The Decadent Handbook

by Rowan Pelling

  ‘Was I a bit rude to me me me me-dear … meeja lady?’ Saliva asks, we walk having left the house abruptly before the phone can ring again. ‘I think saying I am a dirty bitch, go get Pam Ayres was a bit strong.’

  ‘Ha ha! Look!’

  We split a mushroom and it tastes muddy, we swig cider to wash it down and walk, sniggering about custard on pizza, pennies for pepperoni.

  The job centre is noisy with queues of non-activity and Saliva goes in wearing a purple bowler hat, swigging a tin of cider. We fit in, covered in handprints, bruised love bites, we are twins with dreadlock bed clumps at the back of our heads. It’s in part both hilarious and terrifying now the magic mushrooms have worn off, or are they coming back up? We look like crack whores, we stink of booze and sex, we cannot walk upright or straight, when we look at each other we keep cracking up. The woman behind the desk gives Saliva a grilling; she made a mistake wearing the purple hat, the fur coat and the idiot grin. It’s too hot, we are sweating profusely, we shift in our seats nervous to get out of there. The woman is officious, she asks,

  ‘What have you done to seek work in the last two weeks?’

  Saliva tells her she is waiting for her agent to get back to her publisher to get back to her manager who is waiting to get the contracts from the lawyer.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Oh and … and I have been sending out my CV and … reading newspapers, checking the Internet and stuff … I got a telly offer today actually, BBC, I am waiting for them to get back to me … regarding pizza … I mean budget …’ Saliva squirms unconvincingly. The New Deal Advisor sniffs and she taps the keys of the computer with her talons and we know she knows, she knows we know she can smell the good time we had on us.

  We head into the first pub we pass, it stinks, dark and creepy, the barkeep looks odd and unfriendly. We get a pair of halves just to give us the strength and energy to get to the nice pub. A urine drenched, peuk covered old man with a red face sits opposite us and won’t stop laughing. We laugh with him for a minute, he laughs and says something and we nod pretending to understand and he laughs again repeating himself. Snot comes out of his nose in a bubble then he coughs up something like a chunk of cottage cheese. Saliva downs the remainder of the half, stands and hurriedly leaves the pub to retch in the gutter with sheer repulsion.

  ‘You OK?’ I ask lighting her a fag

  ‘I felt the tramp, its surreal, like I felt his soul, his life force or some vibe … it was disgusting.’

  In the nice pub we watch the snow outside and it’s warm by the fire. We have a laugh and a drinky, pints of spritzer are followed by vodkas and sambucas and lots of joking about the faces we pull and the noises people make when they have sex. Random people, strangers come and sit with us and join in making fucking noises so Saliva gets them drinks too. London is thirsty, good because we are having a drinky, Saliva keeps saying, let’s drink I don’t do love, love does me. She tries to drink without using her hands and accidentally bites the glass. I stand ready to mop blood, Saliva’s mouth is full of glass but she isn’t hurt or cut. She grins at me and picks chunks and shards of glass out of her mouth, rinses her mouth out with sambuca and spits it on the pub floor.

  Tuesday

  In the Lock Tavern a mad woman is sitting with us, she has been in prison three times. She has the remains of two black eyes where police beat her up in the back of a van. She has been abused all of her life she says. Saliva gets her a large whisky. The mad woman says she has two beautiful daughters and she went inside because one of her daughters married a wife-beater and she nearly killed him for it. You don’t hurt my girls and get away with it she says. She says she is violent; she says she is always angry. Saliva catches a glance with me and we wonder if she is about to turn nasty, I am ready to grab the ashtray and lump her if it kicks off, she spits as she speaks, lurching and leaning over us. Her arms are tattooed and her teeth broken, she says nobody takes the piss out of me and gets away with it and she points one of her fat tobacco stained digits in our faces. Saliva suddenly stands up and forces the woman to cuddle her, there in the middle of the pub, she hugs this frothing mad woman and she kisses her face. Saliva won’t let go of the rigid woman, she holds her telling the mad woman over and over that she is magic, a lovely and special lady and the mad woman crumbles and starts weeping, Saliva licks and wipes her tears, telling her she is a brilliant person with a twinkle in her eyes and the mad woman breaks down sobbing and says nobody has said a kind word like that to her ever before.

