Leith, William Read online

  it, has said that the best solution, the only solution, is to stop drinking altogether and never go back to it. I once interviewed Billy Connolly, a former alcoholic, or probably it, recovering alcoholic is how he would rather define it, and he said he believed that if, as an alcoholic, you quit drinking, and then start again a few years later, you do not pick up where you left off, in terms of addiction, but where you would have been if you hadn't stopped. I'm not sure I agree with that, but I've heard other people say it, too.

  Former alcoholics they're always warning you off. In her book Drinking: A Love Story, the late Caroline Knapp wrote, `Liquor creates delusion ... A single drink can make you feel unstoppable, masterful, capable of solving problems that overwhelmed you just five minutes before. In fact, the opposite is true: drinking brings your life to a standstill, makes it static as rock over time.' Knapp quit drinking because she changed her mind about one thing in particular. She had spent her adult life, she wrote, believing that she drank because she was unhappy. And then, she thought, 'Maybe,, just maybe, I'm unhappy because I drink.'

  But isn't there a third possibility a third way? What if Knapp drank because she was unhappy, and became even unhappier when she drank? And what if she had looked deeply into herself, and sorted out why she was unhappy in the first place, and become happy? What would happen if she drank when she was happy? She once wrote that her mother, worried about her drinking, had taken her for a walk on the beach, and said, 'This is very serious. It's more serious than smoking.' In the end, her mother might have been wrong; Knapp quit drinking, but died of lung cancer in 2002, at the age of 43.

  inflamed, toxic, and slightly feverish not too bad, in other words. I sat down, ordered a drink.

  `Oh,' I said, to one of the people I had arranged to meet, a woman who had just arrived, 'would you like a drink?' `Ooh, thanks. I'm dying for a glass of wine.'

  I ordered the wine.

  She said, 'I just love that first glass of wine in the evening. Don't you?'

  And I thought, my God, no, absolutely not, I hate the first glass of wine in the evening. Right now, my hangover's just kicking in, and the wine I'm about to drink will be a grim, painful experience. It will taste thinly acidic, and I'll have to force it down, and it will affect me like a mild sleeping pill and a bash on the head. No, the first glass of wine in the evening is my enemy, because it stands between me and my friends, the fourth and fifth glasses of wine, the cocktails, the shooters and shorts I will consume in the early hours.

  I said, 'Yes, the first glass of wine.' I laughed, shook my head slowly. 'The first glass of wine.'

  And then the wine arrived, and I paid for it, and I watched the woman take a sip, and then a gulp, and I had an inkling of what it might be like to have a healthy relationship with alcohol.

  And now I'm looking at a bottle of wine, and the evening is approaching, and I fully intend to enjoy a glass or two of wine, just like the woman in the bar. I'm confident that I'm going to pull this off, to have this healthy relationship. I'm absolutely determined. Nothing will stop me.

  Of course, just about everybody who has ever written about having a drink problem, or talked in public about

  Yes, they always say the same thing. Get off it, and stay off it. In his memoir A Million Little Pieces, James Frey, a former alcoholic and crack addict, describes what happened to him after he drank and took drugs for the last time. He woke up on a plane, with absolutely no idea how he had got there. q look at my clothes,' he tells us, 'and my clothes are covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit, and blood.' In the book, Frey is being taken by his parents to a rehab centre. After his parents leave, he tells us, 'I am lost. I am completely fucking lost.' His response:

  `I scream.

  I piss on myself.

  I shit my pants.'

  When he leaves rehab, Frey walks into a bar and orders a whisky. But he doesn't want to drink it. He wants to stare it out. In a passage that reads like the script of a gunfight, Frey describes the struggle between the part of himself that wants the whisky, and the part that absolutely does not want the whisky.

  `I stare at the glass. The Fury rises from its silent state it 0 screams bloody fucking murder it is stronger than it has ever been before. It screams you are mine, motherfucker. You are mine and you will always be mine. I own you, I control you and you will do what I tell you to do. You are mine and you will always be mine. You are mine, motherfucker. I stare at the glass.'

