Last Drink to LA

by John Sutherland

  Why, I’ve often wondered, does AA work so well in LA? It fares differently (and in my view less well) elsewhere. In New Hampshire, I found the meetings oppressively private; infused to the point of moral implosion with a New England puritan shame. On a practical level, it was hard to find out where they were being held (no one wanted to proclaim their sin: the big scarlet letter had to be hidden). One felt like an early Christian in the catacombs. In the South, I am told, there are meetings in the hills where you have to hand in your gun at the door. Doubtless, there are meetings in Texas where you hitch your horse.

  But in southern California the dominant motif is a kind of freewheeling zaniness. There are as many kinds of AA meeting as there are churches (every one of which is its own denomination, with its own distinctive ritual and theodicy). The devolved organisation of AA thrives on the West Coast. AA/LA has heavy-smoker, moderate-smoker and non-smoker meetings, closed gay meetings, sex-addict meetings, meetings where women knit and exchange pie recipes, cyclist meetings which get together and celebrate their Spandex-lean sobriety on mountain peaks, biker meetings where the un-tattooed enter at risk of their lives, meetings that muster on the fringe of pop concerts (Grateful Dead were a particular favourite), meetings that hang out in gyms and muscle themselves into the right frame of mind (there was, though I never went to it, a scientists’ AA at Caltech; you probably needed a PhD in theoretical physics to qualify).

  The relatively small range of meetings I patronised worked for me. I got sober and found sobriety to be a strange experience. The days, once a frantic race against closing time, were suddenly long and empty. What to do? I couldn’t drive for a couple of months. My nerves were too jangled. And, when I took to the roads again, I was as nervous as a cat. I had lost boldness with my drinking habit. I was a shy automobilist. I also discovered, as many recovering drunks do, that alcohol had for years masked chronic depression, which I now had to deal with.

  I was healthy and quickly got fit (work and workouts were something with which I could fill the empty hours). I discovered that I was, although not the genius that I once thought, competently good at my job now that I could give it my clear-headed attention. Slowly but inexorably a career began to take shape again. California is the land of the fresh start. My Caltech colleagues had noted my drunkenness but they noted, equally, my mended ways and approved. The job offer came and I accepted. My family took the risk and joined me. Unwise, some would have said; but the bet paid off. I was, it seemed, the saved thief.

  Unlike many alcoholics, I had no craving to drink again. Indeed, within a few months, whole days would pass in which I would not think of alcohol once. And, with this indifference, my need for AA diminished. The fellowship had saved me, but I didn’t want to hold on to that lifebelt all my life. I had, I felt, served my time. AA gurus (particularly the relentless Peter C.) warned me that if you ‘go out’ you will relapse. I haven’t nor, frankly, do I think I will.

  I did, however, have one more whirl with AA/LA; more specifically with its undergrowth of juvenile mutations. I know about the groups for teen addicts not because I was myself ever young and stoned in LA, but because my son was. Addiction was, I suppose, my legacy to him, his patrimony; like alcoholic father, like addict son.

  Jack arrived in southern California to join me, after I straightened out in 1983. He was then nine. By the age of 14 he had a bottle of vodka stashed in his school locker and was using any number of substances. Fondly, his parents knew nothing of this. There were suspicious empty sachets in trouser-pockets tossed in the wash, and the usual array of signs – red eyes, inflamed lips and nostrils, poor grades, small sums of money regularly disappearing (and, sometimes, larger sums), a taste for thunderous and repetitious heavy metal (I still hate the sound of Led Zeppelin). But we didn’t see anything too sinister. Hell, he was only a teenager, and, if he was ‘dabbling’, that was a routine part of the Californian educational syllabus.

  Then, of course, the unavoidable thing. He attempted suicide. It was a well-planned attempt (by hanging, not firearm, thank God). Self-destruction is, one discovered, the major cause of death among Californians under the age of 16 (when they can take to the road, racing like lemmings to the cliff). He left – or intended to leave – a heart-wrenching note saying that he confidently expected a happy family reunion in the hereafter. But that things on earth were, currently, unbearable. He had touched bottom, aged 15, and wanted out. It was drink ’n’ drugs that did it. That, and the usual adolescent sexual confusion.

