Last Drink to LA

by John Sutherland

  The Bush parents arranged for their son to meet one-on-one with Billy Graham in 1986 at the family compound at Kennebunkport (this lends credence to the ‘intervention’ hypothesis). It was Billy’s old-time religion – and the ultimatums of his family – that rescued young George from the demon drink. The free world may live to be grateful that the faith-based intervention worked. If it didn’t work, we may not have lived to be grateful for anything. Would you have wanted a dry-knuckle drunk (as Martin Sheen called Dubya) with his finger on the red button?

  Ideally intervention, with its presentation of a Faustian choice to the drinker, needs to be done (as with George W.) when there is still much to lose, still people to care, and still a future career to live for. (‘You can still be President, Son’ – ‘Naw! Do you think so, Dad?’) Middle-class ‘respectable’ drunks with caring families seem to respond best. The remedy seems to work most effectively with those who, like the Bush family, believe in ‘faith-based cures’ and the ‘Jesus factor’.

  All careers end badly, Enoch Powell famously declared, as his own went down the toilet. None more badly than that of the career drinker. Even in a secular age, most of us would like to end well: like Addison, if we are really high-minded, who summoned young people to his deathbed, that they might witness the full dignity of a Christian’s quietus.

  Drunkards’ deaths are awful; enough to drive you (and them) to drink. Worst of all are the deaths of drunken women. Their bodies are not made for hard drinking. Anthony Burgess, himself a problem drinker by his own account, dragged his wife down into a terrible alcoholic decline. He describes her last binge with self-mortifying, polysyllabic exactitude in the second volume of his autobiography, You’ve Had Your Time:

  She had two more long sessions with me in pubs, both of which ended in violence, mine not hers… Back home Lynne complained of nausea. She tasted, she said, strong meat-extract in her throat. Then she turned pale, knowing what it was. A massive portal haemorrhage started while she lay in her bed: there were not enough pots and pans in the kitchen to hold the tides of blood… I read that alcoholic or portal cirrhosis was a chronic degeneration of the liver due to the prolonged ingestion of alcohol, characterised pathologically by increased interlobular fibrous tissue and degeneration of the liver cells, and clinically by obstruction to the portal circulation. The external symptoms Lynne had shown were revealed to be classic: tongue heavily furred; distended abdomen contrasting with wasting elsewhere; skin (the hepatic facies) dry, sallow, and icteroid: ‘When ascites occurs, very bad: this is almost a terminal event.’ One would need to be a St Julian to embrace that body, engage that breath. Ascites was the accumulation of serous fluid in the peritoneal cavity. The origin of the word was the Greek askos, as wineskin. That was all too appropriate… I had always persuaded her to drink drink-for-drink with me, ignoring the truth that women’s livers are not men’s… it was right for me to feel like a murderer.

  Zola, with his usual naturalistic unfeelingness, gives a vivid report of the female alcoholic’s last infirmities in the description of poor Gervaise’s degradation in L’Assommoir. As usual, the alcoholic woman is even more of an object of moral contempt than her male partner:

  Gervaise hung on like this for months, falling ever lower, swallowing the vilest insults, dying slowly of hunger, day after day. Whenever she got her hands on a few sous, she drank them up and pounded against the wall. Around the neighbourhood they gave her the dirtiest things to do. One evening they bet her she wouldn’t eat filth. To earn the sous, she did it. Monsieur Marescot had decided to turn her out of the room on the seventh floor. However, as old Bru had just been found dead in his cubbyhole under the stairs, the landlord was willing to let her have this corner. Now she lived in what had been old Bru’s niche. It was in that hole on a pile of straw that she starved, with an empty stomach and chilled to the bone. Apparently, the earth did not want her. She became a maundering idiot, too dull to think of throwing herself from the seventh floor on to the courtyard pavement, and thus making an end of it. Death had to take her little by little, bit by bit, dragging out to the bitter end the damnable existence she had had. No one ever knew exactly what finally caused her death. They spoke of cold and of heat but the truth was that she died of poverty, of the accumulation of filth and weariness in her ruined life. According to the Lorilleuxs, she died like a pig in its sty. One morning, noticing a bad smell in the corridor, folks remembered that she had not been seen for two days. They found her in her cubbyhole already turning green.