  Frey doesn't drink the whisky. And he makes an interesting point the problem is not the whisky. It's himself.

  And my problem was not drink, is not drink. It was overeating, caused by hyperinsulinism due to the overeatingof carbohydrates. Which made me fat. Which made me unhappy-Which sucked me into a fat, unhappy mindset, which meant that, when I drank, I drank too much.

  I walk into the kitchen and open the kitchen drawer with its knives and forks and spoons, all messed up in their tray, no particular order, the knives with the forks, forks with spoons, which, I'm sure, says something about my attitude to food, and I pick up the corkscrew, my old 'waiter's friend', which I used to think was the best corkscrew design in the world, it's roughly the shape of a spanner, with fold-out tools for prying and penetrating and levering, and an ingenious pull-out mechanism for slicing the thick foil or sharp plastic at the top of the bottle. Just holding the corkscrew makes me feel heady and weak.

  Is this what Caroline Knapp referred to as 'the dark fear' experienced by the drinker the moment before drinking? Possibly.

  And I remove the cork, and pour myself a glass of wine, and take a sip, and sixteen hours later I wake up, in my own bed, alone, feeling fuzzy and nauseous, and a flock of images streetlights and taxis and bars, assignations made on my mobile phone, more bars, a kebab shop, friends and strangers in my flat who stayed until God knows when these images are all rattling on a door deep inside my brain. But I feel terrible, laden down with heavy pain, and I will not open the door. I move my head, trying to get more comfortable, but then I learn that it is better not to move at

  all.

  It was a simple mistake, a mistake anybody could make. I know I've made it many times before. And I'll clear up all the

  mess and drug paraphernalia later on. I can't face anything right now.

  Luckily, though, I don't have any obligations to do anything. I have a hangover to deal with.

  Broken Heart

  `Do you mind if I smoke?'

  `No. Not at all.'

  Stretching out on his bed in a London hotel room, James Frey says, 'I feel great. I don't really smoke. I don't smoke when I'm at home because it drives my wife crazy, but I'm smoking now because I'm stressed out. But I feel great. My body's in pretty good shape. Luckily, the liver is the only organ in the body that regenerates itself, and that's where the most profound damage was. So I feel great. I'm in great shape.'

  We are talking about addiction. Frey was addicted to crack and to alcohol. Crack, he says, is like 'powder cocaine', but it's 'a much dirtier high. Have you ever sniffed glue?'

  `Well ... when I was at school we used to sniff solvents.'

  `Smoking crack is like a combination of snorting the strongest powder cocaine you could ever have, and sniffing glue at the same time. One way I've described glue it's like that Pink Floyd song.'

  Frey begins to hum 'The Great Gig in the Sky'. `OK.'

  `The first couple times you smoke crack, when you take the hit, you have this moment of ... perfection. Perfect confidence. Perfect understanding. Perfect orgasm. Perfect pleasure. So you're always chasing that initial moment, and it diminishes over time.'

  Of crack, Frey says, `It's still the only thing I can't be around comfortably. It still freaks me out to this day. There are weird triggers for it. Like, the last time I had an urge for it, I was sitting in a bar waiting to meet somebody. I had a pack of cigarettes, but I didn't have any matches. So I asked the bartender if he had a light. He pulled out a lighter, and it was a butane lighter. Flip,
click just the hiss of the lighter ignited just this fucking crazy urge. Because that hiss is something I very much associate with smoking. Every time I hear a butane torch, it's immediately what I think of. I don't always have the urge, but at that time . . : you know, I didn't feel very good, I was emotionally not very happy at that moment, and the combination of not feeling good, and the sound of that hiss, and the association of those two things with crack knowing what that does, knowing how it could make it all go away, makes me want it. I think: oh, wouldn't that be great!'

  `Say people were to capture you and tie you up and put a gun to your head and make you smoke crack. What would happen? Would you be addicted again?'

  I would definitely have to go through the process again, yes. I don't believe that I could ever use anything again, recreationally or in any way whatsoever.'

  Frey believes that, 'The source of addiction is emotion. And I think, over a long period of time, I have associated, internally, certain emotions and certain feelings with the use of chemicals.'

