Wasted

by Brian O'Connell

  Drink with me was pints at that time. There are lots of photographs of me including a really famous one on the cover of a particular album with a pint of Guinness in front of me. The second album also. I would sing with a pint of Guinness on stage, but really it was only pints at that stage. That was totally the image I was projecting. The first time I had a gin and tonic I was thirty. I hung with people who were well known for it already in the trade, like the Pogues and Nick Cave and stuff like that. I remember once being interviewed for the New Musical Express (NME) in England and the publicist or manager knew I had been drinking champagne the night before, so he asked if I had any champagne left. He suggested it would be a great idea if I walked down with it in the morning. I said, ‘Ah ya no problem,’ and I did it. One of the other pictures they asked me to do was to lie down outside in the street with my head in the double yellow lines in the road. What the fuck! I did it. I was a wild fucking woman with a vocabulary like the backside of a loo door and a voice like bleeding cherries. So I became known for the boozy image.

  I didn’t realise until the later years, and going into the Rutland Centre, how much damage I had done to my kids. Everybody I knew, all the mothers, at that time all drank at weekends. I remember going to a bar called the Summit, when I lived in Howth, nineteen or twenty years ago. I’d [go] for a few pints in the evening after school, maybe a pint of lager or two, and let the kids run around. Go home then and do the homework and then the dinner. And these are in normal times, now, and maybe later at night you’d walk down for a few more pints. It wasn’t until I started buying drink for my house that I knew it was a problem, which I had never done up a certain period of my life. This was in the 1980s—maybe 1989.

  I was abused horribly when I was a child and I done an awful lot of work in that area. It wasn’t until I accepted it that things began to ease. Looking back on my drinking, I think there was no other way I could have coped. I used drink to hurt myself and it wasn’t until I realised how much I was hurting other people that I stopped, when I had some sort of decency left in me. I was hurting myself because I was a bad, bad person.

  That abuse had left me with an intrinsic self-hate. I used to say I was lower than lino, that I was a worm. I had felt like that since I was about seven. I had felt depressed, and had attempted suicide. I was locked up in a nuthouse when I was sixteen. There was a fact there I hadn’t acknowledged. I’m not saying it was the reason I drank, but there was this feeling of being worthless. It wasn’t until I addressed that that I could actually say goodbye to drink.

  Now, I haven’t had a drink for about fifteen years. I had been to several treatment centres but the Rutland Centre was my salvation. I don’t know if it was the time or circumstance; I was thirty-seven when I started there. I was so bad that I couldn’t go there from the hospital, and I wasn’t allowed home either. Nobody wanted me home. It was really the end of the road, and it worked because even though I did initially think about ‘Will I ever be able to drink again?’ when I was laying on that hospital bed on my own. What prevented it was the fucking shame of it and what I had done to my daughter Claire. I spent her second Christmas in an Accident and Emergency ward and they all came in to see me on Christmas Day. Her second birthday I was down in a nuthouse and let out for the afternoon. The inability to connect with her was probably the most painful experience of my life.

  I was listening to my three eldest children in the Rutland Centre every Wednesday when they had to come in and I never knew they felt so bad about me drinking socially. When they were little, Eóin, my son, was saying how lonely he felt. Eóin is twenty-eight now. How lonely he felt when myself and the mothers I used to hang around with would throw them a mineral and a bag of crisps and let them run around the car park up at the pub. He really felt lonely and felt scared. One time I drove home and he thought I was going to get them killed in the car. I had to sit there and listen to that. And listen, also, to my daughter tell how she used to listen outside the bedroom. Because I used to drink in a spare room and I had a mattress on the floor there and she used to listen out to see if I was alive. I slapped my daughter once, because she was pouring my last bottle of vodka down the sink. I got really angry with her and hit her a belt. When you’re in treatment, and if you look at that shit every single week for six weeks and you have to listen to them saying it over and over again. I had a wonderful therapist there. She was the greatest bitch on two feet and I hated her but she sorted me out! After the first family day in the Rutland, she asked me the next morning, ‘How do you feel?’ I said, ‘Oh, grand.’ And in front of everyone she started screaming at me. ‘How could you feel grand, because I listened to your kids yesterday.’ That’s when it started. They were making me look at what I had done and it clicked with me. Yet I came out of the Rutland Centre and I went home and drank. I don’t remember what I drank but I do remember that my partner found me passed out on the kitchen floor. I don’t remember how I got the vodka, or going for it. I phoned the Rutland Centre and went back out there straight away and did one-to-one counselling, which lasted for a long, long time.

