My Drinking

[Fiery Jack]

All is well chez Jacques. Oddly well. I haven't had a f*ck up in my life due to boozing for some time now. Which doesn't mean I won't have one next week. That's how it goes. But I surprise myself of late, or my apparent stablity does. And I have been thinking about the soft slippery then dry and hard roads that have led me to here with a mixture of horror and nostalgia.

 

Hospitals, jail cells, a coma, woman- and work-related red-cardings and doghouses of various ilks: places I have been in due to drink. But I'm still here. I post this masturbatory monologue in the hope that it might make some of you think and even help you if you're in the kinds of trouble that I have often been. I post it here as opposed to in 'Health' in the hope that it thus will find more readers and maybe do more good.

 

Yes, I'm a boozer. It will kill me. It's taken months out of my life already, and no doubt irreversibly hastened my demise. But some of them were good months. And others were not.

 

The sweaty bed karate, the DTs, never a dull moment, and never a reasonable one. Welcome to the shaky world of alcoholism, where I once lived and still visit when I have a week or so off. You bottom out. It's all uphill from there. my 'wobbly' decade of pill popping alcoholism was simply one long bender. All the fun of the f*cking fair, honestly. I'm not proud of it, but neither wholly ashamed. It just was. And there were reasons why it was. And it didn't break me. Made me stronger. Made me able to see and think clearly enough to deal with other shit that came later.

 

Having said which, five or six washed down with a half bottle of tequila used to be my regular warming-up routine before a good Friday night out. That seemed to make me see very clearly. The hours flew by and it was always fun trying to imagine where I'd wake up the next morning and how I'd find my way home without my wallet or, often, my shoes to hand. I remember my first time ever in Osaka, relatively fresh off the banana boat, I checked in to the cheapest hotel I could find, went out and got totally plastered, no memory at all after about the fifth bar...

 

Woke up radioactively hungover at 11AM, fully clothed and alone on the concrete floor of what turned out to be the store-room of a Shinsaibashi ramen restaurant, with a piece of writing paper safety-pinned to my shirt that had written on it, ‘You nice guy please come back Osaka we drink again! Door is open. See you! T.’ There was a single cigarette and a shop book of matches sellotaped to the bottom of the paper.

 

Okay, check door is not locked: it isn't. Good. But, hold on, my right foot is ablaze with pain and has swollen to the size of a soccer ball. No recollection of how it got that way. My left shoe is still on, but my right is nowhere to be found. Nowhere. Plus, because of the swollen, very painful right ankle, I can't walk properly.

 

Just manage a kind of lurching hobble and make it outside onto the crowded shopping street. Everyone is staring at me. It's pissing down with rain. I have no idea where the dump of a hotel I checked in to yesterday is. I have, in fact, no idea where this is. I can't speak Japanese. I stink of drink, am unshaven with bloodshot ashtray eyes and sporting a hairstyle that looks like I just jammed my fingers into an electrical socket. And I am limping and lurching around like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, and have only one shoe on. Yup, nobody I approach seems all that keen to help me.

 

I finally found a friendly cashpoint and made it, via the rundown hotel, to the local JR line, thence back to the boonies where I was then laying my hat. And all the way with one shoe on and looking like a Shane McGowan on the arse-end of a 3 week bender. Those were the f*cking days, eh?

 

When I 'liked a drink', I'd have (nay, need) five tins of beer (500ml jobs) as a wee morning bracer to set me up for the day. Jesus, I had to set my f*cking alarm for about 5.30AM every weekday to make sure I had enough time to get half a dozen tins down me before I had to leave my drum for my job at 7AM.

 

F*ck me it was hard work. I remember once having to do a 'business presentation' at some doss conference in Hong Kong at about 9AM one morning, me and this other alkie geezer from Dublin. We'd both been out boozing and shagging tuppenny tarts till about 4AM. I had about 2 hours sleep back in my hotel room. I got up at 6.30 and drank four large bottles of beer and a half bottle of Smirnoff vodka out of the mini-bar before heading out to the gig. The Oirish feller turned up looking like death warmed up, like. His face was slate grey and he had the shakes. Cried off presenting because he had the shits and kept having to dash to honk up, so I did it on my own. He was one of these alkie clowns who 'nivver touch a drop before sundown'. Stupid twat. It went very well.I was in fine fettle. The time flew by.

