How Wrong He Was

*

The straight shots of Jack Daniels went down like velvet and he knew soon enough he would be pissed, gloriously pissed, at last at one with the universe. Alcoholism was a spiritual disease, they declared, and he had been blessed with infinite longing all his life. From that first cherry brandy and lemonade the girls sneaked out to him from a nightclub, because he was too young to drink legally, and he drank it quickly and felt as he had never felt before, at one with the world, a unified person, sane, gloriously sane, triumphant, exultant. Alive. Normie Rowe was playing down the road and the next night he went with the little gang from the hotel he had fallen into, from the Stella del Mare, or whatever it was called. And it seemed like the whole world was moving on its axis, and all was well.

There had always been a clicking point, the drink where he knew that beyond this one there would be no recourse, no memory, no regret, just glorious black out. He sought the point in the early hours, when he didn't care what happened to him next. He didn't care. He didn't laugh. He knew there would be a hangover and even that, vicious as they increasingly were, was a price worth paying for the beauty of oblivion. He was shattered to the very soul. He was dark in his precepts, in his reaches, in the hours before dawn. After a night at the clubs, he loved to have a coffee and a brandy and a strong cigarette in one of the cosy little medieval bars in the backstreets of Madrid. He thought everything was wonderful and everything would last forever. There would be no regrets. There would be no price to pay.

How wrong he was. "If you want to go up you have to go down," Jenny used to say. Everything had a price. There was a consequence for every act. Do good be good be rewarded. Do crime pay the time. And now, in his 50s, there was a price to pay for everything. Each mark was a wonder. Each blessing a crime. Every indulgence held a price. He had to pay, he had to pay, in tears and pain and discomfort, for all his sins, for all his indulgent despair, for all his drug fuelled melancholy. It wasn't right, it wasn't fair. His motives had been good. He hadn't realised the price was so high. He hadn't realised what he was doing to himself. And he marched forward, sheets of transparent pain flying every which way, and the gloss and the shivers and the counting pain, it had all come time to pay.

Pay the piper, pay the price, come hither and let me cast eyes across your tight firm body, a flash of desire in the winter sun, a flowering peach tree in amongst the historic old houses, the crumbling back yards, the homes that wreaked of stories never told, secrets never revealed, love never consumated. Because he was scattered to the four winds now; and he had done it all entirely to himself. So he went back to the program and back to the forgiving past; and his fingers flew across keyboards but it never told the story, not really, of all the aching loss and terrible chaos that had troubled his chaotic heart. Each box told a story. One random page almost blew away in the wind; p87, As Yet Untitled, which told of his hitch hiking across the frozen plains of Canada.

Even then, he realised, when he could barely have been more than 19 or 20, he was infinitely sad, infinitely lonely, kissed by an eternal longing. He lay awake at night listening to others making love. Even then he was fascinated by alcoholics and oblivion seekers, and naturally attracted to them, utlimately frustrated and finally betrayed by that which draws us. He stood at the turning point. There were only a few years left. He could take one path or he could take the other. He could drown in his own alcohol fuelled melancholy, he could go to the grave with a dozen incomplete masterpieces cluttering old drawers, filling old boxes. Or he could stay sober and triumph, and be productive, perhaps even happy. Suicide wasn't an option, not at this age, there wasn't enough time left anyway. And so he played and he partied, he took the high road and the low road, and finally, humiliated by his own obsessions, he crawled back through the doors of yet another psychic rehab, ready to repent.