It was a letter forwarded on from the kindly folk at the ABC, the address of the book show crossed out (several times, by the looks of things, as though the envelope had bothered varying departments before finding its way to Brunswick) and mine eventually added. PLEASE FORWARD TO. No return address. But the loopy scrawl commanding my attention, shouting my name in biro, should have been a warning. If penmanship were given names like fonts, this one would have been called Lunatic 2.0.
There should be a sticker placed on the correspondence of all lunatics. Open with caution, it might read. Contents may include one or all of the following: 1. Death threat. 2. Question regarding validity of parentage. 3. Kind suggestion that if you don’t ‘like’ a particular subject you ‘go back’ to ‘where you came from’, or 4. Faeces. On the internet it is possible to politely sidestep the hate-fuelled rantings of people who would rather see you dead. A website entitled ‘Marieke Hardy Has a Face Like a Big Cunt.net.au’ is a title that may ring vague alarm bells, as is anything run by the Westboro Baptist Church. If you don’t wish to read a dissertation on why your prose once made someone castrate themselves, don’t seek it out. In the case of those more brash among the online community who ‘@’ you directly on Twitter—the equivalent of drunkenly shirt-fronting somebody at a party and screaming ‘AND I DON’T MUCH CARE FOR YOUR TIE EITHER’—there’s still a ‘block user’ function. In short: for the most part, it’s possible to go about your life happily ignorant that many people in the world think you are a douchebag.
As I opened the letter, a pamphlet fell from the envelope and onto the floor. I ignored it for the moment.
The letter began:
Miss Hardy.
It was a pompous, knowing start, addressing me as though I were a schoolgirl staring down at my scuffed Bata Scouts and regretting that blissful previous hour exchanging saliva with Scott Webster in the toilet block.
I have been watching you on the television for months now and have come to one obvious conclusion. There is a consistency in the subject matter you discuss on the First Tuesday Book Club and if your co-presenters Jennifer Byrne and Jason Steger are too afraid to tell you, I am not.You have the eyes and demeanour of a professional alcoholic. The first step is admitting you have a problem and, Marieke Hardy, as a regular viewer of the show I must inform you IT IS TIME FOR YOU TO TAKE THAT STEP.
I picked up the pamphlet that had fallen to the floor. It was for AA.
This was somewhat of a blow, like being told ‘you’re not fooling anyone with that stupid haircut, you know. We can still see your forehead.’ I chewed the thought over for a moment, feeling it in my mouth.
A complete stranger thinks I am a drunk.
It was no more odd than a complete stranger thinking I was a Communist or a lesbian, both charges having been laid against me in previous unrelated missives from other friendly neighbourhood lunatics. Once I had seen a severely anorexic girl at the Fitzroy pool. All eyes were upon her as she strolled around, glass-cut clavicle jutting from her bathers. I wanted desperately to gently take her aside and point out that people weren’t whispering about her because she was glamorous. They were whispering because they were worried about her. Because she looked obviously sick. Because she wasn’t hiding her demons like the rest of us were, under the veneer of behaving like functioning human beings.
I wondered for a moment if I was the girl at the Fitzroy pool and my lunatic friend with the loopy writing was me. This thought was soon easily dismissed as I read further and saw his closing paragraph regarding the digital signal of the ABC News 24 channel trying to eat his brain. He was, as originally suspected, a nutjob. My secret life as a heavy drinker could continue unabated.
It’s not overtly fashionable, particularly flying in the face of all those startling commercials where unfortunate lads and lasses imbibe one too many alcopops and crash spectacularly through a variety of glass objects, but I really am a huge fan of drinking. I like thinking about it, I like listening to songs about it, and I like reading about it.
If my life of drinking was ever charted for the purposes of medical science it would look as follows: one big pointy triangle for the teenage years of rocket fuel and vomit, a gentle downward slope for the late teens and early twenties, and then an upwards trajectory around the mid-twenties which plateaus, a steady-as-she-goes prairie plain, for over ten years. Moving from a mid-twenties drunk into a mid-thirties drunk is a career choice not everybody likes to make. If you are friends with musicians the line between hedonism and problem drinking is blurred, probably because you are drunk and can’t focus properly. You surround yourself with drunks, you read their writing, you fall in love with them. Nobody grows up thinking they’re going to be drawn to the one man in the room slouched on a barstool spilling gin on his waistcoat, it just happens. One day you’re kissing posters of Pseudo Echo before you go to bed, the next you’re piggybacking your boyfriend out of Yah-Yah’s at 4 am pleading with him to please stop calling the DJ ‘donkey cock’ as it’s only causing grief.
