Wasted

by Brian O'Connell

  The image portrayed of a hedonistic lifestyle is one of attractive 24-hour party people, living on the edge, rejecting ‘Normal Street’ and not wanting it any other way. The reality is often much starker, incorporating mental anguish, social paranoia, feelings of worthlessness and self-loathing. I was in a series of chaotic relationships, was afraid to answer the phone or even walk into a shop and relied on alcohol more as a means of avoiding reality and numbing day-to-day experience. I started getting blackouts at an early age, perhaps my first one on the night of my school’s debs when a neighbour carried me home and I lay beside a bus getting sick while all the attendees watched. I could remember none of it the next morning, so quite early in my drinking, blackouts became a normal part of a night out. There were times when waking up I had to double-take, to quickly scan the recesses of my mind in order to piece together where I was and how I had gotten there. Moving between houses, my home life was in constant flux. I had certain places I stayed when I was late on rent, or had bills to pay, or needed time away, or wanted someone to lie beside. I began to develop regular night sweats. The first half-hour waking in the morning was the worst as dehydration intensified and parts of the night revealed themselves in periodic flashbacks. There was also the backtracking over finances. Financing drinking is a system in itself—a chaotic monetary world where everything and nothing can be rationalised. If it was a choice between food and drink, between rent and a night out, there was usually no contest.

  During this period—indeed, throughout my drinking life—I lived in some pretty squalid flats and houses. Perhaps in reaction to those days, I seldom go two or three days now without changing sheets. In the drinking days, though, there was no such order. It was all stained sheets, matted carpets and body odour, scraps of paper littering the ground, clothes kept in different houses and a shoebox the sum total of a decade’s possessions. I think the only items I managed to hold onto were a well-thumbed collection of Paul Durcan’s poetry and a Neil Young album—fragments of a decade of existence. And I didn’t really see anything wrong with that.

  The extent of your ambition—be it material, professional, social—is narrowed as alcohol and the impulse to self-medicate take over. Each time I moved home, I threw out whatever little I had accumulated. It was a way of starting anew, of attempting to reinvent myself. But it never quite worked, and the standard of accommodation I stayed in deteriorated over the course of four to five years. I had no savings, couldn’t get it together to learn how to drive a car and was reliant on family to supplement whatever little income I had.

  It was a shambolic life; a meandering, chancing, shell of an existence, and it takes it out of you psychologically.

  But, throughout all this time, from that first drink on Stephen Corcoran’s landing to the last, through multiple house moves and failed relationships, I never seriously thought that drink was an issue. I put my shortcomings and lack of progress in life down to emotional naivety. I put it down to having energy or drive that remained constantly unfulfilled. I put it down to intellectual shortcomings, to feelings of inadequacy and unrealistic expectations. At various points, I blamed the Famine, the Brits, the Church and my ancestry. I put it down to bad luck and lack of opportunity. But what I didn’t put it down to was the one constant throughout all this period, the one ever-present aspect of my life, which I could always turn to in a crisis. I never pointed my finger at the gargle, the sauce, the hooch or the soup. It was always somebody or something else’s fault. In my mind, the drink made things better, not worse.

  Chapter 2

  I said, ‘Yes, Yes, Yes’

  I’m not sure what came first—the excess or the exasperation. Both seemed to develop in tandem, to take flight together. But what I do know is that the crunch came in late summer 2004, when I was 28 years old. The writing had been on the wall for a year or so previously. Life had become chaotic. I couldn’t be on my own for very long, and was barely clinging to the remainder of a once-promising media career. If I’m honest, my son took second place to my social life. I spent my time dodging a widening circle of ex-friends who wanted nothing more to do with me. Five years after leaving secondary school, I’d gone from being a scholarship student at University College Cork to stealing sausage rolls at the hot food counter at Tesco, just so I could save money for alcohol. I had it down to an art form. My usual tactic was to go into Tesco and pick up a shopping basket. I would then walk around the store filling the basket, as if I was doing my weekly shopping. Half way through, I stopped at the hot food counter and got a few chicken drumsticks, sausage rolls and maybe potato wedges. These were eaten on my way around, before depositing the basket with an employee and asking him/her to mind it while I went outside to withdraw more money. ‘You only come in for one thing and suddenly you have a basket full,’ I remember telling one dubious employee. I never returned with the money and this became a weekly, sometimes daily, occurrence. Thankfully, I was never apprehended—I suspect the embarrassment of having to go down because of a few drumsticks and a flaky sausage roll wouldn’t have lent me much cred on the inside.

  Towards the end, the highs were still fulfilling, but the lows were now more commonplace. Panic attacks began to set in, and I struggled to bring myself to look in the mirror. I drank on the breakdown of relationships. I drank on not being able to provide a proper home environment for my son. I drank out of loneliness. I drank because of insecurity, unfulfillment and arrogance. I drank because everyone else did. I drank to fit in. I drank out of frustration. I drank to feel normal. I drank and drank and drank and drank.

