Clapton (22 page)

By the time we set off, at the beginning of 1981, on a major fifty-seven-date tour of the USA, my booze intake was being supplemented by large quantities of Veganin, a codeine-based sedative. I was suffering from a bad back, caused, I thought, by a hefty slap from my Irish pal Joe Kilduff, whom I’d been drinking with a couple of months previously on one of my visits to Barberstown Castle. At first I was taking about nine at a go, several times a day, but then as the pain got worse, and I couldn’t sleep, I began to take more and more, till I was swallowing up to fifty tablets a day. The upshot was that on Friday, March 13, seven dates into the tour, I collapsed in agony as I came offstage in Madison, Wisconsin. We flew to St. Paul, Minnesota, where Roger had me rushed to a hospital. I was diagnosed with five bleeding ulcers; one was the size of a small orange. The doctors told Roger, who wanted to fly me back to England, that I could die at any moment since one of the ulcers was pressing on my pancreas, and could burst imminently.

I was immediately admitted into United Hospital, and the following morning Roger spent his time canceling the remains of the tour, which numbered fifty shows. It was a big enough insurance disaster for the bell to be rung at Lloyds. They kept me in the hospital for about six weeks, treating me with a drug called Tagamet. I remember one of the first questions they asked me was, “How much are you drinking, because we think that might be your problem.” To which I replied, “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m English. We all drink there, you know. It’s part of our lifestyle, and we drink strong ale, not Budweiser.” So they said, “Well, would you ever consider trying to cut back?” And I replied, “Of course.” The funny thing is that I don’t recall missing alcohol at all while I was in the hospital, perhaps because I was on so much medication. They also allowed me to smoke, out in the corridor or outside. I actually enjoyed feeling well again and being in good health.

When I was finally released from the hospital, I felt like I had a new lease on life because my physical condition was restored. My sanity, however, hadn’t been addressed at all. The doctors who treated me had cured my ulcers with drugs and repaired my overall well-being, but my mental state was still the same. I was totally ignorant about the whole subject of alcoholism. I was quite happy to admit to being an alcoholic, but only in a jokey way. I wasn’t prepared to admit that it was a real problem. I was still at that stage where I would say, “I don’t have a problem. I never spill a drop.”

They did address my situation mildly by telling me that it would be good for me to give up drinking altogether after I left the hospital. So I made deals with them along the lines of, “Well, if I moderate and cut it down to two or three scotches a day, would that be all right?” And they would say “Fine” without realizing that they were dealing with a chronic alcoholic to whom two or three scotches was just breakfast. When I did eventually get home, for the satisfaction of Pattie I made a halfhearted attempt to moderate, but it was really no more than me saying, “Let’s have a glass of wine at lunch today instead of Special Brew.” After a couple of months I was back to two bottles a day and didn’t give a damn about my health.

One person who inadvertently shocked some sense into me regarding my drinking was Sid Perrin, whose health had rapidly deteriorated over the past year, much to the distress of my mother. He first of all had to have a colostomy, which hit him hard. His dignity and self-respect were destroyed by having to wear the bag. Then he developed liver and kidney problems, all drink-related, and really lost his will to live. On the last occasion I saw him, visiting him in the hospital with Pat, he was hallucinating and talking to people who weren’t in the room. I had never seen anything like this before.

Sid died early in November and, to a certain extent, for me Ripley died with him. It was the end of the good times. Uncle Adrian and I got incredibly drunk at his funeral and behaved in the most awful way in front of everybody, our excuse being that it was the way Sid would have liked us to behave. It was unforgivable and my mother was livid with fury. I was very upset by Sid’s passing, and in a way it showed me where I was heading. I thought to myself, “It won’t be long before this kind of thing is going to happen to me,” but instead of slowing my drinking down, it spurred me on to drink even more in a desperate attempt to try and blot it out.

