I had £45 and a passport in my pocket and it was close to 2 a.m. The cab driver dropped me to the departures terminal and wished me luck. A national airline had a flight to Boston the next day, so I queued at the check-in desk and waited for it to open. My plan was to tell them I had received very bad news from Amerikay, and that it was imperative I got on the next flight. To me, the plan was foolproof. While waiting for the desk to open, I fell asleep, and awoke several hours later, in the airport, with no recollection of how I got there or why I was queuing for a flight to Boston. A taxi ride later and I was back in bed, trying to sleep off the rest of my hangover, before my flatmates had got up for breakfast. Boston would have to wait.
The summer’s drinking was fuelled by a variety of odd jobs—handing out flyers at nightclubs, waiting tables, working in factories. At the start of the summer, a few others and myself managed to bluff our way onto the British welfare system, and once every two weeks we took a bus to a local employment office to claim £88 benefit. This had usually been drunk by the time we arrived back to our rented accommodation.
The feelings of social awkwardness present since early adolescence accelerated during this period. I felt like I had something to say, but couldn’t find ways of saying it. I never fully fitted in with whatever group I happened to be with, whether it was the daily drinkers on the Cowgate or the artists taking part in the Festival. I leaned on alcohol more and more as a means of unlocking social situations, of easing myself into company. It was a self-confidence thing. Perhaps it’s an Irish thing. Every Sunday night we headed to Taste, a weekly event at the Honeycomb nightclub, and began experimenting more with Ecstasy. One, maybe two pills at most. The atmosphere was part hedonistic, part quasi-spiritual, summed up by the fact that doormen searched you down on arrival and then hugged you afterwards! I had vague notions that I should be part of some creative group—an actor, maybe, or a writer. The Dublin actor Mannix Flynn was in town that summer with his one-man show Talking to the Wall, and afterwards in the bar over vodkas and orange juice he got me thinking politically. The acting seed was planted in my head. Mainly, though, I honed my skill as a drinker. Scottish society welcomed the daily drinker into its open arms—every night there was a party, or even a quiet night in with plenty of stimulants.
The night of my twenty-first birthday was one of the first when I began to eye alcohol suspiciously. A party had been organised to celebrate my coming of age, and I left early, whiskey fuelled, with a regular in the bar where I was working. I fell out of her bed, got up to go to the toilet and for some reason answered her phone, which was ringing. On the line was her boyfriend.
The rest of the summer was like that—chaotic and shambolic. I was becoming paranoid and increasingly erratic, and began a relationship of sorts with someone I shouldn’t have begun a relationship of sorts with, if you know what I mean. My final exam results arrived in August and the hard work and abstinence had paid off. I was a few percentage points off a first-class degree, and had my choice of postgraduate courses. This further vindicated a hedonistic lifestyle. I now had an academic base to my drinking. I was Behan and Baudelaire all rolled into one. To celebrate I had half a Guinness with a shot of Canadian Club nestling in it and lit a £2 cigar. As Paul Calf noted, ‘You can’t buy class.’ The next night I took my first acid trip, and it was one of those great nights when the entire world was all right. Shop aisles moulded into one, pots and pans danced Disney-like across kitchen floors, roses smiled and winked as I looked out in the morning. A good friend’s tooth fell out, and left traces as it flew across the room. The comedown was in a downstairs jazz joint, my only memory of which is singing ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ with the band and waking up in someone’s doorway.
By this stage the signs of what were to become major issues in my life were present. Drink was beginning to tease my morality, mess with my finances and lead to behavioural changes. It led to extreme paranoia in relationships, to unfaithfulness, and blurred the lines between the right thing to do and the wrong. Things like getting sick in a friend’s apartment and walking out the door next morning, not bothering to clean it up—that’s a sign. Drinking on my own all day and night and walking home bare-chested, shouting at passersby—another sign. Not keeping in touch with family except when finances were low—all indications of behaviour to come. It’s difficult sometimes to relay the effect alcohol can have on you to another person—no one really knows the anguish and torment which swirl around in the head of a developing problem drinker. All society sees is the bon vivant, the engaging, entertaining you presented outwardly. It’s also sometimes not the big signs that point to problems. For example, I once went a year not calling my grandparents—partly because of shame, and partly because, well, alcohol makes you self-obsessed. To someone on the outside of my life, outside my environment, that might not sound like a hanging offence. But all my summers were spent in part on my grandparents’ farm, and most Sundays we visited. To suddenly not keep in contact—it was unexplainable behaviour. There were no arguments that led to my communication breakdown, just a total acceleration of self-serving obsession. With one grandparent left alive now, I look back on that period horrified. It still rankles with me. It might not be the destitute-on-the-streets story alcoholism sometimes results in, but to me, if you had told me years earlier that I would ignore family for a year for absolutely no reason, I wouldn’t have believed it.
