great deal more of them but if the propaganda is correct they should be perfect.

  Two decades ago in my drinking prime, a matter of volume, my pain threshold was such that I could endure hangovers and still function as a writer. This became less true in my early fifties and as time continued to pass, which it seems to do, I lost the ability totally. Evidently I was far more devoted to my art than alcohol and developed sensors to be able to check myself. Tom McGuane once said to me, “You can’t quit anything until it gets in your way.” Historically we miners of consciousness have had a decided propensity in this direction. Walker Percy, both writer and nonpracticing doctor, thought of it as a “reentry problem” wherein alcohol could ease you back from the imaginary world of your work to the supposed real world where you did your actual living. This is obviously true in small doses but becomes less and less true as the doses get larger. And at a certain specific point it becomes not true at all. It is not pleasant to watch people hit themselves hard in the temples with this ancient hammer.

  Long ago I misplaced the list I used to keep of writers I knew who had to quit drinking to stay alive. I remember the number had reached nineteen and it must be nearly double that by now. Perhaps it begins with alcohol dispelling the essential loneliness of a solo art, and then for many the habit gets out of hand and swallows the life. I wish I had never seen a certain photo of Faulkner, taken after he had emerged from shock treatments in an asylum for his binge drinking. In the photo he looked like a bruised purple plum, or an old picture of a hanged man with a posse looking on telling jokes while their horses shuffled in the dust.

  Ultimately writers aren’t anecdotally all that interesting. The truly bad behavior is indulgence with a superstructure of shabby myth. For instance, Hemingway scholars haven’t been quite up to the fact that his accident-proneness was a result of getting pie-eyed every day after his morning’s work. In the time around the Liberation of Paris Hemingway liked to have a magnum of champagne for breakfast in his quarters at the Ritz. At nineteen I had to sit on the same bar stool at the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street in the Village where Dylan Thomas drank his nineteen double shots and was from there taken to St. Vincent’s where he could not be revived. Literary history is littered with the iconography of booze and coming to maturity as poets in the 1960s so many of us seemed to think it was obligatory to become willing victims of the disease model of the writer and alcohol. It was all a wonderfully sloppy comedy of stuporous poets and novelists writing as fast as possible before imminent death or decrepitude. The media and public at large seem overfond of these spectacles of disintegration, which confirms in them the wisdom of their own desuetude. An artist’s gift of perhaps excessive consciousness includes a susceptibility to wanting to get rid of this overflow.

  We are all specifically encapsulated in what the French think of as the comedié humaine in which our behavior might strive for the original but is destined for failure. When a country song says “There’s a dark and troubled side of life” many of us actually see it right, left, back, and front, on the periphery of vision, but then tragedy classically requires people of high degree warning with enemies, fate, and destiny. Students of literature understand that tragedy doesn’t include hangovers. No matter how acute, the pain of hangovers can’t rise above farce.

  I was sympathetic with a friend who was identified by the police by his room key when found sleeping in the desert in Las Vegas. Another friend found himself in the Los Angeles airport after having a few pops the day before in a West Side bar in New York City. Having never blacked out I find this phenomenon interesting. One of the primary joys of my life has been sleeping which has always stopped me well short of the blacking-out phenomenon. I’m a bit of a piker, as it were, or life’s secret forces after a bottle of wine drive me toward my bed. The terror of blacking out should stop anyone in their damp tracks. The feathers on your chin mean that you ate the parakeet.

  Doubtless Western culture would suffer great damage if it weren’t for the corrective of hangovers. The origin of the riot-producing English Gin Tax centuries ago was simply that gin had been too cheap and people weren’t showing up for work. It’s no fun to be in the Westwood Marquis waking up to an early meeting at Columbia Studios (now Sony) and due to hangover foibles you are remembering all of the lyrics to Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walking.” In your mind’s eye you can see Nancy herself prancing around the stage on Ed Sullivan in her little white boots. You’re not remembering lines from Yeats, Lorca, or Whitman, only this fungoid song, as ugly as the carrot juice you ordered as a health nostrum for breakfast, a song as ugly as the toilet bowl where you poured the carrot juice rather than out the window so that someone far below could have said, “My God, carrot rain.”