My illustrious career with the bottle began with the person my mother used to refer to somewhat hopefully as ‘your naughty friend’, Lisa Jenkins, implying that without Lisa’s influence I would probably have spent my downtime crossstitching and nursing sick orphans. In my mother’s mind, Lisa led me astray, beckoning wickedly from the dark corners of teenage immorality. In truth, we were as dangerously unhinged as each other and would spend various evenings placing ourselves in the sort of situations usually re-enacted on Crime Stoppers prior to the sobering sentence ‘and young Margaret’s body was sadly never found’. Lisa’s room was on the second storey of her parents’ house, so her nightly escapes involved a high-tech rope and pulley system. We encouraged each other dreadfully, comrades in pre-pubescent debauchery. We lost our virginities around the same time to older boys and were frequently separated on school camps ‘for the benefit of all concerned’.
Lisa had a penchant for trouble, and liquor, and was possessed of the sort of cockeyed grin usually found on pickpockets, or 1980s Hollywood bad boys the Brat Pack. Her hands were rough and papery. We babysat the children of her neighbours and hunted out their booze and pornography like bloodhounds. We were obsessed with pornography, which was fairly common for private schoolgirls at the age of thirteen if St Trinian’s is anything to go by. My great aunt had died five years earlier and left to my family her vast collection of books, at least five of which were intensely pornographic. They were hidden—badly—on the top shelf, amongst Kitty Kelley biographies and There Goes Whatsisname: The memoirs of Noel Ferrier. One of my favourites involved a young lass who should probably have known better getting involved with a circus troupe and spending the ensuing one hundred and seventy pages being ravished by midgets and bearded ladies.
Lisa and I were deeply titillated by this, and decided to write an erotic novel of our own. Considering the only significant thing we did outside of school hours was ride the bus, we called it Sex Bus. The plot involved a number of hapless commuters boarding without adequate fare or concession card and having to pay their way with sexual favours. Since neither Lisa nor I had been penetrated at that point, most of the sex involved vague descriptions like ‘then he did her up the fanny’ and ‘his ralph stood to attention’, the latter of which we had directly copied from Judy Blume’s Forever. We photocopied Sex Bus and handed it out to wide-eyed year sevens on the Balwyn line, an act that these days would likely have us arrested for child pornography. Sex Bus grew so popular with a particular group of year nine boys we had to run a reprint in the library, which was a huge career achievement at that point.
Lisa’s alcoholic specialty was a potent rocket fuel she concocted from ‘anything my parents won’t miss from the liquor cabinet’. Since the overwhelming aroma was aniseed there was a fair chance her mother and father weren’t huge fans of Sambuca. She would mix and measure with the dexterity of a mad scientist, pouring the final product into a Big Red tomato sauce bottle that I’m fairly certain hadn’t been rinsed properly. The end result was something that tasted like a combination of licorice, ketchup, petrol and AIDS. We drank it with gusto.
As a teenager there is no finer way to spend an evening than sitting in a local park taking delicate sips from a tomato sauce bottle and then vomiting into the lap of school heartthrob Stephen Lord, which presumably is why I partook in such activities more often than was healthy. With whispers Lisa and I would steal away from our homes and climb into waiting taxis, picking up helpless boys from Box Hill and Balwyn, Camberwell and Kew. Our lips would be sticky with liqueur. I tapped on more dark bedroom windows than I’d care to remember, swaying unsteadily in the moonlit driveway and waiting for Stephen or Ashley or Harvey or Clinton to slide out, one Stussy-clad leg after the other. There was no sex, not right away, just hours of whirling, gravity-free gloriousness, the freedom that came with another potent sip.
My first real hangover came courtesy of naughty Lisa Jenkins, too. Another night on rocket fuel, some park or other, some party, some hot, strange, illicit kisses with a boy from the rowing squad up against a dirty wall. It was the night before my family was due to go on an overseas trip and I climbed back into my bedroom window with a head full of slosh and the kind of rolling seasickness common to passengers on the Manly ferry. I made it to the bathroom—just—though the toilet itself seemed infuriatingly out of reach, so I simply vomited a lush combination of spaghetti and rocket fuel all over the floor. Mindful that my still sleeping parents weren’t to know of my nocturnal activities, I mopped the whole revolting mess up with tissues, emitting pained little sobs throughout. In photographs from that first day of travel I am with my family, sitting at a New Zealand airport, face the colour of asphalt. There is dried spaghetti on my t-shirt. I look, fittingly, like a teenage drunk.