——
The history department in University College Cork, lured by the strength of my undergraduate work on land agitation in west Clare, offered me a Master’s scholarship, paying my fees and giving me a monthly allowance. In return I would have to do some tutoring. I flicked a coin, literally, during one drunken afternoon drinking sangria on Cockburn Street in Edinburgh. Heads, I’d stay away from Ireland and maybe explore Europe more, or train to be a chef. I enjoyed the theatrics of commercial kitchens, if not the booze-fuelled comedowns after a night’s work. Tails, I’d return to Cork, make a fist of academia and carry on with student life. Nineteenth-century Irish history was big at the time, and I had delivered a good undergraduate paper on aspects of the land struggle, which I felt an emotional connection to. The coin landed on tails, and I headed for Cork and a world of student loans, scholarships, daytime drinking and declining health. Not that Edinburgh would have been much different. Within weeks of starting my postgraduate I quickly realised I was out of my depth. Part of the deal was that I would have to teach third-year history students some of the finer points of eighteenth-century Irish and nineteenth-century European social history. In effect, I was now responsible for about 14 per cent of 80 history students’ final year degree. As part of this process I would have to correct exam papers, complement course teaching, and be punctual and professional. I was 21 years old. My routine began to involve more and more daytime drinking, often with essays or course work deadlines missed, as I downed pints of Carlsberg accompanied by side orders of dry roasted peanuts in Cissy Young’s Bar off College Road. I applied for and got a student loan, which facilitated more daytime drinking, while the lack of supervision a research Master’s gives allowed me to go weeks, if not months, without any contact with my college supervisors. In essence, doing a postgraduate by research was all about giving me a licence to continue the exploits of college socialising for another two years.
My tutoring approach was shambolic—at one point I showed a video about the Irish land wars, which started 100 years after my course material finished—and this to students about to do their final year exams. Suffice to say, I wasn’t exactly CS Lewis developing lifelong friendships with impressionable young minds eager to mine my intellect. During these years I had fewer and fewer ties with Ennis—Cork became my adopted homeland, taking me by the hand and introducing me to the world of sex, drink and indie music. Half way through the two-year Masters, close to Christmas, and following a period of sustained drinking, I began to feel ill. I was living in a Dickensian hovel—the type of accommodation where one wrong turn out of the ba
throom upstairs and you ended up on the footpath. My diet consisted of alcohol, Capri-Suns (for vitamin c) and toasted sandwiches, and I headed home to Ennis with severe stomach pains. A few days later I was admitted to hospital and woke after Christmas in intensive care. The surgical staff had operated expecting to find an appendix that needed removing, but instead found a digestive system in need of some TLC. At the time I couldn’t really bring myself to tell the medical staff or my family that my system was faltering due to excessive drinking. So they carried out a whole range of tests, thinking for a time it might have been Crohn’s disease. It was most likely a bout of ulcerative colitis, brought on by poor diet and lifestyle. In hospital, I passed the time hanging out with an English man who lived in Kerry and was in intensive care with a heart scare. He also had some great weed and as soon as I was able to hobble around, I joined him for a daily smoke in the small church on the hospital grounds. Medicine indeed.
Coming out of hospital I took things easy for the first few weeks, but soon after was back on the booze like before. The illness bought me time with college authorities, who were beginning to suspect I wasn’t the great academic hope after all. After 13 months of postgraduate studies, I hadn’t delivered a single line of my expected 40,000 words. In truth, I was getting tired of the pettiness of college life and having to photocopy an assistant lecturer’s research notes by way of repaying my scholarship.
Around this time I took a job in the bar in the Everyman Palace Theatre on MacCurtain Street. Without my knowing it, my life choices were being determined by my dependence on, or need to be close to, a ready supply of alcohol.
I never for one minute contemplated socialising without alcohol and had this theory that I really only became myself after a few drinks. To my mind, there was no other way to tap into the inner me, who was far more interesting and appealing than the boring, socially awkward, sober self being presented. I had had an interest in acting since college days, appearing in a number of productions in the Granary Theatre. So the Everyman also gave me a chance to blag my way onto the stage. This was a time before late-night licences, when theatres had the advantage of being able to remain open later than nightclubs on weekend nights, or any night of the week for that matter, once a ‘performance’ was on in the bar area.
The late-night bar in the Everyman quickly attracted a tanked-up troupe of musicians and actors, of spoofers and drinkers. And that was only the bar staff. People like the late ballet master David Gordon became regulars. Dave hosted many a party in his flat at number 10 Roman Street, where pints of sherry and rum flowed. If a ballet group were in town, inevitably they ended up at Dave’s, where young Russian ballerinas skirted across the sticky tiles to Dusty Springfield. It was hedonistic and heady, and a million miles from the rail tracks in Ennis. Dave once moved to the flat downstairs, 10A, and when I asked why, he replied, with acerbic wit, ‘Oh, because I didn’t like the neighbourhood, dahling.’ It was that kind of vibe.