 

Notable points? Amid the catalogue of disasters, one high point stands out (or stands highest, or whatnot). Waking up fully clothed on the floor one afternoon realising

 

a. I'd been lying there for at least 48 hours,

 

b. I'd become a complete alcoholic and addicted to all sorts of pills,

 

c. I was rapidly running out of money,

 

d. I had no income and no prospect of any on the horizon,

 

e. I had no one I could feasibly turn to for help because I'd pissed off everyone that had once cared about me so much that they'd all stopped answering my calls,

 

and then lying there concentrating and trying to work out, to the penny, exactly how much money I could cobble together and if that amount of money would be enough for me to f*ck off to Thailand/Camboda/Laos or somewhere and drink myself to death (a la 'Leaving Las Vegas'!) and how long it would take. Then actually calling a travel agent and asking about flight times.

 

Then deciding, f*ck it. Don't be beaten by this. And getting up and walking to a hospital instead and asking for help. Then getting better.

 

It really had got grim. I'll repeat the example I always trot out by way of illustration. When you effortlessly ascend up to full-on gold-card-carrying alcoholism, as I had clearly done, you find that you automatically honk up the first ale of the day about 5 minutes after downing it. The otherwise empty stomach lining's reflex reaction to and rejection of the poison, apparently. It comes out crystal clear and frothy, looking exactly as it did when it went in — hardly touches the sides on the ways down and then up — and, indeed, I have read that greatly impoverished alkies are prone to vomiting their "dawn tot" back carefully into an appropriate receptacle so they can simply immediately re-consume it and get their money's worth. I never did so, but I did used to stock an extra tin of beer in the fridge every night, sure in the knowledge that the inital "bracer" tipple the next morning would end up in the toilet or sink moments after swallowing and thus be not counted in the grand reckoning thereafter.

 

You get accustomed to it: I used to regard it as simply "cleaning the pipes" ready for the next one which, as if by magic, stays in the belly as snug as a long lost traveller who's finally found home.

 

But, yes, there were some hilarious bits: that high school reunion party in 2001. That was a special one. Began normally enough. I'd boozed heavily from breakfast time and dropped a tab of acid an hour or so before arriving, rolled up with eyes on stalks pissing myself laughing, talking shite, and telling every c*nt to f*ck off before getting slapped in the face for sticking my hands on my former economics teacher's tits, being ordered to leave or the police would be summoned, pishing in the school ornamental carp pond while everyone watched in horror through the library bay windows, then collapsing face down with my trousers round my ankles and my bare arse on show in the commemorative clock flower bed outside the old headmaster's study until a taxi someone had phoned for me turned up to take me back to the bed and breakfast joint via a pit stop at an off license, where I was refused service and once again threatened with the police being summoned, then staggered to Skinner's Lite Bite fish and chip shop where I spray-vomited in the doorway in full view of loads of passers by (it was still only lunchtime) and was moments thereafter punched in the face by a drunken Scottish skinhead. Woke up in the B & B about 24 hours later with the landlady bird knocking on the door. I answered the door and her face went ashen grey: I was covered in blood. I'd managed to knock down and smash a framed painting that had been hanging in the (communal) bog/shower room and slashed my arm with one of the shards of glass. I've still got the scar. There was blood all over the beige landing carpet leading to my bedroom door in such a manner that you didn't need to be Sherlock f*cking Holmes to work out which c*nt was the culprit in the 'Non-Mysterious Case of the Smashed Painting'. There was blood all over the bedsheets too. I'd lost my watch, an expensive one. Never saw that bastard again. Then when I checked out, never to be welcomed there again, having paid loads for new bedsheets and a picture frame and the landlady bird to keep her trap shut, she presented me with a phone bill for 140 pounds. I'd rung some bird in Japan at 4AM and been on the blower for an hour or more. No recollection of it, none at all.