As I grew older I fell in love with a variety of alcoholics, including Joel, who would carry a ‘traveller’ at all times in a paper bag. I would open my front door and see him standing there, fresh off the Nicholson Street tram, holding a longneck of beer in one hand and a plastic shopping bag with books and toiletries in it in the other. He looked like a hobo who had just wandered off the street trying to bum loose change. If we went away to the country for the weekend and there was limited access to alcohol, he would panic. On the rare occasions he was sober he couldn’t sleep and would just sit at the window and cry quietly, trying not to wake me.
He was a puzzle; a brilliant, acerbic mind consistently seeking oblivion. I tried to keep up with his drinking for a while but in the end there seemed a chasm between us: he had one foot in the camp of serious alcoholics and I saw myself as a visitor. I couldn’t understand why he was so insistent on wiping himself out, night after night. I dictated a more moderate drinking routine to him and he told me in no uncertain terms to fuck off.When it was over I said ‘we broke up because Joel drank too much’ and more often than not had a glass of wine in my hand at the time.
After that I dated every type of alcoholic. Nobody with a thirst was safe from my affections. Angry brooders, swaggering shot-drinkers, party animals with a bottle of vodka in one arm and naked flame in the other. I remember years ago seeing the breathtakingly clever stand-up comedian Anthony Morgan—himself an excessive drinker—at that very show gulping from a large pint glass of something that quite clearly wasn’t water, pacing the stage angrily, veering from the safety of his pre-written routine to launch a tirade against his ex-wife, who had only recently left him for another man.
‘He’s not even a proper alcoholic,’ spat Morgan in disgust. ‘He’s just a binge drinker.’
In my late twenties I stayed in a long-term relationship with an alcoholic for three-and-a-half years and we drank the world dry.We drank our way across London, Paris, Barcelona, Tasmania, Far North Queensland and Bali. Every day we would stumble from our beds and wait until the time came when it was reasonable to begin drinking. On holidays, this moment came at around midday. We didn’t see ourselves as serious drunks since we didn’t drink at breakfast time, except of course in the case of serious code red hangovers when we immediately reached for a bloody mary before even opening our eyes.
For the most part it was a perfectly loving and functional relationship until I began enjoying the odd day sober and he began enjoying the odd day drinking at 10:30 or 11 am. I encouraged him gently to do as I did, step off the treadmill for a fortnight or a week, or even a day, but he seemed completely unable. It came as a shock and with no small amount of sadness the moment I understood that at that point he loved the drink more than he was able to love me.
Alcohol was a perfect mistress who had led me merrily through twenty years of licentiousness and romance, but I didn’t think I loved it more than people. I wanted to delicately tiptoe that line, to maintain the lifestyle to which I had become accustomed, one hand wrapped around the bottle, the other around a pen. I wanted to be, in other words, a functioning drunk.
I never had a favourite kind of drinker—alcoholics were like children, it was difficult to pick one more special than another and as a fun party trick they too tended to wet themselves when left to their own devices—I just loved men who drank. I still do. There is something deeply untrustworthy about teetotallers, something that emits an aroma of giving up. ‘I never trust a fighting man who doesn’t smoke or drink,’ Admiral William Frederick Halsey Jr once said, when enjoying time off from being an outrageous racist. (‘Before we’re through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell’ was another of his lively conversational kick-starters.) Teetotallers tsk beneath their breath when you reach across to fill up another glass; teetotallers leave parties early. In their eyes is reflected the judgement you are supposed to have fostered for yourself many years ago—that innate responsibility of knowing when to stop and when to say no. Why is that idea in itself so artless? I imagine Jim Morrison peeling away his piss-soaked leathers and taking up jogging and am nearly sick into my mouth. We want our creative icons staggering and helpless with intoxicants. We gravitate towards lovers with dangerous, sharp edges. In the process, we drink to keep up.
When we date, we date drinkers. There is no negotiation to be entered into. Not long ago, I shamelessly asked after a shy tattooed vegan boy who works in a local café and was despondent when I discovered he had subscribed to the strict world of straight-edge. ‘He doesn’t drink,’ I sighed miserably, as though this ruled him out from ever being a viable romantic option. If he didn’t drink then we couldn’t cheat our way through the awkwardness of courtship, couldn’t write ourselves off in order to gather the courage to go to bed together. Couldn’t spend a weekend away running rampant in a bed and breakfast with a bottle of red. Couldn’t get shickered at a friend’s wedding and cry on each other in the middle of the dancefloor. There was no point, really, starting anything in the first place. My favourite boyfriends drank and I drank with them and the idea of dating somebody without the comforting ‘go on then’ nudge of liquor was simply absurd.