  He grew up in a stable, wealthy background. His father

  was a lawyer who spent a lot of time abroad. As a child, he suffered from what he calls 'infant ear infection', which went untreated, and, he thinks, might be the source of his troubles.

  But he hates the idea of blaming his parents. 'For me,' he says, 'it was very important to accept the blame. To take full responsibility. If I went back to using, it wouldn't be because I had infant ear infection. It wouldn't be because my parents couldn't get me to the right doctor. It wouldn't be any of those things. It would be because I, in an immediate moment, made a decision to reach for something, pick it up, bring it towards me, tip it ... and swallow it. That's a process of decision making that I am responsible for.'

  `And you'd never consider drinking again?'

  `It's no issue at all. I know what the repercussions would be

  if I started drinking again, and it's not something I wanna do.' `Like, if you stepped out into traffic, you'd get hurt. And so

  ... you just don't. So why do it, unless you want to get hurt?' Frey says, 'Right. That's a great analogy.'

  He started drinking when he was ten. 'My parents were very sociable. I always watched people drink. There was alcohol everywhere. I noticed that when people drank, they changed. People who were in a bad mood, if they drank, they were in a good mood. Everyone seemed to be having a great time while they were drinking. And neither of my parents had a drinking problem. They were recreational drinkers. I can't remember any time in my life when I've seen my father or my mother drunk. I've never seen either of them slurring their words or stumbling any of that. Anyway, I was fascinated from a young age with alcohol. So one night, when my parents were out, the babysitter fell asleep, and I went tothe drinks cupboard and took a big sip of vodka. It was awful. But a couple of minutes later I noticed it made all that shit that I felt go away. All the anger. All the rage. All the

  confusion.'

  So Frey started drinking more and more heavily, and then

  moved on to drugs. Oblivion, he says, was always his goal. `Have you ever drunk for enjoyment?'

  `No. My goal was always to get fucked up. I don't know the pleasure of a nice glass of wine. Or a beer on a hot afternoon. That was never anything I understood. I understood that I used things to get fucked up. To achieve oblivion. To achieve a state of no emotion. And when I think about drinking, even now, it's always when I'm in a heightened state of emotion either very angry about something, or very upset about something. And I don't think about having a drink. I think about having a lot of drinks. I think about having

  enough to drink so I don't have to feel what I'm feeling at the moment.'

  `And so ... how do you deal with everything? The drinking, the not drinking?'

  Frey stops to think for a moment. He lights another

  cigarette. He says, 'Have you ever had a broken heart?' `Whaff

  `Have you ever had a broken heart?'

  ,millions of times. Well, you know. A lot of times. Well . we all have, haven't we?'

  `Do you know what it feels like?' `Well ... yes.'

  `You can draw on that if you so desire?' `I Suppose ... I

  `But do you carry it around with you? Does it affect your every waking moment?'

  `Um ...

  `In this immediate moment? Right now?'

  `Not ... really.'

  `And that's how the Rage lives within me now. It's something I know very intimately. It's something that is a part of me. It's something that I have experienced and remember.'

  `Right.'

  `But it isn't something that affects how I live every day.'

  Appenzell

  I can have avocados, and steaks, and chicken, every kind of meat, every kind of fish, particularly oily fish, which, as nutritionists are beginning to say, contain fats that are good for the heart, now that's not something you thought you'd be hearing, fats that are good for the heart, and I can have tomatoes, courgettes, asparagus, garlic, cottage cheese, all kinds of cheese in fact, although I don't like the idea of going overboard on the cheese, 'the corpse of milk', I remember somebody calling it, and I also remember getting very animated and anti-cheese at one point, this is when I was with a girl who was vegan, or who was considering taking the step from vegetarian to vegan, and I remember saying, 'You just have to look at it, don't you? You just have to look at it to realize it can't be doing you any good.'