  Hangovers have all the charm of a rattlesnake cracking its jaws as it swallows a toad. My last hangover was during a book tour in New York City when Mario Batali cooked us a nineteen-course meal. On the way to La Guardia at dawn I meditated on the amount of effort it took the magnums of wine to penetrate through the food but it got the job done. During a plane hangover you’re always flying solo in an inward, self-referential trance full of the whimsicality of modest self-pity, modest because the wound is self-inflicted. Doubtless if the plane lands upside down you will be the only fatality. Both murder and hangovers are deeply sentimental, more so than Mother’s Day or first love. The lost sock, the boiled-over oatmeal, the defective coffee-maker are taken personally. Self-pity must be
the most injurious of the faux emotions. Mope and slump in your sludge, your brain chemistry a canned soup of insincere regret. The big boy on book tour conveniently forgets the decades when no publisher bothered asking him to tour.

  Quite some time ago I turned an impressive corner with the emotion of wanting more consciousness. I wrote two pages called the Principles of Moderation, which had a wondrous, albeit slowly evolving, effect on my life.

  Drinking causes drinking. Heavy drinking causes heavy drinking. Light drinking causes light drinking.

  The ability to check yourself moment by moment has been discussed at length by wise folks from the old Ch’an masters of China all the way down to Ouspensky. This assumes a willingness to be conscious.

  The reason to moderate is to avoid having to quit, thus losing a pleasure that’s been with us forever.

  We don’t have much freedom in this life and it is self-cruelty to lose a piece of what we have because we are unable to control our craving.

  Measurement is all. A 1½ounce shot delivers all the benefits of a 3-5-ounce drink. A couple of the latter turns one into a spit dribbler. Spit dribblers frighten children and make everyone else nervous. On any sedative there is a specific, roomy gap between smoothing out and self-destruction. There is no self-destructiveness without the destruction of others. We are not alone.

  Naturally there are special occasions. Generally one can’t have more than one a week due to the first paragraph. When you get older like me it’s once a month, if that.

  It’s hard to determine pathology in a society where everything is pathological. The main content of our prayers should be for simple consciousness. The most important thing we can do is to find out what ails us and fix it. Often we need outside counsel, for clarity and to speed up the process. (I’ve had over twenty years with my mind doctor.)

  In drinking, as in everything else, the path is the way. What you get in life is what you organize for yourself every day. There is an ocean of available wisdom from Lao-tzu to Jung to Rilke. It’s there in a preposterous quantity. If you drink way too much it will kill you and the souls of those around you. If you moderate you can have a nice life.

  There is another rather manly approach that has been useful, an offshoot of bushido I have drawn from occasionally (in The Man Who Gave Up His Name, etc.). It can sound corny but has been quite relevant for most of the history of human life on earth. The main point is that life is trying to kill you in hundreds of ways. You have to be alert by the millisecond. If it’s not wild animals, it’s your human enemies, your habits and conditioning, your lazy senses.

  A lot of overdrinking comes from feeling bad physically. One overdrinks to feel better in physiological terms. This can be avoided by vitamins, exercise, and reasonable diet. Again, it’s a cycle: overdrinking causes overdrinking because you feel bad.

  Another source of the problem is the unreasonable expectations we get from others and ourselves. Unreasonable expectations can be removed by thinking it over. They can’t be “downt,” pure and simple. Evervone can’t get to the top or even the middle.

  The aim is to remove horrors. This really takes a specific level of attention. Pigs love mud and there is a real streak of muddiness in our psyches. It can be soothing to wallow. We prefer to be stunned rather than overwhelmed. Unfortunately the variations of self-pity are the most injurious emotions we have.

  Oddly enough our main weapons in controlling drinking are humor and lightness. The judgment of others and self-judgment (stern) are both contraindicatory. When we fuck up we mentally beat ourselves up. It doesn’t work at all and has to be expunged. The reason to slow down is to feel better and it works real good.

  You begin by cutting it all by a third. After a few weeks you go down to a half. After that your soul will tell you when you listen. It helps to avoid pointlessly cynical camaraderie. Often it is actually a matter of one drink too many.

  We need always to separate the problem of virtue from the problem of lack of control. There are too many lies in circulation as always. Certain countries, France for example, drink more alcohol but have fewer problems. This is partly due to the predominance of wine which is less of a stun gun on behavior but also that drinking isn’t connected to virtue or nonvirtue. It is a practical problem. Drinking has to be strictly self-controlled the moment it negatively affects our character and behavior.

  These are relatively mild pointers though the consequences of ignoring them are as fatal as shooting yourself in the head in a curious time warp wherein the bullet takes many years to reach its inevitable target.

