For some reason I had never been to a multiplex cinema and on the fourth or fifth day of being dried out in Hampshire, it was decided that Rose, her friend Viola and their mothers and I would go and watch Shrek at the Basingstoke multiplex. I was, from the first moment, certain that someone would arrest me for being with normal people. Rose then ordered a medium-sized popcorn and I knew that I was very unwell indeed. A thing the size of a filing cabinet was placed in Rose’s slender arms. I asked the person behind the counter what large looked like and there passed across his features the terrible boredom of having to explain things in the real world to leftovers from the dusty old world. We sat in ogre-seats, each the size of a small car. I had Rose next to me who explained to me the quotations from other, classic, movies. Later in the day Rose was kind enough to opine, ‘I think you’re getting better, Claude.’ At that stage in her life her voice was very much like that of the Queen. Her part in my recovery is inexpressible because that child put her trust in me.
Of course no alcoholic is being honest if he or she denies that there were those radiant moments of connection with what felt like the truth and a clean vision deep down into it. William James catches it in The Varieties of Religious Experience:
The next step into mystical states carries us into a realm that public opinion and ethical philosophy have long-since branded as pathological, though private practice and certain lyric strains of poetry seem still to bear witness to its ideality. I refer to the consciousness produced by intoxicants and anaesthetics, especially by alcohol. The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites and says yes. It is, in fact, the great exciter of the yes faculty in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognise as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what, in its totality, is so degrading a poisoning.
When I was about thirty-two I went on a book programme with Allan Massie and P.D. James in Glasgow; it was for telly, and I’m scared stiff of that. Each was asked to recommend a favourite book. I had just finished reading The Drinker by Hans Fallada. If I had obeyed it, I should not have had to live it to its dregs. It is the stony truth about drink for those who have alcoholism as I have it. It takes genius to write of altered states and how they feel, so that the sober reader may enter the state he has very probably never known. Are such passages ever written by non-alcoholics? One thinks of the writers of such sustained and convincing accounts as The Lost Weekend or Under the Volcano.
I wake up quite often in the night in white dread. Drunks are prone to what are called ‘drinking dreams’. One of my worst drinking dreams reproduces an evening at a private house in Smith Square at which I entertained Simon Sebag-Montefiore and John Stefanidis on Simon’s Anglicanism. He is, of course, a Jew. Neither of these men is crazy about fat mad enormous noisy women; they are used to the most groomed, elegant and pliant women the world may offer. The relief on waking to discover that at my bedside are no bottles of red wine, none of vodka, not a trail of sick, and no blood in the bed is great. I have as many gaucheries, madnesses and fugues as any other drunk. When I hear of some shit who has taken advantage of this looseness in my memory and suggested that we may have been intimate, I add it to my files. You will recall St Elizabeth who, when asked what she had in her basket by a superior who was growing weary of her good deeds, replied, ‘Only roses’, though in fact she was bearing bread rolls to distribute among the poor. So once, caught terribly short on Lexington Avenue, very late at night and unable to find the keys of my sweet old-fashioned hosts, I peed into my Accessorize evening bag. No trace at all in the morning; a miracle. The great thing I mind about having been drunk is the imprecision and boringness that descend and, should one sink further, the self-pity that is the worst of self, in the guise of a lament and in my case, at any rate, a keening for all the dead and all the living who will be dead.
Of course there were lovely funny things that felt like being fully alive, things like chatting with Jerry Hall, in her off the shoulder turquoise Chanel leather mini-dress and matching shoes, about our shared problems with long hair. I told her that, at her recommendation in Vogue, I’d put Hellmann’s Mayonnaise on mine when I was at boarding school and she ratified my suspicion that models are brilliant at teases when asked goofy questions by magazines.
A magazine carried a small intelligent piece on me in which I was described as a ‘party-goer’. It was almost then that I folded up on going to parties, folding myself ever smaller and smaller as with the impossible origami trick, until I was so infolded that I went out not at all, my character as apparently hard but actually layered and latent as a tree peony’s balled bud before it braves its own revelation. You can never prove that you don’t go out; it’s a self-defeater.
