Booze, the reporter and friends lost along the way –
A drink was the inspiration –
This morning I watched a boyhood friend, not a day over fifty, hobble down the street of our hometown, cane in one hand, bag of booze in the other. He confessed to me one day, when I asked about his obviously failing health, “it’s the drink Ted; I have seizures now….had one today down the street.” When he got to the check-out counter to pay for his few groceries, he couldn’t figure out how to make the proper change; he didn’t have enough anyway because he’d hit the “in and out store” for an alcoholic’s lunch first. He was a spent human being because of the booze. That’s the whole nine yards of addiction. Here he was hovering between life and death, having numerous pant-peeing seizures a day, and then taking his last few coins and investing in more booze. The real problem isn’t simply reckoning the ill-fate of my alcoholic friend but the fact booze is apparently the dire consequence of a large, over-consuming chunk of present society.
My friend had a rough childhood. We all knew it at the time but nobody seemed to be able to stop his father from drinking either, and then whacking the crap out of him for a drunkard’s after-hours’ recreation. I’ve known quite a few alcoholics in my day, and as a reporter I used to follow them all the way to court and beyond, for such anti-social offences, as assaulting a partner and driving while impaired. With all the emphasis on the anti-smoking mission, I guess there hasn’t been much enthusiasm left over to take-on the booze industry. I’m pretty sure statistics on alcohol related deaths, and related crime would paint a reasonably dire portrait of a society in greater peril than previously known. Add street drugs into the mix and we’re, as they say, “knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door,” or rattling against the hot iron bars of “that other place.”
I began my own journey with booze as innocently as most. It was the great liberator of conscience and conversation. I was at a party one New Year’s Eve, so intoxicated I took a bite out of a huge intricately carved candle that had just been received by the family as a Christmas present. As a lark, I had a few sips of aftershave lotion to impress the ladies. At the same party I broke an heirloom rocking chair and kissed rather lovingly, my girlfriend’s longtime friend. I was loud, acting badly, and a prime example of the downside to any good time in company of demon rum.
I woke up the next morning in a cold sweat with a pounding heart and booming headache. I had experienced a booze induced nightmare. In it there had been an accident and my girlfriend had been killed. I laid in the livingroom of the family cottage, where I had obviously collapsed after getting home from the party, and nervously attempted to reconstruct fact from the drunken distortion of the night before. It was after eleven in the morning and my girlfriend’s door was still closed. Was she in there? Could there have been a traffic accident? I couldn’t remember a thing other than we had been at a friend’s party. I had more than an hour to stew about the details. When that door knob clicked open, and she emerged unscathed, it was as if the angels themselves had rushed through that doorway in the most radiant glow. The relapse of course, was when she recounted the other stuff I had participated in, sucking all the radiance out of the room; her beautiful smile beyond recovery this precarious morning of our relationship. “Do you remember the candle,” she asked? “What candle,” I enquired with wax-coated teeth, while holding what was left of my crumbling head. “We’ve got the imprint of your teeth for evidence,” she barked back. “What I want to know is if you swallowed all that wax!”
You get the message. I wasn’t a sensible drinker, and following this hangover, there were many, many more to follow. It became a giant problem when I began my journalism career here in Muskoka, and my secondary news desk was at the local tavern, where many of us newsies of the day gathered like the great writers of history, to discuss politics, crime, punishment, and how much we despised respective publishers. We took offers of drinks from story sources, politicians, advertisers and stake-holders in real estate, and even the investment network. It only took a few days to drink a reporter’s salary so charity was always heartfelt, and what we believed was a justified perk of the job. The reality most of those purchased “bevies” (drinks) were of the “conflict of interest” kind, didn’t seem particularly dangerous at the time. In retrospect, we mishandled a lot of details about journalism on the straight and narrow. We even drank on the job because it seemed to be the best way to overcome the misery of being stuck in a job leading nowhere. A few staff members took exception with our on-site imbibing but we were always able to convince them our booze was consumed out-of-office; bestowed upon us by our many friends and admirers. We didn’t represent a large component of the staff but we were by far the most influential, as writers, and the strong drink was getting in the way; not because the stories were being tainted or even badly written but because we wanted to spend more time at the bar than chasing down the stories of the week. By and large we did get some pretty interesting story leads from tavern customers, feeding us the dark-side stuff we would never have found out about, huddled in the predictable day to day drudge of office “phone-tag” journalism.
We were rebelling I suppose. Most of us who did tip more than a few a day, couldn’t abide doing advertising stories. If we hung around the office that’s exactly what we were expected to research and write. If we weren’t in-house at the time of greatest need by the advertising department, sooner or later sales personnel would pen their own stories instead of imposing on us news gatherers. There is no question that by boredom and frustration, about being trapped in the bush league of publishing, we opened ourselves freely to liberal amounts of liquid inspiration. A half dozen beers and we were all of Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, and Joyce caliber. Ready to make our mark on the literary scene.
