The teacup was shaking uncontrollably. Or maybe it was me. I was shivering like I had just been dunked in the Thames in December. I put the thin porcelain cup down into the saucer with the blue swallow pattern and the hot tea splashed over the sides.
“Are you okay, Mr. Tolhurst?” the psychiatrist asked. “Do you want to stop for a moment?”
The nurse and the psychiatrist looked at me with kind but inquisitive eyes as I continued to spill my tea all over the place.
I was holding one shaking hand with the other to try and quell the small tsunamis of liquid, but to no avail. I let go of the cup and I put my shaking hands back in my lap. I noticed the doctor write something in his notepad and then he cleared his throat.
“I’m going to give you a set of numbers to remember, okay?”
I nodded in confirmation, hoping to look nonchalant.
“Okay, 1337. Just remember those numbers. We’ll come back to them later.” He smiled a sort of fatherly smile, but I was probably only a few years younger than him, so I didn’t take him that seriously. My eyes darted around the room, which was a pale primrose color. They say that yellow is the best color for healing and recovery, which is probably why a lot of hospitals have yellow walls.
I’d already correctly answered several questions concerning the current prime minister, the president of the United States, and my age. These were the sort of questions they asked of brain-damaged patients, and I supposed they were trying to see just how much harm I had done to myself.
Meanwhile, I kept repeating the number in my head like a mantra while the doctor gave instructions to the nurse.
“ . . . milligrams of Librium and a vitamin shot daily.”
He turned to me and explained that the shaking was caused by delirium tremens. He needn’t have bothered. I knew what the DTs were and that they came with a vengeance when I hadn’t had a drink for a while. The doctor closed his notebook and put it back in his little black bag. He motioned to the young woman.
“The nurse will answer any other questions you may have and see that you’re comfortable. I’ll see you tomorrow. Good day, Mr. Tolhurst.”
With that he turned to leave, but at the last moment he swiveled slowly round in what must have been a well-practiced move, part of his medical repertoire.
“So those numbers I gave you a while back? . . .”
I opened my mouth and in a small little boy’s voice I barely recognized as my own I said, “Er, one, three, three . . . seven!”
I beamed triumphantly, but my joy was short-lived, as I saw the sadness reflected in the young doctor’s eyes as he looked at my face. The nurse also left and she closed the door behind her with a swish. I was finally alone for the first time since my arrival at the detox unit for the chemically dependent in the Lister Hospital on Chelsea Bridge Road, London. It was 1988.
The gigs at Wembley were a dim memory as we assembled at Boris’s house in the Devon countryside to record demos for what would become the album Disintegration. We had a session to play our home demos, and we all sat around and gave each other’s songs marks out of ten. Then, later on that year before Robert and Mary’s wedding, we had a longer session at Boris’s house to record the demos we’d selected for the album.
In between these two sessions I decided I should try to do something about my drinking problem. My neighbor, an Australian lady, had a suggestion.
“Lol, I have a doctor I see sometimes. Perhaps he can help you?”
By this time I was quite terrified when I woke up each day. If I started to drink, I couldn’t tell what was going to happen and how the day would turn out. I had absolutely no control over myself.
I made an appointment to see the doctor, Campbell was his name, and he had some very nice offices in Harley Street, which, of course, is the premier address if you’re a doctor in England.
“So, Mr. Tolhurst, how might I help you?” Dr. Campbell asked after a few perfunctory medical questions. I described in detail the events of the past few years and how erratic my behavior had become while under the influence of alcohol.
“Well,” he said, looking up from his notes, “you have all the symptoms of an alcoholic. You are right inside the bottle and we need to get you out.”
Alcoholic? I knew I had a drinking problem, but I wasn’t an alcoholic. I had heard of such things, of course, but I didn’t really see how they applied to me. My father, now there was an alcoholic.
The doctor patiently explained to me what he meant and then dropped the bomb on me.
“You need to go to detox first and then we can see about rehab.”
“Er, when?” I asked nervously.
“How about this afternoon?”
That hit me hard. I was in denial about the seriousness of my condition, but now I had to face up to the reality of what I was being told. With great reluctance, I agreed to go over to the Lister Hospital.