 

After I checked out, I went straight to the nearest pub, for a couple to take the edge off. I walked in and towards the bar. The barman, a gent unknown to me (or so I thought), who happened to be a dead ringer for that American actor c*nt Brian Denehy (big bloke, always played a cop, died a few years back) looked up from the pint glass he was towel-polishing, fixed his best Vulcan Death Stare right on me, and said, 'Aye, you keep walking pal. Straight back out of that f*cking door!'

 

I said 'Sorry?' He said, 'You're f*cking barred mate. Don't come back, or I'll call the police.' Again, to this day, I have absolutely no idea at all of what misdemeanor(s) I must have committed there (presumably) on my way home from the young Scottish feller's fist. I had to find another pub.

 

Another time, I remember having a deep and lengthy philosophical conversation with a puddle in a pub car park, then sitting in the house of a complete stranger and his wife, both silver-haired and seemingly in their 60s or 70s or even 80s, drinking whiskey and crying, then a lot of sudden angry shouting and me getting thrown out of there for something bad I'd done in the bathroom, then swimming naked in a river or a canal with a barking collie dog paddling beside me, then getting thrown out of an Indian restaurant and a police car with its light flashing pulling up outside as I scarpered down an alley, then a complete blackout, blank for hours, then finally waking up in broad daylight fully clothed in a flower bed in the front garden of some sort of suburban bungalow on an estate about 10 miles away from where I'd had the drugs, covered from head to toe in sand (though Oxford is, so far as I know, landlocked?), my clothes soaking wet through and my watch and wallet gone.

 

Go to the party and get radioactively plastered. Take a handful of pentamine "bongos" that you smuggled back from Bangkok in a greased knotted condom shoved up your arse and drink half a bottle of vodka on your way home post-party whilst slouched in the doorway of a convenience store until the manager moves you on. After making about 20 unanswered calls to her by phone, leaving a drunkenly slurred message each time, turn up on her doorstep at 3AM and hammer and holler at the door for 30 minutes until the inhabitants (for it is actually not her apartment, but that adjacent to hers, occupied by a family of four) call the police and you have to scarper. See her leaning over the balcony staring at you with a terrified look on her beautiful face as you leg it across the car park. Then never hear a whisper from her again.

 

In an eerily similar predicament, that's what I'd do. That's what I did.

 

But it was never boring and, in some perverse ways, I sort of miss it. I miss the recklessness, the excitement, the sense of being untethered.

 

And as it became a thing of the past? Well, the DTs were actually very interesting. I got to enjoy them, the nightly magic lantern shows, no kidding. If you've had enough downers (valium, temazepam, whatever the f*ck it's called), and have a day or two to spare, the DTs are no problem. It's there in the platinum spires, it’s there in the telephone wires. Fun, really. Like a free acid trip: great visuals, and groovy aural stuff. Without downers, they're unbearable, like. I had DTs-induced alcoholic seizures once or twice. Not recommended, kids. Have a drink instead if the DTs come at you and you've no downers in the house.

 

Ah, those were the f*cking days... Chimes at midnight, master shallow... It's not the end of the world but it's a wake up call. If you think you might be the kind of person who will flounder when the seas of booze and tears become deep, run away from it now, and run like f*ck. Up to you.

 

I remember… Large mechanical bird-like creatures flying round the room that were scary at first but I quickly got used to them and knew they meant me no harm. I found I could kind of control them, get them to fly where I wanted them to, get them to disapear if I concentrated hard enough.

 

Then the people came. Family members and old friends mostly, some of them long dead, and sundry strangers, who'd sit or stand in the corners of the room and look at me and sometimes talk. They were all friendly. The Pet Shop Boys once dropped in, I recall, and sat and had a chat. Nice pair of blokes.

 

I found that I could control the visitors too, and I never felt threatened. It really was quite fascinating, certainly entertaining. I've taken quite a bit of acid in my time, and it was not dissimilar to a mild and very pleasant acid trip. Without the giggling.