  With wine we approach sheer pleasure with bended elbow but not an upturned nose. I could have become a wine snob but didn’t. The escape was narrow but my salvation was several near bankruptcies, and then quitting the screenplay business drew me up short of the income required to maintain a good home wine cellar, the yearly purchases that ensure in ten years and more you will not be stopping on the way home from the office for a syrupy California “cab” so favored by nitwits. I admit I still have some Mount Eden magnums from the seventies, and superb Joseph Heitzs from the same period, but California wines are not my metier. Is this because California has become a state where you can’t smoke a cigarette with a glass of wine in peace? A little bit. Is it partly due to the ridiculous wine-rating system of the Wine Spectator, which occasionally suggests major advertisers are getting a break? Is it because some flatulent venture capitalist has announced that his recently acquired Napa vineyard will compete with Lafite Rothschild?

  Back to the realities, the day-to-day stuff. Money can distort the buying and drinking of wine just as it distorts art with respect to the gallery and auction businesses. The most frequent question is not if the wine or art is good but how much did it cost you and what is it worth now? Money easily demeans our taste in art and wine with that bull-market attitude of look at me, I can afford to turn a four-hundred-dollar bottle of La Tache into pee-pee when the whim comes over me.

  I learned wine by failure and shameful waste. Back before the bull market and the yuppie salad days I earned a bunch of money, as much as “high in the six figures” one year in wages, certainly not speculation. There were a few early lessons buying English gambling stock and Australian oil stock, both of which became worth nothing at all like an empty whiskey bottle. I can’t tell you where the money went as my brain lacks that orientation. I have the feeling that the money simply took a bus out of town. The fact that you can’t even go into a bank and look at what savings you did manage to accumulate makes it less than interesting to my peasant genes. Again, I tend toward the comic view of these years. The pre-bedtime line of coke called out for a vintage Margaux. The fifty-case deal I made with a man selling his collection, over half of them Premiers Grands Crus, flew out of the basement. The seller preferred a private party to a restaurant, someone who would providently take care of the wonderful wines that he had taken years in the making.

  Some of it was well used with friends who were aware of what they were drinking during massive feasts of woodcock, grouse, and venison. This matter stops me just short of a sense of my total loutishness in that period, and my oldest daughter had the sense to hide some old La Tours, Yquems, and Lafites for her future wedding, but all in all I was an untethered swine in a fertile truffle patch.

  My total turnaround was rather slow in coming but finally accomplished, the signal event a few years ago when I sat in a La-Z-Boy chair my wife loathes and stared down a fifth of Canadian VO, a long-term favorite that had become a slowish death of sorts. I simply loved the flavor and a tear formed when I poured it out in the sink after gazing at it for several hours. It’s hard to comprehend the difficulty of breaking a habit so easily acquired.

  I turned to wine with a passion that I had offered it sporadically. Obsession can’t be expunged, only replaced. I’m clearly a daffy sort and one summer tested thirty-four Côtes du Rhônes in search of a house wine I could afford. Since then some of my favorites, Gigondas, Vacqueyras, and Domaine
Tempier Bandol from farther south, have risen in price but I’ve decided I deserve them.

  Unlike booze, good wine resonates so broadly it draws in the world that surrounds us. The effects of it are slow enough so that you can check yourself, an absolutely vital talent if you drink. As a Zen dictum says, you must find yourself where you already are and the effects of booze make this unlikely. Good wine increases the best aspects of camaraderie and sweetens the tongue for conversation. It softens the world’s sharp edges in contrast to the blunting power of booze. In short, you don’t become dumb at a blinding pace, and your mood swings from gentle to gentler.

  It has also occurred to me that I’m drawn to wine for the same reason that fishing and bird hunting have been lifelong obsessions. The pleasure is in the path, the search for something good, that finding a fine, reasonably priced wine is similar to catching a trout in an unlikely eddy of a river, or two grouse in the bag on a cold, rainy October morning. It is celebratory rather than sedating, a nod to the realities of existence rather than an erasure. When I come into an aspen glade in May and find several dozen morel mushrooms I begin concocting a meal, perhaps the chicken thighs sautéed with wild leeks and morels devised by Tom Colicchio of New York’s Gramercy Tavern, also Craft. If I were making the same dish with elk I’d drink a big Tuscan vintage or my all-time favorite financially reachable wine, Domaine Tempier Bandol. Mild dangers lurk in that before we left our casita on the Mexican border this spring I drank an assortment of fine reds with sweetbreads, fresh abalone, doves, quail, and elk. You can pay two hundred bucks to a doctor to find out this combination might bring on gout but you already know that. For some of us the inner greedy child is at work right out there on our skins.