After I’d been given a vitamin shot, the nurse left and I was in my room at the Lister all by myself. They had given me some Librium earlier, which helped calm me down somewhat, but the effect of the shot was to make my head feel as if it were fizzing inside. When I finally relaxed, I slept.
The next day I was awakened at an early hour by a nurse who informed me that some people from “AA” were coming to see me. I wasn’t sure what that meant, so I nodded noncommittally.
The two chaps who came to my room looked normal and were friendly enough, but what they had to say shocked me.
They were from Alcoholics Anonymous, and they explained how as an alcoholic I had a twofold disease that meant I would never be able to drink again if I wished to have a happy life. If I did, I would end up in jail, an institution, or dead. They also explained that alcoholism was a cunning malady that pretended it wasn’t what it was, even as it led me to insanity.
I thanked them for telling me what was wrong with me, and armed with this information I felt all I had to do was be careful and watch myself for certain signs. If they had recovered, then so could I, and I would be able to control my problem. With pure willpower I could conquer my drinking.
Rather than take the good doctor’s advice and go into rehab, I decided to discharge myself from the Lister after about a week. I felt better, I told myself, now that the fog had lifted and I had the valuable advice the AA people had given me. I would be fine.
That proved to be a bad move.
A really, really bad move.
I stayed sober for a couple of weeks after I got out of the Lister, but I really wasn’t happy about it. I decided to go see my friend Pete at his bar at the end of the street. What was the point of living within walking distance of my friend if I didn’t pay him a visit from time to time?
Pete welcomed me back and gave me the beer I asked for. I hadn’t really told anyone what I was doing, although I had said to Robert and Porl that I was thinking of “going somewhere to get healthy before we get back into the studio.”
They had heard that before. I had gone to a health farm where, at 140 pounds, I puzzled the staff.
“So why are you here, exactly? Your weight is fine.”
I never owned up to the real reason. I just told them that I wanted “a rest,” and I got it. It didn’t really help that much since the place had a bar! They only served organic wine, mind you, but it was a bar nonetheless. I dutifully exercised every morning with a crippling hangover.
The beer tasted good and I didn’t really feel any different. So I had another, then another, and then I saw the abyss open up in front of me and I knew I wasn’t coming back for a while.
We reconvened at Boris’s house in Devon during the late summer for the second Disintegration demo session.
“Boris?” Robert asked with a mischievous gleam in his eye. “How far away is this from here?” He pointed to an advert in the local paper for a pool table for sale.
“Not far,” Boris replied.
“Could we go get it and put it in the hallway?”
“Sure,” said Boris. “I have a trailer. Let’s go.”
We got the pool table that day and put it in Boris’s house. With the beer cellar next door in the old house, it was beginning to look suspiciously like a pub.
Oscar Wilde said, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” The making of Disintegration was to prove this. As the songs got darker and more intense, so did my life.
We moved into Outside Studios at Hook End Manor, which was once the house of the Bishop of Reading and was more recently owned by David Gilmour of Pink Floyd. A beautiful place for me to finally fall apart.
We had developed a penchant for recording in residential places outside of the mainstream. This worked, as we were seldom interrupted, and when the recording was finally done Robert could take the tapes to mix somewhere else.
It was a wonderful idea, recording in the countryside. Unfortunately, I couldn’t appreciate it. My world was getting really small. I spent a great deal of time alone inside my head while Disintegration was being recorded. Slowly coming apart both physically and psychically. Living in a tiny place in my mind.
We would start our days in the middle of the afternoon, and as it was later in the year, there wasn’t much daylight. During the winter in England it tends to get dark about 4 p.m. We would work in the studio until about 8 p.m. and then we would break for dinner, a vast and long affair over which much was talked about and much was drunk. Then we would work until nearly dawn and retire for the night once it was almost day again.
We did this for six days a week for quite a few weeks, with one day to do as we wanted. The trouble with that was that by the time we woke up on our day off, it was not really possible to do much else, as the sun was going down again and it would soon be dark out in the heart of the countryside. The nearest town was Reading, which was not that lively. So we were left to ourselves in Hook End Manor, which meant playing snooker or watching TV.
