by Ken Grimes
As if by magic, I recalled the pie-shaped stairs of the narrow staircase in my house in Bucks County. I’m quite sure I missed my footing once and fell partway down that sinister staircase. Did I spill the martini?
Try as I might (and granted, I’m not trying awfully hard), I can remember no other alcoholic missteps. Then how can you trust me to report correctly? I think it’s safe to say I was not a drunk of monumental proportions, like a few writers whose talent I couldn’t get within shouting distance of: Raymond Chandler, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker.
And then there was the great Raymond Carver.
Raymond Carver was, as he himself said, a “full-time drunk” whose writing got in the way of his drinking. He was in and out of rehabs over a large part of his life. Finally, he was told by his doctor that if he continued drinking, he’d die. Soon. He kept right on drinking.
And then one day Carver decided to stop, and he did.
When asked about his accomplishments, Raymond Carver, one of the greatest short-story writers who ever lived, said that the accomplishment of which he was most proud was that he’d stopped drinking. In an interview in the Paris Review, he said, “I’m prouder of that, that I quit drinking, than I am of anything in my life.”
If that isn’t a testament to sobriety, God knows what is.
31
KG
Allons-y!
The most desolate place I’ve ever seen is off the coast of Ireland in the Aran Islands. It’s called the Wormhole, and it’s an image I’ve been drawn to over and over again.
My mother and I traveled to Ireland the summer I was ten years old, and for a boy my age, there was nothing to do. I couldn’t ride a bike that well (I had learned how only a short time before). There were no toys, no shops, only a tiny village with a small boardinghouse run by a Gestapo-like owner who barely tolerated children.
The beach wasn’t what I was used to in the United States. There was no sand, only rocks; no waves, only chilly, flat water going out to the horizon. It wasn’t warm enough to lie in the sun. The far-off, cold, turgid, gray North Sea was something you stared at for its wild beauty.
Time had stopped on the island. It was 1974 but easily could have been 1874.
I was left to explore with two older kids on holiday with their parents. One day we worked our way across the fields of heather toward the ocean and came across the Wormhole. Carved out of the solid rock of the coast, the sea had formed a vast square hole about fifty feet across and forty feet deep. I stood, staring down into the sea, listening to the waves roar against the rocky walls, the swells of the ocean pouring in, wishing I could throw myself down into the waters. The cry of the seagulls and the kids on either side pulled me out of my reverie. The Wormhole has stayed with me to this day—I still feel its downward pull from time to time.
One way to resist that pull is by sheer propulsion. “Allons-y!” (“Let’s go”) is one of my favorite expressions to use with my sons. It expresses determination and hopefulness that the next thing we’ll do will be an unforgettable experience. Like my mother taking me to see 2001: A Space Odyssey when I was nine years old. Or Gone With the Wind when I was eight (and again when I was eleven). Or Richard II at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon when I was eleven. These experiences and many others, like traveling to Prague a few years after the 1968 revolution, or driving across Ireland to see the castles became transcendent in the Isle of Sky light. How could the boredom of everyday suburban living compete?
I’m convinced that boredom, or even the fear of boredom, is a big part of my alcoholism. There is a Ph.D. dissertation to be written about boredom’s role in drinking, gambling, and womanizing. For me and many drunks, a regular life, as described by Robert De Niro in the film Heat, is boring. He says, “If you mean life as ball games and barbecues? I don’t think so.”
I’m still an excitement junkie. When I moved from New York City back to suburban Maryland, it took me five years to detox from Manhattan and gradually come down from the adrenaline rush of living there.
Recovery is composed of many things. One is simple behavior modification. “Stay away from people, places, and things” you encountered when you were drinking is the advice in recovery. You can’t stay sober if you’re around the same people, doing the same things in the same places—the combination is too powerful and goads you to drink.
My mother and I would be considered “high bottom” drunks, in the parlance of recovery: I had a job (if barely), and she still had a home. “Low bottom” drunks usually have lost everything and become homeless or imprisoned. My mother’s experiences and mine were very different, but the suffering and doubt were enough to make us both want to get sober.
The pull downward represented by the image of the Wormhole has become the polar opposite of my relationship with a Higher Power. The Wormhole is hard to understand, mysterious and remote. My Higher Power is equally mysterious.
Six months before I got sober, I found myself on my knees at the Quaker meetinghouse in New York City. I didn’t know why I was there, because I had never believed in God. When the leaders of the meeting asked for visitors to identify themselves, I stood up and said it was my first Quaker meeting in eight years. I went to the coffee hour, and the people seemed polite, but no one showed any interest in why I was there. In my alcoholic grandiosity, they should have been crowding around me, giving me phone numbers and welcoming me. I eventually found that when I finally went to twelve-step meetings, I left discouraged and went home.