  It was only then I started to address all the things I hadn’t told them in there, about me and what happened to me as a kid and how I had felt all my life. I was dealing, really, with being ashamed for my kids when I was in there, and I hadn’t dealt with the shame of me.

  I haven’t had any drink all my life since then.

  When I came out, I hated everyone with drink. I hated them because I couldn’t drink with them. I was left babysitting a lot of the time while everyone went to the pub because I couldn’t stand going to the pubs. I was very good friends with people who had children and we always had a social dinner on a Sunday and I began to resent people for drinking the first year I was out. About three years on I was driving through Dalkey. In my past, I used to drink in the car an awful lot. I would buy drink and drink it in the car. A few times I drove into Dublin to the early house near Pearse Station. I used to go and get drink also in the Spar in the morning. They would open at seven o’clock and a guy in there did me a favour and I’d buy a bottle of port and down it before I called the kids for school in the morning. Nobody would know. My favourite tipple in the car was a bottle of rosé. I would put a straw into it and drink it. So one day, I rang the Rutland Centre from a particular harbour which was one of my favourite drinking sites, and I pulled in the car. The car filled up with gin and tonic. I could smell Gordon’s Gin. I could see the bottle, I could smell the ice and smell the lemon and smell the tonic water. I rang the Rutland and I said to my counsellor, Maura, ‘I’m never going to drink again.’ I said to her, ‘Can I say that?’ She said, ‘You can, if you really want to.’ So I said, ‘I’m never going to drink again, never ever.’ And that was it.

  So I’m at peace with it now. I was in a very nice part of Italy doing a gig a few years ago and the promoter said to me, ‘This is where that great rosé wine comes from,’ and I brought two special bottles home for Christmas dinner for the family. So I was comfortable doing that. I have only gotten respect from people since giving up. I think because from very early on I was upfront and public and my drinking. I did huge interviews with the Irish Times and with Mike Murphy on the radio. That was probably one of the best interviews I have ever done in my life—it was an hour long and I did the whole show with him about drinking. I felt it was that shame of being a mother and alcoholic and I had met so many from treatment. You feel like such a scumbag . . . [A] lot of the men in AA also, I felt, looked down at women. They were just the men having pints on the way home. All my drinking was done at home. I rarely went out to the pub in my last two years of drinking. I drank constantly at home and I think I did the publicity to get rid of the awful shame of it and to say, ‘Well, this is it, and it is a disease.’ And the only thing you don’t have to do is to drink to cure it and deal with it. All that time I was dealing with it in all those interviews I did. I was very, very public about it and it was a kind of a deterrent also. But I felt I have enjoyed
every moment since and everything I have learned about who I am and the relationship with the family changes and the codependents come out of the wall. They find it harder to live with it than I did. I think that’s why I had to leave my husband. He would have drunk every single day for all of the years I lived with him while I was sober, which was about ten years.

  I cried on occasions when he was opening really expensive bottles of wine. The guy I live with now is from New Zealand—a great outdoors type—and never drank. He had a few beers with the family at sixteen or seventeen and that was it and it’s no big deal. It’s great to have a relationship with someone where drink doesn’t enter their lives. Because in the past it was a nightly dinner thing. I had often cooked dinner for fifteen people on a Sunday afternoon and woke up on a Monday morning and had to clear the table after all the drink and cigarettes. So that was not going to last.