  ‘Can you see the rainbows around the street lights?’

  We are walking in the snow down the middle of the road, the street lights make everything orange. Once we are home we manage the best part of another bottle of vodka and pass out in our clothes. Saliva writhes in terrible nightmares, she screams in her sleep, says she has thick syrup for blood. She says there are faces of people looking over the bed, knocking at the windows. She tries to sleep but she says all she can hear is her heart struggling to beat, we twitch, flinching in and out of consciousness trying to remember to breathe. We are both aching all over inside and covered in black, purple bruises and cuts from all the rough and tumble, the bundles and the play, and the love bite fights. Drenched in cold sweat, acrid and fearful. She says she is unable to move, if the monster comes she won’t be able to fight it. In a tiny voice she mumbles weakly that she is dying, she says this is what dying feels like. She says she feels like she is falling off the world and she begs me to never let go of her hand while it is still dark, we share the fear. Holding my hand she is convinced she will stop breathing. She says vodka and cock will kill her in the end and she feels as though she is rotting.

  Wednesday

  By lunchtime we manage to get out of bed, clothes damp with night sweat and there are still three bottles of vodka in the freezer. The walls and floors are sticky, caked with booze, food fights, candle-wax and used condoms, spilt puddles of noodles, brown petals. We both get hot flushes trying to clean up and my tongue is kind of bleeding. I make her eat a boiled egg and run us a bath, hearing her peuk and piss shit. Terrible panic, paranoid to go outside and afraid to meet the devil that is here inside, she jumps at shadows and her own reflection. She curls in a ball on the sofa covering her face with her hands and says she is waiting for it to stop, her heart keeps speeding up and stopping, she vomits a pint of water and jokes weakly that it’s like a stomach rinse, we are still hallucinating.

  ‘I don’t want to be Saliva anymore, its crap, I want to go to church and work with the needy and play tennis, roller-skate, do yoga, eat pulses and wear white dresses …’

  ‘Yeah right! Here …’ I light two fags, pass her one and we giggle nervously.

  Now she has to go and do the radio show in a few hours, its already getting dark.

  ‘I promise that was the last big drinky, that was the last big big drinky. Seven days straight, from radio show to show, back to back, that was the last …’

  Saliva repeats to herself, putting records into her box for the show.

  ‘That was the last big drinky … but … hey the Full Moon boys are my guests this week. I guess I’ll have to have a wee sherry with them, before tonight’s show, just to warm up a bit, won’t I? Just a wee sherry or two before the show, not a drinky though, just a sherry. Just a sherry, or maybe a port. You coming with me? Fancy a wee sherry? Or a little port maybe? Take the edge off. You have to come with me because … because that’s not like a drinky is it? That’s just having a sherry and that’s a different story altogether.’

  Paul Verlaine in the Café Procope, inkwell and absinthe in front of him. Photo copyright Bibliothèque Nationale.

  Absinthe

  Phil Baker

  Gaston Beauvais, the doomed absintheur of Marie Corelli’s Wormwood, is a man with literary aspirations: he has even written a short study of Alfred de Musset. Musset was among the first of the major French poets to fall victim to absinthe, although it comes to look like an occupational hazard as the nineteenth cen
tury goes on. Musset is a melancholy writer, whose work is often about lost love. His first published book was a self-expressive translation of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, full of personal digressions and even ‘improvements’; Musset re-unites De Quincey and Anne, the lost child prostitute, in a sentimental happy ending, as if he found the original unbearable.

  Musset drank for some years at the Café Procope, and at the Café de la Regence, on the corner of the Rue Saint-Honoré and the Place du Palais Royal. There is a second-hand account of him in the Goncourt journals:

  Dr. Martin told me yesterday that he had often seen Musset taking his absinthe at the Café de la Regence, an absinthe that looked like a thick soup. After which the waiter gave him his arm and led him, or rather half-carried him, to the carriage waiting for him at the door.