  Even Zola, for whom the human species was no more than a bacillus under the novelist’s eyeglass, can scarcely bear to linger, it seems, and gives the description of Gervaise’s last days in fast-forward mode.

  Only some celestial audit could work out whether the fleeting happiness of inebriation is balanced by the terminal wretchedness of alcohol addiction. From the first glass of the blushful Hippocrene, with beaded bubbles winking at the brim, to the dog turd eaten for ten sous and the liver bursting like an over-distended plastic rubbish bag: how does it stack up? Good deal, bad deal? One would need a gigantic Benthamite pleasure-pain calculus: all those ‘happy hours’ in one pan; a seething mass of blood, broken bones, irritable bowels, foul breath and morning hangovers in the other.

  For drinkers, the reckoning always nags. ‘What are you paying for this?’ Most drunks could say, contemplating the glass in front of them, what Charlie Parker liked to quip about his glassine sachet of junk: ‘There’s my Steinway, my portfolio of stocks, my Cadillac.’ Alcoholic remorse (‘hangover’) is universal. But one of the oddities of alcoholism is that few recovered alcoholics sincerely regret having suffered the disease (if disease is what it is). The Steinway, and portfolio are well lost; all for drink, as the dramatist might say.

  The willingness to accept a manifestly bad bargain is one of the many paradoxes of alcoholism. It comes up at AA meetings frequently. Given their lives, most of the poor saps suffocating in tobacco smoke and sipping sour coffee out of dixie cups aver they would do it all again – but stop a bit sooner. Before, that is, the really bad things began (and, what is rarely admitted to, before the need for coming to these damn AA meetings and drinking this awful brew). There was, they nostalgically recall, a kind of adventure in it. A voyage to the end of one’s night. At worst, alcoholism (for the ‘recovering’, at least) is a felix culpa: forbidden fruit worth eating, despite the curse (death, madness or, ultimate horror, lifelong sobriety!) that inevitably follows. Many drunks, even those surrounded with their life’s wreckage, like to strike a Baudelairean pose: this mal has its fleurs.

  And what, precisely, are they? Drunkenness, it is protested, can be an educational experience – a spiritual or philosophical quest, even. It was only in the ‘White Desert’ of his alcoholic despair that Jack London was able to have his Schopenhauerian dialogues with what he calls in John Barleycorn the ‘noseless one’, Death. The Reaper would have disdained conversation with a sober interlocutor. Drunks cleave tenaciously to the illusion that drunkenness connects you with the inner truths of the universe, enables you to look God in the face. This is vino’s ultimate veritas.

  Many can trip off a quatrain or two of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the best known of Anacreontics, in support of the boozer’s grand illusion:

  Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring

  The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:

  The Bird of Time has but a little way

  To fly – and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.

  As they used to say of LSD, drink can be a trip. And if you don’t take it, you’ll never know.

  Sometimes drunks can even persuade the sober world that their drunkenness is something grander than mere self-indulgence. When Charlie Parker’s common-law wife asked the physicians to cure her gluttonously addictive husband – by the sledgehammer therapies of ECT or lobotomy, if necessary – she was asked: ‘Mrs Parker, what do you want? A husband or a genius?’ A Strindberg spouse would have opted eagerly for mutilat
ion, willing to apply the electro-pads to her man’s forehead herself, if allowed to, if only for the pleasure of seeing the selfish bastard jump. Mrs Parker didn’t, earning the eternal gratitude of jazz fans. She might have retorted, however, that a sober genius would have been welcome round the house at the kids’ bedtime. ‘Bird’ died in his thirties (the surgeon who conducted the autopsy assumed the musician was in his sixties).

  If not geniuses, most alcoholics feel special and believe that pathological drinking is a mark of their specialness. Like epilepsy in primitive societies, it is a kind of holy affliction. I suppose I, too, am grateful for alcohol – despite the wretchedness it brought me (and still does when I look back at all those years of waste and shame). It was, in its way, a solution.

  I was, from childhood, afflicted with crippling shyness: my light, for what it was, could never shine out from under the bushel of my social nervousness. It’s easy (now) to see why I was awkward. I had been brought up an only child in wartime; there were no siblings; no role models; no dominant males against whom I could define myself. Thanks to German bombers, I went to seven schools before I was 11. And thanks to British bombers (in one of which my father was burned alive) I would never enjoy the cosy stability of the postwar nuclear family. I was disadvantaged, but in no material way deprived (‘pampered’ and ‘spoiled’ were words I heard often when I displeased some elder; which, frankly, I did less often than most children). I wanted for nothing except normal boyhood society. My best relationships were with books. If Victor Frankenstein wanted to create an alcoholic in his laboratory, he could do worse than follow the preceding blueprint.

