Alcoholic
Alcoholic“And it takes a lot of whisky to make these nightmares go away...”
Tom Waits, ‘Blue Valentines’Jack Daniel’s. Bell’s. Jameson’s. Glenmorangie. Single malt, single cask, Irish, bourbon, blend.Whisky, then. My destruction, my love.Like all good alcoholics, I vividly remember my first drink, and none of them since. A shabby New York motel, too naïve to know that spirits are drunk in shots, handed whisky by teenage boys and downing it before they turned around. The next night, sneaking out for beer with fake ID, having a gun pulled on me. New York, Paris, London, Washington D.C.I found myself ten miles away, dazed and confused, waking with two older men I didn’t know. Coming to outside the Zodiac to find myself on Alex’s bike, mid-kiss, glossy black hair swinging around my eyes. Laughed out of the office, collapsing at a famous MP’s feet. My editor’s final dedication, who needs professionalism?, an epitaph. Asked to write Diary of an Alcoholic, I refused. Blatantly obvious that nobody would believe it.I repeated the Manics as a mantra, as the excuse I’d hoped it would never become. Oblivion is privilege, it has a fee. So drunk I forgot I’d said it, pissing off the people who heard the same laments over and over again. James Dean Bradfield, desperately clinging to our old image, the conspiracy theory that getting out of it is just a way to keep you down. But I discovered the art of switching off. The blessed, guilty freedom of forgetting. Irvine Welsh called it the working-class coping mechanism, escapists call it rock‘n’roll. Nabokov talked of exhibitionism and my friends couldn’t understand the personality that thinks smack’s a romantic way to go.That winter, some kind of end. After ten years of excruciating dental work, falling into Cowley Road so hard I lost half a front tooth. I remembered nothing when I woke. Dragging through trenching mud, shaking at the word. Alcoholic.First there were the questions, too many of which I answered yes; then the pictures, cirrhosis’s spongy mass, endemic in northern working-class girls. They say one in 13 depends on drink, that “addicts are loners, who gravitate not towards the person they find most interesting but towards the one who can absorb the same amount of substance as they can” (AN Wilson). Had that been true, Julia and I would have drunk together, not alone. I would have liked Patrick more. They say it’s a question of will, something I’ve never had. I gave up for six months, then four, then two. The word terrifies me, and it never goes away. Like ‘depressive’, like ‘dead’.I didn’t give up for myself. I gave up for Marcus, for Charles, and when they left I found myself drawn to alcopops’ lurid fizz and the vinegar relief of the cheapest possible wine. The scars remain; scarlet marks mazing my skin, increasingly outlandish excuses at the bank, the tooth that aches with every cold wind. The inability to drink socially, the hours of missing memory totalling weeks of my life. When it wasn’t enough, nicotine and self-harm.A prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... I never wanted to be resigned. I can’t let it go.
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose leaves
The way I feel today - 10 July 2004
Just seventeen - 17 March 2004
Roads to freedom - 25 February 2004
Confessions of a failed self-harmer - 25 February 2004
Manchester, united - 25 February 2004