  Musset’s absinthe drinking was well known. Nearly sixty years after his death, when absinthe was about to be banned, a politician with vested interests named Alfred Girod (from the absinthe manufacturing district of Pontarlier) did everything he could to defend it. It was ridiculous to endanger such a successful French industry. The anti-absinthe lobby claimed it turned men into ferocious beasts, he said – but he had a glass every day, and did he look like a mad dog? Finally, in desperation, he said it had inspired the poetry of Alfred de Musset. How could they possibly ban that?

  In his lifetime Musset was made a member of the Académie Française, but he often missed their meetings. When somebody remarked that Musset often absented himself, Villemain, the Secretary of the Academy, couldn’t resist a bitter pun: you mean to say, he said, that he absinthes himself a bit too much.

  There is a poem dedicated to Musset by another poet of the time, Edmond Bougeois, about the thin green line between being inspired and being washed up.

  Anxious and grieving, in the smoky enclosure

  Of a café, I dream, and, dreaming, I write

  Of the blue tints of the sun that I love

  When I see its light in a glass of absinthe.

  Then the mind scales the highest peaks

  And the heart is full of hope and the scent of hyacinth,

  I write and write, saying; absinthe is holy

  And the green-eyed muse is forever sovereign.

  But alas! A poet is still just a man.

  With the first glass drunk, for better writing,

  I wanted a second, and the writing slowed.

  The tumultuous waves of thought dried up

  And deserted, my brain became hollow:

  It only needed one glass, and I drank two.

  Musset’s younger contemporary, Charles Baudelaire, the author of Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil), became fixed in the public mind – particularly on the other side of the channel – as vice incarnate. He was more complex than that, and Christopher Isherwood has tried to pin down some of his contradictions. He was a religious blasphemer, a scruffy dandy, a revolutionary who despised the masses, a deeply moral individual who was fascinated by evil, and a philosopher of love who was ill at ease with women. In his Intimate Journals Baudelaire writes, “Even when quite a child I felt two conflicting sensations in my heart: the horror of life and the ecstasy of life. That, indeed, was the mark of a neurasthenic idler.”

  Baudelaire was a great explorer of the new sensations of urban life, of early ‘modernity’ and what we might now call alienation and neurosis, extending the domain of art and poetry to cover previously taboo subjects and find a new, strange beauty in them. He was a great exponent of dandyism, considered as an attitude or a philosophy rather than just a matter of clothing. He was also completely unimpressed by the idea of ‘progress’, hated the banality of modern life, and was inclined to believe in Original Sin. Late in his life he began to fear madness. He tried to give up drink and drugs and took up prayer with a new intensity, praying not only to God but to Edgar Allan Poe (whom he revered, and translated into French), as some people might pray to a saint to ‘intercede’ for them.

  Isherwood writes, “Paris taught him his vices, absinthe and opium, and the extravagant dandyism of his early manhood which involved him in debt for the rest of his life.” Baudelaire also translated De Quincey’s Confessions of An English Opium Eater and wrote his own classic accounts of hashish, opium and alcohol in Les Paradis Artificiels and in his essay ‘Wine and Hashish Compared as a Means for the Multiplication of the Personality’. Jules Bertaut’s Le Boulevard includes a picture of Baudelaire rushing into a café, the Café de Madrid, and moving the water jug: “the sight of water upsets me”, he says, before sinking two or three absinthes with a “detached and insouciant” air.

  The Lost Art of the Bender

  Erich Kuersten

  The bender. The very name brings to mind drama and danger, tragedy and determination. That strange and forbidden part of town you always wanted to explore but don’t because society and common sense tell you you might not come back, and if you do come back you might not be the same person.