I suspect that there is a certain amount of old-school-tie snobbery about which place dried you out and which place is tougher than the other. I am certainly prone to it when I hear that softies at The Priory have televisions or rooms to themselves, or are allowed out for un supervised walks. That is, you could say I am thoroughly brainwashed and very easily institutionalised. Going to Clouds was more frightening than the first day at school, but with many similarities. If you break the smallest rule you are expelled; these rules seem arbitrary but are life-saving. If you hear of any substance being abused and do not shop the user, you are expelled. It goes against the grain. It goes, in fact, against all sorts of grains, both in soft privately educated people like me and in those who are taking the option of doing time at rehab rather than in Pentonville. There is something repellent, dishonourable, not to mention explicitly forbidden in the traditions of Narcotics and Alcoholics Anonymous, about telling ‘war stories’, as they are known, to civilians.
There is nowhere to hide. Those who find this most difficult are certainly the bulimics and anorexics, whose habit seems to have its teeth into them further even than methadone or alcohol. Heroin is jittery to come off; for about three days people sit around shaking, saying ‘I’m clucking’, which means ‘I’m doing cold turkey.’ Methadone is a dulling brute. Junkies pass a rumour that it was used in the Reich, and derives from the words ‘Method One’; I just don’t know, but it is a slow pig to get off for sure.
The drugs that tell you most sharply that you must have them the minute you’ve got out of the place that is protecting you from them appear to be methamphetamine sulphate and crack. Speedballs, once had, are never forgotten. Speedball bores are like orgasm bores. You can’t convey it unless you can.
You have to have got to the bitter end of your using if you want to recover. Only desperation has the energy required in order to stay clean and dry, as the spooky, infantile words have it.
What I never got used to was that people were expelled or ran away with terrific expedition, so that the cast of characters in rehab–normally around thirty–changed all the time. Very few people lasted the whole six weeks and any of us who did were told that only one of us would be alive in five years’ time from among the thirty or so.
I grew attached to a beautiful heroin addict called John who’d been a pimp and had found his sister self-garrotted when he was a small child. He said that on the outside he’d have rolled me in thirty seconds. He meant robbed, burgled, what have you. He was fascinated by what I ate, particularly salad and olives. He kept telling me that they’d be no good for me at all and what I needed was a Big Mac. He spoke of a Big Mac in terms of such descriptive brilliance that he might have been describing the Warwick Vase. One day I gave him a physal
is fruit that my daughter had brought for me. Of course I didn’t tell him its proper name or he’d have said, ‘You’re having me on; you can’t call fruit after the pox.’ I told him it was called a golden berry, which it sort of is in a merchandising way. There was one room where we were encouraged to mix, write our diaries of events throughout the day and hold meetings. It was the old drawing room of Clouds House, a long chunkily elegant room with desks and wipeable furniture. It was a visiting Sunday, deep into my stay at Clouds. The vicar really was circulating; it was teatime. I gave John my delicious golden berry to try.
‘FUCK, FUCK, FUCK,’ he screeched. ‘FUCKING BITCH IS TRYING TO POISON ME. IT’S YOU THAT’S THE VILLAIN ROUND HERE.’ Only a really big bar of Fruit and Nut went even half the way in convincing him that I was innocent.
In a rehabilitation centre, the currency is cigarettes and milk chocolate. Bizarrely, I met no regular user of heroin who didn’t inveigh against putting white sugar in your tea or coffee, explaining that brown was much healthier. Nor was this an in-joke; it was in deadly earnest. Same with bread.
We slept in dormitories, rose to and were run by shaken hand-bells, and were allocated chores according to the length of our trembly new sobriety. To a person who hasn’t washed for months, the sense of achievement in being promoted from dusting to cleaning up the hot drinks room is extraordinary. The first real faculty to return seems to be vanity and in its wake, not far afterwards, the instinct to, if not have sex, flirt a bit and find someone special among the crowd. This is entirely forbidden; when people are seen to be fraternising too much solely with one another it is systematically broken up, even at the level of friendship. During my time there were a few lightning conductors for all this loose lust, including a thrillingly tattooed Irish traveller who looked like a silver wolf, and a lap dancer whose loveliness was vitiated by the low price she put on herself. Hardly ever have I known a girl so in need of love and so incapable of understanding it save through the giving of sexual services. She could not remember a time before penetrative paternal abuse. She would sit at a table and one would wonder why all the boys were clustered round the table. She was, as it were, doing phone sex so that they could all then rush out of the room and wank. She had the face of a singing angel or a sex doll, mouth always open. She could not get my name right so she made me new ones every day, which pleased me. She was obviously used to the notion of confected names since her own was Benice, pronounced to rhyme with Denise; goodness alone knows what it was in fact.