As friends grew older there was a polite bowing out of the heavy drinking game. As though they had reached the age of thirty-five and been handed a little pass. Thanks for drinking with us! it read. Enjoy the rest of your life with white wine spritzers and the occasional low-carb beer at family barbecues! Lots of love, your Libertine Youth. P.S. Please don’t visit, it only upsets the children.
They feared, of course, everything we’d read about, everything we’d been told a life of heavy drinking would lead to. Apparently when Hemingway was near the end it was possible to see the outline of his distended and diseased liver lying under the surface of his skin. Is this what will eventually happen to those of us who remain committed, who don’t simply murmur ‘no thank you, I’m driving’ but rather end each and every family get together with dress defiantly held above head and middle finger raised at our cluckingly disapproving GPs? What happens if that dedication to a life lived blurrily doesn’t simply continue in carefree afternoons and nights but leads us, helplessly, into a whirlwind of catheters and assisted bathing? That doesn’t pique my interest at all. I want to be a pretty drunk, like Dusty Springfield. I want to reach languorously for a margarita while a calypso band lulls me into an afternoon haze. No malfunctioning kidneys just yet, please, no brain haemorrhages. Just the odd hangover that feels like eighty power lifters trying to ejaculate inside your skull all at once.
It’s those exact hangovers, of course, which prove to be the breaking point for so many. One day in my early thirties I woke up and stood, naked, in my living room, trying to remember where it was I’d left my car the night before, whilst simultaneously hoping against hope I’d at least had some clothes on when I arrived home. My brain, as it processed this, felt like a cardboard box filled with crumpled newspaper. Then the newspaper caught fire. Then some dwarves appeared out of nowhere attempting to put the fire out. They were naked too. I felt all this frantic activity taking place inside my brain and simply stood helplessly, arms dangling by my side, waiting for it to subside. This was a hangover in your thirties, I told myself. This was different to those days of springing out of bed in your twenties with a mild headache and eating a banana sandwich. This is where you could actually feel those important little puzzle pieces of your brain melt away.
There haven’t been blackouts. Not too many. A delicate handful. What’s a few blackouts between friends? Yet the older I got the more colourful they seemed to become. At twenty-eight I collapsed unconscious on a stranger’s lawn. At thirty-three, after a night spent on a friend’s rooftop in Sydney doing shots, I crawled into his bedroom and passed out. I woke up, fascinatingly, in the bedroom of a completely different member of the house, a gay man named Peter. Apparently I had walked into his room at 5am nude and looking, in his words, ‘like the girl from The Ring’. With nary a second thought I had climbed into his bed and curled into a ball and gone to sleep. His first thought was ‘holy mother of christ’. His second: ‘girls are soft’. His third: ‘I am getting the hell out of this bed with this drunk naked madwoman and going upstairs to sleep on the couch.’ To this day I am simply grateful that I didn’t do a wee in the corner of his bedroom. Perhaps I did and Peter had just been too polite to tell me.
There is apparently something even more shameful in this sort of behaviour for women. Women aren’t supposed to drink heavily or write about it unless they’ve left it behind, in a cane basket full of old hurts and solved problems. There is a neatness in moving on from a past of heavy drinking for women, a sad and brave memoir full of tales of regret. Caroline Knapp writes well about being a drunk in her novel Drinking: A love story, but the book ends with lots of therapy and hugging and misty-eyed talk about facing a new dawn sober. The best writing about drinking is masculine writing, inebriated writing. Why? And when will women challenge HL Mencken’s assertion that ‘The harsh, useful things of the world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men who are as starkly sober as so many convicts in the death-house, but the lovely and useless things, the charming and exhilarating things, are best done by men with, as the phrase is, a few sheets in the wind’?
It’s time for women to romanticise drinking. Forget brushing off the indignities contained in a bottle of Drambuie, or carrying on with lives making babies and pretending we were never once the author of a three-page poem entitled ‘The revolution begins at the bottom of my West Coast Cooler’. Why can we not too lay claim to the brutish gorgeousness of falling asleep on the ‘j’ key of a laptop? I know plenty of salty ladies who come undone at the thought of a whisky sour and an evening spent whirling around dens of ill repute, sticky with devilish thoughts and tobacco smoke. So where is the woman who writes the equivalent of Charles Bukowski’s ‘Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you’re allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It’s like killing yourself, and then you’re reborn. I guess I’ve lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now’? Perhaps they’re afraid that one too many feature articles in Imbibers Monthly will lead to a swathe of letters from helpful members of the community. (‘The first step, Anaïs, is admitting you have a problem.’)