  It seems that in these allegedly more enlightened days, the bender is all but forgotten as a legitimate form of self-exploration and abuse. Now when people talk of destroying themselves through consumption of alcohol, they generally mean overdoing it one night, getting sick later that same evening or early the next morning, then repenting for the remainder of the weekend. This cycle of loathsome behavior is okay if you simply wish to embarrass yourself in front of your friends, but what if you have a deeper, darker wish? What if you long to escape, to disappear from sight and drink unrepentantly and alone for a long period of time, to vanish off the face of the earth for a long ‘lost’ weekend? What then? Then you are aiming to go on a bender.

  Defined in the lexicon of drinking slang, a bender is a period of at least three days of continued drunkenness. Why three? Because the weekend is two days long. It’s that third day (quite possibly a workday) that all bets are off, when eyebrows start to raise, when tongues start to cluck, when the amused laughter turns into whispers of concern.

  Times past, the bender was saluted as a period when good men went bad, usually for excellent reasons. Maybe the love of their life betrayed them, maybe a loved one passed away, maybe they were laid off, maybe there wasn’t a good reason at all except that natural human desire to see how far you can take something without killing yourself, then walk away relatively unscathed. Being able to say, with all honesty, ‘Yeah, I went on a real bender after that happened,’ is akin to casually mentioning you parachuted behind enemy lines.

  The typical recipe for a bender is as follows: 1) Begin drinking within five minutes of waking up, 2) continue drinking, 3) pass out, 4) wake and repeat. Continue this process until a) you’re hospitalized, b) dead or c) you come to your senses and realize you must stop.

  The root of a bender is simply one drink, perhaps at a Friday happy hour. It then multiplies and finally ceases to be mere recreational drinking when one wakes up the next morning and, as a hangover cure or simply for breakfast, starts the day fresh off with another drink. As morning drinks lead to brunch drinks and lunch drinks eliminate the need for lunch, one’s grip on reality is relaxed to the point that it slips completely away and with the aid of a television, a VCR, drawn curtains, and lots of privacy, the petty world of normality and all its tedium … evaporates. And the bender is underway.

  Sound good? Here’s what you’ll need to do:

  1. Score a handful of good movies because cable is too uncontrollable. You want something nice and familiar. Howard Hughes used to watch his favourite movie Ice Station Zebra over and over again, for years on end. Wouldn’t you like to be that deranged? You will be when you’re on a legitimate bender. So rent, own or borrow a collection of favourite movies. Ideally ones with lots of inspiring drinking scenes.

  2. Invest heavily in the alcohol of your choice. Variety is a good idea, as your moods and tastes may shift mid-bender. You should always have more than you need. Stock up. It won’t go bad, it’ll get better.

  3. Turn you
r phone off and the volume down on your answering machine. In between moments of clarity, you may think you have the ability to talk coherently on the phone. This can lead to trouble as you have to explain your words later and can’t remember them. And never mention you’re actually on a bender. Make the mistake of cavalierly mentioning the fact to the wrong person and you’ll have a teary-eyed bunch of interventionists at your door. The bender is a very personal journey, keep it that way.

  4. Close the curtains and lock the door. Think of yourself as a vampire, sunlight and visitors are the bender’s natural enemies.

  You’re all set. Start drinking! I like to start with red wine, then shift to vodka cocktails and cheap American lager, then charge ahead with Jack Daniels on the rocks. Rhythm and pace are essential. Start guzzling hard liquor right off the bat and the binge is over before it started. On the other hand, you want to paddle fast enough to get past the breakwater and into the wide sea that is the bender.

  After a while you may realize you’ve been passed out on the couch for some time. The tape in the VCR will have rewound and the ice in your drink will have melted. Perhaps you will even realize it is 3 in the morning. That’s quite okay. Just slowly get up, make yourself another drink and press play on the VCR remote. You are in bender-land and there’s no time frame to dictate your actions, no place to be, and video knows no schedule. You can simply let the miasma of day/ night duality drift away.There’s no worries about social activities, current events, food, sleeping schedule maintenance, etc. All you need is another drink to make everything smooth like a slow passing cloud on a hot summer’s day.