The fallacy about drinking, however, is that when people say they drink to forget, all it does is magnify the problem. I would have a drink to banish the problem and then, when it didn’t go away, have another one, so the end of my drinking days were really insane, because I was constantly spurred on by the hope that I could somehow get to another place. I was hiding booze everywhere, smuggling it in and out and concealing it in places I thought no one would look. I’d usually, for example, have half a bottle of vodka underneath the mat where the pedals are in the car.

My rock bottom was preceded by a number of warnings, the first during a weekend away visiting some friends in the country. We had been invited to stay with Bob Pridden, sound engineer for the Who, who was married to Lady Maria Noel, one of the daughters of the Earl of Gainsborough, and they lived in a house on the grounds of Exton Park, the family home in Rutland. Being full of bravado and therefore having no idea what I was taking on, I promised Pattie that I would not drink during the trip. We set off on the journey, and when we were quite close to the destination we got lost. I spotted a telephone box and stopped to call Bob to get the final directions. While I was talking to him, I suddenly felt faint and a bit dizzy and fell against the side of the kiosk. The blood soon came back to my head and I straightened up and finished the conversation, but I was a little perturbed.

When we arrived, we were met by Bob and Maria, who showed us our room, and then we had something to eat. I noticed there was no booze to be seen, and then it struck me, because I knew that Bob liked to take a drink, that they obviously had been told to hide or lock up all the liquor. I remember getting up in the middle of the night and prowling around the house, opening every cupboard to try and find some alcohol, without success. The next day Bob was going duck shooting, and I went with him and helped him carry his stuff, and by the time we returned I was feeling a bit agitated from not having any alcohol. I started suffering the first signs of withdrawal.

That night we went out to a local restaurant, the George at Stamford, for dinner. It was a grand occasion with a lot of very posh county people, and I noticed that while we were sitting in the bar before dinner, everyone was drinking water or orange juice, which made me think that these people, too, had been given the “E.C. brief.” We went in to dinner and I’d hardly sat down at the table when I felt the earth revolve. I was sitting upright, but the room went sideways, and the next thing I remember I was coming to in the back of an ambulance.

Pattie was with me, literally shaking with fear, as she had no idea what had happened. It turned out that I had suffered a grand mal seizure, brought on by abruptly ceasing my heavy intake of alcohol without medical supervision. I was admitted into the Wellington Hospital in London for tests, where I was soon diagnosed as having a late-arriving form of epilepsy that they said could have been dormant in my system for years. They then gave me the appropriate medication, which was fine because it was another chemical to play with.

Soon after this, at the end of November, we flew to Japan for a short, eight-date tour, opening in Niigata. When we arrived at our hotel in Tokyo a few days later, I went up to my room to find I’d been given a bottle of sake that had flakes of pure gold floating in it, a very highly regarded gift in Japan. I drank it in one sitting, and within a few hours I had a serious physical reaction. My body became covered from head to foot with an enormous rash, and my skin started peeling off. Somehow I got through the show, and that night I showed Roger, and he reiterated what he had been saying for months. “You’re an alcoholic.” Of course, I refused to accept it.

That Christmas we had lots of people staying at Hurtwood, close friends and family of all ages. I had asked Santa for some special thermal underwear for fishing, and on Christmas Eve, I waited till everyone was asleep, and then, blind drunk, I decided to open my gifts. There I was, in the middle of the night, sitting under the tree opening presents, the kind of thing a naughty boy of five would do. I found my precious bright green thermal underwear and put it on and went wandering. When I came to, hours later, I was lying in the cellar in my new thermals, looking like Kermit the Frog, with flashlights shining in my face. It was Christmas morning, and everyone had panicked because I had disappeared and no one knew where I was.

Pattie had been particularly scared, because I was prone to walk out of the house in the middle of the night, with no clothes on, and try to get into the car and drive off. She was at her wit’s end when they found me in the cellar, and I was laughing and crying at the same time. It was ghastly, and I remember seeing the fear in the eyes of the people who were looking at me. Pattie was understandably furious. She took me upstairs and put me to bed. “You’re staying here till everyone’s gone,” she told me. “We’re going to enjoy Christmas without you,” and she left the room, locking the door behind her. She was very clever and very wise, and she kept me in the room, feeding me just enough food and alcohol to keep me sedated. I was so confused about what had taken place, and so ashamed of the damage I had done, that I didn’t put up any fight whatsoever. I knew she was right and that I had to lie low and just do as I was ordered for a little while.

