by Ken Grimes
I was part of a team responsible for putting on a book party to celebrate Donald Trump’s new business tome, Surviving at the Top, which featured a self-satisfied Donald throwing an apple up in the air. A follow-up to his surprise best seller The Art of the Deal, this book party was hosted by Steve Wynn at the Mirage, the first of the mega-casinos to swallow Las Vegas.
The trip began ominously on the flight from New York to Las Vegas. Turbulence over Utah was so bad that we were thrown from side to side, much to the alarm of the passengers, some of whom screamed in fear. I swapped stories with a producer from Entertainment Tonight and did my best to manage my fear like I always did: I read whatever I could get my hands on. According to a Publishers Weekly I clutched in my hand, Ken Kesey, one of my literary heroes and godfather of the counterculture, was driving the original Merry Prankster bus from his Oregon home to Las Vegas. He was promoting a new book, The Further Inquiry, a twenty-fifth anniversary of the exploits of my favorite band of LSD-fueled outlaws. My excitement over the Merry Pranksters and those pure, idealistic times that I was too young to have experienced made me overlook it as a shameless PR stunt. Strange, since I was a PR guy who was supposed to create shameless PR stunts.
Much to my delight, Ken Kesey and his pals had unearthed the bus from the backyard of his creamery in Oregon, cleaned it up, and were going to relive a little of the glory days. As my flight bumped through vicious turbulence, I ignored the hushed whispers and clenched fists of my neighbors. I closed my eyes to block it all out and remembered some of the best parts of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe. It was one of my favorite books in high school, a real manifesto for the 1960s that I tried to copy by following the Grateful Dead, wearing tie-dyes bought in parking lots after concerts, playing Ultimate Frisbee, hitting on girls, and partying my ass off. At that point I had been to more than fifty Grateful Dead concerts, impressive by some measure but not many to dedicated “tour heads.”
My cab dropped me off at the Mirage, where I was greeted by a fake volcano belching fire and Siegfried & Roy’s white tigers pacing in their glass cages in the lobby.
The check-in lines were horrendous. When I finally made it to the counter, I was informed that they had no reservation for me. I would have to use my own credit card to guarantee my room. I indignantly tossed my credit card over and wondered if the tiny credit limit could handle the charge. I made my way upstairs to a Day-Glo claustrophobic room designed for one thing: to propel me into the casino. That began three days of nightmare conventioneering. Padding back and forth in our booth like one of the white tigers, I schmoozed with reporters and booksellers about the big books for the fall and the importance of our authors. The over-air-conditioned convention center and deep carpeting and hours and hours of talking without a drink gave me an almost hallucinatory, out-of-body sensation that spiked on the day of the big book party for Donald Trump.
After a four-hour stint in our booth, I had to get out to see Ken Kesey. I left the air-conditioned mausoleum and trudged across the impossibly large parking lot in the blinding heat toward the ramshackle bus. Tentatively, I stepped inside. The interior was much smaller than I anticipated, maybe because most of the seats had been removed and cots had been installed along the sides. Ken Kesey had transformed a long, narrow old school bus into one of the most iconic images of the era when the Pranksters waved their freak flag high during a journey across America.
It was all here: the intersection of parts of America that never would have dreamed of combining into one: a bus designed for innocent children to ride to school, driven by Jack Kerouac’s famed lunatic, Neal Cassady, carrying Ken Kesey’s Grateful Dead coterie to the furthest edges of LSD-fueled consciousness. I could feel it all inside the bus, and I desperately wanted to be a part of it.
I was disappointed that Kesey wasn’t anywhere to be seen. A small group of modern-day hippies lounged in the bus. I looked around hopefully to see if they were ingesting anything of interest while thinking how much I missed going to Dead shows.
A wave of self-hatred hit me: I despised myself with my bourgeois-wannabe career, wearing my already out-of-fashion 1980s green Armani double-breasted suit with extra-wide lapels. I despaired of selling out to “the man.” The same man, by the way, who was paying me to go on the business trip and allowing me the visit to the bus.