  It was, in a sense, his youth that saved him. Because he was under 16 he had no rights. One of the most interesting features of the West Coast medical industry is the ‘closed-treatment facility’ – sanatoriums for the under-age. Jack was referred, within 12 hours of his suicide attempt, to an adolescent unit at Ingleside (called, irreverently, ‘Ingletraz’ by its youthful inmates). Most of the kids had to be taken there kicking and screaming. He was still too shaken up to protest too much. No matter if he had. He was under 16.

  Ingletraz was hugely expensive – $5,000 a week (picked up, for a month only, by my medical insurance). It was, none the less, value for money and had a good success rate. There was one nurse per inmate, 24-hour CCTV surveillance, daily one-on-one meetings with therapists and supervised 12-Step meetings three times a day. In the evening, these would be ‘family’ meetings, in which parents and siblings would be involved (this was the only time in ten years in southern California that I had anything like intimate conversation with non-alcoholic Hispanics and African-Americans: suffering parents, like me). The institution was organised on correctional-facility principles. The juvenile inmate arrived with no privileges at all, other than food and sleep. Good behaviour earned points; these could be converted into ‘air time’ (the right to go outside and smoke), visitors or candy.

  It was intense and – given the fact that most of the insurance coverage ran out after a month or so – necessarily short. The follow-up was AA, MA (Marijuana Anonymous) and NA (Narcotics Anonymous) – all of which have teenage chapters in LA. This system is highly interventionist and offensive to many liberals. It would have been offensive to me, had I been an idle observer of it. As it is, my judgement is tempered by the fact that places like Ingletraz work. I suspect one reason is the green-stick mendability of the young – if you intervene hard enough and at the right moment. Middle-aged drunks, like myself, need to be broken wholly before they can be reset. And they have to perform the operation themselves. It’s different for the young. Screw civil rights and save the child, I say.

  If Jack had not tried to kill himself and had not landed up in Ingletraz, but had kept on drinking and using, he would certainly have come to a bad end very quickly. His three closest friends (fellow Led Zeppelin lovers) got wasted six months later in one of their girlfriend's houses. The parents, this being southern California, had guns around for the ‘armed response’ which you are warned about on every middle-class front lawn. After drinking and doping to toxic levels, for reasons they will doubtless never understand, two of the boys killed the three girls with a shotgun (‘Man, we smoked them all,’ one of them wonderingly said later). The state prosecutor wanted the death penalty. They smoked them all; he would fry them all. But they were under 16 at the time of the crime and got life without parole. Two of them (the third plea-bargained his way out by giving evidence) will die in prison. Jack, I firmly believe, would have been with them but for Ingletraz.

  As it is, he recovered. I followed his path through a maze of AA/MA/NA groups as strange to me as Mars. Meetings with more tattoos than a British battleship; valley girls, jumped-out gang members, designer-clad ex-junkies. It looked like fun. But if you’re young, everything is fun. Even alcoholism. Life is less fun, but he is alive.

  ‘I have lost Los Angeles as a locale,’ Raymond Chandler lamented in 1957, on moving to London. ‘It is no longer the part of me it once was.’ I lost my Los Angeles as well, when I returned to London after ten years in 1992. But I suppose, at least I hope, I
brought LA/AA with me. I’ll die an alcoholic, I know. But, hopefully, a sober one.

  Epilogue

  How did Scott Fitzgerald do his auto-obit? ‘I drank for many years, and then I died.’ For me the obituary, God willing, will be: ‘I drank for many years, then I didn’t drink for many years, and then I died.’ And, God again willing, it will be many dry years more before the husk of the one-time drinker is lowered into his wicker coffin. A dry old stick in a bed of dry sticks.

  To paraphrase Martin Amis (himself paraphrasing Henri de Montherlant), drunkenness writes black, sobriety writes white. And age writes grey. My life quietened with sobriety although it had its moments of minor excitement. One of those moments was when, 18 years abstinent, I wrote the more confessional parts (‘My Story’) of the foregoing book. I vividly recall the circumstances. They frame the contents with a certain nostalgic highlight.

