Double Double (14 page)

I vaguely remember Big 10 football games where we stormed the field after big wins or wrestled one another in the stands to grab the “peace pipe” of pot whenever it stopped circulating because someone was hogging it. Or coming home from the games to take a “football nap” so we could go out to the bars and party until one
A.M.
, then come home to drink until four
A.M.
The next morning I would find bruises on my body that I couldn't explain. I ate so much goddamned late-night pizza that, to this day, I hate pizza. I stopped playing Ultimate Frisbee or engaging in any other form of exercise and gained too much weight.

I wasn't alone. There were thousands of teenagers doing the same thing any given night. Some of them were alcoholics in the making, but most of them were not. They didn't leave a fun party in the living room to hide and snort coke in the back room. They didn't look out the window at nine
A.M.
on a Sunday, after a twenty-four-hour jag, to see people going to church and wonder what it would feel like to be normal.

At the end of senior year, my gang went on a weeklong bender to celebrate graduation. My mother and father and other relatives made the trek out to the Midwest for my special day. I graduated with the worst hangover I ever had in my life and was desperate for the ceremony to be over and for them to leave so I could start
partying again. College was another crowning achievement in my life ruined by alcohol and drugs. Somehow I got out with a degree. Through my mother's editor, I got a job in book publishing in New York City.

Then the real fun began.

“Straight down the line, Walter.”

A
nother member of our group is leaving. He's standing before us, giving reasons for his decision to stop coming to the clinic. They're pretty much the same reasons. Or reason: He has his drinking under control now.

Straight down the line, Walter.

That's more or less what I want to say to him. It's what Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck) says to Walter (Fred MacMurray) in that great film noir
Double Indemnity.

In any well-constructed mystery, there is a sense of inevitability. In most cases, the reader realizes it only after the last page is turned:
Of course, how could it have been otherwise? Double Indemnity
ratchets forward like a bullet out of a gun. You can't squeeze it
back in; you can't turn it or dodge it. The target will be struck. And the target is them.

The movie begins with a gorgeous romance into which is interjected something chancy and dangerous, thereby making the romance even more glamorous. Then they do the dangerous thing together, and it's all downhill from there. What's especially damning is the corrosive agent in their love. What's eating at them is not so much guilt as the awareness that, having committed this crime, they're stuck with each other.

I've watched
Double Indemnity
so many times that I think it's leaking out of my pores as slowly as my last drink. It's such a beautiful piece of chiaroscuro; the lighting should be distilled and drunk neat. There's the scene at the end where she's sitting in her living room, waiting for him with a gun; his shadow is thrown on the wall as he stands in the doorway with a gun. They didn't go all the way together; they stopped and shot each other. Crash.

Straight down the line, baby.

Straight down the line.

After that earlier dialogue, you think, Oh, God! Now it's come to this!

And “this” is where I see our own Walter, announcing he's quitting.

The way in which
Double Indemnity
moves along the track to its inescapable end is the way this fellow will end. He can handle his drinking. He's got a plan. Say, drinking only on weekends. It doesn't matter. What he's thinking about now is the taste of that first drink.

Crash.

He's Walter. The bottle's Phyllis. They're a perfect fit. The bottle is alive with solace and the fulfillment of desire. So was Phyllis for two thirds of the film.

There is no stop on this train ride until you're over the rail and onto the track, like Phyllis's husband.

There is another reading of “straight down the line.”

If this member of our group is anything like me, that first drink, that taste, is as good as a kiss, a long embrace and the return of a flaming romance. That first drink, and it all unravels. Not immediately, but give it time, until a drink later he realizes he's stuck with it. It's straight down the line for both of them, and neither one can get off, and the last stop (says Walter's boss) is the cemetery.

When you're in the “Surely one drink won't hurt” frame of mind, don't stop with imagining the first taste of that first drink. Imagine the second drink. Imagine the third. The fourth. At what point does the memory of that first lush icy taste on your tongue disappear and you start, well, just drinking?

What has kept me sober is that I know I can't drink just one. That sounds stodgy; it sounds boring; it's unimaginative. It would sound so much nicer, more romantic or sentimental, to say it's the love of my grandchildren that keeps me sober. It isn't. Nor is it my health; nor is it writing. It's knowing I can't drink just one. I go straight down the line with two, three, four until I see myself over the rail and onto the track. I know it would happen.

Crash.

In
Double Indemnity,
there's no strenuous drinking (although they don't exactly miss a chance). When Phyllis happens to have only a pitcher of iced tea handy, he drinks it, says, “A little rum would get this up on its feet.”

My sentiments exactly, Walter. Up on our feet until we all fall down.

Crash.

O
ne of my favorite movie scenes is the opening of
Throw Momma from the Train.
Billy Crystal plays a writer with severe writer's block. His ex-wife has stolen his book idea and is famous because the book is a best seller. He stares at his typewriter (how pleasant to see this relic) and tries desperately to get beyond the three words he has written. He stares out the window; he paces around the room, reciting the three words over and over; he makes himself a cup of tea and spends endless minutes dipping the tea bag in and out of the cup; he adds a shot of whiskey to the tea; he finally tries Scotch-taping his nose toward his forehead.

I don't know if I've ever had writer's block. In my drinking years, I would tell myself I had it. I could not come up with a sentence. I would stare at a blank page that remained irretrievably blank, not the temporary blankness through which I could see or sense a word or two but a blankness beyond blankness. My mind
felt as if it were trying to navigate broken rocks barefoot. I didn't try the Scotch-tape trick.

