Forty-Seventeen (7 page)

Because of loss of energy – reaching for a book was an effort – sweating, horrendous nausea, inflammation of the oesophagus, pale shit, he went to have tests done by a GP in the city he was visiting.

The GP was grave. ‘You have cirrhosis,' she said. She was appalled at how much he drank.

‘You must never drink again,' she said, studying the liver function tests.

He'd told her that at the end of the day he had about four or five drinks before dinner – beers, martinis, bloody marys, or bourbons – followed by a half to full bottle of wine with dinner, followed maybe by a glass of beer to ‘refresh the palate', followed by probably two ports or liqueurs or cognacs with coffee and then some after-dinner drinking, say a few beers or bourbons – about twelve to fifteen drinks of alcohol a day, each drink containing about half an ounce of alcohol. He drank about six days a week and within a month there would be a number of heavy drinking ‘sessions' lasting over eight hours when, apart from dinner or lunch drinks, there would be another eight or so, bringing a session to about twenty drinks.

Not only did he find it hard to be honest about
the amount he drank, sensing that it was a little gross, he also had never in his life
counted it up.

He told his friend and drinking companion Richard that he had cirrhosis and would never drink again but Richard vehemently disputed this (after all, if one of them had cirrhosis, then all of them might!). Richard insisted that he have further tests done by a ‘friendly doctor' who would give him a clean bill of health.

‘But Richard,' he said, ‘I
am
sick.'

The friendly doctor, himself a drinker, did liver function tests and interpreted them as ‘the result of a heavy binge' and said that he'd be OK after a week off the booze.

His own GP said that if he were worried he'd refer him to a specialist.

‘Yes, I'm worried,' he said.

When he told the liver disease specialist how much he drank, the specialist said, ‘Hell, I drink that much.'

The specialist diagnosed viral hepatitis – a mild case – and recommended abstaining from alcohol for six months to allow any damage to the liver to repair itself.

He decided to follow this course. It was his first extended abstinence from alcohol in twenty-five years – since he'd left school.

 

In the first week he worried that he did not have ‘friends', only drinking companions, and that he would now be unacceptable company, that he would be socially deserted.

 

Drinking was a ritualised bonding, mutual intoxication
was an act of helpless solidarity in the face of the human condition. How was he going to face the human condition without drink?

 

When he was younger he had sometimes wanted to ‘drink himself to death'. In literature it had seemed a romantic and pleasant way to go, imagined as a slipping into intoxication and then into death, but he realised that he had wilfully misunderstood the expression ‘drinking yourself to death' and that it would be both painful and miserable.

 

Alcohol was like a camp fire they huddled around.

 

He tried the non-alcoholic drinks, noting for the first time that supermarkets carried something called non-alcoholic ‘wine'. He finally settled on drinking a mix of non-alcoholic cider and soda water about fifty-fifty and became fond of it. He also drank virgin marys (bloody marys without alcohol).

 

Drinking companions were a special sort of friend – ‘he's good to drink with' – who would go willingly with you into the zones of intoxication and anything that might follow from that.

 

How static he now found his personality. The weather of his days seemed mild. Alcohol, he thought, introduced an exaggerated mental turbulence and strong winds into the personality.

He observed that now sober he was more absentminded; he'd expected the opposite. But he did find that he no longer needed to keep notes of information given to him the night before.

 

After a month he had his first yearning for a drink – he yearned for a cold, flavoursome American beer – a Coors in a heavy glass beer mug – with salted popcorn in a dim American country and western bar with a stool-girl to chat with.

 

A form of intimacy, a description of a relationship, ‘We did a lot of drinking together.'

 

He realised that alcohol was a relatively benign drug and that after twenty-five years of consistent drinking he suffered no distressing withdrawal symptoms.

 

He'd always known that uneasiness with people was behind some of his drinking. This was confirmed after his first public lunch with strangers when he developed neck tension.

 

He dreamed that he'd forgotten he should not drink and had accepted a drink and wiped out the progress of repair that his liver had achieved.

 

He observed a dinner party, his first sober dinner party for years. He noticed the conversational risks that drinking encouraged, the making of puns, the wise-cracking,
quipping, the saying of things which might fail. Other drinkers gave a generous reception to every thing – at least in the early part of the dinner. Drinking permitted free association, emboldened a quickfire tempo, which he found beyond his non-drinking mind. He found his mind too self-critical, full of stray material, cluttered with marginal connections, too qualified by caution. Later intoxication, he observed, was not so generous. It could become querulous, dogmatic, obsessive, and attention to what others were saying became erratic.

He decided that as a non-drinker he should leave drinkers at midnight.

 

He had his second craving. He craved spaghetti bolognese, plenty of cheese, plenty of black pepper, with a bottle of Valpolicella. The craving came to him while reading
Her Privates We –
First World War soldiers eating spaghetti and drinking wine behind the lines. It was not a ravenous craving.