She and I went together to church on the last Sunday in Lent. She asked me the meaning of many of the pictures in the stained glass. She had not heard the story of the crucifixion or of the resurrection. How had she avoided them? It was easy to imagine her in the garden, astonished by the man who was not the gardener. She had such space for belief and intelligence in her neglected life. She had a craving to be a mother because she had so much love to give and so much redress, she felt, to take; it was she who felt guilty at the abuse she’d suffered. She would plan how she would knit little outfits for her child–always a daughter–and she cooed over all the pictures of our children that those among us lucky enough to be mothers whipped out at any opportunity.
It was impossible not to be chuffed by attention from such a lovely being. She was being visited at weekends by an individual pretending to be a relation who was actually taking from her, repeatedly among the trees after Sunday tea, the thing she was used to giving. She hated him, but she gave him what he wanted: ‘I went around the world, Italian, French, fucking Russian, the lot. Who cares?’ she’d ask. He sent her children’s clothes to wear while he was doing it. Crystal meth was her drug.
Only two of us didn’t smoke and I am embarrassed to say that sometimes I took up smoking just to escape my fellow middle-class, healthy-lunged goody-goody. I think that what I could not bear in him is what I possessed so much of myself: the element of hysterical control. He was a high-achieving professional whose recourse to spirits had driven him to shove a knife through his wife. Each of us in that place was trying to find the reason why and how not to, not ever again. To deny the metaphysical aspect of this would be to deny the subconscious.
I’m trying to think what questions people ask about rehabilitation centres that I can usefully answer. If they are considering going to one the questions are all about what you are allowed to take in with you. I can only speak for myself. I was allowed to take no books, no personal sound system (not that I have one), no radio, no aerosols, no razor blades, no nail clippers, no scissors, and had to surrender to the nurses my scent and lotions in case I was moved to drink them. After a few weeks, I was allowed a squirt every morning of my scent and this luxury, having been withheld, became the morning’s grand bouquet.
When you arrive at a rehabilitation clinic a photograph is taken of you, for which you prepare to pose by, on the whole, being completely blootered, off your face, since it is the addict’s logic that if you are going to get clean, you might as well get truly dirty first. As it happened, I was only half intoxicated in my mugshot because of the good work my family had done, but I was still incapable of sitting still, incapable of walking, and drinking litres and litres of Diet Coke and water, and I was seeing things, scuttling, swarming, inbreeding. Five days after having had a drink, when my blood was taken, it was still well over the limit where it is legal to drive. I could have been used to start a fire.
There is nothing amateurish about the medical care at Clouds, and it is to the doctor there that I owe a blessed clarification he made for me. For years, doctors had been telling me that I was depressed and ‘self-medicating’ with alcohol. I knew I was not depressed. I was sad. Sad things had happened, one after the other. I did not fail to respond to beauty, I did not hate life, I did not want to be dead. Or, and it is the crucial golden ‘or’, I did not feel depressed unless I had been drinking. It was drinking that made me depressed, not drinking that ‘cured’ my depression. I was pleased that the doctor realised that matters were this way round because he could see that I was in good faith when I said that I could no longer drink and stay alive and that I wanted, more than anything, to be sober.
In my dormitory were a gorgeous pregnant crack-head, a sad girl who didn’t think there was anything wrong with her, and a methadone addict who later duped me into lending her ten quid, which was an expellable offence, but the Board of Trustees agreed that I was so dopey that I was hardly culpable and had probably really just been doing her a kindness, as I thought. Clouds is not smart. It is run by a charitable foundation. Many of its inmates are not paying for themselves.
