The only drinking I could find within cycling distance (at least, cycling-back distance) was, as it turned out, Pasadena’s sole gay bar. It had the unlovely name of Nardi’s (half naff, half sordid, as I merrily thought). It was not what I would have chosen, but that was how the chips fell. On the any-port-in-a-storm principle, I adopted Nardi’s as my local. Drinking went on till 2am, the legal closing time in California. Thereafter, a hard-core of survivors would adjourn to someone’s apartment.
I have never explored gay sex. But it was the only thing on offer at Nardi’s. And, in a way, it seemed to fit in with my current Baudelairean sense of self. A new, dangerous road to explore. In fact, it turned out to be baffling rather than adventurous. After one heavy night I awoke from a blackout to find myself slumbering alongside an African-American whose name, I dimly remembered, was Richard. We were both partly undressed. My hand brushed against his groin (accidentally, as I trust), and felt nothing there (I’m fairly sure this was not an hallucination). His Johnson had been cut off, amputated. Perhaps it was a preliminary to a sex-change operation.
It was just as well things went no further. Aids was reaching epidemic levels in southern California, although, in 1983, no one was entirely clear as to what the new disease was. I would almost certainly have contracted the virus had I carried on as I was then doing for a night or two more.
It was the morning of 11 February 1983. I had a monster hangover. The phone rang: it was Richard’s parole officer phoning up to make sure he was home and not violating his curfew. (What, I vaguely wondered, had he been in for? Penis chopping?) I made my ultra-English excuses and left. I emerged into the blinding early-morning sunlight among the palms and skuzzy bungalows of western Altadena – Rodney King territory, would be famous, eight years later. If Officer Koon had been going at me all night with his mighty Kevlar truncheon I could not have felt more bruised.
This, as I walked down the interminable miles of Marengo Avenue, was the end of my night and my morning of clarity. Was this what it had come to? All that grind, the degrees, the books read and the books written? Holding the penile stump of someone I barely knew, in a godforsaken Californian ghetto in a sun-baked country where I didn’t belong?
I would have one more drunk: the final test. Me versus my alcoholic destiny. It would be no half-hearted affair. I bought two bottles of cheap Californian champagne and a large, two-quart flagon of Gallo’s even cheaper Chardonnay (as back-up, when the fizz ran out and one’s palate had lost its discriminating edge: the alcoholic mind at work). This last stash was taken back in the basket of my Raleigh and consumed – gulped – in my apartment. I can taste the saccharin-acrid Gallo’s now. I was, finally, a wino. End of the line, Ma.
Of course, my tolerance was shot. I needed a lot less than I had bought to do the trick. But, somehow, I finished it all off (never let it be said a Sutherland left an empty flagon). I blacked out early. When I came to, all the furniture had been rearranged. I never did find out which fairies had done it.
I awoke to a different world. The sun had gone in. For ever, as it seemed. Southern California was now experiencing record-breaking rains (some damned weather record is always being broken over there). The Queen of England, no less, was visiting a West Coast sodden all the way from Vancouver to Baja California. Storm systems were backed up like a Venetian blind, all the way to Japan, waiting to sweep in and dump their load on me and my monarch.
Pacific storms are different from Britain’s ‘soote shoures’. They are made up of heavy drops, widely spaced. It is, somehow, a harder rain and up to three inches a day can fall (a third of the annual rainfall in a dry year). The downpour triggers mudslides. Less dramatically, but more dangerously, the patina of tyre rubber and grease on the freeways, baked for months on end by the desert sun, is moistened into pure slick. Withered windscreen-wipers peel and smear. People get nervous and short-tempered. In short, the Golden State turns and looks ugly when it rains. Apocalyptically so. The great flood, they say, will be more destructive than the great earthquake, ‘the big one’.
Alcoholics are always on the lookout for their ‘objective correlative’ (as T.S. Eliot called it). My internal works were as turbulent as the end-of-the-world weather. I emerged from my bout with the Gallo brothers in the grip of agonising withdrawal. Uneven heartbeat, panic attacks, dislocation of time (minutes became hours; days passed as eye-blinks before I could even pretend to do any work). I was sweaty and chilled at the same time. I was hearing voices, experiencing visual phenomena (jagged zigzags of light out of the corner of my eyes), afflicted by paranoid persecution-fantasy in public places (Why were people looking at me that way? Did they know?); ravenous, nauseous, anorexic by turns.
