The DTs—delirium tremens—medical Latin for shaking frenzy. They seem to have gone the way of Gothic fainting, female genital hysteria and poor nerves. They are pre–National Health, a quaint black-and-white starched-wimple rectal-thermometer condition. DTs belong to a nostalgic type of inebriation, along with whiskey bottles with corks, horse-drawn drays and pink gin. I had a summer of pink gins. Drunk as personal self-flagellatory punishment because I was drinking too much; I imagined I’d drink less if the drink was vile. Indeed, they were so gratuitously foul I had to neck the first two at a dead sprint, after which I’d pass caring what they tasted like. The barman always asked, “In or out, do you want the bitters left or flicked?” leaving the gin pale pink–tinctured.

DTs went the way of drunk tanks, straitjackets, padded rooms and music hall drinks. There aren’t comedy drunks anymore. There used to be clowns whose acts were slapstick tipsy—stand-up-and-fall-down comedians with semidetached collars, squiffy ties and a broken fag. It was funnier if it was a toff, the descent more precipitous and humiliating, unrestrained by a safety net of sympathy. A flat-cap drunk was a Methodist sermon and a crusade, not a thing of humor; but the posh-pissed are ripe for mockery—the slow mime of misjudgment, the lost keys, the wife in bed with the gamekeeper, top-hatted Johnnies throwing pebbles at lampposts because there’s a light on upstairs. When did we stop thinking all that was amusing, why did we stop laughing at drunks? They were such a staple character of John Bullying British humor.

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,

The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.

The nations of Britain were collated by drink long before they were collected under one crown or church. The brown baritone Welsh drunks, the lyrical Irish drunks, the morose Scots and the tedious English. Boorish, finger-jabby, jut-chinned drunks all of them, nations that are heavy and mild, light and bitter, gin-soaked, whiskey-steeped, cider-soused. Every so often some why-oh-why politician will ask, “Why oh why can’t the British drink like the continentals . . . like the southern Europeans?” The question is rhetorical, inspired by the memory of agreeable afternoons spent in the staccatoed buzz of Tuscan villas or provincial village squares listening to the plink-plink of pétanque and the drone of fat Englishmen in straw hats. No one ever asks drunks in the dank corners of urban pubs why they drink like dank drunks in dark corners instead of like happy dagos in the sunshine. So we never hear the rhetorical answer, fruity with phlegm and sprayed crisp crumbs—“We drink like this because we can, because it’s our birthright, it’s our heritage, our history, our myth and legend. Why would you drink like a prissy prancing mellifluous child of Dionysus in the vineyards of antiquity when you could bellow obscene songs in the mead halls of Asgard? We are the chilly, sweaty drunks of the north, of the long nights. We drink in the dark in the flickering shadows, not in the sunny blue-hued shade of the south. We drink like this because we fucking can.”

It was the medical Latin that killed the humor of drunks, when they designated alcoholism an illness rather than a weakness or a choice or a culture—that’s when it became mocking the disabled. You can’t laugh at an illness, an ism, unless you’re pissed. But then I never had much time for theatrical lushes; drink was my craft, I took a professional pride, and comedians and clowns always got it wrong. The actor is a sober man pretending to be a drunk, a drunk is an inebriated man desperately trying to look sober. Watch the precision, the concentration of the shit-faced attempting to get across a room. It is a heroic effort. Inside that wobbling head, he is the captain of a doomed bomber struggling with the unresponsive controls, staying at his post till the last, after everyone else has evacuated—bowels, bladder, syntax—the world spins, the ground rushes up to claim him, yet still he fights for every inch of height, every ounce of propulsion, David Niven in the cockpit of his flaming Lanc talking to the ethereal, invisible, cool and admiring WAAF. Maybe he can make it to the door, to bed, to some glorious country airfield where the dog’s waiting to meet him. There’s a pat on the back from the CO—“Damn close-run thing”—and into the mess, barmaid already has the foaming tankard with the double stiffener on the side. She’s smiling, trying to hide the tears. He leans on the bar, a pensive sigh, and slowly lifts the glass. Here’s to those who didn’t make it. We do good crash landings. Watch the face, the determination, the perseverance, the pursed lips, the knotted brow, the head swaying, running out of energy, feet numb on a tightrope, one stalwart leg, the other a coward. You shouldn’t mock the crumpled failure of drunks but wonder instead at the repeated, determined, hopeless bravery of so many postponed calamities mentioned only in imaginary slurred dispatches.

—

I CAN’T REMEMBER what our bedroom looked like. The flat was the basement of a terraced house in Wandsworth. Bennerley Road. I can’t remember the number. A living room, a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen and the small garden we shared with Chris, the landlord upstairs. I remember the kitchen. Small like a galley with a back door onto the ignored garden, a no-man’s-land of dead pheasants, sodden barbecue and more dog shit. There was a Welsh dresser, an oven, a sink, a table pushed up against a wall. I can’t remember the chairs or if there was anything on the walls or the tea towels—which is odd, you can always remember tea towels. Were they white or colored? Did they have ironic pictures on them of seaside towns and recipes for regional specialties? There was a radio and the radio was always on. Always. No exception. On in every room. I couldn’t sleep without a radio. The BBC World Service at night. “Lilliburlero” played by the RAF band. The Shipping Forecast. London Calling. Then Radio 4 would start in the dawn—Farming Today, beef prices, wheat yields. After a fitful night of African politicians, the radio was like a parent. I was brought up by the Home Service. It was moral and dependable and it had a plan. It knew where it would be at any given hour. It had rules. I understand why Home Service listeners get so upset when schedules change. I get upset. Everything else in life is random and collapsing, fateful and a disappointment, but the radio is a fixed point. Something you can’t grasp, but you can hold on to.