The beds are just beyond camp beds, the blankets are nylon, the sheets polycotton, the rooms are stuffed with addicts and there are never enough beds. Talking after lights out is discouraged. Fraternisation between the sexes is forbidden. The nursing station and the smoking room and the room where hot drinks are made remain open all night. Hot drinks acquire fetishistic significance. When you enter a rehabilitation facility you are given a mug on which, with your shaky hand and some nail varnish, you write your name. For us, this was perhaps to be the seed of a future responsibility for our own lives, looking after a single mug. Hot drinks become all that drugs and drink were. People try new combinations and on the coveted Saturday afternoon shopping hour in Shaftesbury that is allowed at the end of your stay, you see your peers looking crazily for new ginseng, apricot, strawberry, redcurrant and vanilla teas. My own great discovery was high-fat Horlicks with extra milk. I broke a rule and took it to bed with me. In order to encourage healthy eating, there was a bowl of fruit out at all times in the main room. The only fruit my peers liked was bananas. They did diverting rude dances with them and didn’t think they were as disgusting as normal fruit, so I got my pick every week of apples, pithy oranges and tall, woody pears. The hero in the daily life of such a place is the cook. Day after day, with the help of whoever was on kitchen duty that day, the cook produced four or five options because, of course, there’s nothing like an
addict for saying he’s allergic to gluten, nuts, chilli or what have you. As in, ‘The smack never done me no harm, it was all the take-aways. I can’t take rice.’
There was something beautiful, too, about seeing those who had been close to death regain, literally, an appetite. And God those skeletons ate. It was the crack addicts, the speedball users and the heroin addicts who just had to have puds, and every day our giant of a cook produced all the old-school favourites and then fruit salad for poofs like me. It was one of the shocks of body modification that I received when I was in Clouds, that probably half the girls in there had had boob jobs. But was it surprising to be able to abuse your body in this way (and who am I to be priggish about that?) when you had felt able to swallow fifteen condoms full of cocaine? When the girls got better, which took about three weeks–as short as that–each planned a new life, in almost every case, without the man inhabiting her old life. He would frequently be her dealer or pimp, often too the father of her children. The girls looked to a purer future, all except one who seemed already to be resigned completely to death. She was beautiful, loved, in her early twenties, affluent to boot, and very bored indeed. It is a sad reason to resign from life.
With the boys, it was the other way about; they’d got straight now and they wanted to get back to the old lady and straighten her out too. Invariably they wanted to stay in the relationships they found themselves in, unless, that is, they found new relationships in Clouds. We were attended by male nurses and male and female counsellors. The day began at 6.30, we hauled on the comfortable and loose-fitting clothes that the list of what to bring had recommended, and hurtled or hobbled down to whichever room was designated to our group. There was no doubt a more than quasi-religious element to the day. We would listen to a reading, go to breakfast, say grace. To be chosen to say grace was a privilege. Sometimes people would have gone in the night, having been found with gear or trying to escape. We cleared away breakfast, a mysterious meal for me because the dying girl could put back a packet of Cheerios and one of Frosties, and still she looked like death. A slight rivalry grew up between myself and a really handsome blond junkie who said his legs were murder weapons and he could kick a man to death. He kept a place for me at breakfast every morning, which I loved him for, but I knew one reason why. Every week I would try to get my Sunday visitors to bring hotter and hotter mustards and Linton could always beat me when it came to either putting them up your nose or eating them off the spoon. So we were getting our capsaicin high. While he spoke to me often of the beauty of needles, I just couldn’t be tempted to mainline mustard and I didn’t see how we could get any works here. Anyway, I’m scared of needles, but, peculiarly, the really needle-fixated junkies will tell you that they are scared of needles too, just like alkies ‘not liking the taste’. It is a complicated business that these poor counsellors are there to unknot. As a rule, they have ‘been there’, which creates trust and an ambition to emulate that is again–has to be–infantile. Counsellors go at it simply because what they seek is emotional truth, which is far plainer than all the distractions like class and milieu. After our morning’s group work in which I hid and said nothing at all for some weeks, allowing the others to fill in questionnaires about my character which were pretty spot on (‘this person is full of fear’), we had lunch and then optional creative work or exercise or other organised pastimes. I painted a bit but I saw at once that not my facility but the truth was required and that I was just making pretty marks on bits of paper. One of the sweetest inmates was a professional graphic artist who hoarded Marmite, since Marmite is famous for rehabilitating your liver. He shambled like a man with chains on his legs and his feet were too painful for shoes after all the superlager and methadone; yet every word he spoke was beautiful sense. He died shortly after leaving Clouds.
What to Look for in Winter Page 27