Double Double (24 page)

Within thirty minutes, my older son was flopping the fish into the boat, swinging the hook backward without looking, and reeling in the hook for more bait all the way to the tip of the rod. My younger son ran around the boat to cast willy-nilly in every direction. My wife and I kept reminding them of the rules, but they had turned stone-deaf.

At our last fishing spot, where the bay meets the Gulf, the action was nonstop, with Will and Scott catching ladyfish and sea trout and Captain Tom shouting at both of them.

“Wait, Will, what did I tell you, don't reel the hook all the way into the rod!”

“No, Scott, don't pull the fish all the way into the boat, let me get it!”

“Hey, both of you kids, I just said not to do that!”

“What did I just tell you guys!”

“Hang on, you nearly hooked your dad in the eye!”

“No, no, let me bait the shrimp!”

Captain Tom sprinted away from the wheel and grabbed the rod from Will, yelling, “Wait a second, wait a second, you're not doing that right!” Then he whipped around to tell Scott, “Didn't I just tell you not to do that!”

The two would heed one direction while forgetting the others. Will seemed to be willfully ignoring Captain Tom as he competed with his younger brother to land the biggest fish of the day.

At one brief break in the action, Captain Tom turned to look at us and said, “So, I guess you two must drink a lot.”

“I hope you're drinking again—,

Life's too short.”

—LETTER FROM HARRY

C
ould this letter have come at a better time with its almost unassailable argument? Just when we'd finished writing this book?

The irony had me laughing so hard I almost measured out a couple of fingers of the Absolut and a splash of vermouth from the bottles I considered hauling out to the dumpster together with the Gordon's gin and Jack Daniels. They've been hanging out in my cupboard for a long time. Why don't I toss them out?

“Yes, why don't you?” asks one of my fellow addicts in the circle at the clinic. “It's dangerous keeping booze so close at hand.”

I answer with a shrug. “I know I'm not going to drink them.”

“Then why do you keep them?”

Does she really think that's a sly response?

I don't answer. I don't know.

That was a long time ago, and I still don't know. I still have the bottles waiting for the Dumpster.

 • • • 

After all the arguments that tell you to stop drinking, there's only one telling you to keep on: that you can't stand not having that fiery slug of vodka or whiskey going down your throat and wearing down the rough edges of the day.

That's not an argument, is it? That's a statement of desire, a need. Yet that need is the first hurdle and the last hurdle that an alcoholic has to jump. When all the arguments have been put forth, what it comes down to is that you don't want to stop, because you'd lose that drink.

It's that one drink. The trouble is, you think of that one drink. It's always one. It's thinking about the drink that fires up your imagination, and imagination here is a killer.

(What you should do, as I have said elsewhere, and what the secret is—if there is one, and I think this is it—is follow that one drink to the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, to the slip on the front steps, the hangover, the remorse.)

If that's the secret, why is it parenthetical? Because you don't give a damn when that one drink is sitting on the bar before you or delivered on a silver tray, you don't care at all about the trip to Remorse.

Recently, I read a description of that one drink written by an alcoholic who hadn't had a drink in a decade. He was in a bar for
some more somber reason than drinking, and the bartender mistakenly placed a drink before him . . . well. His description of the drink just sitting there was enough to make an alcoholic weep. It was almost to his mouth before he set it back on the bar.

Here is an ad for a new vodka, and it's the most seductive advertisement I have ever seen: a woman's shoulders in wine-colored velvet; hair the color of brandy falling over her eyes so that we see only the lowered lid and lashes of one; claret-red lips just a breath away from the rim of a martini glass, the vodka looking like liquid silver. Her lips hover over the glass. The caption reads: “Hello, Delicious.”

Not only the words themselves but the sound of them—that gentle sibilance. The look of the stemmed glass, the whispery sound of the words. Combine this with Forster's “Only connect,” and that would be my answer to “Why do you drink?”

I return to the drawing room of the London hotel in Chelsea, the dark wood paneling, the deep cushions and wing chairs, the fire, the flowers in huge vases, the white-jacketed porter bearing a martini on a silver tray.

Hello, Delicious.

 • • • 

“If it's all of those details that attract you,” says the good doctor who runs the clinic, “why not just fill the glass with water?” Because it's all illusion (they would have said in the clinic); all of those details are a kind of drinking bribery. It's as illusory as your old friend Gordon.

Why not sit with your buddies in Swill's and just, well, drink water instead of vodka? Why? Because the fireplace, the porter, the silver tray are all part of that drink.

I listened to an interview with the late Christopher Hitchens, who at the time was in the last stages of esophageal cancer. He said he had no doubt that the cancer was caused by his excessive smoking and drinking. He'd known the dangers of both; he'd taken the gamble, he said, and lost. But he could not imagine never drinking wine again, sitting around the table at a dinner party, the wine enriching conversation, or not having the edge that drinking and smoking put on his writing.

I wonder how Christopher Hitchens would have reacted had the interviewer said, “But that's all illusion, isn't it? All of the claptrap about enriched conversation, about a writing edge—isn't that sort of embroidery a form of denial?”

Christopher Hitchens probably would have looked thoughtful (to be polite) and then said something like “No. It's the truth. It's a drug. There's a rush. Don't you get it?”

“My old friend Jim Beam.” This is a standing joke among alcoholics. It's famous. Only it isn't a joke when you come down to it. Taking the last of the empties out to the trash really does feel like throwing away a friend. And I think any alcoholic will tell you, there's simply no friend like that old friend, the first drink of the evening.

I remember a movie in which the daughter of wealthy parents had come for dinner. There was no alcohol served because the father was a recovering alcoholic. Afterward, the girl and her mother were talking about the father, and the mother said ruefully that she had liked him better when he was drinking. That was a shocking admission, she knew, about herself. But he had lost a spark, something that made their lives more enjoyable. Since he'd stopped drinking, he was sad a lot of the time.

In my clinic, I think they would come down hard on this
woman; they'd call her an enabler. But she wasn't: She had never done anything to undermine her husband's earnest effort to stay sober. I thought she was being devastatingly honest.

 • • • 

Where am I in my life except toward the end of it, standing at a Dumpster with a fifth of Absolut and a bottle of vermouth. If I were to take them inside and pour them in a shaker, what then? As Harry says, life is too short. There isn't enough time left to do much damage. I think of that seductive ad, the woman with her lips so near the glass. “Only connect,” said E. M. Forster. This was the connection, not simply with other people but with myself and with the world.

I tip this ancient bottle of Absolut into the Dumpster and hope it doesn't smash. I hope it lands on some sort of soft bed of eggshells and ashes.

I don't hear a thing.

Goodbye, Delicious.

© MICHAEL VENTURA

Bestselling author
MARTHA GRIMES
has published at least one book a year for the last thirty years, including twenty-two Richard Jury mysteries. The winner of the 2012 Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award, Grimes lives in Bethesda, Maryland. Her website is
www.MarthaGrimes.com
.

COURTESY OF THE AUTHORS

KEN GRIMES,
shown here at age eight, works in Washington, D.C., and lives with his wife and children in suburban Maryland.

MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT

SimonandSchuster.com

DOUBLE DOUBLE
is a dual memoir of alcoholism written by Martha Grimes and her son Ken. This brutally candid book describes how different both the disease and the recovery can look in two different people—even two people who are mother and son.

THE WAY OF ALL FISH
is a wickedly funny sequel to Grimes's bestselling novel,
Foul Matter
, “a satire of the venal, not to say murderous practices of the New York publishing industry” (
The New York Times Book Review
).