 

The aural hallucinations, which I got more often than the visuals, were wonderful. I could make music. I could think of a band or singer I like, then create original songs by them in my head, have them play whole concerts. Johnny Cash, Don Williams, Suede, Suicide, The Ramones, Motorhead: I had them all in my living room. If only I'd been able to record it. I perfectly understood that speech of Caliban in The Tempest.

 

Caliban: Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs that give delight, and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,

That, if I then had wak'd after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,

The clouds methought would open and show riches

Ready to drop upon me, that, when I wak'd,

I cried to dream again...

 

The DTs were exactly like that for me. With the Pet Shop Boys dropping in and whatnot.

 

Oh, and yes, there were odd flowers, crystalline things, that would appear large and vivid right before my eyes. And, behold, behold, they'd be devoid of presence or substance when I reached out for them. My hands would pass straight through and the spell would be broken and they'd vanish.

 

But they'd come again. I could summon them.

 

It really was illuminating. You can understand why people get tricked into believing in Gods. A brave kingdom to me, where I shall have my music and my boozing for nothing…

 

And this is where secret tippling ("sneaking it", the yanks say) comes into play, thrill seekers. It's the answer to all our problems. Get a few down you before you meet her, have secret stashes (half bottles of spirits) of booze around your drum (bog cistern, airing cupboard, garden shed), and invest in a hip flask. That means you're always half-pished from dusk till dawn and simply topping up the battery in public, under her cold gaze.

 

Worked for me. My ex-missus used to snap at me — "That's your FIFTH can of beer and you've work in the morning! — little knowing that it was, in fact, my tenth can of beer, and chasing down six or seven secret nips of vodka to boot. No worries, mate.

 

(You'll end up an alcoholic, losing all your mates and your job and ruining your health and about 6 years of your life and quite possibly the lives of some of those around you, like, but that passes. It's all a wee bit of fun, life's rich tapestry and whatnot.)

 

If you can find yourself in any of the above, I wish you luck and love, for you will need it. Be strong, and be well. It has to be in that order.

 

Cheers. :cheers: See you in September. :)Mine's a large one; never lend my lips to less.

 

jack

[sayjann]

good to read a sensible post after so long

after my recent misfortune i hit the bottle badly.

always liked a drink but this time it hit me.

missed my flight to LOS and somehow got on a train to go home(no recollection).

 

somehow ended up in another county to where i live lying beside a railway line at 5am.

ambulance/police called and taken to hospital.

no clear memory for 3 days but have vague memories from the time.

 

laying in bed on the ward and lighting up my last tab and setting off the fire alarms.

 

not getting to the loo in time and making a mess all over the floor.

 

getting dressed and absconding from the hospital in search of a shop because i needed more ciggies.

collapsed in the street and returned to the hospital under police escort.

 

in hospital for 2 weeks for de-tox and escorted everywhere because i had a habit of disappearing.

 

off the booze for 2 weeks and did'nt miss it at all-----until i got home.

back on the sauce now though as the demons got the better of me.

 

i like a drink but know it will get the better of me in the end.

[Coss]

Thanks for that Jack.

[Flashermac]

Brendan Behan has been reincarnated as an Englishman?

 

 

 

[The_Munchmaster]

A sobering post Jack. I've been in a fair few situations over the years because of the booze but nothing in your league.

[The_Munchmaster]

...missed my flight to LOS and somehow got on a train to go home(no recollection)...

 

So you were rat arsed.

[sayjann]

Mr.Munch.

 

who knows

told i was not allowed to fly and then had to wait for my luggage to be taken off the plane and i then left to get my train home.

no recolection of the next 9 hours...

[Flashermac]

 

Welcome to the Twilight Zone ...

 

 

[cavanami]

After a tough evening out and upon wakening...check for the wallet, yes, still there!

Open wallet, credit card(s)? cash? IDs?

Check for cash...any stranger(s) in the room with me?

 

Flashbacks from the movie, Hangover (1 or 2)...

 

[Redbaron]

Flashbacks from the movie, Hangover (1 or 2)...

 

Any truth in the rumour FJ may be starring in the third movie??

 

Great read Jack, look forward to catching up again one day.