Last Drink to LA Read online

  “A remarkably honest book” – The Guardian

  “John Sutherland is among the handful of critics whose every book I must have. He’s sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued, with a generous heart and a wise head.”

  – Jay Parini author of The Last Station

  “Last Drink To LA is an enlightening and courageous book, and quite different from the wallowing, breast beating, confessional splurge one might be offered from a media celebrity. This, in contrast, offers analysis and hope, and should be required reading in all surgeries and branches of AA.” – Goth Lady, Amazon review

  “I don’t know much about literature. I'm just a working class builder who struggles with drink. It’s a superb book, full of insight and the sort of stuff that sticks around and bubbles up out of your subconscious when you need it to.”

  – Andrew Henry, Amazon review

  Contents

  Title Page

  The Drinking Life (and Death)

  Not Drinking: Alcoholics Anonymous

  My Story

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Copyright

  I got drunk in many places and got sober in Los Angeles – with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. I no longer reside in Los Angeles, nor am I nowadays an attender of AA meetings. Nor, in writing this, can I claim to have safeguarded my anonymity, as conscientious members of the fellowship are enjoined to. But, as I console myself, AA is a forgiving organisation.

  I am not drinking just now. Nor have I drunk alcohol for three decades (ten undergraduate degrees, six PhDs, five Californian marriages, and three life sentences for murder, as it pleases me fancifully to calculate). I abhor the preferred AA term for sober initiates – recovering alcoholics – which has to my ear a Uriah Heepish ring. I prefer to think of myself as ‘past it’; over that hill, a veterano, as the Hispanics (who honour such oldsters) say.

  And, I will confess, I am no longer up to the strenuous physical demands of booze. ‘Serious’ drinkers, as they jestingly call themselves, enjoy a longer career than football players, but not much. Practising (as opposed to recovering) alcoholism is not for weaklings. Books are easier. I have written many books since sobering up – this, I hope, is among the more honest.

  For what it is worth, this book is a meditation. It is not a temperance tale (‘How I Conquered the Demon Rum’). Nor is it a treatise on the disease of alcoholism (if one is wanted, I would recommend Alcoholism by Neil Kessel and Henry Walton; it used to be available as a Penguin but will now have to be hunted down second-hand). Least of all is this what AA calls a drunkalog – or drunkard’s exemplary tale (‘How the Demon Rum Conquered Me’) – told to terrify, inform and instruct. Just some thinking about drinking.

  PS. I have made minor changes to the text which follows, to even out what would be, after 13 years, anachronisms. I’ve also written an epilogue, looking back from my present place and time of life (October 2014).

  The Drinking Life (and Death)

  Some would say (certainly many members of AA) that only those who have plumbed the abyss will ever know the huge semantic gaps that lie between the simple sentences ‘I have drunk’, ‘I am drunk’ and ‘I am a drunk’. The white-coated ‘experts’ know least of all. In this area of medical research only the guinea pigs wear the white coats; they alone are expert. I myself used to drink, as they say, like a fish (except, as I understand it, fish don’t drink, any more than the maligned newt gets inebriated himself). Drink practically killed me – as it actually kills hundreds of thousands of my drunken fellow-citizens every year; cut off, many of them before their time.

  It would have been of no great moment had I drunk myself to death in the early 1980s, my forties and the climacteric of my drinking career. There would have been no banner announcements or half-page obituaries in the press; no solemn minute of silence in my employing institution (although I believe, as a ‘Reader in English’, I would have warranted a day’s half-mast of the college flag at UCL. As far as the world was concerned, the demise of Sutherland would have been just another sot gone to his liquid grave. Good riddance.

  Death certificates do not use the term ‘alcoholism’ as cause of death – too vague. But there are, by modest calculation, a hundred such mortalities a day (three times the daily number of deaths by road accidents; innumerably more than are stabbed, strangled or shot to death in the UK). The response of those bereaved of my presence would have been discreetly masked relief. Whatever there was to lose had been lost (passed away, as they say) years ago. Money, trust, houses, job, marriage, liver, lights and lungs. Above all – respect. There are many Shakespearean lines that resonate for drunks, but none more so than Othello’s agonised adieu to the world’s admiration:

  O, now, for ever

  Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell, content!