 

He realised that he'd sometimes had a drink to make himself ‘feel like drinking'.

 

When he told Louise at a restaurant dinner that he was not drinking, Louise said, ‘What a bore' and at first found it disconcerting. Maybe she felt she was being denied the security of complicity.

He was reminded of the play
The Iceman Cometh
where Hickey returns to his former drinking buddies after having found ‘peace of mind' and given up drinking.

Hickey tells his former drinking mates in the saloon that he isn't against drinking, though.

 

Just because I'm through with the stuff don't mean I'm going Prohibition. Hell, I'm not that ungrateful! It's given me too many good times … If anyone wanted to get drunk, if that's the only way they can be happy and feel at peace with themselves, why the hell shouldn't they? … I know all about that game from soup to nuts. I'm the guy that wrote the book …

 

But they find that having a sober Hickey about affects their drinking. One of them, Rocky, says, ‘But it don't do no good. I can't get drunk right.'

And then Harry Hope who owns the bar, says, ‘When are you going to do something about this booze, Hickey? Bejees, we all know you did something to take the life out of it! It's like drinking dishwater! We can't pass out! … there's no life or kick in it …'

 

In the mornings he tended still to have a slight thickness of the mind, a pain from awakening back to life which he had always attributed to slight hangover.

But whatever slight pain there was in the morning it was not as horrendous as hangover and every morning he had a dream again that he had accidentally drunk alcohol and would have to start his six months over again.

In his period of sobriety he was for the first time able to examine the nature of his drinking. He saw it as maybe, six drinking
sets
or separate waves of intoxication.

The first set of drinks, say the first three or so, achieved a perceptible change of mental weather – a change to a conscious mellowness, reasonably anxiety-free, although it had to be noted that the first drinks also usually punctuated the day and the end-of-work stress. The drinks celebrated a productive day or took the sting out of ‘one hell of a day'.

The second set of drinks (say, the drinks with dinner) gave a free play to the mind, and stimulated some rush of ideas and words, a pleasing (or self-pleasing at least) rush of verbalisation.

The third set of drinks (equivalent to, say, the first of the after-dinner drinks) was simply a fuelling or maintaining of the first two waves of intoxication, the heightened animation and mellowness.

The fourth set of drinks – if embarked upon – represented for him the beginning of a pursuit of deeper relaxation or intoxication, some unspecified state of pleasure (through chance encounter, confessional conversation, uncontrolled hilarity, revelry or whatever). In recent years of drinking he'd found alcohol unreliable in achieving this effect.

The fifth set of drinks was pursuit of loss of self, a seeking of a high level of intoxication without real expectation and with no concern for the aftermath. Again, he'd found alcohol increasingly unreliable as a means of reaching this stage.

There was perhaps a sixth wave of intoxication – drinking to oblivion, passing out – which was something he had not done since his teens or early twenties.

He'd found that waves four and five could fail to occur and, instead, become sodden intoxication leading to irritability. When drinking he was now able to perceive that the potential of reaching these states was lost and that there would be no pay-off from further drinking. But with good drinking companions it was always tempting to try for the fourth and fifth state.

 

After three months of non-drinking he found that he still had the feeling after dinner parties that he had been ‘intoxicated'. He could now observe the adrenalin effect as distinct from alcoholic stimulation. He now saw that his non-drinking personality too was
not
particularly different from his drinking personality. He still said dumb things, and, if relaxed, could still be reasonably spontaneous, outrageous, playful. His earlier observations of himself soon after he'd stopped drinking had been of a tense and self-conscious, fearful, non-drinker.

He listed the drinking experiences which he missed:

• for some reason he missed again the drinking of cold cans of beer with a friend in a car at a drive-in cinema, eating hot dogs with mustard and sauce (something he hadn't done for years)
  
• drinking Jack Daniel's ‘old No. 7 Tennessee sour mash whiskey' and eating salted nuts on an international flight at 10,000 metres looking down
  on the world's terrain – say, the delta of the Ganges or the Russian steppes – or looking at the sun setting across a cloud bank, disoriented in time, ideally listening to Indian classical music in the headphones
  
• champagne at intervals at the Sydney Opera House looking out onto the harbour
  
• Jack Daniel's bourbon alone in a motel room in a strange city after a long journey, watching foreign television
  
• a very cold Heineken beer and a Mexican meal arranged in a garden courtyard in the sun
  
• Jack Daniel's beside the campfire in the bush, after a day of heavy going, on a cold night, with macadamia nuts
  
• cans of West End beer off the ice while driving across the outback in a Volvo wagon on a hunting trip
  
• a good cognac or a pernod and ice alone in his reading chair, with a book, in a dim room, reading for the night, with an occasional telephone call to or from a close friend
  
• a correctly made, not too dry, but very very cold martini in a dim piano bar, with the pianist playing the blues.
  

Another dream that he had been drinking and had set back his recovery.

 

He'd lost the habitual urge for a drink at about six or seven at night.