  In adolescence, I needed some magic potion to help me connect with my male peers and – most urgently (given what was happening to my body) – with women. The romances of Rider Haggard and Dennis Wheatley (which I devoured from the ages of 11 to 13) no longer satisfied. I now wanted the real thing. Breaking the ice that kept the sexes apart was difficult in the 1950s; even for those possessed of style, good looks, quick wit, bravado and a winning line of ‘chat’. I enjoyed none of those assets.

  It would have been aeons before I took to the dance-floor sober (more so given the new steps that were coming in: jive had given way to the ‘creep’; Victor Sylvester’s sedate rhythms were drowned out by Bill Haley’s caterwaul; it was the end for the rituals of ballroom and ushered in frightening new anarchies). And never, had I waited till the end of time, would I have dared to place my hand on those forbidden zones of a young woman’s body (well guarded as they were in those days with brassières that could have served as medieval armour and the impenetrably elastic ‘roll-on’; I learned about lingerie hands-on, like other young males of my generation).

  What emboldened me, and timorous youths like me, to the necessary pitch of sexual recklessness was gallons (literally) of bitter beer. Indulgence on this swinish scale did not make for urbane manners. The trick was to get the woman – who could be persuaded to drink ‘shorts’, as something more sophisticatedly feminine than ‘pints’ – even drunker, more ‘incapable’, than oneself (this, incidentally, was where the pre-alcoholic’s tolerance sometimes came in handy). Acquiescent intercourse was the best that could be hoped for. Truly consensual sex in this pre-Pill era was something to be found only in the fantasies of Hank Janson, the leading pornographer of the day. What, one wondered, was a nymphomaniac? She was rarer than the unicorn in the Essex town of Colchester in the 1950s.

  In their hearts, most drunks feel they were most truly alive in those days when they were most drunken. There is a husk-like dryness to the ‘recovered’ life, however fiercely joy in sobriety and pride in serenity are protested. Nor, having tasted the pleasures of excess, does moderation satisfy. Few alcoholics really want to return to ‘social drinking’ (a mistake that the medical profession often makes). Even now, with many years of sobriety behind him, Stephen King declares that social drinking ‘would be like kissing my sister’. There is no juice or kick in it.

  Raymond Chandler, a literary hall-of-fame alcoholic, eloquently describes the wasteland of post-alcoholic sobriety:

  The toughest thing about trying to cure an alcoholic or a user of dope is that you have absolutely nothing to offer him in the long run. He feels awful at the moment, no doubt; he feels shamed and humiliated; he would like to be cured if it is not too painful, and sometimes even if it is, and it always is. In a purely physical sense, you maybe say he is cured when his withdrawal symptoms have passed, and they can be pretty awful. But we forget pain, and to a certain extent we forget humiliation. So your alcoholic cured or your former dope addict looks around him, and what has he achieved? A flat landscape through which there is no road more interesting than another. His reward is negative. He doesn’t suffer physically, and he is not humiliated or shamed mentally. He is merely damned dull.

  For men, excessive drinking, despite medical evidence that it shrinks the penis and withers the scrotum, is intimately connected with the peacock displays of manhood. ‘A man does not exist until he is drunk,’ Hemingway declared. In his study Hemingway vs Fitzgerald, which depicts relations between the writers as a decades-long drinking match, Scott Donaldson records that the most shaming thing for Fitzgerald – the thoroughly bested contestant – was the fact that, compared to macho ‘Papa’, he drank ‘like a girl’; when it came to booze, he was ‘a cissy’.

  On his part, Hemingway drank like a man – even inventing his own ‘poison’ for posterity to remember him by: the ‘daiquiri’. (Michael Palin solemnly imbibes one of the syrupy concoctions, with the reverence of a communicant, in his popular pilgrimage book, Hemingway’s Adventure.) Manly to the end, Hemingway died a madman, convinced, in the sodden wreckage of his alcohol-ruined mind, that the IRS and FBI were pursuing him for unpaid taxes. All those daiquiris down the hatch led to the shotgun barrel in the mouth at six o’clock in the morning in July 1961. (It was Hemingway’s proud boast that he’d ‘been drunk 1,547 times in his life but never in the morning’; he was clear-headed when he blew his head off.)