It is a state of mind in which banal events take on the portentousness of symbol or prophetic sign. I walked, pelted with rain, past the local supermarket, Louis Foods, and saw genteel senior citizens rooting in the skips (‘dumpster diving’), as they always did in the morning, for the perishables that Californian state law obliges retailers to discard after 24 hours. The old gents civilly made way for the old ladies among them to take first pick of yesterday’s sandwiches. It was, in my suicidal frame of mind, an incredibly depressing sight. And there was a kind of de te fabula aspect to it – how long before I was there, shuffling through the garbage with the geezers?
I found myself, at midday, in my office at Caltech, shuddering like a holed fox. I had forced down some food, at that incredibly early lunchtime the Americans like, around 11.30am. Chilli con carne (something warm, a distant maternal voice told me, would be cheering). I can taste and see it now: white onion, lying like maggots, on tongue-scorching red sauce. It lay in my stomach like a pocketful of billiard balls.
It was drink or not drink time. And the next drink, I feared, would be decisive. A one-way ticket into the dark – goodbye, high-functioning; hello, dumpster diving. I was very frightened. After a riffle through the Yellow Pages, I phoned up AA – some forgotten Samaritan had once told me about the helpline. I was not, as I expected, put on hold. After two rings, my details were taken (most importantly: ‘When did you have your last drink?’). Ten minutes later, I was told to go to a nearby street-corner rendezvous. I would be met. Right on the button, a nice guy, Ken H. (market gardener and recovering alcoholic), rolled by in his pickup. There were cacti sticking up in the back of his truck.
I was subjected to what I would later recognise as a hail of AA patter as Ken drove me off to a lunchtime Speaker meeting in San Marino. It was my introduction to the wacky world of SoCal AA. On the ‘Where were you when Kennedy was shot?’ principle, I can remember the event vividly. It was classic dusty church hall, stale cookies, bitter coffee, high-pressure bonhomie. There were lots of sober retirees (some there, I suspect, on the ‘never turn down a free lunch’ credo).
A smartly uniformed Hispanic security guard (from the Huntington!) called Mañuel spoke about his year’s sobriety as he ‘took his cake’. Before coming to AA, Mañuel had been ‘homicidal and suicidal’. Life was good now. He was happy menial Mañuel. Try as I might, I could not ‘identify’ with the success stories of uniformed men who opened doors for me. Drunk I might be, but I wanted more from life than that. Snobbery is the last thing to be eroded by alcohol.
Ken, who was not as dumb as I (with my Marie Antoinette prejudices) took him to be, perceived that it wasn’t working. That same evening, he chauffeured me on to a Participation meeting. This was something else: a ‘closed’ (alcoholics-only), all-Californian, male affair with the rueful name ‘The Wheel Grippers’ (life, in other words, is one damned traffic jam). There were no African-Americans, no ‘minorities’: this was redneck, with a bit of grubby white-collar. The tone of the discussion was extravagantly macho, amoral and incorrigibly racist.
Ken, himself, was a changed guy in this company, bubbling over with stories about nights in whorehouses, jail-time, fights. There were several ex-cons there and a couple of still-serving cops. One of the men in blue (sworn to ‘serve and protect�
��) cheerfully told how he had shot gooks in Korea and how he’d like the fuck to go out in the streets now with his M16 and clean things up. Give him a few good homicidal maniacs and it would take him three weeks, ‘max’. There was some demur from those who suspected that they might be on the receiving end. But hell, this was a place where you could speak your mind.
Another Wheel Gripper, Slim, announced that he’d just come from Bob’s Big Boy. He was completely broke and knew, when he told the cashier he couldn’t pay for his double-double burger, that she’d just tell him to hand over his driving licence. Which, of course, he’d handed over at Burger King the day before! ‘You’re weird,’ was all she would say. Not worth calling the law for seven dollars and three cents.
Slim was currently living in his (uninsured, of course) wreck of a car. His address, as he liked to joke, was the same as the licence number. In California, your automobile says everything about you. The fleet outside the meeting ranged from Cadillacs to ten-year-old ‘compacts’ (the SoCal equivalent of Del-boy’s Robin Reliant), Slim’s mobile home and my own Raleigh bicycle. (I, alone, had no wheel to grip: just sit-up-and-beg handlebars.)