  The pain and isolation that people are feeling, that’s why they drink, I think. Carl Jung wrote the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and I read him a lot. I did a ten-week course and was going to go on and do addiction counselling but I didn’t have time; the career started off again. He speaks of it as being a disease, which means ill at ease with your psyche. He talks about alcohol and drug addiction and depression as being various stages of being ill at ease with your spirituality and your physicality, your emotions. It’s about being split off from things, and that’s where I was, right smack bang in the middle of that. My children would have inherited that so by the time they were ten, I was emotionally unavailable to them.

  I don’t think it helped my career, the fact I was sober. But I think that for the first time in my life since I stopped drinking I am only now realising what it’s like to be really sober in my head. I have a new manager, Jools Holland’s manager, and am playing the Sydney Opera House in August. I have the greatest records I’ve ever made out. I have broken every connection with the past, including my husband. I might not be up there in lights, but everywhere I go I still have a career. It’s much smaller than it was and much more manageable and much more fulfilling than it was. Now I go into clubs with three hundred or four hundred people and love every minute of it. I’m glad I’m an alcoholic because I might never have gotten to this level of understanding of myself and the rest of humanity or the humanity within my sphere of living. And I certainly have compassion for people out there that I never would have had beforehand.

  If you’re asking me what I think of Ireland, I think this country is fucked and it has been for a very long time. And whether it is TV or computer games or the pub, Ireland has gone through this huge identity crisis. It came when we joined the EEC, and we had to shake off the Church and we had to shake off all the shame and we had to acknowledge it.

  They say there was seven hundred years of oppression by the Brits but the real oppression was done by our own. I do feel that there is a collective unconscious and I do feel the country hurts.

  There was abuse in my family, abuse in my parents’ family, and I do believe I have called time on it now because I have confronted all my demons.

  It’s always better to talk it out. So many people are in denial in Ireland. I know personally people who have tried to stop coroners’ reports. There are an awful lot of deaths that are drink-related and not reported. Lot of heart attacks, brain injuries, and [a] lot of it is alcohol abuse. I don’t think the government can do anything about Ireland’s way of drinking. It’s a cultural thing. I know when you’re seventeen, and there’s drinking in your family and you’re emotionally fragile. I don’t think anybody can do anything about it. I don’t think banning drink or putting up the price does anything. Kids have to find their own way. Addiction, as far as I’m concerned, is a huge personal pain people have and what they do to bury pain is to use, food, alcohol, and drugs. Anything that removes you from reality and become overused and keeps you from thinking about your life.

  My kids know and I’ve talked to them about it and my fears. I suppose I’m very excited about Cian. I was sober for three years before he was born and he is twelve now and he’s going into secondary school in September. To be quite honest, I’m looking forward to it as much as he is, because I’m going to be there physically, mentally and emotionally all the way this time. I have worried about my kids feeling lonely and abandoned. I drank on that for years and felt guilty about that and remained fucked up about it. A fella said to me one night in the Rutland Centre in an aftercare group, having been there for two years—‘Get off the fucking cross, Mary.’ His point was, whatever I had done was over with and I had to get on with now.

  I swear to Jesus I have a life beyond my wildest dreams and I don’t go to AA. I discovered scuba diving when I was forty-eight. Horse-riding. There’s a new man in my life. I have grandchildren. Looking forward to building a house, looking at a site. All that stuff.

  The first time I went on holidays I remember it was a little difficult and the last holiday I had with my husband was particularly difficult because I knew we were going to split up. I’ll never forget him drinking wine on our holidays and that was really difficult. I work really hard at things now. But it’s only in the last four or five years that I have been able to reap the rewards.

  The at-home drinking in the last few years has been huge. I know people who have built bars in their houses. And they are now staying home more and they say it’s because of the recession and so on. I think it’s because people are hurting. There is going to be a huge thing of drinking at home, and women have always drank at home anyway.

