You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead (23 page)

He was a puzzle; a brilliant, acerbic mind consistently seeking oblivion. I tried to keep up with his drinking for a while but in the end there seemed a chasm between us: he had one foot in the camp of serious alcoholics and I saw myself as a visitor. I couldn't understand why he was so insistent on wiping himself out, night after night. I dictated a more moderate drinking routine to him and he told me in no uncertain terms to fuck off.When it was over I said ‘we broke up because Joel drank too much' and more often than not had a glass of wine in my hand at the time.

After that I dated every type of alcoholic. Nobody with a thirst was safe from my affections. Angry brooders, swaggering shot-drinkers, party animals with a bottle of vodka in one arm and naked flame in the other. I remember years ago seeing the breathtakingly clever stand-up comedian Anthony Morgan—himself an excessive drinker—at that very show gulping from a large pint glass of something that quite clearly wasn't water, pacing the stage angrily, veering from the safety of his pre-written routine to launch a tirade against his ex-wife, who had only recently left him for another man.

‘He's not even a
proper
alcoholic,' spat Morgan in disgust. ‘He's just a
binge drinker
.'

In my late twenties I stayed in a long-term relationship with an alcoholic for three-and-a-half years and we drank the world dry.We drank our way across London, Paris, Barcelona, Tasmania, Far North Queensland and Bali. Every day we would stumble from our beds and wait until the time came when it was reasonable to begin drinking. On holidays, this moment came at around midday. We didn't see ourselves as serious drunks since we didn't drink at breakfast time, except of course in the case of serious code red hangovers when we immediately reached for a bloody mary before even opening our eyes.

For the most part it was a perfectly loving and functional relationship until I began enjoying the odd day sober and he began enjoying the odd day drinking at 10:30 or 11 am. I encouraged him gently to do as I did, step off the treadmill for a fortnight or a week, or even a day, but he seemed completely unable. It came as a shock and with no small amount of sadness the moment I understood that at that point he loved the drink more than he was able to love me.

Alcohol was a perfect mistress who had led me merrily through twenty years of licentiousness and romance, but I didn't think I loved it more than
people
. I wanted to delicately tiptoe that line, to maintain the lifestyle to which I had become accustomed, one hand wrapped around the bottle, the other around a pen. I wanted to be, in other words, a functioning drunk.

I never had a favourite kind of drinker—alcoholics were like children, it was difficult to pick one more special than another and as a fun party trick they too tended to wet themselves when left to their own devices—I just loved men who drank. I still do. There is something deeply untrustworthy about teetotallers, something that emits an aroma of
giving
up
. ‘I never trust a fighting man who doesn't smoke or drink,' Admiral William Frederick Halsey Jr once said, when enjoying time off from being an outrageous racist. (‘Before we're through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell' was another of his lively conversational kick-starters.) Teetotallers tsk beneath their breath when you reach across to fill up another glass; teetotallers leave parties early. In their eyes is reflected the judgement you are supposed to have fostered for yourself many years ago—that innate responsibility of knowing when to stop and when to say no. Why is that idea in itself so artless? I imagine Jim Morrison peeling away his piss-soaked leathers and taking up jogging and am nearly sick into my mouth. We want our creative icons staggering and helpless with intoxicants. We gravitate towards lovers with dangerous, sharp edges. In the process, we drink to keep up.

When we date, we date drinkers. There is no negotiation to be entered into. Not long ago, I shamelessly asked after a shy tattooed vegan boy who works in a local café and was despondent when I discovered he had subscribed to the strict world of straight-edge. ‘He doesn't
drink
,' I sighed miserably, as though this ruled him out from ever being a viable romantic option. If he didn't drink then we couldn't cheat our way through the awkwardness of courtship, couldn't write ourselves off in order to gather the courage to go to bed together. Couldn't spend a weekend away running rampant in a bed and breakfast with a bottle of red. Couldn't get shickered at a friend's wedding and cry on each other in the middle of the dancefloor. There was no point, really, starting anything in the first place. My favourite boyfriends drank and I drank with them and the idea of dating somebody without the comforting ‘go on then' nudge of liquor was simply absurd.

