The Best of Life

The Good Times Sour

Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; The best of life is but intoxication:

Lord Byron, Don Juan

Everywhere you go; everywhere you look. The focus of every meal and celebration. A bar on each corner. Medicine cabinets crammed with drugs. You never realize how pervasive intoxicants are until you try to stop. The cruise line advertisement shows a tiny ship sailing across the surface of a martini — as if drink were the voyage, the destination, the ocean itself. As if you can't drink at home.

Eventually you might realize that it isn't the world so much as you. That you have become one of those who, as Thoreau wrote, "mistake their private ail for an infected atmosphere." Your mind has slipped into this rut and is mired in obsession. Now you have to find a way out.

When first facing recovery, you want desperately to run back to your old world — so familiar and comforting, the path ahead steep and uncertain. To reassure yourself that it's still there. You're still you. That strange new life, featuring some strange new you, can start tomorrow.

And while that's a bad idea — you'll only end up, a day or a week or a year later, right back where you are now, or worse — it's helpful to pause and look at it for a moment, realize that it was both great and not at all great. Is this the most important thing in your life? It's become that, true, but is this really how you want your story to end? A vital skill in recovery is the ability to think about the what-comes-next part, "consequences," as we tell children. Look at it all. Not just the joy of the first drink but the jolt of the tenth — the hangover after the party, your shame, the hopes of everybody you love dashed.

Even Byron, that romantic idol, fond of wine, debauchery, and revolution, followed his lines about the necessity of drunkenness with the inevitable result. The poem continues:

    But to return — get very drunk; and when
    You wake with head-ache, you shall see what then.

    Ring for your valet — bid him quickly bring
    Some hock and soda-water

Hock is German white wine. Hock and soda water being the early nineteenth-century version of a wine spritzer. Not the most romantic beverage; then again, the glittering image always has something spattered on it if you look closely. Byron sees clearly enough to capture the whole cycle in a dozen lines: the joy of life shifts to the joy of repairing the damage. Indulgence moves seamlessly from an opportunity to an anticipation to an obligation. At first you use it to feel wonderful, then you use it to feel normal. First you want to, then you have to. You don't even realize what is happening — take comfort in that, in the understanding that this problem is, at least in this sense, not your fault. Nobody wants to become an alcoholic. "You don't decide to be an addict," William S. Burroughs writes in Junky. "One morning you wake up sick and you're an addict." It happens when the pleasure you clutch at clutches you and won't let go. Which is one way of thinking about the recovery process: not so much about you letting go of something — were it that easy — but about finding a way to make something let go of you. Because the two are intertwined, and while you were grabbing at your substance, your substance was grabbing you.

"It was not always with me," begins Rainer Maria Rilke's "Song of the Drunkard." "It would come and go."

    I wanted to hold it. The wine held it for me.
    What it was, I no longer know.
    But I was the one being held, held this way and that,
    until I could do nothing else.

    I, fool.
    Now I am trapped in his game....

Many are trapped. Are they fools? They are ordinarily intelligent people who in this regard don't know any better, who insist they choose to live in bondage. They are not ready. They can't do it, or, rather, believe they can't. But you are ready. You can do something else. At least you hope you can, or suspect you can, which is enough. You already are doing something just by reading this. Don't torture yourself with regret about giving up your addiction forever. You are trying something new, for a day, a week, a year. How many years have you already spent in your old life? Why not try something different and go to a new place? Just for a while. Maybe you will like it there. Take one step, even if it seems impossible, by looking at what you had, what you loved, what it became, and then say goodbye to it, for now or forever.

* * *

All ways led to the saloon.

Jack London, John Barleycorn

* * *

At a tavern, there is a general freedom from anxiety. You are sure you are welcome: and the more noise you make, the more trouble you give, the more good things you call for, the welcomer you are ... there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.

Samuel Johnson, quoted in The Life of Samuel Johnson

* * *

Bring in the bottled lightning, a clean tumbler, and a corkscrew.

Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

* * *

A martini makes an ordinary glass shine like a diamond at a coronation, makes an iron bed in Mexico seem like the feather bed of a sultan, a hotel room like the terminus and climax of all voyages, the pinnacle of contentment, the place of repose in an altitude hungered for by all the restless ones.

Anaïs Nin, diary entry, summer 1953

* * *

What beauty can compare to that of a cantina in the early morning?

Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

* * *

    all the best of life ...
    then daydreaming to drink at six,
    waiting for the iced fire,
    even the feel of the frosted glass,
    like waiting for a girl ...
    if you had waited.

Robert Lowell, "For John Berryman"

* * *

On a busy night familiar greetings would ring out from old friends when de Kooning entered the bar. "Hiya, fellas," de Kooning would say. "Hiya, fellas." ... From the crowd, Elaine, smoking and chatting, would toss him a wave. Rauschenberg would smile. Frank O'Hara and Mercedes Matter would make room for him at the bar.

Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, de Kooning

* * *

In places where...