I remember after one hefty drinking jag, right out of the movie script of “The Lost Weekend,” I set myself up in my apartment with a stack of paper and a brand new typewriter ribbon, and spent hours upon hours banging out the first chapters of my first (and by the way, last) novel. As I started the project under the influence, I kept drinking through the night, and when the last page was signed off, the last amber drop of ale had been consumed, I honestly believed my ship had arrived. This was a keeper. Publishable. A name maker. A money fountain. Waking up enormously pleased with myself, despite having a thick head and thicker tongue, I re-read the still fresh ink of that new book, and was rather shocked to find it sounded, when read aloud, like a drunkard’s illogical rant; about the days of wine and roses in a tearful slober. I had produced about thirty pages of absolute garbage, without one salvageable page of copy. It wasn’t the last time I drank and composed but it was the last time I expected anything good to come from the effort.
I had long been in the company of girlfriends who liked the idea of being connected to the writer-kind; the ever brooding, incorrigible risk taker, who also got invited everywhere to “report” on the carryings-on. When I met my wife Suzanne, who I had known back in my high school years, she couldn’t have care less if I was a writer or a horse trainer. The only thing that mattered to her was that we enjoyed time together and shared some life missions. I used to get mad because she wouldn’t read my newspaper columns, unless she was mentioned, and very seldom if ever, issued a compliment. It used to drive me nuts and I often accused her of a selfish indifference to her husband’s creative enterprise. To get her attention I began taking writing much more seriously, and in fact, without booze, attempted to win her over with a better quality, more aggressive writing style. We’ve been married happily for more than twenty years now and she’s read about four stories since our nuptials. So what? Well, what she was telling me, by not involving herself in the ups and downs of my writing junkets, was that she was delighted by my successes but she expected as much from a career author. The effort at self improvement, and the reduction in show-boating, moved me further and safely away from my longtime partner, the “long hard drink.” If I had even a taste of beer while penning anything now, I’d be compelled to stop, because of wicked memories of how easy it was to get hooked on artificial inspiration. The reality Suzanne wasn’t ga-ga over the writer Ted, meant that if I wanted to stay in the profession, I had to rely on something substantially better than shallow jottings of the moved-to-expression drunkard.
The temptation that leads writers to booze is a behemoth reality, and whether it always germinates in self pity and frustration, or with the false securities it inspires, letting alcohol color perception and corrupt clarity of thought, is a career ending error in judgement. On the infrequent occasion of a wee stint of self-loathing, I still feel a tad miffed why Suzanne opts to leave my copy unread but it is made redundant by the fact we’re the best of friends in all other areas of partnership. She has always encouraged me subtly, to write out of passion and a personal sense of mission, not by the kind of adulation a fan gives to an idol. Her support has always been to offer me the freedom of time and space to compose without interference; and for providing the good counsel many years ago that I was a competent, determined and prolific writer without any requirement of booze for thought.
When readers comment about a story printed in one of the publications I contribute to, I always feel that surge of adrenalin, and even if the comment is of a critical nature, just having “a” reader confirmed outweighs the negative. Some times I wonder if readers want to know how the writer came to be interested in such things…..writing about antiques, history, current affairs, politics, the environment? So this is a little biographical piece for those who have pondered what keeps this gent at the task of word-smithing day after day.
I have watched a fair number of talented folks in my ballywick toss their lives away to partner instead with booze. I’ve known hockey players that could have easily made the National Hockey League, who beat themselves to a pulp after every game, not knowing when to push back from the bar and head home. I’ve known many writers and artists who depended on alcohol for their inspiration and instead they wound up losing it all; their mission, their profession, their families. All gone. And then in the midst of condemnation toward others, I can’t help but recall my own days of wine and roses, my lost weekend.
When I see the pathetic amble of my childhood chum, an eerie, wavering silhouette, his image is the harbinger of what my own life and time would have appeared, at this precise moment in time, if sensibility hadn’t prevailed; the writer releasing himself from a fate worse than death. My mate will die. He has damaged his body with years of abuse and as sad as it is, I can find no better image to demonstrate the casualty of life’s nasty side-bars. A few years back I might have saddled up to my friend and helped him drink that fresh flask. We’d have shared some dear old tales of the home town, laughed till we cried, and spent the rest of the occasion fearing the dark hole we’re about to fall into.
There isn’t a day that passes, in my much-cherished mid-life, when I can ignore this keyboard. I don’t expect to pen my way to a Pulitzer, a Booker or even a short story blue ribbon but the fact I still feel inspired after all these years, to invest in the creative process, booze-free, is a truly liberating reality I wish I could share with all those, who by circumstance, are woefully encumbered.
Thanks for reading this weekly blog contribution.