Wasted (5 page)

Throughout this period relations with my son were occasional at best and indifferent at worst. My finances were shambolic and I began to borrow heavily from the banks to support my fledgling
music business. The Celtic Tiger was roaring loudly and financial institutions were only too happy to hand out loans based on the skimpiest of business plans. One bank manger in Cork signed off on
a sizeable overdraft without needing me to call into the bank in person! I don’t want it to sound like I’m blaming my financial mess-ups on the banking sector, but the fact is they were
looser with the money than at probably any other time in the history of the State. Then again, I could be very convincing. The apartment I was renting ended in acrimony when I missed payments and
moved into a shared house. The next two years were a haze of weeklong drinking sprees, all-night parties, and increasing loathing and self-hate. My parents had to bail me out of the music industry
when I accrued debts to the tune of €20,000. My drink of choice was often double tequilas and pineapple juice, accompanied by steadily increasing amounts of cocaine and Ecstasy, often
mid-week. Journalism offered me some level of income, but I was frequently behind on bills and child maintenance payments, and often missed deadlines and turned up at interviews the worse for wear.
I passed it off by pretending I could turn things around at any moment if I really, really wanted.

The image portrayed of a hedonistic lifestyle is one of attractive 24-hour party people, living on the edge, rejecting ‘Normal Street’ and not wanting it any other way. The reality
is often much starker, incorporating mental anguish, social paranoia, feelings of worthlessness and self-loathing. I was in a series of chaotic relationships, was afraid to answer the phone or even
walk into a shop and relied on alcohol more as a means of avoiding reality and numbing day-to-day experience. I started getting blackouts at an early age, perhaps my first one on the night of my
school’s debs when a neighbour carried me home and I lay beside a bus getting sick while all the attendees watched. I could remember none of it the next morning, so quite early in my
drinking, blackouts became a normal part of a night out. There were times when waking up I had to double-take, to quickly scan the recesses of my mind in order to piece together where I was and how
I had gotten there. Moving between houses, my home life was in constant flux. I had certain places I stayed when I was late on rent, or had bills to pay, or needed time away, or wanted someone to
lie beside. I began to develop regular night sweats. The first half-hour waking in the morning was the worst as dehydration intensified and parts of the night revealed themselves in periodic
flashbacks. There was also the backtracking over finances. Financing drinking is a system in itself—a chaotic monetary world where everything and nothing can be rationalised. If it was a
choice between food and drink, between rent and a night out, there was usually no contest.

During this period—indeed, throughout my drinking life—I lived in some pretty squalid flats and houses. Perhaps in reaction to those days, I seldom go two or three days now without
changing sheets. In the drinking days, though, there was no such order. It was all stained sheets, matted carpets and body odour, scraps of paper littering the ground, clothes kept in different
houses and a shoebox the sum total of a decade’s possessions. I think the only items I managed to hold onto were a well-thumbed collection of Paul Durcan’s poetry and a Neil Young
album—fragments of a decade of existence. And I didn’t really see anything wrong with that.

The extent of your ambition—be it material, professional, social—is narrowed as alcohol and the impulse to self-medicate take over. Each time I moved home, I threw out whatever
little I had accumulated. It was a way of starting anew, of attempting to reinvent myself. But it never quite worked, and the standard of accommodation I stayed in deteriorated over the course of
four to five years. I had no savings, couldn’t get it together to learn how to drive a car and was reliant on family to supplement whatever little income I had.

It was a shambolic life; a meandering, chancing, shell of an existence, and it takes it out of you psychologically.

But, throughout all this time, from that first drink on Stephen Corcoran’s landing to the last, through multiple house moves and failed relationships, I never seriously thought that drink
was an issue. I put my shortcomings and lack of progress in life down to emotional naivety. I put it down to having energy or drive that remained constantly unfulfilled. I put it down to
intellectual shortcomings, to feelings of inadequacy and unrealistic expectations. At various points, I blamed the Famine, the Brits, the Church and my ancestry. I put it down to bad luck and lack
of opportunity. But what I didn’t put it down to was the one constant throughout all this period, the one ever-present aspect of my life, which I could always turn to in a crisis. I never
pointed my finger at the gargle, the sauce, the hooch or the soup. It was always somebody or something else’s fault. In my mind, the drink made things better, not worse.