  I remember growing up, even, there were two women who were absolutely stunning on our road. We were never let into their houses, and I found out when I was in my twenties that it was because they were alcoholics. Lovely-looking women and very well kept, and I had no idea. I remember when I was living in Howth and I had a few women friends and we used to drink and the question did come up an odd time, ‘Do you think we’re fucking alcoholics?’ We did drink a lot, very rare an evening would go by and you didn’t have three pints. And where that wasn’t going to rip anyone apart, it was the beginning of it. And you get progressively worse. I remember not sleeping one night because of the jitters and getting into the car and driving in to the early house. So that’s where it leads you.

  With the AA meetings I had planned to do everything I was told to do, so ninety meetings in ninety days. If you had told me to jump off a house I would have done it. Some days I went to two meetings and really felt the need for them. It was just for the connection, and I loved the aftercare group. Anything to do with pain and grit and real soul-searching I loved. I’m not knocking AA. If this is what people need to get over their addiction then that’s fine. I just didn’t want to stay sober, I wanted to find out why I drank in the first place and find out what would keep me away from it for the rest of my life without saying this bullshit of ‘One day at a time and I’m Mary and I’m an alcoholic and so on’. I didn’t believe that. I had a public forum, though, and I did engage with that and it was cathartic for me and I did it. I did go to AA for a long, long time at lunch and in the evenings. I still go because of the social element. A lot of the women I know in New Zealand I have met through AA. There’s a huge difference going to AA in other countries. In Sydney, the AA there is like counselling sessions; it’s not just surface stuff. But it’s easier not to drink there too. I think the scene in Ireland now is really, really bad drinking, more so than ever. I saw a girl one night, when I was coming up through Temple Bar, and she was on a bollard and she had a skirt on up her arse and every bastard that passed her out on the street was having a feel off her. She was puking her guts out. I went over and asked her if she was okay and she told me to fuck off. It was so depressing. I was doing a show in the Olympia and had to walk back through Temple Bar six nights a week. Monday night not so bad, Tuesday night okay too. Thursday, Friday, Saturday—give me a fucking break. Vomit everywhere and that was in the height of the Celtic Tiger in 2002.

  I know a lot of artists ta
lk about needing drink after shows. I remember once finding it hard to sleep and sharing it at an AA meeting in Bray. The reply was ‘No one ever died from lack of sleep!’ And it’s true. I never worried about the effect not drinking would have on my creativity. The only person who worried about it was my ex-husband.

  He felt I wouldn’t be any craic any more. But I’m the best craic now; I have just finished a tour and got an email back from the band saying they really enjoyed every minute of it.

  They were all having a drink and I was buying them a drink after the show. They could have one drink before the gig and none on stage and they are my rules. They all know now, as well, the difference between a drunken musician and a sober one is a huge benefit.

  I don’t buy the drunk artist thing. Shane MacGowan’s thing is the most depressing and disgusting scene. I hate all the people around him for doing what they’re doing and I know most of them. Shane MacGowan and myself and Nick Cave used to do it to the best of our ability in dressing rooms after gigs. Huge bags of cocaine and huge bottles of drink and pills. Shane is the only one carrying on that lifestyle. People have died in his company, some very young. I was singing in the church at one funeral and in the middle of the thing in came Shane and slithered to the back of the church. I have no time for anybody like that. I have compassion but I have no time for the people who he hangs around with. I did a huge tour with the Pogues and sang every night Kirsty McColl couldn’t do. I did the most frightening gig of my life at Brixton Academy and all those people jumping up and down completely out of their minds. It was fucking horrible. I sang with him at the Point and at the Olympia. And I thought, what the fuck are you doing here, Mary, do you really need this kind of shit in your life? It was all this give him a bottle, give him this give him that, get him on stage, wipe up his vomit. Maybe it’s just too close to the bone, but I can’t stand the people who were around him. What the fuck has he done? The people around him, as far as I’m concerned, are like the people who used to hang around me when I was drinking, fucking leeches and hangers-on, just there for the session. At the height of my fame I was doing seven nights a week in the Mean Fiddler in London and two nights at the Palladium, all in the same month.