  Farewell the plumèd troops and the big wars

  That make ambition virtue!

  There are, by official estimate, some 300,000 lives terminated or shortened by alcohol abuse in the UK every year. The figures vary, decade to decade – but they are invariably huge. Society at large is admirably stoical about this annual Passchendaele, as it is about the fewer (but still staggeringly numerous) citizens who wipe themselves out on the roads, day in, day out. People must travel; people must drink; fish gotta swim.

  Often, of course, the two bills of mortality converge: alcohol is reckoned to be a factor in over 50 per cent of automobile crashes – particularly after the pubs and bars close and the A&E rooms move on to red-alert for the nocturnal tsunami of blood, liquor and petroleum spirit that washes into the country’s hospitals. Among those waiting for treatment will be a sizable number of sober victims of alcohol: 40 per cent of violent crime and 90 per cent of assaults in Britain are recorded as being alcohol-related. Domestic assault is, overwhelmingly, done ‘in drink’. Cheers.

  By the modest estimate that ten per cent of the adult population are problem drinkers, the British census is around five million and the American four times that figure. A sombre calculation. According to Alcohol Concern’s latest spoilsport bulletins, three out of four British adults have had their lives severely disrupted by their own or someone else’s alcohol abuse. And what does that bleak Latinism ‘disruption’ mean? Blood, bruises, scratches, curses, screams.

  In October 2000, the sociologist Betsy Stanko took a ‘snapshot’ of domestic violence in Britain and came up with the headline-grabbing statistic that there were, over the course of any day, an average of 600 ‘incidents’ and hour. Over half a million acts of domestic violence are reported each year in Britain, and many more, given the behind-doors nature of the offence, elude official notice. Alcohol figures in most of these invisible crimes; the sober thump is, apparently, a rarity.

  It needs, as Horatio would say, no sociologist to tell us these things. Circumspice; a drink’s monuments are everywhere around us. Alcoholism is immensely destructive. And expensive. Every few months some committee or other will tot up the zillions it costs the country in road accidents, premature death, burden on the health service, family breakdown, suicide, homicide, assault, bankruptcy, homelessness, police, probation and court time.

  Why do you drink? the Little Prince asks the drunkard in Saint-Exupéry’s fable. Because I am unhappy, the drunkard replies. Why are you so unhappy? Because I drink. Alcoholic logic.

  In the face of this carnage and misery, society displays an amazing degree of Alcohol Unconcern. Abuse is serenely tolerated. If a pretender to the premiership boasts, as a lad, to have drunk 14 pints, or a premier’s son is found paralytic after his many pints in Leicester Square, or the third in line to the throne reels drunkenly out of a night club in the early hours of the morning, lashing out at importunate ‘paps’, it is thought of as
no more than a manly rite of passage. Beer street is as wholesomely British as it was in Hogarth’s day; not so Drug Lane.

  The damage to the social fabric attributable to alcohol is, however vast, a bearable cost. It is not tragedy but ‘statistics’ – as Stalin dismissively said of his millions of soldiers dying on the Eastern Front. Sticks and stones can break our bones but numbers can never hurt us. Even eight-digit numbers. The cost of alcohol is a domestic price that liberal Western democracies, for all their squeamishness about hanging murderers and priggishly ‘ethical’ foreign policies, have always been willing for their peoples to pay. Eager, even, for them to pay.

  What does society get in return for the licence it grants its citizens to intoxicate and immolate themselves? At some deep Machiavellian level, the incessant, society-wide overdose of alcohol is, one presumes, prescribed (or at least condoned) by our leaders as something prophylactic. Chronic drunkenness inhibits reasoned protest, organised party resistance – even revolution, if that’s the flavour of the time. ‘Let them lick the sweet that is their poison,’ as Coriolanus says of the Roman plebeians. Rome will be that much more easily governed by the patriciate if the canaille are so occupied.