The trick is to admire the artistic outpourings of other drunks from a safe distance without fear of living out the rest of your days face first in a bowl of peanuts right next to Norm in the Cheers bar. Listen to Donald Newlove, a man who was so enamoured with the combination of alcohol and prose he wrote a book entitled Those Drinking Days: Myself and other writers. When Newlove writes about being drunk in the novel’s first half, it is in homage: ‘I patiently uncurled the English tongue to make it speak plain but it kept tying itself into gorgeous knots I couldn’t make sense of. And if the knot had a hard glow, like sunlight on snow, then I didn’t care about sense. This light overrode sense, or the need for it. Light is all. This, I’d assure myself with a thankful glance toward heaven, this is the best prose I’ve ever written.’
I want to marry writing like that. I want to put it in a brandy snifter and set fire to it. I want to smash a bottle against it and ride it out to sea. Yet Newlove then renounces drinking in the second half of his book and pens instead many glowing paragraphs about how improved his life is since he’s stopped punching random publishers in the face and wearing his stained purple suit on first dates. Those Drinking Days becomes, in that moment, an infinitely dull read. I believe I actually muttered the word ‘quitter’ aloud when closing the book.
In the face of all the negative press, all the po-faced body+soul liftouts promoting AFDs and clean living and shiny, brand-new livers, it is more than admirable that there are those promoting a louche life lived underground. Fuck sobriety, they say. Let us mingle for a few more precious moments in the half-light of gin’s muse. Let us celebrate the temporary relief of tuning out. Let us love harder and burn brighter.
Kingsley Amis put it beautifully when he wrote:
The reason why I, and most others, usually turn out to enjoy meeting such creatures is simply and obviously the co-presence of drink. The human race has not devised any way of dissolving barriers, getting to know the other chap fast, breaking the ice, that is one-tenth as handy and efficient as letting you and the other chap, or chaps, cease to be totally sober at about the same rate in agreeable surroundings. Well and good, the serious student of the effects of drink will retort in the grim, curmudgeonly tone peculiar to serious students of the effects of drink; well and good, but what about what happens later? What about those who drink, not to cease to be totally sober, but to get drunk? What about the man who drinks on his own? . . . Leaving aside dipsomaniacs, most or many of whom are born, not made, I feel that there is very little we can safely add, in discussing our motives for drinking, to the verdict of the poet who said we do it because ‘we are dry, or lest we may be by and by, or any other reason why’.
Of course, KA was a fat old pomp who saw women as a bothersome arrangement of piffle and noise and died desperately lonely, but that’s neither here nor there. He’s correct, drinking alone is somehow seen as something disgraceful. ‘I drink,’ friends say to me with a self-effacing superiority, ‘but I don’t drink alone.’ I can’t see the issue with this. Drinking alone is often infinitely preferable to drinking with others. For one thing, you don’t have to tolerate the company of other drunks.You don’t have to notice the moment they first slur their words, indicating the beginning of the end of the night, the sorry moment a once enjoyable conversation slides muddily into an overloud self-congratulatory circle of wank. If you drink alone you can prank call ex-lovers, listen to Toots and the Maytals with the volume turned up so loud your neighbour calls the police, and go on Chatroulette with complete strangers whilst wearing only your underpants and a Ronald Reagan mask.
Drinking alone is life affirming and a joyous exercise. I do it because sometimes I am simply jack of toeing the line and being good and I want to give myself over to the rakish unpredictability that liquor offers. And for that I’m willing to stand up and be counted, to not write a sad and breathy memoir about bar-hopping days of yore or tip out all my Campari bottles in martyrish ritual. This one’s for the drinking girls.
I will file that lunatic’s letter and its accusatory pamphlet away, along with the aerogramme telling me I dress like a common prostitute, and the postcard helpfully pointing out that my forehead is too big for my face and if I am in any way set on a further career in the public eye I should have it seen to. I’m aware these kind people are only trying to assist me, but so far I have made a life out of being a drunk with the sort of forehead you could project 3D movies on and if it’s all the same to them I’ll carry on doing so and sifting through matters in my own sweet time. There may have to come a day when I put down the wine glass. I know that. But everything until then is fluid. Everything until then is liquid.
Parts of this story first appeared in Frankie magazine.