  There is, as all adolescent drinkers know, something grand about excessive drinking. People tot up (and exaggerate) their tots because excessive drinking is, like sporting or athletic prowess, something that it is important to record. Norman Mailer, who has clearly veered into heavy drinking during ‘Irish’ periods of his career, notes as a matter of pride that he has done more damage to his brain with drink than he sustained from blows to the head in his boxing days – which were also, of course, his drinking days.

  This masculine-competitive drinking ethos (‘drinking like a man’) goes back to those old days in the wassail hall that we read about in Beowulf. After a day’s slugging it out in the marsh with Grendel’s mother, they would go back, sit on the ‘yelping bench’ in the wassail hall and get wasted on their filthy Anglo-Saxon ale, mead and wine. There is a particularly hilarious passage in the epic where, as the verse makes clear, a legless Beowulf – collapsed under his heroic intake of drink – is talking from the floor to a standing companion.

  It was (and is) a warrior thing. The man who aspires to be a hero, wrote Samuel Johnson (an abstinent alcoholic in later life), must drink brandy: the ‘infuriator’. The fact is that all drinking – if done to admirable success – is heroic (I’m not entirely sure of Babycham). The illusion is timeless – look at Ibiza Uncovered, that fascinating TV-verité record of young British animals at play. It is a repetitive round of competitive drinking, competitive shagging, ‘Madama’ gang-banging (drunk girls orally ‘servicing’, on camera, a long line of young men for more drink) and (usually off-camera) fighting. Imagine Ibiza Undrunken or Saudi Uncovered, or Madama in the new Caliphate of Isis. The imagination strains, and fails.

  The long list of British ‘hell-raisers’ – from the Earl of Rochester to Oliver Reed – is a drunkards’ line-up. Reed is an exemplary case. The years of his acting fame were decades of spree. Reed’s preferred company was Beowulfian: club-rugby players, manual workers. His social life, in the high-ear
ning years, was one of continuous, boisterous, glass-breaking knockabout: bawdy sing-song, press-up competitions, prick-measuring contests. He played compère and led the drunken charge. Reed relished the brutal camaraderie of the post-match piss-up in the public bar. He holds a kind of hell-raising record: 90 pints in three days, an orgy of swilling.

  Oliver Reed died during the shooting of the movie Gladiator (the film is dedicated to him). In Ridley Scott’s screenplay he has the part of an old lion, a veteran of the arena, Proxime. On-screen, Reed’s character suffers a nobly Roman death, holding his rude – the wooden sword that commemorated the manumission granted him by the emperor – as he is cut down by a pack of lesser swordsmen.

  Off-screen, Reed toppled to his death off a bar stool in Malta, where Gladiator was being shot on location. It was the finale (morituri te salutamas) to a squalid session, during which he had drunk, it was reported, the equivalent of two bottles of Scotch. For all the awe and affection in which he was held, it is impossible not to regard Reed’s career as one of wantonly wasted ability. His single talent was not buried, but drenched to extinction.

  One knows, as a matter of course, precisely how much Reed consumed (wow!) on this last bender. Quantitative exactitude is an odd feature of excessive drinking. I do not think that spliff-puffers, or needle-toting addicts calibrate their overdoses as proudly as drinkers do their skinfuls. How many puffs did Clinton not inhale? How many grams of coke did Don Simpson (the Hollywood film producer) take on his last toot? Who’s counting? They ‘used’; that’s all. How much is an ‘OD’? How long is a piece of string?

  Drinkers count neurotically (and not just volume; beer is, I think, the only intoxicant that can be consumed by the ‘yard’ from those peculiar tubular drinking vessels that one occasionally sees in traditional pubs). In his 1999 book On Writing (it’s really about his drinking), Stephen King records that he knew he had a problem with alcohol when he calculated that he was ‘drinking a case of 16oz tallboys a night’. A case is one up from a six-pack – 12 one-pint cans. With this regular nocturnal intake, King turned out a blockbuster, Cujo, ‘that I barely remember writing at all’. It went straight to the top of the New York Times’s bestseller list; that he remembers.