BOOZE

Booze, photo by Cottonbro Studio pexels

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How does someone who’s adequately intelligent, and too aware of the risks, fall into alcohol addiction?

by Paul Halas

Beneath it all alcohol is another drug. The drug of preference for much of the world – bar the quarter of the global population who are Muslims – it has a history and culture going back to ancient times. The first record of imbibing is in 7,000 BCE ancient China, where an alcoholic beverage made from fermented rice, honey and fruit was consumed. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans were wine drinkers, the Huns and ancients Britons drank a beer-like booze by the barrel-load (at least they did according to Robert Graves, and that’s good enough for me), alcohol consumption, enjoyment and abuse has been embedded in most cultures for a great big chunk of human history.

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Alcohol has a place in religious rites, in launching ships, in giving toasts, it was used to give Jack Tars a daily pick-me-up, it was issued to Tommies going over the top, in shamanic rituals, at marriages and wakes, and in so many countries it’s viewed as an essential element at almost any social gathering. We all know it’s jolly nice, in fact it can be exquisite and life enhancing… and we all know there can be a negative side to it too.

Here I declare a certain standpoint. I’m an ex-addict (I’m supposed to say recovering alcoholic but I find that very irritating. I’m Paul and blah blah blah. No thanks); I have history. However, I’m not anti-booze, and I certainly don’t believe in being holier than thou about it. I’ve made my peace with alcohol. It’s about 35 years since I’ve imbibed and it’s no longer an issue. Not much of one, anyway.

How does someone who’s adequately intelligent, who’s all too aware of the risks, fall into it? You’d think that person must have a self-destructive streak, a massive blind spot, a belief that in some divine way what happens to others won’t happen to them. But still it happens, on a massive scale, and booze addiction is no respecter of intelligence, wealth, social boundaries, gender or, to a certain extent, religion. (I’ll leave out of this equation the few Muslims I’ve known who’ve drunk alcohol, some of them excessively, because I have no way of knowing how typical they are.) In my case I should’ve known better. And I guess my point is that that’s no protection.

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I knew at a fairly early age that my mother was a heavy drinker. Despite the odd embarrassing episode she managed to make it look fun, and the fact that in the 1950s and early 1960s my parents would throw wildly uninhibited, bohemian parties just made it all look even more desirable. I first got plastered (beyond just finishing the dregs in glasses) at the age of fourteen in Rimini, where my parents were attending a film festival (privileged brat, I know), when I got away with quaffing several glasses of wine. My mother was pretty much in her cups too, and my expected ticking off either never happened or was too insignificant for me to remember.

By the time I reached my later teens I was well aware my mother was an alcoholic. She’d been a high functioning alcoholic for years, but increasingly the functioning part wasn’t doing so well. A crying shame for such a wonderfully talented person. For me, however, and my hedonistic little friends, boozing was simply fun. Desirable. It helped us find a place in the wider world, and all the people who weren’t handling it had to have some kind of defect.

In all this my father, who enjoyed drinking but always kept it within very strict boundaries, was saddened by his wife’s decline and evidently unable to do anything to help her. His answer was increasingly to keep her at arm’s length, albeit under the same roof. But wasn’t a fair chunk of society awash in booze anyway? Certainly in their milieu. Being an alcoholic wasn’t so much an issue, it was how you handled it. If you couldn’t hold your drink you were a bit of a pantywaist. “I don’t just use alcohol, I use it creatively,” slurred the bearded, reeking painter, who could barely stand upright. He was much loved.

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Of course alcohol is just another drug (with all its cultured history), and by the time I turned twenty I was familiar with a few alternatives. I reckoned hash was a gateway drug to the harder stuff because they (the Man, the Straights) lied about it being addictive and harmful. So we thought speed, coke, opium and heroin (etc.) would prove harmless too. So, throughout my twenties, I took all sorts uppers, downers, opiates, hallucinogens, plus liberal amounts of drink too.

I don’t like to be preachy about alcohol, and I won’t be preachy about the illegal drugs either. In fact a think legality is the chief distinction between them. Some of the harder drugs can kill (as can alcohol), and in very small quantities too, but I’m not a fan of prohibition. It fosters all the worst parts of addiction and criminality, and humane controls should be applied instead. I think Portugal has tried to approach the issue in a grown-up, humane way.

Giving up the illegal drugs simply involved moving away from that destructive background, but I replaced them with drink and more drink. (In fact quitting heroin proved rather easier than giving up alcohol for me.) My career as a storywriter was becoming well-established, but like a goodly proportion of my peers I was a functioning alcoholic. Prolific at my work, good at it, and drinking like a fish. Why? Filling a hole? Covering up an introverted personality? Protective colouration? That feeling of superiority I’d felt towards lushes in my teens, I could see it in the faces of some of the people who looked at me. I needed to hit the brake, but I found I didn’t have one.

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There’s no doubt my drinking badly damaged my marriage. The relationship kind of bumped through years of the ‘just about reining it in’ period, but then, as I approached forty, I increasingly knew there was going to have to be a reckoning. The party was going to have to be over. It hadn’t been fun for a long time. The odd part of it was still enjoyable, but mainly it was a necessity, and most of the time I felt pretty awful. Strangely, I was still at the top of my game writing, but everything else suffered. Everything.

I had one failed attempt at quitting drinking, and ended up in an NHS rehab unit. It was okay, I even started getting quite fit thanks to the enforced exercise. But what really did it for me was my fellow boozers, nearly all of whom were there as part of their probation, and couldn’t wait to get out and start drinking again. I thought, why go in there if you aren’t going to try to turn yourself around?

My marriage puttered on for another eight of so years (on and off), and I’d rather fucked my health. I think for my first year sober the world appeared in black and white to me, colourless, but a recovery gradually took place. Parenthood (increasingly single parenthood) helped, as did keeping the writing going. I just had to learn to live with being an introvert. Relationships changed. Many, it turned out, failed to survive my non-drinking. It changed with my two editors, both big drinkers. Heavy drinkers, particularly those who knew they were problem drinkers, mistrusted me. They always imagined I was judging them, looking down on them. I had to re-learn how to engage socially, accept that things were always going to be a bit different. In a room filled with people who are steadily getting merrier, it often feels awkward. I do my best to merge. Drinking ginger beer. It’s not the same.

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It’s no surprise I’m well aware of all the negative parts of alcohol consumption, the carnage it can and does cause. From West Coast celebrities dying of alcoholic poisoning to villagers succumbing to deadly bathtub booze in the global South, I think the problem can only be tackled in a humane, caring, treating way, and not by prohibition. That’s never worked. (And anyway, capitalism is still too much in love with drink to put the kybosh on it, so we need to live with it as well as we can.)

I’m at peace with it. My second wife took a few years to get used to it, but she’s now quite relaxed about me not drinking while she enjoys a few glasses of wine or G and Ts. No arguments about who drives home. That’s not to say I don’t miss a really good red with a meal, and I’m a bit miffed I never got to try a hors d’age Armagnac before I took to the pledge, but hey ho. I buggered that up, didn’t I?

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Paul Halas, the Arts and Lifestyle Editor of Ars Notoria and co-founder of AN Editions, is a writer of Jewish heritage whose escape from 1970s hippidom was the discovery that he could invent stories. He spent forty years contributing to various Disney magazines and books, as well as a variety of non-Disney comics, books and animated films.