A Deadhead in a tie-dyed shirt and multicolored pants smiled and said, “Hey, man, how’s it going?”
I immediately poured out my tale of woe to these chemically altered strangers, describing my meaningless life, my unsatisfying job, how everything after college seemed to be about money and career advancement.
I had been telling complete strangers my problems more and more, with increasing desperation. The previous month in New York, I had seen a local news profile of a man who sat on Madison Avenue and Fifty-second Street, in front of the Seagram Building, with a sign stating: FREE ADVICE. I tracked him down the next day and asked what I should do about my girlfriend breaking up with me. His answer was so unsatisfying that, as I walked away, I knew why his advice was free: “Don’t worry, if she really likes you, she’ll call you again.”
I realized the Deadhead had been talking to me for a while: “Dude, it’s okay, I mean, you’re working this convention, and it might suck, but you’re here in the bus with us now. That’s good.” How simple, how in the moment. It wasn’t enough.
I mentioned I was working the party for Donald Trump later that evening. The lead hippie in the lethargic group snapped to attention. “Dude, you’ve got to get us in!”
“Okay,” I said, confused as to how the conversation had taken this turn. I had a sneaking suspicion that letting a gang of drug-fueled hippies into The Donald’s book party was a bad idea.
I looked around the bus at the half-dozen beaming faces. “Meet me outside the main convention room in the Mirage at six.”
With an adrenal surge, I jumped off the bus and rushed back to the convention hall, where one of the senior executives at my company told me that a radio producer had stopped by to see me.
“Meet with that guy?” I retorted. “I don’t have time for small fry like him!” I was half kidding, half not.
Fully anticipating a night of free food and girls to chat up, I became livid when my boss told me I was to be the doorman. I stood seething at the front door of one of the Mirage’s cavernous ballrooms. Steve Wynn was the new king of the Strip, and Trump was on his meteoric rise, so this meeting of business titans was the hottest party at the convention.
I had to screen people and then tell them where to wait to have their picture taken with The Donald. I couldn’t believe I had to work the event while my boss and the other executives were enjoying themselves.
I checked invitations and made wisecracks about Trump. Surveying the line of more than a hundred people waiting to have their photo taken with His Eminence, I cracked, “I wouldn’t wait in line to meet this guy!” I noticed a sour-faced woman a few feet away with a pad and paper, scribbling something down, and it occurred to me that members of the press might be here. I blocked that from my mind and turned to see six Deadheads in full tie-dye regalia, with long hair and burning red eyes, charging up to me at the door.
“Dude! Can you still get us in?” one cried.
“Sure. In fact, you can cut in line right here.”
I watched as members of the group attacked the piles of shrimp and ordered drinks from the bar while one held their place in the photo line. Books were stacked on a table near the door, and people waited patiently to meet Trump and Wynn, who stood in the middle of the room shaking hands and taking pictures. Through the dusky gloom of the ballroom, I could see the Deadheads closing in on Trump and Wynn. When they reached Wynn—who is legally blind and wears dark glasses—he seemed completely nonplussed by this assault on his person. Trump visibly gritted his teeth and looked around wildly for his PR people as the Heads gleefully snapped photo after photo and had their free books signed.
Just as quickly
as they arrived, they disappeared.
“Ken, are you checking invitations in this line?”
I jumped and turned around to see the CEO of my company staring at me through her pink-tinted glasses.
“Of course,” I said.
“There seem to be some people here who don’t look like they belong.” She paused. “So make sure you check the invites carefully.”
“Absolutely,” I answered, beginning to sweat despite the subzero air-conditioning.
Somehow, I returned to New York City in one piece and with a third-tier talent agent from Los Angeles stalking me by phone. We had met the night of the Trump party, and she fully expected me to take her up to my hotel room. I wasn’t feeling it. I had her drive me around Vegas in her convertible and stop in one of the seedier sections of town so I could buy a cheap present for my assistant in New York. The whole weekend was weird, reminiscent of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by another of my literary heros, Hunter S. Thompson. Without the bravado and drugs. Only the weirdness.
