Last Drink to LA

by John Sutherland

  In A Drinking Life, Pete Hamill’s tough, but sensitive journalist’s memoir of alcoholism and recovery (sans AA, allegedly), he discovered the root reason he drank when he saw Norman Mailer, drunk and pathetic, make a fool of himself at a riotous party. Unable to stand the sight of his hero being laughed at, Hamill rushed out into the New York Street:

  I walked for blocks, suddenly understanding clearly that another of the many reasons I drank was to blur the embarrassment I felt for my friends. If a friend was drunk and making an ass of himself, then I’d get drunk and make an ass of myself too. And there was some residue in me of the old codes of the Neighbourhood, some deep adherence to the rules about never, ever rising above your station. Getting drunk was a way of saying I would never act uppity, never forget where I came from. No drunk, after all, could look down on others. Being drunk was the great leveller, a kind of Christian act of communion. Who could ever point the finger at a drunk if all were drunk? I’d do the same thing in the company of friends who thought they were failures and I was a success. Who could accuse me of snobbery, a bighead, deserting my friends, if I was was just another bum in the men’s room throwing up on his shoes?

  There are other, equally riddling replies to the Little Prince’s question. ‘Why do you drink?’ – ‘I drink to forget.’ ‘To forget what?’ – ‘I can’t remember.’ One takes refuge in smart replies because straight answers are extremely hard to come up with.

  Most drunks have been asked, typically amid some spectacular wreckage of their lives: why the hell do you do it? At such desperate moments, the teenage killers Leopold and Loeb’s defiantly Nietzschean answer appeals: ‘Because I damn well want to.’

  But many don’t want to. Like D.H. Lawrence’s horse on the verge of bolting, they have two wills; and the will to drink is stronger than that to stop. After a certain point, internal resistance crumbles. The drunk can no more stop drinking destructively than the suicide who has thrown himself out of a skyscraper can stop falling. The best he can manage is the falling man’s jaunty ‘so far so good’. Optimists that they are, AA alcoholics like to picture their descent as more like sinking gently through fathoms of water like Ferdinand’s father; when the bottom is touched, they will rise again to the air – DV. The bard himself, folklore has it, died of drink.

  A few are saved; most are destroyed or badly damaged. The odds against healthy survival are no secret. Why then drink to destruction? Every swallow is a willed, deliberate act. Very little alcohol is given away (never enough for the serious drinker). Alcoholism is the sum result of millions of voluntary decisions and purchases. It’s mysterious. Particularly so at the beginning of a drinker career, when one still has choices and can clearly foresee outcomes and plan one’s game. Why, as Cassio plaintively asks in Othello – amid the debris of his ruined army career – do men put thieves in their mouths to steal out their brains? Why do they pay to do it; not just with money, but (if push comes to shove) with every possession that can be pawned to get more to drink? The answer that many drunks would be inclined to give, if it didn’t seem flippant, is that it feels good and seems right at the time. Or, as the more mature drunk, further into his career, might say: ‘It used to feel good, and I want – I need – that feeling again.’

  Alcoholic pleasure is described as something erotic – orgasmic, even – in Caroline Knapp’s hypersensitive journalist’s memoir, Drinking: A Love Story.

  A love story. Yes: this is a love story. It’s about passion, sensual pleasure, deep pulls, lust, fears, yearning hungers. It's about needs so strong they’re crippling. It’s about saying good-bye to something you can’t fathom living without.

  I loved the way drink made me feel; and then loved its special power of deflection; its ability to shift my focus away from my own awareness of self and on to something else, something less painful than my own feelings. I loved the sounds of drink: the slide of a cork as it eased out of a wine bottle, the distinct glug-glug of booze pouring into a glass, the clatter of ice cubes in a tumbler. I loved the rituals, the camaraderie of drinking with others, the warming, melting feelings of ease and courage it gave me.

  The primal bliss about which Knapp rhapsodises is short-lived and not, alas, easily recaptured. And, with time (as ‘tolerance’ builds), the intake required for what Tennessee Williams, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, calls the ‘click’ is so numbingly high that feeling anything other than a persistent ache in the bladder (and later the head) is a daunting challenge. But one chases it, ignis fatuus, or not, until the swamp closes over one’s head.