  To think thus may be paranoia – as whites thought it paranoiac that African-Americans should allege that the CIA flooded big-city ghettoes with narcotics in the 1970s to exterminate Black Pride, Black Consciousness and (most effectively) Black Power. ‘Hey, Hey! You can buy your gage from the CIA’ sings the dissident West Side rapper Ice Cube. He means now.

  Paranoid it may be but I do think that the government’s toleration of alcohol abuse (an ‘issue’ which they could as easily address as fox hunting) is motivated, at least in part, by Coriolanian cynicism. Let them swig the sweet that is their poison; a pissed electorate is (politically) a docile electorate, except, predictably, on Saturday nights and at big football matches – ‘hooligan’ outbursts which the Home Secretary can handle with his big stick, and, if not, let’s vote in somebody with a bigger stick. I also half-credit Ice Cube’s allegations about the CIA pushing crack to the ghetto kids in South Central. After all, vodka and acquiescence to tyranny are intimately linked in 20th-century Russian history. Picture the future, O’Brien tells Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four: a boot stamping on a human face for ever. Alcohol numbs the pain of the tyrant’s boot. For ever, it seems.

  Unlike other opiates of the people, alcohol does not tranquillise – but is does deaden reason (listen to the late-night conversation in any bar). Drunkenness stimulates violent but wholly thoughtless action. The routine red-mist/blackout defence in alcoholic crimes of passion is: ‘I don’t know what came over me.’ It’s usually true. ‘Why are you looking for your keys here when you dropped them over there?’ the policeman asks the drunk. ‘Because here is where the streetlamp is,’ replies the drunk. The alcoholic mind at work.

  The other signal difference between alcohol and narcotics is that drinking to drunkenness and incapability (unlike the high that comes with a heroin hit or cocaine snort) takes several hours to be successfully achieved. And, unlike hard drugs, it can be continued for decades at toxic levels of intake before the organism gives way. Drinking gives the people (particularly young, dangerous males) something to do with their leisure time and most rebellious years. Until, that is, they become civilised. Or, at least, tired and law-abiding.

  Because of what it does to their brains and their reputations, drinkers (unlike, say, people with Aids or even pot-heads) are never capable of organising themselves as a lobby or interest group. No one speaks for them (although many speak at and about them – the madwomen of Mothers Against Drunken Drivers (MADD) and the prigs at Alcohol Concern, for example). ‘Petrol protests’, however illogical, selfish and thoughtless about the global environment, can attract moral support form the amoral majority, righteously indignant at stealth taxes. But to protest at the sky-high (and rising) ‘sin tax’ on alcohol is to argue oneself sinful. (I have always believed that the dramatic revival of the Scottish National Party’s fortunes in the 1970s had much to do with the party’s rash promise at that time to lower the price of a bottle of whisky to 60p. I’m not sure that Alex Salmond would ever have honoured that Bacchanalian promise of his forebears.)

  Every month or so newspapers dust off their ‘alcohol epidemic’ story or column. It invariably takes the same shock-horror form. Typically, the tone is gothic, designed to reassure the drinking reader that he/she is not so far gone and never will be.

  I take the following, at random, from the Independent, 11 November 2000. Fergal Keane (a BBC special correspondent) is writing an op-ed piece about the drink ’n’ drugs death of the celebrity Paula Yates (the result of a ‘foolish’ overdose, the coroner declared):

  I’ve seen more than a few friends die from addiction, and I lost a parent to the disease. It is closer to me in my daily life as both legacy and living issue than anything. When I write about it, I struggle to step back and see things in anything like cold light. So forgive me if it reads like I’m losing the plot here. I don’t have an ounce of distance in me when it comes to this stuff.

  And so I feel a quiet rage when I see how so much of the media distorts the truth of addiction. I watch the replays of Oliver Reed and George Best disintegrating drunk on television and feel sick in my stomach. Here are men killing themselves while we are urged to celebrate their wildness. Would we stick cancer victims on prime-time and then replay the tapes endlessly for our own enjoyment? It is as if there is no connection whatsoever between the wild-man antics – ‘magnificent’, I heard one chat-show host call Reed – and the shivering figures pissing blood in the dawn as their livers disintegrate.