  I dashed off the last, personal sections, of Last Drink To LA (pp. 76-110) by night, sometimes all night, over a fortnight, in a godforsaken Texan motel (self-misnamed ‘roadhouse’) underneath Interstate 35. The 1994 NAFTA free-trade agreement meant the highway above thundered, day and night, carrying goods (and vast amounts of drugs) through the now wide-open frontier between Texas and Mexico. The motel quivered like an overwound violin string about to snap.

  The gothic feel was intensified when the town was struck by an ice storm. I only knew about the phenomenon second-hand, from Ang Lee’s 1997 film of that name. The real thing was extraordinary and worth experiencing at least once in your life. Rain congeals instantly on contact with any surface into crystalline ice. The world turns diamond. Power lines, tree branches, roofs snap and fall. Electricity cuts out. Cars skid. All shops and restaurants close. I felt I was in an Arctic Wuthering Heights, as I tapped away, that icy night, on battery power and candlelight.

  I was holed up in this strange hostelry with a woman – innocently, I should add. My consort was Lady Spender, widow of the poet Stephen, of whom I was the ‘authorised’ biographer. I was writing to order, in a sense. A hired hand. It meant a certain muzzling. But it also meant that I was privileged with access to ‘the papers’. It’s what every biographer craves and will go to almost any lengths to get – viz The Aspern Papers. Natasha was my Juliana Bordereau, but an awful lot nicer. One of the things (in addition to the highest advance of my writing career) that I took away from the years of work on the project was friendship with the surviving members of the Spender family. I made close friends.

  Natasha and I were by day burrowing through the mountain of Spender papers lovingly archived in the Harry Ransom Center. Ransom was a former president of the University of Texas (Austin), a town-sized campus. It’s world famous for, among other things, being the site of one of the more bloody spree shootings in recent American history. I never entered the Center over that fortnight without thinking of Charles Whitman, in the neighbouring University Tower, and his 48 victims.

  Ransom was an English Literature scholar – a sadly rare pedigree for holders of the higher posts in the academic world. As president (bless him) he had diverted a streamlet of the flow of oil money slurping into his institution towards the setting-up of what is now the finest collection of modern British literary manuscripts in the world. And the largest – Texas likes big. The second-largest collection (also rich in Spenderiana) is at Emory University, in Atlanta, enriched by that other black gold, Coca Cola. Both places, unlike their stingy British counterparts, pay you handsomely to go and work there on their treasures. I salute them.

  ‘You’re sitting on a goldmine’, the Spenders’ new literary agent, Ed Victor, had told them, when they came to him with their money problems – Stephen’s ‘thirties’ (in both senses) being long gone and his literary star and earning power sunk somewhat below their lifestyle. (‘He always lived rich’, one of Stephen’s friends told me, ‘though they had no money.’) The Ransom Center duly sent their agent to the Spenders’ house in St John’s Wood to cart off hundredweights of unsorted material in bin bags from what the family called the ‘bottomless pit’ in the cellar. They paid top dollar (so did Emory).

  This digression into Spenderiana is not, believe me, irrelevant. For the biographer, what the Ransom Center had accessioned, curated and catalogued was a motherlode. Relevant to the drunkalog I was frenziedly thrashing out by night were certain of Spender’s unpublished literary remains, notably a confessional testament of early youth called ‘Torso’. The title refers to a portion of the human body (often fetishised sexually) that means, literally, ‘stump’ or ‘stalk’. Spender clearly saw a connection with ‘contortion’, i.e. ‘twisted’, or ‘bent’. Writing in his teens, about his teens, Spender – the most precocious of writers – pondered what had ‘made him him’, what were his truly formative experiences? Every thoughtful person does that at almost every stage of their conscious life. What was interesting about ‘Torso’, though, was the searing honesty of the introspective analysis. The essay (pamphlet length) will, one day, I hope, see print. Both Stephen’s children, I believe, are writing, or thinking of writing, about their father. He remains a fascinating topic – worthy of much more work than I did. But ‘Torso’ proved too much for Natasha. We had been reading the text, in Stephen’s schoolboyish hand, at adjoining desks. Before reaching anywhere near the end, Natasha turned away, leaving me to read on, alone. We walked back that evening the half-mile or so to our deafening motel in silence. I took her out for supper that night (hearty Texas steaks, overlapping the dinner plate) and we talked of other things. After an early goodnight, I hammered away on my laptop for hours – not Spender biography, but Sutherland drunkalog.