A week after Las Vegas, my boss called me into her office to confront me about my behavior, starting with bellowing at my colleagues in the booth that I didn’t have time to meet a radio producer. Then she threw a newspaper on her desk. A story in a Connecticut newspaper about the book party reported “an employee of the publishing company said that he wouldn’t stand in line to meet Donald Trump.”
My boss looked me straight in the eye, her bushy hair standing up in the air. “So, Ken, did you say this? We’re in big trouble if Trump or the editor of this book reads this paper, which is likely, since the editor lives in Connecticut and it’s his local paper.”
I lied so coolly and calmly, it reminded me later of lies I had told my mother for years about my drinking, friends, and general whereabouts. “No, that wasn’t me. I don’t know what that reporter was talking about.”
My boss stared at me and said, “Okay. I believe you. But consider yourself under review. One more mistake and you’ll be fired.”
I left her office trembling and walked down the hall to my office. I stared out the window. If I lost this job, I lost everything. What would I do? Where would I go?
Back to Vegas?
2
MG
Down the Drain
It was somebody’s birthday. A couple of friends, my agent, and her husband came over for a couple of drinks. For them, it was a couple; for Ken, it was none; for me, it was as many as I could put away before dinner.
I was the one who furnished the bottle of wine and made an inroad on the vodka and vermouth.
The next day I was leaving Manhattan for my house in Pennsylvania, where my friend Chris was deconstructing a 1950s bathroom for me. It occurred to me that it wasn’t fair to Ken, who’d stopped drinking and joined A.A., to leave vodka in the apartment (that having been his favorite drink after beer), or wine, or vermouth, for that matter.
I poured the wine down the drain, then the vermouth. Bravely, I poured out nearly a fifth of Stoli. Then I was faced with the problem of the empty vodka bottle. The other two bottles had gone in the trash can. I was about to put the empty vodka bottle in but thought: Wait. If I do that, will Ken think I drank the whole thing? The empty wine and vermouth bottles didn’t bother me, but an empty bottle of Stoli?
Here was my solution: I packed it in my suitcase.
An empty bottle to lug all the way to Pennsylvania. That made sense.
I got there; I unpacked. I took the empty bottle to the kitchen and was about to toss it in the trash when I thought, No, Chris might think I drank the whole thing. So I took it outside, up to the road, and deposited it in the trash that would be collected that afternoon.
• • •
Anyone whose relationship to alcohol isn’t quite as obsessive would have done one of two things: left the bottle or taken it along. Why didn’t I just take the full bottle to Pennsylvania? Chris was a big drinker. We could have swilled down the Stoli’s together.
This, mind you, is what’s called “alcoholic” or “addictive thinking.” The whole approach to drinking is crazily mazelike. You turn left, you turn right, you go along, you go back.
Now, you—standing outside the maze, having heaps of laughter at the idiot in there who can’t find his way out—please note: The idiot in there doesn’t know it’s a maze; he thinks this is the Capital Beltway or some other annoying, clogged-up, circular multilaner, but for all of that minor annoyance, it’s the only way he can travel. This kind of thinking can also be called “denial.” There are exits from the Beltway, clearly marked; there’s an exit from the maze, unmarked. Much harder to negotiate.
So, you, standing outside at the exit, yell, “It’s over here, stupid.”
But for her, where’s here?
3
MG
Where’s Here?
(Who’s an Alcoholic?)
An alcoholic who is now in a twelve-step program, or who has otherwise stopped drinking, often cringes at the thought that others will notice and wonder why she’s turning down that drink. The addict is sure everyone else at the party has a burning need to find out why she’s refusing that drink. For the addict, it’s all about her; it’s all about me. Everyone will turn to look at me. Then, as if in a cartoon, these others will grow into huge, elongated shapes, taller and taller, and there’s little me in the center.