Because we didn’t start till late on a Saturday night, often I was well oiled behind the bar during work, but so was everyone else. Many nights the drinking only really started after the last customer had left. This was probably the beginning of the most consistent period of my drinking, where tolerance levels rose and other areas of my life began to take second place to getting sozzled. I got a few small parts on the Everyman stage, decided I was the next Liam Neeson, ditched the postgraduate studies and the world of academia and waited for Hollywood to call. Surprisingly, the phone never rang.
——
In the years that followed I worked various jobs to make ends meet, including nighttime work in a cash-and-carry and weekend shifts impersonating Charlie Chaplin at children’s parties. Things shifted in my personal life when, at the age of 23, I became a father. My son had barely entered the world when I was wetting his head, downing shots bleary-eyed, while baby and mother tried to get to sleep. I was out of it—a combination of the pressures leading up to the event and the copious amount of free drink offered by well-meaning acquaintances after. I ended up in hospital for two days, thanks to a run-down system which shouted stop. It was a pattern that would repeat itself later. Rather than embrace the responsibilities of fatherhood head on, I sought refuge in drinking binges, mostly at weekends and almost always with consequence. I had just about held onto friends from college, but my behaviour when drunk became more erratic, including running around the backyard naked when guests came over for dinner (I still can’t figure that one out), and getting quite abusive and incoherent on nights out. I was unfaithful and untrustworthy and blackouts were becoming a regular occurrence. More and more I was getting frustrated with my personal and professional life. I started to blame others—luck, fate and circumstance—for the lack of opportunities afforded to me.
At the time, it seemed everyone was getting work in the information technology industry, and so I thought if I got myself on a career ladder, life would level out. Therefore, I signed up to do a programming course through FÁS, and half way through was offered a job as a computer programmer with a new startup company, which is just as well because I would have failed the course hands down had I stayed. My only contribution to the company was producing their annual pantomime, after which they realised I was no threat to Bill Gates and had to let me go. I began substitute teaching, mostly primary schools, and enjoyed the short days and lack of ongoing responsibility life as a replacement teacher brought with it. I also began to write articles and started to be published on a regular basis for the Irish Examiner, after the editor there, Tim Vaughan, took a punt on me. The media world was an attractive one, with liquid lunches and brewery launches still a feature of the scene. I got pally with a few editors who had the use of company credit cards, and long afternoons often turned into two-day binges. And yet no one at any point told me to cut down on my drinking. There was lots of other advice about getting a qualification or perhaps rethinking my domestic situation, but never once did someone refer to my drinking as cause for concern.
Several years in, the relationship with the mother of my child ended; I moved into an apartment I clearly couldn’t afford, and lost myself in weekly drinking sprees and a replaying of my adolescence. I began dabbling in the music industry, and set up a company to promote acts around the country. I took particular interest in securing the drinks rider for the acts I was promoting, far more than in helping cultivate their rhythm. The lifestyle I fell into meant I was on the road four or five nights a week, which in turn gave me further licence to drink on a daily basis and be paid for it. My personality began to take on a nasty, ego-driven and arrogant slant.
On one occasion I was responsible for promoting a gig in a venue in the southeast, and had booked into a plush five-star castle after, where a girl I had met in a nightclub a few weeks earlier was to join me. It was all pie-in-the-sky stuff, running before crawling and all that. I had a meagre income, had probably lost my shirt on that night’s gig, and there I was splashing out on an overnight in a plush resort. It was all about the pretence. A few drinks after the gig had ended, we headed for the hotel, which was accessible only by a private car ferry. A night porter had been waiting all night for us to arrive and once we approached the quay, the ferry began moving across the bay to meet us. The both of us were well tanked and the night was foggy so we drove towards the water’s edge, except we misjudged it, and suddenly the car began filling with water. We scrambled out the back windows, up to our knees in muck and estuary water. The girl I was with had to call her ex-husband, who in turn called the car insurance company and organised for the vehicle to be towed out of the river. We arrived in the castle, dripping wet, covered in mud, demanding champagne. I thought I had arrived.
Throughout this period relations with my son were occasional at best and indifferent at worst. My finances were shambolic and I began to borrow heavily from the banks to support my fledgling music business. The Celtic Tiger was roaring loudly and financial institutions were only too happy to hand out loans based on the ski
mpiest of business plans. One bank manger in Cork signed off on a sizeable overdraft without needing me to call into the bank in person! I don’t want it to sound like I’m blaming my financial mess-ups on the banking sector, but the fact is they were looser with the money than at probably any other time in the history of the State. Then again, I could be very convincing. The apartment I was renting ended in acrimony when I missed payments and moved into a shared house. The next two years were a haze of weeklong drinking sprees, all-night parties, and increasing loathing and self-hate. My parents had to bail me out of the music industry when I accrued debts to the tune of €20,000. My drink of choice was often double tequilas and pineapple juice, accompanied by steadily increasing amounts of cocaine and Ecstasy, often mid-week. Journalism offered me some level of income, but I was frequently behind on bills and child maintenance payments, and often missed deadlines and turned up at interviews the worse for wear. I passed it off by pretending I could turn things around at any moment if I really, really wanted.
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