  The ‘Torso’ insight, and the thoughts it provoked, was a trigger for the writing burst, and its flagrant indiscretions, in the Texas motel, to the Wagnerian accompaniment of 16-wheelers above. I believe that alcoholism of my kind (it’s far from unique, I’ve observed) originates in uncertainties – class, sexual, personality uncertainties. Truth in wine, the stale old proverb says. Frequent intoxication, and the painstaking hangovers, encourage deep introspection – the honesty of what, in AA, is called ‘touching the bottom’ and ‘the moment of clarity’. Why is one acting so destructively? Is it ‘in character’ or ‘out of character’? How many characters does one have? Must they be in irreconcilable conflict with each other? Does one really want to know that much about oneself? One cannot live, argued Ibsen (in The Wild Duck) without one’s life lie. But you must, insist AA gurus and puritans.

  My first physical sexual experience with another human being was being manually and orally abused, by a male predator, while out blackcurrant picking in the fields of Tiptree. I recall it every time I see a pot of Wilkins’ jam (‘boiled in silver vats’, the Tiptree firm’s advertising slogan used to say). I’ve written about that elsewhere. I’d like to say I was traumatised, like those young victims of Rolf Harris, whose lives thereafter were wholly blighted by his gropes and worse. My life wasn’t even partially blighted. It was parenthetic. The violation of my juvenile person made me, there is no other word for it, ‘curious’. Curious, that is, about myself. (My attacker was later, for a string of other offences, arrested and jailed. Given the homophobic culture of British prisons he, a ‘nonce’, doubtless suffered much more than I did among the ripe blackcurrants).

  The part of Last Drink To LA that seems to stick most adhesively in the minds of those who have read it is where I talk about my squalid night in north Marengo Avenue (see p. 90). It was, I now think, a mistake to publish it. I should have reserved it for the privacy of the AA meeting, where nothing leaves the room, and all the shameful confessions evaporate into the air with the Serenity Prayer. But there was a kind of recklessness in my Texas scribblings and determination to publish them. I was lashing out at shadows.

  As an added explanation, 2001, the millennial year, was a fraught period of my own sober life. My marriage of 35 years was breaking up. I will not go into detail other than to say there was only one guilty party (the divorce proceedi
ngs have sternly put that fact on permanent record).

  In the interim three years between publishing my memoir and publishing the life of Spender, in 2004, I went through big life changes. Divorce was one. Forming a new partnership was another. My son’s falling off the wagon, after 15 clean, sober and hugely successful years, yet another. My own professional hara-kiri was another. I could have stayed on for a year or two beyond the statutory retirement age of 65 at UCL, as one of what are called, sarcastically but all too accurately, ‘the living dead’, consoled by my absurd title: Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English (like being called the Mammon Professor of God, my predecessor, Frank Kermode, quipped). I had done well enough there, I was assured, and had earned an afterlife.

  I could also, polite ‘feelers’ assured me, have sunk into a comfy position at an American institution (there they had no mandatory retirement age and old professors clog up the academic arteries like blood clots). In somewhere balmy, like southern California, I could have sat on my ‘chair’, dribbling out ever feebler ‘scholarship’, until the mortician lifted my corpse off it to make way for a younger pair of buttocks.

  Not for me. Using the ‘break-up’ of my personal life, I decided to make a second break for it. Vita nuova. Lawrentian resurrection. There were less poetic urgencies. My pension was substantially reduced. I needed a lifestyle subsidising income stream and I decided, at the age of 66, to make my way in the real world – to ‘earn my way’. Fuck retirement. Fuck Saga. Fuck bus passes. Fuck paychecks. Fuck sensible.