The Quakers meet in silence and meditation, looking for the spirit to move them. They attend meeting, not church. It’s an inward-looking religion, not a lecture by a religious authority figure. All of the members are equal. If moved to speak, they can stand and share anything they like. I’ve attended Quaker meeting on and off for many years, volunteered in their homeless shelters, and continued meditating on my own. Little did I know when I went to a Quaker high school and blew off silent worship to get high in the woods that I would end up attending twelve-step meetings that are similar to Quaker meetings: All the members are equal, no one criticizes you, and you get to choose what you want to talk about. I’ve finally agreed with what I heard from an old Irishman in recovery years ago: The answer to my unhappiness is a conscious contact with a power greater than myself whom I choose to call God—“because that’s His fucking name.”
The image of the Wormhole finally faded from my life a few years ago, when my wife and kids and I were in Florida visiting my mother. I decided to charter a boat to go fishing with my family. My uncle had taken me out fishing a few times and taught me the rudiments, and I had taken my boys fishing in South Carolina a few times. In the beginning, I wrestled with my own incompetence with the rods, reels, fishing lines, and tackle boxes, while trying not to lose my temper as the kids constantly asked for help. It occurred to me that hiring a professional might help, and a chartered fishing trip on the Gulf Coast might be just what we needed to amp up our skill level.
On a beautiful breezy Florida morning, we pushed off with Captain Tom, an amiable man with the fishing captain’s requisite shades, FSU cap, and plug of chew in his bottom lip. He talked to us on our way out to the Gulf, pointed out the shore birds flying by, and regaled us with stories about the mighty marlins and grouper he had caught and the kinds of fish we would see.
Captain Tom explained to my seven- and five-year-old boys some very basic rules. We are catch-and-release fishermen—my sons are vegetarians—and Captain Tom laid down the rules. “After you catch the fish, never pull it into the boat. If you have lost your bait, never reel the line all the way in so the hook gets jammed in the rod. Always look behind you when you cast, so a hook doesn’t snag someone in the head. And be careful on the boat when you’re moving around so you don’t fall into the water.”
Within thirty minutes, my older son was flopping the fish into the boat, swinging the hook backward without looking, and reelin
g in the hook for more bait all the way to the tip of the rod. My younger son ran around the boat to cast willy-nilly in every direction. My wife and I kept reminding them of the rules, but they had turned stone-deaf.
At our last fishing spot, where the bay meets the Gulf, the action was nonstop, with Will and Scott catching ladyfish and sea trout and Captain Tom shouting at both of them.
“Wait, Will, what did I tell you, don’t reel the hook all the way into the rod!”
“No, Scott, don’t pull the fish all the way into the boat, let me get it!”
“Hey, both of you kids, I just said not to do that!”
“What did I just tell you guys!”
“Hang on, you nearly hooked your dad in the eye!”
“No, no, let me bait the shrimp!”
Captain Tom sprinted away from the wheel and grabbed the rod from Will, yelling, “Wait a second, wait a second, you’re not doing that right!” Then he whipped around to tell Scott, “Didn’t I just tell you not to do that!”
The two would heed one direction while forgetting the others. Will seemed to be willfully ignoring Captain Tom as he competed with his younger brother to land the biggest fish of the day.
At one brief break in the action, Captain Tom turned to look at us and said, “So, I guess you two must drink a lot.”
32
MG
Hello, Delicious
“I hope you’re drinking again—,
Life’s too short.”
—LETTER FROM HARRY
Could this letter have come at a better time with its almost unassailable argument? Just when we’d finished writing this book?
The irony had me laughing so hard I almost measured out a couple of fingers of the Absolut and a splash of vermouth from the bottles I considered hauling out to the dumpster together with the Gordon’s gin and Jack Daniels. They’ve been hanging out in my cupboard for a long time. Why don’t I toss them out?
“Yes, why don’t you?” asks one of my fellow addicts in the circle at the clinic. “It’s dangerous keeping booze so close at hand.”
I answer with a shrug. “I know I’m not going to drink them.”
“Then why do you keep them?”
Does she really think that’s a sly response?
I don’t answer. I don’t know.
That was a long time ago, and I still don’t know. I still have the bottles waiting for the Dumpster.
• • •
After all the arguments that tell you to stop drinking, there’s only one telling you to keep on: that you can’t stand not having that fiery slug of vodka or whiskey going down your throat and wearing down the rough edges of the day.
That’s not an argument, is it? That’s a statement of desire, a need. Yet that need is the first hurdle and the last hurdle that an alcoholic has to jump. When all the arguments have been put forth, what it comes down to is that you don’t want to stop, because you’d lose that drink.
It’s that one drink. The trouble is, you think of that one drink. It’s always one. It’s thinking about the drink that fires up your imagination, and imagination here is a killer.
(What you should do, as I have said elsewhere, and what the secret is—if there is one, and I think this is it—is follow that one drink to the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, to the slip on the front steps, the hangover, the remorse.)
If that’s the secret, why is it parenthetical? Because you don’t give a damn when that one drink is sitting on the bar before you or delivered on a silver tray, you don’t care at all about the trip to Remorse.
Recently, I read a description of that one drink written by an alcoholic who hadn’t had a drink in a decade. He was in a bar for some more somber reason than drinking, and the bartender mistakenly placed a drink before him . . . well. His description of the drink just sitting there was enough to make an alcoholic weep. It was almost to his mouth before he set it back on the bar.