As friends grew older there was a polite bowing out of the heavy drinking game. As though they had reached the age of thirty-five and been handed a little pass.
Thanks for
drinking with us!
it read.
Enjoy the rest of your life with white wine
spritzers and the occasional low-carb beer at family barbecues! Lots
of love, your Libertine Youth. P.S. Please don't visit, it only upsets
the children.

They feared, of course, everything we'd read about, everything we'd been told a life of heavy drinking would lead to. Apparently when Hemingway was near the end it was possible to see the outline of his distended and diseased liver lying under the surface of his skin. Is this what will eventually happen to those of us who remain committed, who don't simply murmur ‘no thank you, I'm driving' but rather end each and every family get together with dress defiantly held above head and middle finger raised at our cluckingly disapproving GPs? What happens if that dedication to a life lived blurrily doesn't simply continue in carefree afternoons and nights but leads us, helplessly, into a whirlwind of catheters and assisted bathing? That doesn't pique my interest at all. I want to be a pretty drunk, like Dusty Springfield. I want to reach languorously for a margarita while a calypso band lulls me into an afternoon haze. No malfunctioning kidneys just yet, please, no brain haemorrhages. Just the odd hangover that feels like eighty power lifters trying to ejaculate inside your skull all at once.

It's those exact hangovers, of course, which prove to be the breaking point for so many. One day in my early thirties I woke up and stood, naked, in my living room, trying to remember where it was I'd left my car the night before, whilst simultaneously hoping against hope I'd at least had some clothes on when I arrived home. My brain, as it processed this, felt like a cardboard box filled with crumpled newspaper. Then the newspaper caught fire. Then some dwarves appeared out of nowhere attempting to put the fire out. They were naked too. I felt all this frantic activity taking place inside my brain and simply stood helplessly, arms dangling by my side, waiting for it to subside. This was a hangover in your thirties, I told myself. This was different to those days of springing out of bed in your twenties with a mild headache and eating a banana sandwich. This is where you could actually feel those important little puzzle pieces of your brain melt away.

There haven't been blackouts. Not too many. A delicate handful. What's a few blackouts between friends? Yet the older I got the more colourful they seemed to become. At twenty-eight I collapsed unconscious on a stranger's lawn. At thirty-three, after a night spent on a friend's rooftop in Sydney doing shots, I crawled into his bedroom and passed out. I woke up, fascinatingly, in the bedroom of a completely different member of the house, a gay man named Peter. Apparently I had walked into his room at 5am nude and looking, in his words, ‘like the girl from
The Ring
'. With nary a second thought I had climbed into his bed and curled into a ball and gone to sleep. His first thought was ‘holy mother of christ'. His second: ‘girls are soft'. His third: ‘I am getting the hell out of this bed with this drunk naked madwoman and going upstairs to sleep on the couch.' To this day I am simply grateful that I didn't do a wee in the corner of his bedroom. Perhaps I did and Peter had just been too polite to tell me.

There is apparently something even more shameful in this sort of behaviour for women. Women aren't supposed to drink heavily or write about it unless they've left it behind, in a cane basket full of old hurts and solved problems. There is a neatness in moving on from a past of heavy drinking for women, a sad and brave memoir full of tales of regret. Caroline Knapp writes well about being a drunk in her novel
Drinking: A love story
, but the book ends with lots of therapy and hugging and misty-eyed talk about facing a new dawn sober. The best writing about drinking is masculine writing, inebriated writing. Why? And when will women challenge HL Mencken's assertion that ‘The harsh, useful things of the world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men who are as starkly sober as so many convicts in the death-house, but the lovely and useless things, the charming and exhilarating things, are best done by men with, as the phrase is, a few sheets in the wind'?