Outside the studio, the grass and wet brown leaves of the English countryside seemed much darker to me than before. My days were mostly spent in the back of the studio area in a little lounge off the main control room, slumped on slightly worn-out couches of various hues. We’d come such a long way, yet something inside of me couldn’t break free of the mental fog that permeated my very being. I had one or two ideas from our demos that made it onto the record, but the hardest thing for me was to get out of that morass of self-pity that had enveloped me. In my heart I really wanted to contribute to the band I loved, but my spirits were so low there wasn’t much I could do. So I idly sat outside the control room waiting for inspiration to come.
One day Porl’s kind and concerned face interrupted my brooding.
“Bloody hell, Lol, it’s really sad seeing you sit here. You know nobody would mind if you went back to the hospital to sort yourself out.”
“Yeah, I will go back,” I said, “but not until the album is done.” I was in denial about what was wrong with me and believed I could still control what was going on by contributing to The Cure, the group that had been my whole life, but I was starting to resent people intruding in my personal life. It was still my life, wasn’t it?
The long autumn dragged on into the dark end of the album. There was a fire one night at the studio’s living quarters. Robert’s room had caught fire. Half of the fire brigade were volunteers who were in the pub when the alarm was raised. The part-time firemen rushed from the pub onto the truck and over to the burning studio. We all helped them in with their equipment and emergency lights, as all the power had shut down when the fire started. Great clouds of black smoke enveloped the old house as we stood outside in the late-night drizzle waiting for the all-clear to go back in after the firemen had extinguished the blaze.
The whole house smelled of charred wood the next day. Robert’s original room, now a black, burnt mess, was right next to mine with a connecting door. I had felt safe there, like a small child protected from the world, but Robert was now forced to relocate to another room on the other side of the house. Now nobody was next door, and the smell of charred wood permeated my clothes, my hair, everything.
The house felt cold, as all the windows were left open all day and night to rid the air of the smell. I shivered at night in my bed. Every breath I took was tinged with ruin.
The sessions dragged on as the icy winter approached. Now we hardly saw any daylight, as we had started going into the early hours to finish the recording. At dawn one cold morning with the wind whipping through the drafty old manor house, Robert came across me in the kitchen. I had a bottle of whisky in my hand and took a slug. We had been up all night. He looked at me sadly.
“You’re fucking insane! You don’t even like whisky. Each time you take a shot you grimace!”
He shook his head, and whereas before there would have been a grin on his face at his friend’s crazy behavior, now there was that look of sadness and concern. It was as if he could sense the end approaching.
The session wound down and I went back to the new house that I shared with Lydia and our faithful dog, Yarda. It was in Devon in the middle of Dartmoor, a rock-star mansion if ever there was one. I had decided after the fiasco of the last tour that what I really needed was to relocate. That would sort out all my problems, I thought. I figured I wouldn’t have to deal with a city full of people who didn’t understand me if I was out in the countryside. I bought a house right inside the desolate and wild Dartmoor National Park, 220 miles from London. Lonely, miserable, and in glorious solitude, I carried on doing what I had to do, seeking oblivion again and again.
One day, just before Christmas, I got a call from the Fiction office. It was Ita, the de facto manager of the label.
“Robert wants you to come and hear the album mixes with everyone at RAK in London.”
“Okay, I’ll be there.”
I booked my usual hotel and later that week I got on the train. I had never learned to drive because I’d always been driven about from place to place. It was also a convenient excuse for never having to sober up. On the train I looked out of the window during the two-and-a-half-hour journey to London. A single silver birch tree reminded me of the cold but emotional beauty of what we had made during the early days of The Cure, and sadness engulfed me.
I arrived at the studio and came into the control room. Robert was at the desk, pushing up faders, and we all listened to the final mixes of Disintegration. I slumped on the couch at the back of the studio and listened to the music. It was, and is, quite a wonderful album, but I felt very removed from it. This was unbearably painful for me, as I had lived and breathed The Cure since the very beginning. Unfortunately, this was the last time I was to be involved with my childhood friends and bandmates in an artistic fashion for a very long time.