  Tolerance initially feels good: you can ‘hold your drink’ (more importantly, hold your job, hold your marriage together). To drink and never get drunk is the mid-career drunk’s proudest achievement – paradoxical as it seems. One of my favourite scenes of this alcoholic chauvinism is in the not very distinguished 1961 film The Comancheros (directed by Michael Curtiz). John Wayne (white hat) and Lee Marvin (black hat) are, for their respective ends, both pretending to be staggering drunk. Both have consumed, we apprehend, many shots (bottles, even) of rotgut whisky (no sarsparilla for these tough guys). In fact, they are both stone-cold sober, testing each other out.

  For alcoholics (ten per cent of the audience, to be tediously repetitious), the reassuring element in the drinking-but-not drunk scene is that ‘serious drinkers’, manly drinkers like our heroes (and ourselves), can ‘hold’ the booze. Bacchus wins no easy victory over these topers. Or us. Off-stage, in real life, both actors were known to be heroic drinkers; something that added savour to the scene on-screen.

  Marvin died wretchedly from this disease. Wayne was saved from a wet death by the lung cancer which suffocated him (heroic in everything, the Duke claimed to have smoked 100 cigarettes a day and, after having one dead lung removed, declared that he had ‘licked cancer’).

  Tolerance, alas, does not last. After a few years of being steeped in it, alcohol (like other addictive drugs) reverses on you. Damn it. It’s not that you feel good when you imbibe; you feel bad when you don’t. At the very end of the line you need drink medicinally to allay the pains of abstinence (‘withdrawal’). Sobriety, not over-indulgence, has now become your ailment. Intoxication is the only cure for the toxin of alcohol. Alcoholism, in its final stages, is quaintly homeopathic. You need a ‘hair of the dog’: antidote alcohol to counteract the poison, which is – alcohol, of course.

  Tolerance wilts, in the last stages of alcoholism, under the grossly anaesthetic amount of drink needed to keep the pain at bay. And, at the end of the road, tolerance goes altogether. One drink will do what a bottle used to. One is back where one started; but without the primal joy that kicked the whole cycle off. It is no longer a ‘love story’.

  I daresay some ingenious alcoholic has set up an IV drip to maintain the alcohol level in the blood during sleep. But most drunks – however far along the arc – abstain when unconscious, setting in train the torments of withdrawal – hangover, as it is called.

  All alcoholics start the day with headaches, nausea and anorexia. Enough to take the sober citizen immediately to the casualty ward. One of the sharpest descriptions of hangover that I know is in the neglected novel, The Morning After, by Jack Wiener. The hero, a Los Angeles PR man, Chuck Lester, wakes in a hotel after a night on the razzle. He has asked for an early call – he has an important morning meeting:

  My mouth was caked and parched, my throat was sore. Probing with my tongue, I felt bits of sour undigested food. I had vomited in my sleep. The pillow was wet beneath my cheek, sticky. Raising my head abruptly, pain shot through my skull, forcing me down. But the odour was too strong. I became nauseous. I couldn’t stand, had to crawl to the toilet on my hands and knees.

  Empty, my eyes watering, I stretched out on the cool tile floor. I fought to rise. I’d have to strip the bed. But I couldn’t get up. Each time I raised my head the pain stabbed across my temples.

  What time? I lifted my arm to look at my watch. Unable to focus at first. Bringing it closer, squinting.
Ten after eight. No. It couldn’t be; she was supposed to call at seven. I looked again. It was true; ten after eight. Christ, she never called. The stupid rotten bitch had never called.

  I was due to meet Rudy in 40 minutes. I had to shower and shave and dress. Clean up the mess, get some coffee down. Be presentable and alert. Articulate.

  What the hell was I going to do? Idiot. Stupid, fucking idiot.

  Panic-stricken, I lay there, immobile. Staring at a tiny crack in the ceiling. I could call, say that I was sick, had sprained my ankle. Slash my wrists in a bathtub of warm water. Help me, God help me. Please.

  Wiener’s description of the condition is so painfully accurate that one could assume he may be a fellow-sufferer. He is also clearly a Los Angeles man. I looked up hopefully for him at every meeting I went to where a speaker said: ‘My name is Jack. I’m an alcoholic.’ No luck.

