The Wet and the Dry

by Lawrence Osborne

“The best bar in Abu Dhabi. You’ve been to the Ally Pally, surely?”

  We had now entered the high-design glass cage of the hotel and were standing by Marco Pierre White’s restaurant. He told me all about John, a contractor for hotel construction all over the Middle East. Married, three kids, ten years younger than me, and a decent shot at snooker. John was a sweet talker, mild mannered, and full of anecdotes about the construction business, but when he got drinking, he chased every lady in the bar. He went berserk in his quiet gentlemanly way, and there was no constraining him. He told me all this as if I needed to hear it from a third person, as if this real me were totally unknown to the person standing in front of him right then.

  “And did I say anything untoward to the ladies?” I asked as we took the escalator up to the dazzling Barbarella lobby, where a few sheikhs in ghutrahs and rope agal sat on the sofas with their overdecorated wives.

  “Not at all, John. You was politeness itself. But the staff had a hard time getting you out of the pool.”

  I must have been on a roll, I thought grimly. It happens sometimes, some switch is thrown inside me and all the controls cease to function. My Jewish male friends in New York say it never happens to them.

  By now I was curious as to why he had walked up with me into the lobby, and I supposed it was because I was now an interesting specimen. The English are very indulgent to episodes of alcoholic insanity. They strike them as sympathetic, understandable, and a sign of being a real human being, however inconsequential such episodes might be.

  “You come down to the Ally Pally at eight,” he said in comradely fashion. “It’s not as bad as they say. The Chinese hookers don’t arrive till ten at the earliest. We’ll have shots with the lads.”

  “All right,” I said. “It can’t be any worse than Chameleon.”

  “Oh, it’s way above Chameleon, John. There’s no darts at Chameleon, for one thing. No hookers neither.”

  “True enough,” I agreed, shaking my head. “They wouldn’t allow darts and hookers at Chameleon.”

  “And what’s a bar without darts and tarts?”

  • • •

  That afternoon I walked around downtown Abu Dhabi looking for the Ain Palace Hotel. I walked along the Corniche, with a taste of cement dust on the tongue, along Hamdan Bin Mohammed Street, and past the Capital Garden. Here and there were the pockets of small traditional streets I was looking for, wedged between the skyscrapers and the malls, and here were fashion shops with names like Swish and White Angel with completely curtained display windows where nothing, therefore, was on display. Alongside these were an inordinate number of laundries and long walls with scraps of halfhearted graffiti: I Love Pakistan.

  The desert and nomad life feel close here, despite the thick veneer of internationalism. The long, obscure history of an economy based on pearling, horses, falconry, ships, and then finally oil. These were the Trucial States ruled by Britain until 1971. First paved road: 1961. National dress: the dishdasha. The state was opened to oil exploration in 1966 by its then ruler, Zayed bin Al Nahyan Sultan. Since then it has become one of the richest, and healthiest, nations on earth. It is legal for non-Muslims to drink, but not in the street. Liquor can be purchased only in special government outlets, use of which requires a permit issued by the Ministry of the Interior. There is a quiet asceticism here, but not the tranquillity of an old Islamic city. The lines of the streets have been destroyed to accommodate all those Western towers; glass and steel soothe nobody. The asceticism is moral, not material, and it is the puritanism of the desert peoples who seem to have wandered into a world where other people’s tastes have to be accommodated for the higher purpose of making money. Therefore there are bars.

  The Ain Palace Hotel lies right behind the Corniche Cricket Club and the Sheikh Khalifa Energy Complex. It’s an older hotel, once luxurious but now decidedly dejected, cramped and claustrophobic and filled with traveling Indian men attracted by its insalubrious reputation—insalubrious, that is, for those who have no need to go there in the first place. The hotel bar lies to one side of the lobby, safely invisible behind heavy doors, and the lobby after seven at night is shaped by the flow of these men and the occasional Chinese freelancers who make their way in and out of what exiles call the Ally Pally. But at eight that night, for some reason, there was almost no one there. The black-and-white floral wallpaper and glass wall lamps seemed to contain myself and three Chinese girls playing mah-jongg in a corner. Where were the lads? The barman said something about horse races that night. The girls looked bitter and very Harbin, but one of them came up anyway to try her luck. An ancient Western guy sat at the bar, listing sideways, a cigarette burning in the blue Foster’s ashtray.