All the Grippers seemed to have, and love, guns (something else I didn’t have and don’t love). All, even the married ones, seemed to have ‘girlfriends’. ‘What the fuck, this isn’t a training for the priesthood,’ Pat O. later explained to me. And, he advised me – good buddy that he was – that meetings were a perfect cover for fooling around: Adulterers Anonymous. In America, everything has old-world ethnic roots, if you dig deep enough. In the Wheel Grippers, it was 100-per-cent-proof Irish. This was a paddy pub with no beer.
Some of the Grippers were business successes. At least one had a private plane. There was a surgeon who, though sober, still couldn’t keep his hands off his secretaries (much bawdy mirth), but had, thank God, managed not to raid the drugs cabinet for six weeks (‘Way to go!’; small round of applause). All the Wheel Grippers spoke in that fluent, hard, inventive vernacular that sounded as if it had been scripted for Jack Webb 30 years before. A Sergeant Friday, however, with the morals of James Ellroy. ‘I used to feel guilty about what I put my woman through; but shit, she could have split any time. She just hung around to watch me croak’ – this from a speaker who, on getting sober, promptly divorced ‘the bitch’. That was his goddamned moment of clarity. There was only one thing that united this group and brought them together: they didn’t drink any more. It was enough.
I gravitated away from the hard men to an older, gentler man. Harry S. had dried out twice: once for 13 years, once for 17. He was an old-timer twice over. He had several marriages and a number of careers behind him. He had flown B24 bombers in the postwar period and had seen a bit of real action in Korea. He was still nostalgic for those glory days (happy drinking days, too). He had subsequently been a PanAm pilot, before disqualifying himself. He had been an insurance salesman – almost impossible to drink yourself out of that job. And, if you were a nice guy (which he was), it was easy to scrape by. He was, like Willy Loman, ‘well liked’. But he got less energetic with age, and now he was rather hopelessly peddling air-exchangers to small businesses wanting to solve the problem of smoke-filled-rooms. (He should try selling to AA, I suggested: no cash, he bleakly replied. And, he might have added, the air-exchangers didn’t work all that well, anyway.)
Harry S. was a variety of Californian I grew familiar with in AA. Their professional life was one long quick-change act. One year they would be a schoolteacher, the next a fireman, and the year after that, having been ordained in a shack somewhere, a preacher. Rolling, tumbling through life. As someone who had been in the one professional groove, man and boy, I was constantly amazed by my fellow-drunks’ wild CVs. At Speaker meetings, I got to know born-again Christian ladies who had, within the memory of some of those present, been full-on strippers (the mind ran riot). I recall a former veterinarian who was now selling ‘affordable caskets’ (discount coffins). The commonest change was those who had been rich, sometimes very rich, and were now living in the weeds in the canyons, or in some crummy halfway house.
This chameleon-like ability to switch, in the blink of an eye, from career to career, lifestyle to lifestyle, was one of the reasons that, as they liked to say in SoCal AA, ‘it works’. In a world of constant metamorphosis, what was strange about being a hopeless drunk one week and a sober success story the next? California is, at root, an immigrant culture where your past is so far away geographically as to be lost: dropped off and forgotten like the fuel stages on a rocket. The past was simply what got you here. Start now. And start often.
Harry attached himself to me as I did to him. He needed to pass on his message to preserve his own sobriety (this is the rationale of the Twelfth Step – carrying the message to the alcoholic who still suffers). AA duty apart, Harry was genuinely nice, with a kind of burned-out wisdom about life. He longed to save enough cash from his air-exchangers to sail a yacht (and his third wife) round the world. Which, I think, he later did. The last postcard I received from him was from somewhere in South America.
Over my first weeks of sobriety Harry vaguely sponsored me. Not very successfully (he was far too deferential about my degrees, my big salary, my $10-words). But just drinking coffee with him was fun therapy. He was a repository of sagacious truth about drink, drinkers and drunks. You can never tell who will make it, he would say, having watched AA at work for three decades. Often the successes were the apparent deadbeats. The down-at-heels, bums, the ones who turned up still drunk and bleary. Those who looked like really good prospects – the bright-eyed, eager, clever ones – would most likely flame out. He was right. It was a lottery. Do not despair, as St Augustine said, one thief was saved: do not presume, one thief was damned. Which thief was I?