I’
m not sure what came first—the excess or the exasperation. Both seemed to develop in tandem, to take flight together. But what I do
know is that the crunch came in late summer 2004, when I was 28 years old. The writing had been on the wall for a year or so previously. Life had become chaotic. I couldn’t be on my own for
very long, and was barely clinging to the remainder of a once-promising media career. If I’m honest, my son took second place to my social life. I spent my time dodging a widening circle of
ex-friends who wanted nothing more to do with me. Five years after leaving secondary school, I’d gone from being a scholarship student at University College Cork to stealing sausage rolls at
the hot food counter at Tesco, just so I could save money for alcohol. I had it down to an art form. My usual tactic was to go into Tesco and pick up a shopping basket. I would then walk around the
store filling the basket, as if I was doing my weekly shopping. Half way through, I stopped at the hot food counter and got a few chicken drumsticks, sausage rolls and maybe potato wedges. These
were eaten on my way around, before depositing the basket with an employee and asking him/her to mind it while I went outside to withdraw more money. ‘You only come in for one thing and
suddenly you have a basket full,’ I remember telling one dubious employee. I never returned with the money and this became a weekly, sometimes daily, occurrence. Thankfully, I was never
apprehended—I suspect the embarrassment of having to go down because of a few drumsticks and a flaky sausage roll wouldn’t have lent me much cred on the inside.

Towards the end, the highs were still fulfilling, but the lows were now more commonplace. Panic attacks began to set in, and I struggled to bring myself to look in the mirror. I drank on the
breakdown of relationships. I drank on not being able to provide a proper home environment for my son. I drank out of loneliness. I drank because of insecurity, unfulfillment and arrogance. I drank
because everyone else did. I drank to fit in. I drank out of frustration. I drank to feel normal. I drank and drank and drank and drank.

If I could get away without paying for anything that didn’t involve alcohol, I did, and most of the time I owed money to someone or other. I surrounded myself with male and female
companions in the same boat, hiding from some aspect of life. Two episodes brought home to me that the party had to stop. The first was at the end of a two-day drink-and-drug bender, which ended up
at a get-together at a friend’s house after closing hours. I was waiting on a delivery of Ecstasy, to keep the party going, when I witnessed a death. It was one of those shocking and
traumatic, time-stood-still moments almost too monumental to take account of. To be honest, my first thoughts were whether or not I should still take the chemical delivery. Afterwards, I drank for
two days—any excuse—and went to the funeral and sympathised with the family in a dazed state. Many months later, I gave a witness statement to Gardaí and broke down, in a
windowless room with a sergeant nearing retirement scribbling frantically. Only then did I deal with what I had seen, did I realise the extent to which my life had become out of control and how
fragile emotionally I was. It was a telling moment that brought me some way towards self-realisation.

The second moment that sticks out was in October 2004, at a World Cup qualifying soccer match in Paris. A group of us had decided to go to the game, taking the ferry over and driving down to
Paris via Normandy. The drinking on the ferry was shocking, kind of like being at a Wolfe Tones concert for 20 hours. The ‘best fans in the world’ tag was nonsense—it was a
drunken free-for-all. Teenagers slept in the cinema cradling bottles of vodka; ferry staff were abused repeatedly, while the ship’s internal
PA
system was taken over
by drunks shouting obscenities. Marauding groups searched the cabins below for an empty bed to lie down in, while vomit and beer redecorated the carpets and decks. We found a quietish bar and
sipped away nicely for the journey—the party had begun. I even managed a chorus of ‘Boys in Green’ and ‘A Nation Once Again’. I was with older friends at the time, and
was in a financial mess, barely scraping together what little money I could in the week previous to have enough to get through the couple of days’ drinking in Paris. I overcame financial
shortfalls by buying cheap bottles of wine. So while the others sat in restaurants or drank in bars, I hung around outside on the steps and drank, or joined them later with a bottle of wine
concealed up my sleeve.

