I enjoy getting drunk. After all, I’m from Baltimore. But I have a guilt complex about drinking. Though this involves health concerns, guilt’s the main factor. The “next day syndrome” keeps me from indulging too frequently. I assume waking up after a raucous night is the same for everyone. There you are, in bed, it’s strangely quiet except for a distant roar in one’s head, the furor of the last evening gone, there’s a strange clarity mixed with a piercing, nail-in-the-brain headache. Memories of what one said and did start slowly coming back.
I’m not alone. A hard-drinking Australian friend, now deceased, would drink a bottle of wine at lunch every day and then at about seven p.m., go to the bar and drink scotch until closing, once surprised me by admitting that he, too, shared in this process. I had thought he, like Bukowski, had moved beyond all drink-associated guilt.
Though rare and dangerous, normalizing the drunken state is one solution. I don’t know what that’s like, say, staying drunk for a year or more. When I was a boy, a college friend of my father’s came and stayed at the house. I recall him as a serious yet friendly guy. He was a successful business lawyer and was in town for some case. He was in the guest room and I, eight at the time, wandered into his room unannounced to say hi. He was reading through papers. I noticed he had a fifth of whiskey on the table, half-empty. My parents rarely drank. My father later explained to me that his friend was a functional alcoholic; he’d even go to court drunk.
I once visited a friend of mine in a rehab clinic on the Eastern Shore in Maryland. She was there for drugs but since there was no Narcotics Anonymous chapter, she went to the local Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. She loved drugs and felt no guilt but was in the program to make her parents happy. She was young and pretty. She liked the attention she received when going into the meeting hall, like a movie star walking into a bread line. The other people were, for the most part, destroyed. They’d lost their families, jobs, been in prison. They were hanging on, all on the brink of a precipice, terrified to fall. And there was my friend, in another world, smiling like she was waltzing at a debutante ball. Years later, she died of an overdose.
I’ve met very few people who’ve normalized their drinking, but they exist. Once, a friend came to stay with me in Paris. The trip, originally meant as a chance to take a break and start a new novel, turned into a month-long binge. His capacity for alcohol was something I’d never seen before. He’d drink constantly, not eating, not sleeping, sometimes disappearing for days. At first, I was concerned, afraid he’d been murdered or mugged. But after the second time it happened, I saw it was just his modus operandi and let it go. His personality became expansive when he drank, leading to various scenes I either witnessed or was told about. He was very up-front about why he drank. He said, “I know people don’t like me when I drink, but I like me when I drink.” He wasn’t a violent drunk, and usually very charming, going back to places where he’d made a scene, apologizing, and the cycle started over.
Another time, in Spain, I met a BBC writer. She’d just bought a house in a small town. I was just visiting and like her, spoke no Spanish and stood out. It was natural that we’d speak. One day, I saw her sitting in a café and went over to say hello. The first thing I noticed was that she was drinking tall glasses of gin, one after the other. I learned that she did the same each day beginning at around 10 a.m. She made no attempt to hide her alcoholism. I asked why she drank so heavily. She said that if she didn’t drink the world was gray, so this was the price she paid to live in color. It made me think of The Wizard of Oz and Dorothy before she left Kansas. It was like she started out on the Yellow Brick Road every morning, going as far as she could, but never quite getting to Oz.