I wanted something more than Harry could give and found it at a Speaker meeting where a large bearded alcoholic, with an eerie resemblance to the young Burl Ives, came up to chat during the coffee-break. Peter C. was one of the more remarkable comrades I encountered in the fellowship. He was a freelance carpet-layer, with a PhD in archaeology from Harvard. He had recently become interested in folklore and was writing a book on werewolves (it was published during my second year of sobriety, and remains, I understand, the most scholarly work on that much-travestied subject). Peter C. came from a fundamentalist German émigré community infused with iron-hard Calvinism and grim depression (close members of his family had committed suicide, I later discovered). His mind was profoundly theological. He took to AA like a fish to water and enjoyed high-priest status in the groups he attended. He attended a lot: five meetings a week, minimum.
I am inclined to judge Peter C. as the most impressively learned man I have met – even though I have spent my professional life among a community of academic wiseacres and smart-ass operators. But, in that paradoxical Californian way, reassuring veins of philistinism ran through his superfine intellect; like fat in streaky bacon. He had a huge arsenal of guns. One of his greatest pleasures (in sobriety) was donning his leathers to ride with a motorcycle gang. Not for Peter C. the sherry-laden gentilities of the senior common room.
With Peter C. as my Virgil (he suggested the analogy) I attended some ‘satin-sheet’ meetings in Hollywood – not to his taste; but he appreciated I was, only three months into Tinseltown, still something of a rubberneck. It beat Disneyland. At one Beverly Hills meeting, I found myself actually sitting next to a ‘star’ (OK, a once-upon-a-time star), Aldo Ray. I had seen him, as a boy, in such steaming romances as God’s Little Acre (with its just off-screen act of fellatio, which provoked much wondering speculation in Colchester in 1958) and Miss Sadie Thompson. In those days, the 1950s, Aldo was built like Adonis, had an Astroturf crew-cut, and a voice like a slow cement-mixer.
Now only the gravelly voice remained. Aldo had, 30 years on, come down in the world. He was flabby, shabby and beat up by life. There were no safety nets for screen actors any more than for college professors. He had, a few years before, bee
n offered his ‘star’ on the pavement of Hollywood Boulevard but couldn’t come up with the $3,000 they charged for that tawdry honour (if he’d had even that little cash – chump-change for real Hollywood players – his creditors would have fallen on him like vultures). I noticed, during the Seventh Tradition, that when everyone else pitched in their dollar, Aldo merely fumbled in his pocket and passed the basket on no fuller than it was when it came to him.
As he munched resolutely on somebody’s birthday cake in the coffee-break, he reminisced – for the millionth time, one suspected – about ‘Bogey’, with whom he’d worked on We’re No Angels.
A luckier alcoholic than Aldo, Bogart (legend has it) died with the famous last words: ‘I should have stuck to Bourbon.’ Aldo died himself in 1991. No last words are recorded; nor whether the poor slob died sober or with Bourbon on his breath. I’ve often wondered why the hawkers you see on the pavement of Sunset Boulevard don’t sell the AA Big Book rather than those tacky Star Map guides.
Peter C., who appointed himself my spiritual as well as my temporal guide, favoured a local AA meeting – the ‘77’, a low-bottom haven. No satin sheets for 77. It was ostentatiously squalid: the kind of meeting that took pride in its coffee tasting like battery acid; in the Maxwell House jar-top ashtrays (always overflowing) and the torn, Rexine-covered chairs, salvaged from some local refuse dump. Its core membership were sober bums, halfway-house inmates, men rebounding from unemployment or prison, and quite a few women who had given up what they called ‘prostituting’ (clearly because they no longer had even the minimal physical requirements that line of work takes). While he held on, one poor sod attended with the oxygen tanks that were all that kept him from death by lung cancer or emphysema. It didn’t stop the rest of the group smoking volcanically. Slumming West Side drunks regularly dropped in at the 77. I recall one, an actor whom I still regularly see on TV re-runs. He was astonishingly eloquent about how, that very morning, he had woken up to find a SWAT team outside his apartment. His no-good, drugged-up son had robbed some store. I didn’t much like the 77 zoo. But Peter C. thought it was good to rub my nose in echt alcoholism. He may have been right.
Last Drink to LA Page 7