What I wanted was easeful thought, smooth and seamless. What I got was a blank page that stayed blank while my mind was busy with the dinner menu.

After thirty years of writing books, my mind still resists. At times it appears to begrudge me every word I try to set down.

There I was with, say, fifteen books written, and I could still scare myself into thinking the fifteenth (or twelfth or seventh) could be my last book. Writing has always been precarious for me, but back then it was an utter cliff-hanger.

Rarely did I drink while I wrote. That's not because I was being a good little writer but because I wrote in the morning and I didn't drink in the morning. (When I did write in the evening, I would certainly keep company with a martini.)

The difference in the writing between my drinking life and my nondrinking life was not in output. I insist that one can write even when one can't (a seeming tautology). I'm all for putting words—any words—down on paper and worrying about them later. “Never, never, never walk away” was my motto.

What was the first book I wrote after I stopped drinking? I think it was
Rainbow's End
. I have a clear memory of Richard Jury sitting on the roof of the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe with a local policeman, engaged in the Santa Fe ritual (not quite as flamboyant as the Key West ritual) of watching the sun go down. I recall most clearly that everybody up on that roof out in the crisp New Mexico air was drinking.

It might seem to anyone who read the books from both parts of my life that they were pretty much the same (just as good or just as bad). Again, there was no difference in output. Consequently,
one might wonder (and believe me, I did) what advantage lies in my not drinking.

It's one thing to stare down at a blank page and try to formulate a sentence—anything just to write—and not be able to (correction, thinking I wasn't able to), and conclude: That's it, I'm done for, I'm finished as a writer. It's quite another to see an unformed sentence or a blank page as a temporary wall, knowing it will come down, and probably in the next fifteen minutes.

That is an enormous difference.

Writing is thinking. The thinking is in the writing; it is not
about
the writing, and it doesn't come before it; the thinking lies in the process of writing. Trying to think outside of that process won't do you much good.

I believe I have finally discovered the answer to the eternal problem that students complain of when trying to write papers in English 101. (Not that the problem stops there; no, it continues on forever.) “I don't know what's wrong,” a student says. “I've got these words in my head that I can't get down on paper.” How familiar and how true. The same thing happens to me, but I write around what I want to say. The problem is that you can't really think out beforehand whatever it is you're going to say. The writing of it is the thinking of it. In other words, don't think, write. That sounds as if it's leaning lemminglike over the edge of impossibility, but it's true.

Drinking helped me with such mental acrobatics. If there's anything that releases you from forced thought, it's a stiff drink. Perhaps just as important, it's company, and company is one of the things that drinking is very much about.

On the other hand, on those occasions when I had a drink while writing, the writing came with a certain ease. (Was this the easeful
thought I so wished for?) If that's the case, why not keep on drinking? There are many writers who would lay claim to alcohol helping their writing, giving it an edge.

So what was the problem?

I don't know the answer, aside from the enormous difference mentioned above. Perhaps it's that thought shouldn't be easeful; writing shouldn't be easeful; it shouldn't feel as if it's smooth and seamless.

That's not exactly the right answer, since writing does become easier, drinking or not, when you find you're in a groove. Or, as Stephen King wonderfully put it, when “you fall through a hole in the page.”

You forget what you're doing and do it. What do you know? That sounds almost like drinking.

But drinking takes no effort. Writing takes an enormous amount, which is why more people don't do it.

We'd rather drink.

I
was sober for nine months and in recovery when I was twenty-six years old and working as a book publicist at Random House. During that time, I had the opportunity to spend a month with an author who changed my life and taught me some lessons about those who can't surrender to this disease. I kept a diary of the time I spent in New York City with her. Here is some of what we grappled with together and apart.

Julia Phillips—the producer of
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
and
The Sting
and
Taxi Driver
(all of them favorite films)—rolled into town to promote
You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again,
an explosive tell-all about Hollywood in the 1970s and her personal destruction through booze and drugs.

Julia had it all. Funny, smart, and young. She was the first
woman to win an Oscar as a producer—at age twenty-nine, for
The Sting
—and she went to the Academy Awards high on Valium, coke, and pot. Her acceptance speech brought down the house when she uttered the immortal “You don't know what a trip it is for a Jewish girl from Great Neck to meet Liz Taylor and win an Academy Award in the same night.”

She went on to destroy her career over and over with freebase cocaine (a high so scary that even I wouldn't go near it) from 1978 to 1980. In those three years, she smoked and spent somewhere between seven to ten million dollars.

She kicked the cocaine habit, but she still liked her vodka and marijuana and smoked four packs a day, thank you very much. A rigorous workout regimen and a spiky hairdo kept her looking youthful. Energy came off of her in waves. Julia was the type of drunk who ran umpteen miles on the StairMaster in her suite at a ritzy hotel overlooking Central Park while watching TV and jabbering on the phone, smokes and bottle of vodka on the coffee table nearby.

A week before her book tour, she threatened to cancel all the interviews our publicity department had arranged, screaming at the director of publicity in Los Angeles, “I walked away from
Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
and I can walk away from this!”

That was just the beginning. Book tours are carefully constructed edifices built on staggered interviews, with each national media outlet demanding to be first, second, et cetera, in print, then broadcast, followed by appearances in major cities. Trying to recast the cement a week before the start of the tour would be murder, but I was told to do it. Hers was our biggest book of the spring season.

Julia soon proved to me that she had her finger on the pulse of popular culture. After her tirade, she told me in her gravelly voice,
“Ken, this book is going to number one on the
New York Times
best-seller list. I know what I'm doing.”