Here is an ad for a new vodka, and it’s the most seductive advertisement I have ever seen: a woman’s shoulders in wine-colored velvet; hair the color of brandy falling over her eyes so that we see only the lowered lid and lashes of one; claret-red lips just a breath away from the rim of a martini glass, the vodka looking like liquid silver. Her lips hover over the glass. The caption reads: “Hello, Delicious.”
Not only the words themselves but the sound of them—that gentle sibilance. The look of the stemmed glass, the whispery sound of the words. Combine this with Forster’s “Only connect,” and that would be my answer to “Why do you drink?”
I return to the drawing room of the London hotel in Chelsea, the dark wood paneling, the deep cushions and wing chairs, the fire, the flowers in huge vases, the white-jacketed porter bearing a martini on a silver tray.
Hello, Delicious.
• • •
“If it’s all of those details that attract you,” says the good doctor who runs the clinic, “why not just fill the glass with water?” Because it’s all illusion (they would have said in the clinic); all of those details are a kind of drinking bribery. It’s as illusory as your old friend Gordon.
Why not sit with your buddies in Swill’s and just, well, drink water instead of vodka? Why? Because the fireplace, the porter, the silver tray are all part of that drink.
I listened to an interview with the late Christopher Hitchens, who at the time was in the last stages of esophageal cancer. He said he had no doubt that the cancer was caused by his excessive smoking and drinking. He’d known the dangers of both; he’d taken the gamble, he said, and lost. But he could not imagine never drinking wine again, sitting around the table at a dinner party, the wine enriching conversation, or not having the edge that drinking and smoking put on his writing.
I wonder how Christopher Hitchens would have reacted had the interviewer said, “But that’s all illusion, isn’t it? All of the claptrap about enriched conversation, about a writing edge—isn’t that sort of embroidery a form of denial?”
Christopher Hitchens probably would have looked thoughtful (to be polite) and then said something like “No. It’s the truth. It’s a drug. There’s a rush. Don’t you get it?”
“My old friend Jim Beam.” This is a standing joke among alcoholics. It’s famous. Only it isn’t a joke when you come down to it. Taking the last of the empties out to the trash really does feel like throwing away a friend. And I think any alcoholic will tell you, there’s simply no friend like that old friend, the first drink of the evening.
I remember a movie in which the daughter of wealthy parents had come for dinner. There was no alcohol served because the father was a recovering alcoholic. Afterward, the girl and her mother were talking about the father, and the mother said ruefully that she had liked him better when he was drinking. That was a shocking admission, she knew, about herself. But he had lost a spark, something that made their lives more enjoyable. Since he’d stopped drinking, he was sad a lot of the time.
In my clinic, I think they would come down hard on this woman; they’d call her an enabler. But she wasn’t: She had never done anything to undermine her husband’s earnest effort to stay sober. I thought she was being devastatingly honest.
• • •
Where am I in my life except toward the end of it, standing at a Dumpster with a fifth of Absolut and a bottle of vermouth. If I were to take them inside and pour them in a shaker, what then? As Harry says, life is too short. There isn’t enough time left to do much damage. I think of that seductive ad, the woman with her lips so near the glass. “Only connect,” said E. M. Forster. This was the connection, not simply with other people but with myself and with the world.
I tip this ancient bottle of Absolut into the Dumpster and hope it doesn’t smash. I hope it lands on some sort of soft bed of eggshells and ashes.
I don’t hear a thing.
Goodbye, Delicious.
© MICHAEL VENTURA
Bestselling author MARTHA GRIMES has published at least one book a year for the last thi
rty years, including twenty-two Richard Jury mysteries. The winner of the 2012 Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award, Grimes lives in Bethesda, Maryland. Her website is www.MarthaGrimes.com.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHORS
KEN GRIMES, shown here at age eight, works in Washington, D.C., and lives with his wife and children in suburban Maryland.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
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Also Available in Print and eBook
DOUBLE DOUBLE is a dual memoir of alcoholism written by Martha Grimes and her son Ken. This brutally candid book describes how different both the disease and the recovery can look in two different people—even two people who are mother and son.
* * *
THE WAY OF ALL FISH is a wickedly funny sequel to Grimes’s bestselling novel, Foul Matter, “a satire of the venal, not to say murderous practices of the New York publishing industry” (The New York Times Book Review).
Martha Grimes eBooks available from Scribner
First in the Richard Jury Mystery Series
The Man with a Load of Mischief
* * *
A bizarre murder disturbs a sleepy Yorkshire fishing village.
The Old Fox Deceiv’d
* * *
Murder makes the tiny village of Littlebourne a most extraordinary place.
The Anodyne Necklace
* * *
In Shakespeare’s beloved Stratford, Miss Gwendolyn Bracegirdle of Sarasota, Florida, takes her last drink.
The Dirty Duck
* * *
Jury has himself a mysterious little Christmas set in a chilly English landscape and Gothic estate.