If that weren’t bad enough, my real rock bottom took place a few days later, after the guests had all left. Early in the morning, wearing my new thermal underwear, I crept out of the house to go fishing. I drove down to the river Wey to try out the water near one of the locks. I had some brand-new equipment—two Hardy carp rods and a couple of Garcia reels—and I set up to fish for pike. I’m a country boy, and I’ve always thought of myself as a reasonably good fisherman, but on the opposite bank were a couple of professional carp fishermen with a tent, and everything beautifully laid out. They had probably been there a day or two, and they were watching me. I was drunk and had just about managed to get all my gear set up when I lost my balance and fell over onto one of the rods, breaking it clean off at the handle. The other fishermen witnessed this scene, and I saw them look away in embarrassment.

That was it for me. The last vestige of my self-respect had been ripped away. In my mind being a good fisherman was the one place where I still had some self-esteem. I packed everything up again, put it in the back of the car, and drove home. I picked up the phone and called Roger. When he answered, I just said to him, “You’re right. I’m in trouble. I need help,” and right away I remember having this incredible feeling of relief, mixed with terror, because I’d finally admitted to someone what I had been denying to myself for so long.

I
called Roger rather than Pattie on that fateful day because he had become the most important person in my life. More than anybody, he was the one who had seen me in all my different conditions and who had also pronounced, with absolute certainty, what no one else had had the nerve to tell me, that I was an alcoholic. He had obviously been researching the subject for some time because he had already booked me into Hazelden, which was then said to be the best treatment center for alcoholics in the world. I had no idea where it was and didn’t really care. My only stipulation was that I didn’t want to know when I was going until the last moment.

On the day we left, a cold January morning in 1982, Roger picked me up from Hurtwood and took me to Gatwick Airport. I was a bag of nerves. He flew with me on a Northwest Orient flight to Minneapolis–St. Paul, the scene of my ulcer treatment only six months previously. On the flight over I drank the plane dry, so terrified was I that I might never be able to drink again. This is the most common fear of alcoholics. In the lowest moments of my life, the only reason I didn’t commit suicide was that I knew I wouldn’t be able to drink anymore if I was dead. It was the only thing I thought was worth living for, and the idea that people were about to try and remove me from alcohol was so terrible that I drank and drank and drank, and they had to practically carry me into the clinic.

Hazelden turned out to be in Center City, in the middle of nowhere northeast of Minneapolis–St. Paul. The nearest town was a one-horse place called St. Croix. The clinic itself looked grim and resembled Fort Knox, its low, concrete buildings giving it the appearance of a high-security prison. It didn’t surprise me to learn that when they tried to get Elvis to go there, he apparently took one look at it and refused to get out of his limo. Most of the new arrivals were either drunk, like I was, or dying for a drink, or possibly comatose due to the amount of alcohol in their system and in need of immediate detoxification. They wouldn’t even let me bring in my guitar. All I wanted to do when I saw the place was run away.

After checking in, I spent the first week in the hospital part of the clinic, where most new inmates go, because they are usually seriously addicted and have to be withdrawn medically. I was given a drug called Librium, which helps you to come off the alcohol and balances you out. It left me feeling very woozy. I didn’t really know who I was, or who the other people were, or what I was doing there. It was all just like being heroin-stoned again. Four times a day I was given my medicine in a little paper cup, and gradually they weaned me off booze.

Before you start, you are asked to write down a list of everything you have been taking and, since they often don’t have any medical records of new patients, they have to rely on your honesty. Of all the things I had been using, I neglected to include Valium on the list, because I considered that to be a ladies’ drug. The result was that I suffered another grand mal seizure, because they hadn’t medicated me for Valium withdrawal. I later learned that this can be a very dangerous drug indeed, and is highly underestimated.