As the night wore on, I visited the small fridge in the studio, which was full of beer, and gradually got more intoxicated. Sometime during the playback, I got up from my seat at the back of the studio and announced to all and sundry that what we were listening to was not really a Cure album.
“Half is good, but half is shit!” I roared. “I mean some songs sound like The Cure but some don’t,” I fell back into my seat with a thump.
Honestly, I don’t really know what I meant. I think I felt so bad that I hadn’t been able to pull it together enough to contribute to the album that I lashed out against it. I’d kept my mouth shut all through the recording process, and now I was going to speak my mind? My timing couldn’t have been worse.
A long, uncomfortable silence ensued while we sat and listened to the rest of the tracks. When it was over, everyone avoided me. When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I ran out into the night, a tearful mess of incoherence.
The next day I awoke with an impending sense of doom that I couldn’t shake off as I tried to piece together the events of the previous night. I had made a terrible mess of what I wanted to say. It wasn’t so much a matter of whether I was right or wrong. We had always been able to express our views without them being taken personally. This time I didn’t think that Robert would be able to brush off my drunken dismissal of an album he’d poured his heart and soul into. I’d finally reached the breaking point.
A simple white envelope with Robert’s handwriting on the front arrived in the post. I didn’t need to open it. I knew what was inside. It had been three weeks since that disastrous night at RAK Studios in London, when I’d fled drunk and crazed into the long dark night.
I’d spent that Christmas holiday waiting for the news to come. Christmas was no longer the fun time I remembered from living in Horley, when I’d spend Christmas Eve at the King’s Head with Robert, Simon, Gary, and all my other friends from home. I’d retreated to a sprawling home on the edge of Dartmoor National Park. The wild and stormy moors were literally right outside my front door. It was a beautiful place, untamed and utterly real. It was the perfect place to quietly break down.
I opened the letter, which had been crisply folded in three parts, and started to read:
“This has been one of the hardest letters to write for me. . . . Either I felt it was too hard or too soft. . . . Everybody in the band says if you come on the next tour they won’t be coming. So you should not come on the tour I am planning. . . . Please don’t build a wall between us but don’t try to change my mind as this decision is not changeable . . . ”
The words swam before my eyes as I took in their meaning: the end of the biggest era of my life, the loss of my second family. I went to the kitchen to inform Lydia what had happened. She stood, looking a little stunned, in our lovely Smallbone kitchen that she’d wanted so badly. It didn’t really seem to matter much now.
Yarda nuzzled my palm and I thought to myself, “I must get out, clear my head. I feel claustrophobic and trapped here.”
I put on my jacket, grabbed the dog leash, announced to Lydia that I’d be back, and slid through the door. I saw Lydia traipsing behind me, but I just wanted to be alone with my thoughts. After a few minutes of walking back and forth in the garden in total silence, I said to Lydia, “You know, I’m going to walk up to the Cleave with the dog.”
Something about my dog’s loyal muteness was comforting, and I think she sensed that I needed a long walk up the craggy hillside. Yarda forged ahead down the muddy, stony path into the dense woods that led up into Lustleigh Cleave, a large rift full of trees that were more like America’s Pacific Northwest than the southwest of England. It’s a place of beautiful tranquillity and space surrounded by large, strange outcroppings of granite stones untouched by human habitation for centuries. Totally timeless.
The dog and I sat on one of the larger rocks overlooking the valley. It was late afternoon and the winter sun was wan and dim through cloud cover. A light mist hung in the valley, and I could feel the slightly sun-warmed rock beneath me. The air, however, was rapidly turning crisp with the setting sun as I stared across the Cleave.
I thought I should feel something, anything, but I didn’t. I just numbly stared into the middle distance. I lay down next to the dog and looked up at the gray sky above as the fog drifted across the moors. A hawk glided high in the sky above, searching for prey.
Then I felt it. A solitary teardrop rolled down my cheek, hot and salty. As if on cue, the heavens opened and the Dartmoor rain started to fall cold and wet. I would have stayed there and let myself be washed away into the granite if I could, but I couldn’t. I had to find my way back, if only for the dog’s sake, who was anxious and shivering now. We walked back to my house and my life—or whatever was left of it.