  When one wakes with a real hangover, forget coffee. Only a ‘phlegm-cutter’ (George V. Higgins’s wonderfully graphic term) will still the shakes, calm the morning panic, keep at bay the terrors. Delirium tremens, the final collapse of consciousness into hallucination under the stress of withdrawal, is, typically, a disease of the early morning.

  DTs is nothing like the ‘pink elephant’ fantasia in Walt Disney’s film, Dumbo. A graphic description is given by Charles Jackson in The Lost Weekend (it was somewhat tidied up in Billy Wilder’s film version; Wilder also latched an optimistic ending on to Jackson’s bleakly pessimistic fable of the drinking life). Don Birnam, in the novel’s presentation, has come to the end of a long drunk. He is now dry and in terminal withdrawal. A small friendly mouse (as he perceives) has burrowed its way out of the wall and is looking at him. He feels, like Robbie Burns, a fellowship with the poor cowering beastie. Suddenly a bat flutters past and springs on to the mouse:

  The obscene wings hid how the contest went. They were folded around the opening of the hole, hooked into the plaster, deathly still; they stirred with a scratching sound as the bat shifted for position. There was a smell. His breath stopped in his agony to see. The wings spread as the bat began to squeeze the small bat body of the mouse – he could see the gripping claws like miniature nail-parings. The horrible wings lifted, the rounds ears of the bat disappeared, as its teeth sank into the struggling mouse. The more it squeezed, the wilder and higher rose the wings, like tiny filthy umbrellas, grey-wet with slime… Tiny drops of bright blood spurted down the wall; and from his bed he heard the faint miles-distant shrieks of dying.

  One of the more ingenious literary treatments of the DTs is in Kingsley Amis’s ghost story, The Green Man. Amis’s hero, Maurice Allington, suffers from alcohol-induced jactitation (convulsive twitching) and hypna-gogic hallucinations (as did Amis). But, at the same time, Maurice is haunted. Which is the supernatural and which the alcoholic spectre? Suppose Macbeth (like too many other Scots) was a heavy drinker: what would one make then of the dagger he sees before him? (‘Cut back on the usquebaugh, laddie.’)

  My own brush with the DTs was more banal. On one occasion, I was convinced that there was someone (it might, in point of fact, have been a giant toad), just outside my field of vision, about to pounce. On another, I recall turning a number of pictures to the wall to stop them staring. Nothing quite as horrific as what Birnam/Jackson evidently experiences.

  The pictures also, as I recall, spoke to me. ‘Voices’ are a less florid hallucination, which afflicts terminal drunks in extreme withdrawal. Typically, the voices are less heard than dimly overheard – coming out of cold-water taps, through the central heating, or (in my case) electric kettles and hanging pictures. And, typic-ally, they are overheard saying bitchy things about one (eavesdroppers, of course, never hear good things about themselves). Sometimes as strangers pass in the street, they will be ‘heard’ – by the deluded alcoholic ear – muttering some barely audible insult. Many a pointless brawl has been started that way.

  Evelyn Waugh, an alcohol and chloral abuser, wrote an amusing novel around these voices (which the author had experienced himself, during a spectacular late-life breakdown). In The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (or ‘Portrait of the Artist in Middle-Age’), the hero (Waugh to the life) embarks on an ocean cruise to recover his health. He hears a series of conspiratorial conversations, relayed – as he deludedly thinks – through the ship’s air vents: ‘I don’t say he’s an actual card-carrying member of the Communist Party,’ one voice says, ‘but he’s certainly mixed up with them.’ ‘Most Jews are,’ another voice answers. And so it goes – Kurt Vonnegut’s catchphrase, a writer who has clearly done research into the rituals of AA to judge by the ‘Serenity Prayer’ with which he chose to conclude Slaughterhouse-Five.

  Once the drinker has experienced DTs and heard those vaguely persecuting voices, madness (‘wet brain’) and other kinds of serious organic decay are imminent. The end is nigh. Drink and die, or stop. Most don’t.

  None the less, the quest for joy remains to the end. There was a time – now long forgotten – when even the skid-row drunkard drank because it made him merry and life look good. That mirage is pursued. Even as the last months of their pathetic lives run out, you see a group of winos in the park: men (usually) who have manifestly lost everything. They are disgustingly unkempt and can be smelled at ten paces if you are injudicious enough to get that close. They have not, probably, long to live and that little time will be uncomfortable. All that holds their posse comitatus together is the brown-bagged bottle, or can, which they pass and swig (unwiped) from hand to mouth to hand to mouth. Passers-by will hear their rambling, slurred, periodical ranting or lachrymose, too-loud discourse punctuated by gales of raucous laughter.