  If I could get away without paying for anything that didn’t involve alcohol, I did, and most of the time I owed money to someone or other. I surrounded myself with male and female companions in the same boat, hiding from some aspect of life. Two episodes brought home to me that the party had to stop. The first was at the end of a two-day drink-and-drug bender, which ended up at a get-together at a friend’s house after closing hours. I was waiting on a delivery of Ecstasy, to keep the party going, when I witnessed a death. It was one of those shocking and traumatic, time-stood-still moments almost too monumental to take account of. To be honest, my first thoughts were whether or not I should still take the chemical delivery. Afterwards, I drank for two days—any excuse—and went to the funeral and sympathised with the family in a dazed state. Many months later, I gave a witness statement to Gardaí and broke down, in a windowless room with a sergeant nearing retirement scribbling frantically. Only then did I deal with what I had seen, did I realise the extent to which my life had become out of control and how fragile emotionally I was. It was a telling moment that brought me some way towards self-realisation.

  The second moment that sticks out was in October 2004, at a World Cup qualifying soccer match in Paris. A group of us had decided to go to the game, taking the ferry over and driving down to Paris via Normandy. The drinking on the ferry was shocking, kind of like being at a Wolfe Tones concert for 20 hours. The ‘best fans in the world’ tag was nonsense—it was a drunken free-for-all. Teenagers slept in the cinema cradling bottles of vodka; ferry staff were abused repeatedly, while the ship’s internal PA system was taken over by drunks shouting obscenities. Marauding groups searched the cabins below for an empty bed to lie down in, while vomit and beer redecorated the carpets and decks. We found a quietish bar and sipped away nicely for the journey—the party had begun. I even managed a chorus of ‘Boys in Green’ and ‘A Nation Once Again’. I was with older friends at the time, and was in a financial mess, barely scraping together what little money I could in the week previous to have enough to get through the couple of days’ drinking in Paris. I overcame financial shortfalls by buying cheap bottles of wine. So while the others sat in restaurants or drank in bars, I hung around outside on the steps and drank, or joined them later with a bottle of wine concealed up my sleeve.

  Inevitably, though, I was broke half way through the three-day trip, and so, one night, while my roommate slept, I helped myself to �
�100 from his wallet. I can still see myself doing it, carefully reaching under his bed for the wallet, expertly opening the button clasp that held it closed and sliding out one of the larger notes. Of that group, he’s the only one I’m still in contact with and I’ve never been able to admit what I did. Although I’m sure he was aware of it next morning. It didn’t really matter to me, though; I would have done anything to be able to continue drinking. Would have fucked over anyone, and not thought twice about it. There were countless other incidents, including getting barred from late-night clubs, abusing people verbally and not having any recollection next morning, and messing up relationships through serial infidelity.

  The French weekend got to me, though. It got to me because I was with a group, all with stable relationships and steady incomes. For that weekend, at least, they were on the same level as me, out for a laugh and a good drink. Yet once the weekend ended they continued with their lives and I continued with mine. I had probably spent my week’s rent and child maintenance and would spend the next week or two playing catchup, ducking and diving to try to cover the excess. It made me realise that my ‘friends’ could dip in and out of my life and take part in the gregarious bits. I was stuck with it 24/7. I couldn’t opt out of it periodically. I remained unfulfilled, while they were laying life-markers—getting promoted, having children, buying houses. And yet, if you ask any of them today should I have stopped drinking, they will probably say I shouldn’t have. But, as I’ve said, no one knows really the true torment of the mind of a problem drinker. You don’t really even realise it yourself until long after the last hangover.

  On several occasions I didn’t turn up to collect my son as expected on Saturday mornings. My time with him was now condensed to 8-hour periods on a Saturday or Sunday—the stereotypical McDonald’s dad. Because I didn’t have a proper room for him in whatever house I happened to be staying in, I would drop him back again in the evening. My timekeeping and sense of days became more erratic. I was a father in name only, nothing of a moral guide and an increasing emotional void. This lasted for maybe two years, and looking back, I find it impossible to reconcile myself now to that vacant father figure I had become. And of course I drank on the shame and the guilt of that.

  I recycled stories I had heard and passed them off as my own. I was a fraud. A phoney. A fantasist. It’s alarming the depths to which human self-delusion can sink. I pretended to be writing a book, a sort of novel based on fact, or an ‘observational take on Ireland’s underbelly’. Other times, I assumed the guise of a big-shot music promoter, when the reality was that I had lost a small fortune due to negligence and bad management and chaotic bookkeeping. With no transport, when I was in the music game I would take a bus to gigs which I was promoting. If someone called me while I was en route, I’d pretend my car had broken down or that I had missed the train and was now having to endure the ‘nightmare of a bus journey!’ I’d say it out loud so the other people on the bus would be able to hear me. Yes, I was one of those incredibly annoying public-transport-grudging travellers. That’s how screwed your head gets! The reality was that a car I did part own had been repossessed when I had left it into a garage for repairs and didn’t have the money to retrieve it. It was embarrassing for my family, as a neighbour in Clare who owned a garage had organised the finance a year or so earlier. And now he had to call the finance company to arrange for it to be collected. His words were ‘That fella can’t even buy a breakfast. You’d better take it away.’