It's time for women to romanticise drinking. Forget brushing off the indignities contained in a bottle of Drambuie, or carrying on with lives making babies and pretending we were never once the author of a three-page poem entitled ‘The revolution begins at the bottom of my West Coast Cooler'. Why can we not too lay claim to the brutish gorgeousness of falling asleep on the ‘j' key of a laptop? I know plenty of salty ladies who come undone at the thought of a whisky sour and an evening spent whirling around dens of ill repute, sticky with devilish thoughts and tobacco smoke. So where is the woman who writes the equivalent of Charles Bukowski's ‘Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now'? Perhaps they're afraid that one too many feature articles in
Imbibers Monthly
will lead to a swathe of letters from helpful members of the community. (‘The first step, Anaïs, is admitting you have a problem.')

The trick is to admire the artistic outpourings of other drunks from a safe distance without fear of living out the rest of your days face first in a bowl of peanuts right next to Norm in the
Cheers
bar. Listen to Donald Newlove, a man who was so enamoured with the combination of alcohol and prose he wrote a book entitled
Those Drinking Days: Myself
and other writers
. When Newlove writes about being drunk in the novel's first half, it is in homage: ‘I patiently uncurled the English tongue to make it speak plain but it kept tying itself into gorgeous knots I couldn't make sense of. And if the knot had a hard glow, like sunlight on snow, then I didn't care about sense. This light overrode sense, or the need for it. Light is all. This, I'd assure myself with a thankful glance toward heaven, this is the best prose I've ever written.'

I want to marry writing like that. I want to put it in a brandy snifter and set fire to it. I want to smash a bottle against it and ride it out to sea. Yet Newlove then renounces drinking in the second half of his book and pens instead many glowing paragraphs about how improved his life is since he's stopped punching random publishers in the face and wearing his stained purple suit on first dates.
Those Drinking Days
becomes, in that moment, an infinitely dull read. I believe I actually muttered the word ‘quitter' aloud when closing the book.

In the face of all the negative press, all the po-faced
body
+
soul
liftouts promoting AFDs and clean living and shiny, brand-new livers, it is more than admirable that there are those promoting a louche life lived underground. Fuck sobriety, they say. Let us mingle for a few more precious moments in the half-light of gin's muse. Let us celebrate the temporary relief of tuning out. Let us love harder and burn brighter.

Kingsley Amis put it beautifully when he wrote:

The reason why I, and most others, usually turn out to enjoy meeting such creatures is simply and obviously the co-presence of drink. The human race has not devised any way of dissolving barriers, getting to know the other chap fast, breaking the ice, that is one-tenth as handy and efficient as letting you and the other chap, or chaps, cease to be totally sober at about the same rate in agreeable surroundings. Well and good, the serious student of the effects of drink will retort in the grim, curmudgeonly tone peculiar to serious students of the effects of drink; well and good, but what about what happens later? What about those who drink, not to cease to be totally sober, but to get drunk? What about the man who
drinks on his own
? . . . Leaving aside dipsomaniacs, most or many of whom are born, not made, I feel that there is very little we can safely add, in discussing our motives for drinking, to the verdict of the poet who said we do it because ‘we are dry, or lest we may be by and by, or any other reason why'.

Of course, KA was a fat old pomp who saw women as a bothersome arrangement of piffle and noise and died desperately lonely, but that's neither here nor there. He's correct, drinking alone is somehow seen as something disgraceful. ‘I drink,' friends say to me with a self-effacing superiority, ‘but I don't drink alone.' I can't see the issue with this. Drinking alone is often infinitely preferable to drinking with others. For one thing, you don't have to tolerate the company of other drunks.You don't have to notice the moment they first slur their words, indicating the beginning of the end of the night, the sorry moment a once enjoyable conversation slides muddily into an overloud self-congratulatory circle of wank. If you drink alone you can prank call ex-lovers, listen to Toots and the Maytals with the volume turned up so loud your neighbour calls the police, and go on Chatroulette with complete strangers whilst wearing only your underpants and a Ronald Reagan mask.