The clinic, founded in 1949, was divided up into a series of units, each one named after a famous person connected with the twelve-step program. Mine was Silkworth, after William Silkworth, a New York doctor who is quoted in the Big Book of AA. The unit was divided into a living area, a small kitchen, and lots of little rooms, shared by two to four people. They had all been through the same as me, the new boy bouncing off the ceiling, and for the first few days they looked after me. I was put into a room with a New York fireman named Tommy, who had no idea who I was and didn’t care.

He was more concerned with the way I interacted with him on a personal level, and I had no idea how to do that, because I was either above or below everybody. I was either towering above as Clapton the guitar virtuoso, or cringing on the floor, because if you took away my guitar and my musical career, then I was nothing. My fear of loss of identity was phenomenal. This could have been born out of the “Clapton is God” thing, which had put so much of my self-worth onto my musical career. When the focus shifted toward my well-being as a human being, and to the realization that I was an alcoholic and suffering from the same disease everybody else was, I went into meltdown.

At first, I basically withdrew. My counselor and most of the other people concerned with me all reported that I was playing a game in not revealing anything of myself at all, but I think I’d forgotten how and had little ability to account for myself without my guitar. For over twenty years I had been attached to this partner that gave me my power and my accountability, and without it I didn’t have anything to refer to. I didn’t know how to begin to relate, so I just sort of shifted around in the background. Then part of my reasoning began to figure out just how much I needed to do in order to get through my “time” and reach a successful conclusion so that I could leave, just like everybody else. I knew, because they dangled this threat in front of you: If at the end of the standard one-month period you were not seen to be ready to be released back into society, because you were still in the grip of your addiction, whatever it might be, they would recommend that you be transferred to the psychiatric unit, called Jelonek, which involved all kinds of medication and extended care.

Like all the units, Silkworth held twenty-eight people and basically ran itself, though there were a couple of counselors in situ to keep an eye on everybody and make sure that nothing got out of control. Everyone was accountable, and you weren’t supposed to do anything unethical or abusive. We were expected to be honest and supportive, love one another, and act with decorum, things I wanted to do without being sure how to go about it. The fact is, it was the first time I’d been in a proper democratic community situation in my entire life. The closest I’d ever come to one was when I was hanging out with the guys in Long Acre and we would have group sessions getting stoned. In those first few days I really didn’t know how to communicate and I felt quite frightened. I chose to think of myself as shy again and developed a stutter.

Once it was considered that I could stand on my own two feet, I was given tasks to do, the simplest being to make my own bed, which I’d never done before, and keep myself and my surroundings clean and tidy. Then I was given the job of setting the table for my unit before mealtimes, quite a task for someone who lacked any experience at doing anything domestic. Each group had a hierarchy, consisting of a leader and a caretaker, known as the “Pig Master,” whose responsibility was to make sure everyone did their duties. There was little chance of skiving off, and if I had done so, the Pig Master would have been after me. The day began with prayers, followed by breakfast, and was then filled with activities such as group therapy sessions, lectures, psychological tests, and exercise interspersed with mealtimes, all designed to keep you occupied until you collapsed into bed at the end of the day in a state of mental exhaustion. Sleep came easily, which for me, who had always had to drink to sleep, was great.

At first, the thing that scared me the most was group therapy, where we were encouraged to confront one another about our day-to-day behavior inside the unit. I had never learned to look honestly at myself. In fact, in order to protect my drinking, it was important not to do that. So here I was, feeling raw and vulnerable, wondering how I could even begin to get in touch with the person I had become. But that’s what we were there for, and there was no getting around it. The purpose of group therapy seemed to be for us to see, through direct interaction with one another, the kind of people we had become, and to help one another identify the symptoms of our disease by honestly recognizing the shared defects of the group.

Denial seemed to head the list, followed by self-centeredness, pride, and dishonesty. I found that it had become almost impossible to be honest, especially with myself. Lying and deflection had become second nature to me. But hanging above all this was the big question: Had I truly accepted that I was an alcoholic? Because, until I did, progress would be difficult. The struggle of doing this kind of internal work unaided was unthinkable, which is why group therapy was really necessary. We helped each other, sometimes with brutal means, to discover who we really were.