  It’s a British pub. Empires always leave behind places like this. It was a bar of global brands, of Smirnoff, Jim Beam, Magners Irish cider, Cutty Sark and Pernod, and then of generic premium gin and standard cognac served in multiples of 30ls for twenty to twenty-five dirhams a shot. In places like the Trucial States, it would have been the officers’ mess that was the model for such pubs. A male space by definition and not ashamed of the fact. A half-pint of beer was about twelve dirhams. You could come here and drink Steinlager Edge and Breezer and Gaymers beer. The vast corporate alcohol industry that networks across the world was showcased in a single bar, offering to the Englishman a taste of home (or Singapore) and to the local who might happen to be here to drink a soda, a vision of industrialized uncleanness and temptation. They might both watch the rugby on the plasma TV, and they might both like the gold-sprayed chandeliers. But the scent of distilled liquor and spilled beer that defines a bar of this kind cannot be avoided. A Muslim friend in Dhofar once told me that, for him at least, it was like the smell of roasting pig: appalling and beckoning, and irresistible on the level not of appetites or mental desire but on the level of dopamine and the hormonal mysteries. “And therefore more dangerous,” he said with the utmost gravity, “than you can possibly imagine.”

  And sitting there in the Ally Pally, I was suddenly overcome with nostalgia. England, my England: did you make me an inconsiderate drinker?

  England, Your England

  As A. A. Gill has said, “First drinks are important to alcoholics.” It was in the mid-1970s that I used to take the train from Haywards Heath to Victoria Station while playing truant from school for the afternoon. I made my way to Soho where there was a pub called the Nellie Dean, a place that is still there, of course, the Nellie Dean of Dean Street. My first drink might have been there, but one is never sure, because I have talked about the Nellie Dean so many times with my father, who used to be a regular there, and now I cannot remember if my first drink was at the Nellie Dean or in the Witch on Sunte Avenue in Lindfield, a rural pub near our house that today serves, with a special kind of sadness, pad thai and grapefruit sorbet, or whether it was another place up on Berners Street. But I am pretty sure it was the Nellie Dean. Today I walk past it briskly, amazed at the amount of hanging greenery that stifles its facade and the golden glow from inside. It looks like a jeweler’s box on some miserable nights.

  The Nellie Dean was not just any pub, because it had once been called the Highlander and had only recently changed its name. I could go in when I was fifteen and no one threw me out. I started with shandy and worked up to shots of vodka. By now I had discovered a book called Memoirs of the Forties by the dandy, screenwriter, and sometime Duke of Redonda, Julian Maclaren-Ross. It was a book that I could not stop reading because it portrayed a part of London just south of Oxford Street, Fitzrovia, as a topology defined by pubs like the Wheatsheaf and the Highlander, between which this amazing man in his dark mirrored glasses, teddy bear overcoat, and gold-tipped cane rushed in search of daily audiences and small doses of satisfactory oblivion. Later he became the model for the down-at-heel writer Trapnel in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, but many have observed that Maclaren-Ross was anything but down-at-heel. He was half or quarter Indian, with a mixture of Scots and Latin America
n, and he seemed to me—dimly glimpsed through a book that came out in 1965—like a model of paranoid elegance befitting a character whose main energy was the creation of itself. He was, of course, a drinker of moving proportions, and it was because of Maclaren-Ross that I had been impelled to seek out the Highlander, which is now called the Nellie Dean.

  Maclaren-Ross possessed several identities, between which he moved as the need arose. One was “Mr. Hyde.” He invented himself as a multitude of personalities. Later in life he fell into poverty and could never finish the books he had long planned. Anthony Cronin describes him as a wandering drinker who perhaps squandered his considerable gifts on the spontaneous art form of the one-man monologue, fueled by alcohol: “He liked the myth of apparent failure; forms of revenge intrigued him and forms of mysterious return; the ruined gambler with one last throw, the heir who would reappear one stormy night, the Jacobite exile who would live to see the usurpers humbled.” This was the legend of the drinker as a man who has inverted the normal rules of personality and the success that proceeds from them. The drink gave him curious characteristics. Verbal brilliance, ephemerality, nostalgia. It may have made him into a performer who could have immortalized himself more successfully through YouTube but who died too early, from a heart attack in 1964.