  But I have cheese every couple of days. I like cheese, I like the taste, although I can't help feeling that cheese is sinister in

  a way that, say, bread isn't. I didn't like cheese when I was a kid, when sweet things were my goal, and savoury things, in contrast, were burdens to be borne my first experience of food was suffering the ham, the eggs, the cheese, with the apple pie or chocolate mousse or whatever as a reward afterwards. As people get older, they want increasingly disgusting things anchovies, rare steak, inhaled smoke, oyster sauce, whisky, powder that stings the nasal membranes.

  I'm sitting in my flat. My girlfriend has left me. Emotionally, I am numb. Of course, I knew the relationship was not working out. But perhaps I wanted to be trapped for a bit longer. Now I am free. Now I can do what I like. We were in a restaurant when it happened. We had ordered food I'd ordered lamb shank with cabbage and something else, and she'd ordered some mess of carbs with bits of stuff in it, spaghetti with tomato sauce probably, something crowd-pleasing and unhealthy anyway, and the exact sequence went something like this: she lit a cigarette, the woman at the next table complained, loudly and rudely, tears sprang to my girlfriend's eyes, she slid her hand across the table, reaching for mine, my mobile phone rang, and I picked up my mobile instead of her hand.

  That was the start.

  And now she's gone, this was yesterday, and I'm sitting here alone, and I feel a powerful urge to leave the premises and go somewhere and flirt with, and possibly kiss, and Possibly have sex with, women. Maybe it's just like Billy Connolly says these urges continue to grow inside you, even during the abstinent period. It's the excitement of going out, the challenge of catching someone's eye, the first touch of hands, the first suggestive thing one of you says to the other.

  The sex itself I can take or leave. Waking up in the morning afterwards? No thanks. And then the guilt, the feelings of emptiness and hollowness, the worries about what you've caught, what you've passed on. I think about this, but I manage only to think about it for a moment, a second, and then it's gone.

  I've been to the deli a lot recently, sampling all sorts of cheeses. Today I tried jarlsberg, and Gruyere, and Appenzell, which is creamy and slightly foul or mildly rotten at the same time, seductive and punitive, and therefore rather addictive, and my mother called and said, 'Oh, Appenzell, we had that when we lived in Germany, and you liked it, I think,' and I remember seeing photographs of us, myself at ten and my brother six, in Appenzell, by the Rhine waterfall, but I can't remember the cheese. I think they must have had the cheese on another occasion, probably
after I had flown back to England to go to boarding school.

  And I can have tomatoes and raspberries and blueberries, and tuna stir-fry. My girlfriend, or rather my ex-girlfriend, liked to stir-fry. She would chop vegetables, peppers and courgettes and aubergines, I remember, and broccoli, and fry these things with chunks of chicken, not organic, and therefore worryingly battery, possibly full of injected hormones and fed on ground-up bits of animal protein, and suggestive anyway of bad karma, and she would sprinkle soy sauce on top, and have it with rice.

  I of course have it without rice, and with chicken that is organic and free-range. I can have cauliflower, mushrooms, onions, and vodka, as long as I drink the vodka with a sugar-free mixer.

  Girls

  And over the next few days, the next few weeks, I meet girls, and I talk to them, hold their hands, kiss them, whatever, and the worst of it is that one day I'm walking along the street with a woman I've slept with, and will sleep with again later on, and I look up at a poster of another woman in her underwear, and I can't stop looking at it, I can't stop looking at it, the woman is holding herself in a certain way I find very appealing, and the woman I'm with notices and I make a joke about it, but I'm not sure, in the end, if the joke is good enough.

  Revenge of the Killer Carbs

  Research published in the New England Journal of Medicine appears to demonstrate that people on the Atkins diet lose more weight than people on low-fat or low-calorie diets. In one study, conducted by the University of Pennsylvania's Weight and Eating Disorders Program, sixty-three middle-aged people were divided into two groups an Atkins group and a low-calorie group. After twelve weeks, the Atkins group had lost an average of 6.6 kilograms; the low-calorie group, on the other hand, had lost an average of 2.6 kilograms. In the second study, conducted by the Philadelphia Veterans Administration Center, 132 obese men and women were divided into two groups again, an Atkins group and a low-fat group. The lowcarb group lost around twice as much