After about ten days I began to enjoy being there. I looked around and saw some amazing people, sometimes real hard-liners who had been in Hazelden four or five times and had much worse stories to tell than I did. I started to bond with my inmates, and I remember laughing and laughing for the first time in years. We had a coffeepot on the go all day long, and we’d get “coffee’d out,” sitting up into the night talking about ourselves, our ambitions, and the things we had lost. It was a very rich and loving experience.

Most days we heard really inspirational lectures, given by people who had had a long time in recovery, who would usually just tell their story. Sometimes they’d highlight certain aspects of recovery, like honesty and denial, but they always emphasized how great life was now that they were sober, and you knew it wasn’t bullshit. At other times the lectures would take a scientific slant, depicting the nature of the disease in its different phases. It was really good, if not essential, for me to learn, for instance, that alcoholism was regarded, at least in America, as a disease and not a form of moral degeneracy. It was a huge relief to know that I was suffering from a recognized medical condition no more shameful than diabetes. It made me feel less alone.

These talks riveted me, and I got really excited by some of the personalities who came, people who had been sober for twenty years or more and had stories to tell that were often hair-raising and sometimes tragic. But some of us were hard to reach, and I heard later that there was quite a lot of drug taking going on in my unit. Sundays were family visitation days, and this is when substances could be smuggled in by friends or family. I didn’t do anything myself, only because I didn’t know anyone who would bring me anything.

My problem was of a different kind. Hazelden was not a single-sex institution, but fraternization between the sexes was strictly forbidden, and patients were expected to report anybody seen doing this. But flirtation was a daily practice, and attempted liaisons were fairly common. I did manage to have a couple of dalliances with girls without being caught. I achieved this by somehow persuading my counselor that I was entitled to a room of my own, and once I got this, I set about trying to get girls to come and visit me. I succeeded, but only at risk to other people who knew it was happening. If they had been found out for not reporting me, we would all have been thrown out.

Hazelden was one of the first clinics to have a family program, and toward the end of my stay, Pattie flew out to undergo a five-day course designed to teach spouses and family members what to expect, and how to reapproach their relationships when the patient finally returned home, hopefully sober. It also encouraged them to look at their own role in the family structure, to see whether there would be a possible need for them to get help as well. It has become generally accepted in these matters that no one holds a gun to the head of a person involved with an alcoholic. They are almost invariably there for their own reasons, and in many cases this is because they are addicted themselves, even if it’s only in a caretaking fashion.

If this is the case, their foundations are often shaken and their roles threatened when the addict takes steps toward recovery, because they can no longer practice their own addiction with satisfactory results. The Hazelden family program, among other things, focused on the need for family members to look really honestly at the nature of their relationships and learn how they could identify and, if necessary, redirect their own needs in order to share their lives successfully with someone who didn’t need looking after anymore.

For Pattie, these sessions were to prove incredibly helpful, not least because she got to meet other people who were in the same situation that she was. I think she felt she had been acting as a surrogate mother most of her life, starting with her siblings, and continuing the role in her relationships. In her life with me, I think she yearned for an independent identity, but was rarely allowed to account for herself because I was always the focus of attention. For years all she would hear was, “What are we going to do about Eric?” or “Eric’s such an annoyance,” “Eric’s done this, Eric’s done that. Isn’t he wonderful? Isn’t he awful?” Until she came to Hazelden, nobody ever asked her, “Well, who are you, and what’s your reason for being with him?”

Of course, at times I felt I’d never make it through the whole month, and some did give up. One very wealthy guy actually had his wife fly a helicopter into a nearby field and left in the middle of the night. I got through what was to be the first of two visits to Hazelden by what I later learned was called “tap dancing.” I figured out exactly what it was I thought they needed from me, and I gave it to them. I also watched the counselors very carefully and tried to mimic them, going to other people in the unit and trying to work out their problems to deflect attention from myself. The result was that I finally got to the end of my stay, having done just enough of the required work to be released.