Inevitably, though, I was broke half way through the three-day trip, and so, one night, while my roommate slept, I helped myself to €100 from his wallet. I can still see myself doing it,
carefully reaching under his bed for the wallet, expertly opening the button clasp that held it closed and sliding out one of the larger notes. Of that group, he’s the only one I’m
still in contact with and I’ve never been able to admit what I did. Although I’m sure he was aware of it next morning. It didn’t really matter to me, though; I would have done
anything to be able to continue drinking. Would have fucked over anyone, and not thought twice about it. There were countless other incidents, including getting barred from late-night clubs,
abusing people verbally and not having any recollection next morning, and messing up relationships through serial infidelity.

The French weekend got to me, though. It got to me because I was with a group, all with stable relationships and steady incomes. For that weekend, at least, they were on the same level as me,
out for a laugh and a good drink. Yet once the weekend ended they continued with their lives and I continued with mine. I had probably spent my week’s rent and child maintenance and would
spend the next week or two playing catchup, ducking and diving to try to cover the excess. It made me realise that my ‘friends’ could dip in and out of my life and take part in the
gregarious bits. I was stuck with it 24/7. I couldn’t opt out of it periodically. I remained unfulfilled, while they were laying life-markers—getting promoted, having children, buying
houses. And yet, if you ask any of them today should I have stopped drinking, they will probably say I shouldn’t have. But, as I’ve said, no one knows really the true torment of the
mind of a problem drinker. You don’t really even realise it yourself until long after the last hangover.

On several occasions I didn’t turn up to collect my son as expected on Saturday mornings. My time with him was now condensed to 8-hour periods on a Saturday or Sunday—the
stereotypical McDonald’s dad. Because I didn’t have a proper room for him in whatever house I happened to be staying in, I would drop him back again in the evening. My timekeeping and
sense of days became more erratic. I was a father in name only, nothing of a moral guide and an increasing emotional void. This lasted for maybe two years, and looking back, I find it impossible to
reconcile myself now to that vacant father figure I had become. And of course I drank on the shame and the guilt of that.

I recycled stories I had heard and passed them off as my own. I was a fraud. A phoney. A fantasist. It’s alarming the depths to which human self-delusion can sink. I pretended to be
writing a book, a sort of novel based on fact, or an ‘observational take on Ireland’s underbelly’. Other times, I assumed the guise of a big-shot music promoter, when the reality
was that I had lost a small fortune due to negligence and bad management and chaotic bookkeeping. With no transport, when I was in the music game I would take a bus to gigs which I was promoting.
If someone called me while I was en route, I’d pretend my car had broken down or that I had missed the train and was now having to endure the ‘nightmare of a bus journey!’
I’d say it out loud so the other people on the bus would be able to hear me. Yes, I was one of those incredibly annoying public-transport-grudging travellers. That’s how screwed your
head gets! The reality was that a car I did part own had been repossessed when I had left it into a garage for repairs and didn’t have the money to retrieve it. It was embarrassing for my
family, as a neighbour in Clare who owned a garage had organised the finance a year or so earlier. And now he had to call the finance company to arrange for it to be collected. His words were
‘That fella can’t even buy a breakfast. You’d better take it away.’

Of course there was a dawning realisation that I couldn’t continue life the way it was. Living the type of life I did, you become increasingly isolated and there are few avenues left open
to you. I thought about moving abroad (most problem drinkers do at some point), toyed with the idea of returning to college and finally tried to resurrect my media career.

An editor in Clare took a chance on me and gave me a few days a week working in a local newspaper. It would be a chance to wipe the slate clean, get away from Cork for a bit and have a regular
income.