If you take the more aggressive approach of telling your party acquaintance up front that you’re an alcoholic, he’ll be embarrassed to hear about it, unless he suspects that he’s an alcoholic, too, and then he’ll quickly disappear, or else he won’t let you alone; he’ll annoy you for the rest of the evening. He’ll look at the drink in his hand as if he’s never seen it before, as if it flew in out of nowhere, an alien with strange powers.
“Am I an alcoholic?”
Good question.
I’d say to the worrier, look at it this way for a moment: See that half-drunk martini sitting on the table over there? Whoever left it there isn’t an alcoholic. Alcoholics might abandon their mates, their children, their jobs, or their cars along the road, but they’re not about to leave a half-drunk drink sitting on a table.
Do you wonder whether you’re an alcoholic? It’s quite possible, if you’re reading this book and can’t find any other reason for it: You might be a parent worried about a child, or a child worried about a parent; you might be doing research on the subject; it might be too early to head to the cineplex around the corner. Reading this book will hardly brand a scarlet “A” on your forehead.
Here are a few standard questions a person might answer if he or she is wondering.
The first one, of course, is are you worried? The thought is that if you’re worried, you have a problem; if you ask the question, you have a problem, because those who aren’t alcoholics wouldn’t think to ask the question (unless it occurred simply because you picked up this book).
Those who most willingly own up to drinking too much may not be alcoholics, since denial is the alcoholic’s stock-in-trade, her first line of defense. (If one tries to eschew the notion of being an alcoholic by putting in its place “drinking problem,” watch out.)
What about this—do you think about drinking when you’re not doing it? A nonalcoholic wouldn’t bother unless she were afraid that she wouldn’t get to the liquor store in time to pick up the wine for the dinner party.
Another familiar question: Do you drink alone? Say yes and you’re down a point or two in the magazine quiz. Drinking alone doesn’t in itself peg you as an alcoholic. But if you say no, it probably tells you you’re not.
I was told of a woman living alone who had exactly two highballs (if they still call them that) in the evening, sitting in her wing chair, reading a book. One could argue that anyone who is locked in to such behavior is probably an alcoholic. Well, maybe. It doesn’t appear to be ruinous behavior, nor does her drinking increase over time. She stops with two drinks. Also, her tipple is the highball. Alcoholics don’t mess around with that so
rt of dilution. Oh, an alcoholic might start out with a highball, but very swiftly, she’s leaving out the water and down to the real business of drinking. (And it is a business, usually with set hours of operation, managed with meticulous care.)
I believe the craving for solitude is almost endemic to alcoholics. I’ve never known an alcoholic who didn’t drink alone. Drinking and solitude appear as confederates in so many stage directions that there’s probably a link.
A pragmatist could say you like to drink alone because you can drink more, and drink unsupervised by whoever is dying to say, “Haven’t you had enough?,” to which the answer is “No.” The answer is always “No” as long as you’ve the wits to speak at all. Why don’t people say what they mean? “You’ve had enough!” No one wants to take responsibility. Not the alcoholic but also not the wife, partner, child, or friend who asked that stupid question.
The alcoholic is irresponsible and undependable, it is said. At least I always turned up for my drink. You knew where to find me at five P.M.: in the kitchen or the living room with my ice-cold martini. I might have been the most dependable person in the state. Right here. On the spot. Hard by the telephone in case anyone wanted to check up on me.
Solitude is the wild card in the drinker’s deck. The love of it goes beyond avoidance of surveillance.
“Beyond all this the wish to be alone,” wrote Philip Larkin. I’ve never understood people who can’t bear to be alone. Frankly, I think they’re worse off than alcoholics. People like that are usually nonstop talkers. Noise is the whole point. Noise, motion, lights, camera, action! Let me know I’m alive, for God’s sake! Such people strike me as desperate.
“But you’re a writer,” someone might point out. “Solitude is necessary; to write, you’ve got to have it.” I’ve written in restaurants, bookstores, Starbucks(es), airport lounges during flight delays, and so forth. Perhaps solitude is a state of mind you can carry around with you.