  What do these wrecks have to laugh about? Being relieved of the need to work – and the disturbing fact that (as Steve Martin wryly pointed out) they tend to have good heads of hair – is all that makes these deadbeats enviable to their sober, industrious, world-fearing fellow-citizens. (On the hair: is never shampooing the secret, as Martin muses? Or are the moulting strands stuck to their heads by the adhesive goo that oozes from their scalps?) Whatever the weather, park drunks seem, like the monkeys in the zoo, to be having fun; at least intermittently. No one else in the park is laughing uproariously.

  Alcohol, viewed objectively, is no fun whatsoever. The social life of the far-gone drunk is Sartrean in its loneliness. Alcohol abuse features, often as the primary cause, in many divorce cases. But the alcoholic will probably be disjoined from more than the bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. At the end of the road, he has no colleagues, no fidus achates, no ‘community care’. If he has a dog to share his blanket, or his cardboard box, one has to wonder at canine irrationality (as when Bull’s Eye follows his psychopathic master, Bill Sykes, to destruction). But at least four-legged friends are not so irrational as to drink (the only alcoholic dog I know of in literature is Rum Dum in Nelson Algren’s Man with the Golden Arm). Drunkenness is the main cause of ‘homelessness’ – as street destitution and vagrancy are euphemistically called. At least lepers had colonies. The homeless sleep as solitary as Crusoe on his island.

  Lonely as the sufferer will be, alcoholism is, in its effect, the least self-contained of afflictions. Cancer, even HIV, you can keep to yourself, but not diseases of the bottle. Sooner or later, you will be outed and cast out by your sober fellows. ‘Secret drinker’ is, for career drinkers, a contradiction in terms. The habit, once it takes hold, cannot be kept under wraps. The domestic fallout of alcoholism can trickle down for generations in the form of financial, social or emotional ruin. Grossly unfair as it is, the innocent partners and offspring of the drunkard will share the stigma; social, moral and psychological. George Cruikshank’s The Drunkard’s Children is, with its innocent victims, a more pathetic series of plates by far than his The Bottle. The alcoholic’s thoughtless bequest to his loved ones rivals anything a sadist might invent.

  Save yourself is the bleak advice usually given to those with an unregenerate drunk in the family. Pack your bag, scoop up the kid
s, raid the piggy-bank, leave and don’t look back. There are few more pathetic 12-step gatherings than those of the Adult Children of Alcoholic Parents, Al-Anon (for partners and family), or Al-Ateen (for adolescent children of alcoholics). Those who have stayed on, cohabiting with a drunk out of residual love, loyalty or financial dependency, have a hard time of it. Like syphilis in an Ibsen play, it poisons families incurably, generation after generation.

  The favoured prescription in American counselling circles now is the ‘early intervention’ – a ‘nipping in the bud’, ‘stitch in time saves nine’ measure. Intervention normally takes the form of an ultimatum, delivered ensemble by the drinker’s family. Typically, the alcoholic is surprised by the confrontation. You come home, perhaps after a night on the batter, turn on the light, and the room is full of friends and family shouting, ‘The party is over.’ They are rehearsed and have a script. You are off-guard and dumbfounded.

  Former President George W. Bush admitted having drinking problems in the past. From guarded newspaper revelations it seems that he was successfully ‘intervened’. As best one can put it together, the 43rd President of the Union went on an epic bender in July 1986, culminating in his 40th birthday party. He had, one apprehends, been drinking heavily for at least ten years (he was 30 when he picked up the drunk-driving charge that threatened to scupper his presidential prospects, when it was divulged five days before the poll, in November 2000). Reportedly, his wife Laura had told him, ‘maybe 50 times’, that ‘It’s me or Jack Daniels’. George chose Jack: 50 times. At the same time, 1986, Dubya’s father George was Vice President and, one may assume, he did not want a son with a drink problem embarrassing his upcoming campaign for the White House. Barbara, like any mother, was worried about her wild boy.