  My father used to go to the Highlander because he worked nearby on Frith Street, and occasionally he would mention it when my mother was not around. In later years he claimed to have seen an extraordinary graffiti on the walls of the gents’ in the Nellie Dean, which read, more or less as follows:

  The Highlander with its pathetic documentarian pretensions is dead, thank Christ.

  I was always aware that my mother drank more than my father, and that many imputed this flaw to her Irish origins. It is, for the English, a common accusation and revelatory of a cast of mind that does not care to submit a mirror-ward glance at its own epic alcoholic lawlessness. But my father, at least, was never a drinker in that sense. He liked his pint rather than his dram. His nickname for my mother was “Coffee,” presumably in honor of her love of that drink, but the irony did not take long to adhere, and with time the sobriquet withered.

  I felt, perhaps wrongly, that as they grew older, alcohol destabilized the intricate microcosm they had built around not just each other but around their three children as well. I and my two sisters were not even aware of this much of the time. It was a noble, defiant kind of denial, a self-submission to a higher interest—the family and the welfare of children—that was very English. And the way that drink made it both bearable and completely unstable was also very English. I was not sure, either at the time or since, whether to loathe it or feel grateful to it. The English relationship to drink is so deeply burned into my way of being in the world that to write about drink is to simultaneously write about England, a country I now know almost nothing about since I have lived in New York close to twenty years.

  If you grew up in a steadfast English suburb of those years, you grew up steeped in booze. My parents kept a large drinks cabinet in their front room in Haywards Heath, with a folding minibar and mixers. It was fashionable at that time, long before wine was mainstream, to mix drinks in the early evening and serve them standing by the fire—gin and tonics with curls of shaved cucumber and Bloody Marys. When my father came back from his commute to a market research company in London, my mother would on occasion mix him a drink before dinner, and I noticed how it relaxed the atmosphere between them, unless my mother had gotten there first with a glass of Famous Grouse, her favorite Scotch. Writing by herself at home, it was possible. A journalist and a talented radio playwright, she drank her Famous Grouse I imagine for inspiration, a habit that she has passed on, without inflicting upon me a taste for that lamentable Scotch.

  Alcohol hovered in the air as an independent presence. It was always there, esoteric to the children but concrete in its familiarity. What would it have been like if my parents—or any parents of that time—had cheerfully smoked pot together every night after work? Many did in the late 1960s.

  My parents, however, had decided to leave London partly in order to save their three children from the urban drug culture. They moved out in 1967, which was just in time, and bought a bank manager’s house in the garden commuter town of Haywards Heath, where Harold Macmillan had retired.

  Thus removed from the drug culture that would prospectively ruin them, their children were thrown into the suburban alcohol culture that would certainly affect them instead. Why alcohol rather than marijuana? The reasons were social: Haywards Heath was conservative and Little England. Only an hour from London and a half hour from Brighton and its “dirty weekends at the Metropole” extolled by T. S. Eliot, it was a fortress of private rectitude defended by a thousand lawns and yew hedges and scrolled gates. Behind these tall hedges stood the Victorian brick villas and the timbered Mock Tudors and the mansions with their service bells and dumbwaiters where isolated men and women could sink into their evenings with a glass of sherry and intoxicate themselves out of a present moment that offered little outside the home but long, dusky lanes and streets of closed shops and parks where the perverts gathered with their own bottles. It was a fine place to grow up.

  Such a place was bound to encourage the use of a drug that was commensurately traditional. In the late 1960s, in Haywards Heath, pot was mentioned as a taboo. It seemed to come from far away, from the tropics, from America, from another dimension of life. Intoxication as an idea, however, was familiar. I remember someone at school telling me that Malcolm X used to get high on nutmeg. I looked it up. Nine megs of nutmeg was lethal, apparently, and there was nothing in the references about it making you high. I tried eight megs, an entire container, and mixed it with yogurt. It failed to make me high, but I threw up all night. Malcolm X must have had an extra additive up his sleeve. I was sure even after that that nutmeg could get me stoned, and I tried it several times afterward with no result. It seemed like an easily disguised habit to have.