  Powerful stuff. But who are ‘we’, Fergal? As the same edition of the Independent proudly records, its daily circulation has risen to 240,407 (the highest figure for three years – it’s now, sadly, in 2014, a quarter of that figure). Surveys routinely reveal that in advanced and prosperous Western societies, some ten per cent of the population – irrespective of class – will be damaged by their drinking practices; whether habitual, recreational or occasional. This means (assuming, conservatively, two readers a copy) some 48,000 of ‘us’ Independent readers (AD 2000) were up there every dawn with the blood-pissers. Enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool and do one’s morning laps.

  That ten per cent of ‘vulnerables’ is food for thought, if we cared to think about it. It means that every tenth person you pass on the street (or, terrifyingly, every tenth person who streaks past you in the fast lane) will be a ‘problem drinker’ (another strange locution; if only one could drink one’s problems, eat one’s debts and excrete moderation).

  As Dylan Thomas (drunk to death a year short of 40) wisecracked, an alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do. For the British press, an alcoholic is someone who drinks even more than you, but of whom – like the Pharisee – you can (just about) say, ‘Thank God I am not as that man is; well, not quite as that man is.’

  To shock without being a killjoy requires a delicate professional hand. Fortunately, the practising (but denying) alcoholics who read the newspapers are as adept at wilful doublethink as journalists are in skilful doublespeak. Alcoholic Calibans specialise in not seeing their own image, but that of an ugly other Caliban, in the hand-mirror. It goes with those other alcoholic skills; what in AA-speak is called ‘powerful forgetting’ (convenient repression of uncomfortable facts) and ‘screwy thinking’ (paranoia, typically, but sometimes compulsive obsessive disorder, the flavour-of-the-month malady in the US, or suicidal melancholia).

  Journalists are, of course, like publicans and service men, an ‘at risk’ profession. But so are most professions. Some social groups and nationalities seem less prone than others to problem drinking: the Irish, Scots and Scandinavians are notoriously prone; Jews and Sikhs less so. But, as any AA group witnesses, alcohol, like cancer, is a great leveller and can leap any class and ethnic boundaries.

  Its leaps are getting
longer. AA members used to be middle-aged by and large. ‘It takes a lot of years to get sober’ was the grey-headed wisdom of the meetings (AA is as addicted to the pithy proverb as to stewed coffee). Nowadays, the fellowship is typically younger; particularly in metropolitan America. The reasons? The erosion of licensing laws and unenforced age limits; huge amounts of disposable income released into young pockets by the bullshit 1990s stock market, the economic boom and the IT revolution; stronger beers; the vogue for liquor-based cocktails (as in that other ‘roaring’ decade, the 1920s); and, above all, multi-drug abuse.

  Using, say, marijuana, cocaine or, most explosively, methamphetamine (‘crystal meth’) in combination with alcohol produces an accelerator effect. It may be chemical or a consequence of social disinhibition (using an illegal substance plausibly encourages less controlled use of the legal substances). Who knows? But, observably, two-fisted addicts fall faster and harder.

  There are, it has to be said, nobler reasons for drinking than that of Saint-Exupéry’s sad sack and his whingeing ‘because I’m unhappy’. My favourite apologia pro vita alcoholica sua is Jack London’s in John Barleycorn. He drank, the wolf-lover loftily proclaimed, to make other (sober) people interesting. It’s a gallant thought. Nor is it uncommon, hollow as London’s gallantry may ring in the sober ear. The film star George Sanders, a sad and sodden late-life drunk, topped himself – after a long career playing drawling ennuyés – with the bleak suicide note for posterity, ‘You bore me so.’ Let’s hope he’s having a livelier time in drunks’ heaven, that big rock-candy mountain in the sky.

  Finding your sober semblables and frères so boring that they drive you to drink is the last high ground left to the drunk. They (we) are so dull. It’s not very elevated but, like blind Gloster’s hillock in King Lear, any eminence will do for alcoholic suicide. (Jack London killed himself – impulsively, and with a narcotic; unable to put up any longer with the intolerable boredom of life among the sober, presumably.)