  Of course there was a dawning realisation that I couldn’t continue life the way it was. Living the type of life I did, you become increasingly isolated and there are few avenues left open to you. I thought about moving abroad (most problem drinkers do at some point), toyed with the idea of returning to college and finally tried to resurrect my media career.

  An editor in Clare took a chance on me and gave me a few days a week working in a local newspaper. It would be a chance to wipe the slate clean, get away from Cork for a bit and have a regular income.

  I was to start in Ennis on a Monday morning. Because relations with my family had broken down, I planned to leave Cork on Sunday afternoon and stay in a B&B in Ennis. A few media friends and a girl I was seeing at the time suggested meeting in the HI-B bar in Cork for a few last jars and a toast to new beginnings. The HI-B is a curious spot, with the eccentric owner Brian O’Donnell at the helm, barring everyone from coffee drinkers to mobile phone owners. (I once heard him shout ‘SPACE INVADERS’ at a couple who had been sitting on the only couch in the pub and nursing one drink for two hours.) It had a core group of daytime professional drinkers, and was a perfect oasis in the middle of an afternoon.

  My plan was to have two drinks and make an afternoon bus, which would have me in Ennis for early evening, leaving plenty of time to get accommodation for the week sorted. Two drinks became three and the crowd got bigger and the bus time got later and later. I was now intent on making the last bus, at 7.25 p.m., which would have me in Ennis for half ten or thereabouts. By 8 p.m. I was still ordering drinks and had been drinking steadily for five hours. Not exactly ideal preparation for your first morning in a new job. At 9 p.m. I said my goodbyes, convinced my female companion to come with me, walked out the door and hailed a taxi on Patrick Street in Cork.

  ‘Where we off to, lads?’ the driver asked.

  ‘Ennis, please,’ I said, ‘or Power’s Pub in Clarecastle if we make last orders.’

  The job lasted a matter of days, and I was back in Cork, drinking with the same media colleagues who a week earlier had toasted my departure. It was farcical. My living situation at this time was still chaotic. I had left a house where I was sharing in order to rent a place on my own, but a month or so in I arrived home to find the locks had been changed. I was already several weeks behind on the rent, and the letting agency decided to take action. After that, I stayed in different locations, mostly spare rooms, and kept whatever possessions I had held onto under the stairs of a friend’s house. I used to change clothes and freshen up in public toilets, generally art galleries or theatres, washing my hair in the sink and giving under my arms a wipe with toilet soap and paper. When staff began to recognise me, I made up a story about the plumbing at home being on the blink. I did this for a few weeks, especially if I was in the middle of a bender and felt rough. Warped needs must.

  ——

  One day, my parents, with whom relations had been strained for several months, called and told me they wanted to see me. I met them at St Finbarr’s Hospital in Cork, where the rest of my family had arranged for a treatment counsellor to help them confront my drinking. I sat there, silent, as they expressed their concerns. None of them knew me any more. My brothers and sisters had no real relationship with me. They wanted to know if I was willing to do something about it. Would I go back on my own the following week and provide a urine sample? I probably would have tried anything at that stage. I had become ‘sick and tired of being sick and tired’, as the manual says, and I wanted out. After the consultation, my family headed for Clare and I went on a two-day pub crawl, ending up getting barred from my local late-night bar and crying my eyes out on a side street as dawn broke. As an 11-year-old child, watching JR Ewing in ‘Dallas’ reach for a crystal decanter full of whiskey and pour, you don’t anticipate that that initial spark will lead to such inglorious finales. I knew myself at that point the game was up. I had been full of increasing self-loathing in the preceding weeks, would wake up with a sudden shock of anguish, frantically trying to remember the night previous or rampage through my pockets to find out how much money I had left. But it was the paranoia, the self-hatred and the insecurity that comes with heavy drinking that is rarely spoken of which got to me most of all. It’s the feeling deep down that you know you’re better than the existence you’ve settled for, but you know also that alcohol keeps those thoughts at bay. It waters the self-denial. It can also be a hell of a lot of fun, don’t get me wrong. I had some great nights, days and early mornings because of alco
hol and whatever else went with it. And if my parents hadn’t intervened, who knows, I might even still be there in the land of mid-week benders and bullshit. I’d like to think, though, I’d have crawled out of the hole myself at some stage. Few people ever said to me, ‘You should do something about your drinking,’ but the thing is you end up surrounding yourself with the type of people who you know won’t be upfront with you. You depend on them and vice versa. In Ireland, we have such a high tolerance for the problem drinker, and in the circles I was moving—arts and media—it’s accepted even more.

  I took on board what my family had said. I was the eldest and somehow meant to lead by example, yet here were my younger brother and sisters giving it to me straight. They didn’t have a brother anymore. They couldn’t believe a word I said. They said I had no interest in them and they were right. I had become completely self obsessed—my pub friends were my family by that time. It’s pathetic and shameful to think back on it, but it’s the truth.