I did what most alcoholics do in this situation: I took a hostage. I got married to Lydia. The wedding itself was an orgy of grandiose excess. I invited everybody I knew from around the world, and I put them up at my expense in and around my country house in Dartmoor. The Cure, my other family, were on tour the day we got married, so they weren’t there, another reminder of my diminished life. Remarkably, I managed to stay almost sober the day of the wedding, but when I look at the pictures taken that day I see a man whistling in the dark, hoping that this change in his life will be for the better.
That summer I spent all my time at the local pub. I had only been married for a few months and things were not going well. I was either passed out at home or attempting to out-Oliver Oliver Reed at the pub. One day I took my small nieces for a ride on my mower, and I managed to turn the machine over with them onboard, throwing the girls out onto the ground. Miraculously, they were unhurt, but it gave me the horrors to think what might have been a most terrible outcome.
That summer dragged on and I went to see Michael at his house in Sussex. I behaved as drunks do, horribly and shamefully, in the home of one of my oldest friends. The next day I was mortified by my actions, which I only dimly recalled. I was burning bridges left and right.
The following day I returned to Dartmoor on the train and I had an epiphany of sorts. I had always loved traveling by train. It made a mundane journey from A to B so much more exciting, and being able to drink was just the icing on the cake.
That day, however, felt like a waking nightmare as I bounced from carriage to carriage clutching the small bottles I had bought from the little bar on the train. I couldn’t buy enough to drink and carry them back in one go, so I had to make several trips with my little spirits. As I stumbled along, I fell on top of people, who at first were laughing at my antics, then gave me shoves and scowls as I lurched violently down the aisle.
I got into the carriage with my bounty and caught sight of my reflection in the train window. Empty and disintegrated, I barely resembled the young man I had been. The man who had a passion for life and beauty and art, and a bond that he shared with his friends. Here was the sad mess I had become. A despicable old drunk on a train.
Eventually I made it home. Miserable and done in. The next day I called up Dr. Campbell and asked him if I could come and see him again. I told him this time I intended to go all the way to rehab.
“I’m done,” I told him. “I need your help.”
A day or so later the arrangements were made and I was on the train to London once more. This time, my eventual destination was the Priory rehab facility in Roehampton, just on the edge of London’s Richmond Park. First, however, I had to go through detox at the Lister. The night before I was to be admitted, I stayed at my friend Martin’s house. I had a change of heart, but the next day he convinced me to go and not bolt back home.
After completing detox, I arrived at the Priory and discovered that I didn’t have a room in the chemical dependence unit and would have to spend my first night on the other side of the hospital, where people had very different kinds of problems.
I was not really sure what that meant, and I felt a little uneasy as they put me in a room with bars on the windows. I settled down and unpacked my belongings. Late that night I realized I was housed in the part of the hospital where people were more than a little disturbed, because some of them screamed at irregular intervals all through the night.
I went out to the nurse’s station and discovered that they had a smoking lounge down the hall, so I went over and had a smoke. A young woman, perhaps about twenty-five years old, came in, and I had a sense of déjà vu, a vision of a day many years ago in Hyde Park with Michael. I was about twelve years old and we were getting a Coke while watching our first concert. Like the girl at the soft-drink stand that day long ago, this woman wanted me to give her something.
“Do you have a ciggy?” she asked.
I gave her one and lit it for her with my Zippo. After the smoke break I went back to my room and firmly locked the door, placing a chair underneath the handle. I didn’t want any midnight visitors, thank you.
The next morning I was informed that my room was ready and I could move over into the dependence unit.
I imagine I ran to it.
For the next six weeks, I learned all about what had been wrong with me for a very long time, and how I could recover from “a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body.” Each day I felt a little stronger, and I believed I was where I belonged. It felt as if the people understood exactly what I had been going through. In a strange, ironic twist, one of the counselors who took a shine to me and helped me see the light was an old Catholic priest named Tom. He was a fearsome Glaswegian who knew how to prick someone’s pomposity with a word or two, especially mine. We became friends, and he opened my eyes to a new way of existing in the world I could barely have imagined before. I emerged from the Priory a month and a half later renewed, reborn, and in much better health than I had been for years.