  Attached so firmly to the colonial past, filled with its retired soldiers and government officials, as well as aging spinsters and widows and young families seeking a safer, more English way of life, Haywards Heath was more suited to the drugs that had been used for centuries: the sherry, the beer, the Scotch.

  The men went off in the morning to catch the 7:50 express train to Victoria, and the women stayed behind in their big empty houses listening to Radio 4 and bossing around the butcher deliverymen. Their lives were isolated, and then there were those tall yew hedges and lawns. You could never see the neighbors unless you bumped into them by accident walking down Summerfield Lane. Then they would stop for a moment, ask how the cats were, and move on.

  So with my mother. On days when I was sick and staying at home, I remember the sound of her typewriter echoing through the house, and the radio turned up loud, and it was as if her past life were being guarded from submersion in her current life. I was sure that she had begun to drink.

  She was a woman who had wandered almost by accident into a life she had not quite intended for herself. But as is often the case, a loyal and hardworking husband, a man with a sense of humor and an ability to love his children, had proved seductive. And why should it not be seductive? The drinker’s legendary unhappiness and frustration are often exaggerated, and it is in any case an unhappiness that is much more complex than is suggested by the tinny word circumstances. A drinker is entangled in herself, unable to unravel the threads that have closed in upon her. The daily intoxication arises from an entire life’s experience, not from an “illness” that is supposed to be less mysterious.

  My mother dropped out of Durham University in her first year in 1953 and took a long experimental train journey across Europe to Naples. She was robbed on the train north of Rome and arrived in the Eternal City with nothing; an Irish priest, a friend of her family, took her in. The Tyneside Irish, of whom my mother was a member, were in those days severe Catholics (with a taste for spirited drinking), and the faith saved
her in her hour of need. Rome in the middle of the Dolce Vita, fresh from the visits of Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn, must have been a youth in and of itself. But eventually, tiring of its tourism, she moved south to Naples, where she lived in Parthenope on the waterfront, teaching English to businessmen and making casual friends out of neighbors like Lucky Luciano and the best-selling Catholic novelist Morris West.

  She later said that she could not have suffered to go back to Naples, to see its slow decline. But a decline from what? The city she knew was feral, the dark metropolis of Norman Lewis’s brilliant book Naples ’44. It must have been the first city in which she had been free, far from priests and family. The first place in which she had been able to be a woman.

  There was a fearless insolence about her, a quality I saw years later on her deathbed. The suburban life of Haywards Heath after Naples, marriage after the life of a reporter on the lam, must have been a shock. As the years passed, she began to drink. My sister told me one day that she had noticed the family piano sounding a little strange when she played. Opening the lid, she found a bottle of vodka hidden under the strings. This was a secret between us, and we didn’t talk about it for years. My own taste for drink, meanwhile, might be genetic, and it might have something to do with the Irish. Around us in those years in Haywards Heath hovered the shadowy outer family of the Tyneside Irish clan, the Grieves, the O’Kanes, and the O’Malleys, the male boozers who occasionally appeared at Christmastime and then disappeared like circus tricks, a nightmare fringe of shadow-puppet men with bright blue eyes and wet lips.

  My uncle Michael, who died in a halfway home for alcoholics in Scotland, his foot recently amputated from diabetes, a man who had disappeared for a quarter century, abandoning his wife and children, to whom he had become a mysterious stranger. My great-uncle John O’Kane, publisher of the Liverpool University Press, who appeared every Christmas Eve with a different girl fresh off ocean liners and airplanes from Madrid, who would walk in the front door covered with snow and sit at the piano, pull up his cuffs, and begin to play and sing, uninvited, mad and drunk. A man who was convinced that he was admired and loved, and maybe even feared, but who was none of those. As a child, I adored him. He wore tweed suits and Italian ties and brought me jazz LPs from stores in Paris and Barcelona; his hands shook all the time, and he had those bloody oyster eyes that did not preclude tenderness. I remember, as he lay next to me in bed listening to “Purple Haze” (not the Jimi Hendrix song), his smell of booze and cologne mixed up, the inadvertent vibration of his body.