The bedroom had a window, there must have been a wardrobe, a chest of drawers, a mirror somewhere, something on the walls—what color were the walls? The carpet was green—there was a green carpet . . . the color of algae, the damp green of penicillin. I remember how it smelled, it was like a living thing, the pelt of something that hid terrified and shivering under the furniture in basements. The bed was big, with an ornate headboard carved with herms or caryatids, cherubs, griffins, basilisks, cockatrices, black oak nightmares. It was a Cromwellian bed for morbid lingering, a laying-out bed, already half a coffin. I don’t remember the counterpane or the blankets, quilts or pillows, I remember how it smelled. It smelled like it had been having rough, nonconsensual sex with the carpet, the sour-sweet sweat of the sorry mold-green abused carpet. You can’t get any lower than a basement carpet.

It was in the bed that the DTs came. One morning I woke up. Waking up is not a given for a drunk. It’s not a simple transition. It’s not how you wake up, like turning the key in the ignition—a couple of coughs and you’re ticking over in neutral. A drunk’s awakening has layers and protocols. There is a great deal of spare and lonely emotion that has to be acknowledged, folded up and buried between sleep and consciousness. There is the panic of unresolved fright left over from the badlands of sleep. Every drunk has a procedure for getting things locked back and away in their crypts and cages. I was gingerly negotiating the painful roundup when there, just there, right there on the ceiling, there were spiders. Spiders hanging on to the ceiling. They were off the reservation, out of the box. They weren’t the shades of night, they were huge, the size of soup plates, heavy as guilt. They scuttled. No, spiders don’t scuttle, they move with a horrible purpose. Spiders octorate. They are always on a mission. These ones octorated across the ceiling from behind the wardrobe that may or may not have been there. They were hairy. And I knew they were going to fall on my face. They were bigger than my head. Simultaneously I also knew empirically, practically, that spiders bigger than your head were not indigenous to Wandsworth. So, sensibly, like a five-year-old, I closed my eyes tight and waited for them to go away or get back inside wherever it was monstrous impossible creatures lived.

I’ve had a lot of hallucinations in my time, from acid before it was moderated and pasteurized into an easy psychotropic disco drug, when an LSD workout lasted a day and came with added flashbacks that would slap your retina a month later. We would advise each other not to drop tabs alone, a trip was a dangerous saga. I’d seen the wallpaper turn into an earth mother’s pulsating womb. I’d seen vacuum cleaners become Jack’s beanstalk, I’d stared into a sugar bowl for five hours, downloading the secrets of kinetic sweet energy. I’d watched the traffic on Tottenham Court Road turn into a carousel, I knew all about hallucination. And these spiders weren’t hallucination. I got out of bed in a cold panic of twisted sheets and palsied limbs. The spiders came after me. The brilliance of delirium is that it happens only when you’re sober. You can’t blame it on the port or the absinthe. I was straight-up, single-visioned, unslurred, unprotected and utterly unprepared. The trick, the cure, the prophylactic, is to get drunk again as quickly as possible. I understood this instinctively. But then, the answer to most things was to get drunk or drunker. I sucked a whiskey bottle in a corner, not daring to look up. It wasn’t the first time I’d drunk to make things go away, but it was the only time it worked.

—

A DOCTOR TELLS ME that the rarity of DTs in modern drunks is because alcoholics get help—or at least medication—much earlier these days. They are given Valium, a really simple cure for the horrors. Not actually a cure of course, just a muzzle. It pulls the curtains and keeps the spiders on the reservation. Before Valium, DTs were a favorite image for filmmakers. Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend has a rubber bat that eats an imaginary rat; there is something crawly in Blake Edwards’s Days of Wine and Roses. Charles Laughton, in David Lean’s Hobson’s Choice, gets a giant rat at the end of his bed, and then there’s Harvey, the urban rabbit in James Stewart’s hallucination. I think that’s the only case of a hallucination from a chronic illness getting its name up in lights—and not just imaginary ones.

Drunks’ horror visions are almost always animals. A small medieval menagerie of the repellent and fearful; things that share our homes, under the floorboards, in the rafters. They can come with a tactile hallucination technically known as “formication.” You feel things crawling all over you, 3-D sense-surround hallucination. There was a publican in Earls Court who regularly saw Martian cockroaches landing outside his pub and would block the road with beer barrels for the safety of humans. I’ve only ever heard of one man who had a pleasant, though no less disturbing, hallucination. Having drunk a concoction based on bomb fuel during National Service in Malaya, he was hospitalized and woke to find a naked Malay girl sitting on the end of his bed. She gave him a medical discharge.

The shaking frenzy DTs were first described in 1813. Between 5 and 10 percent of drunks get them. Of those, 35 percent die shortly after. Surprisingly, there’s very little research into the DTs, considering how much has been painstakingly discovered about Amazonian frogs and the causes of baldness. No one knows why they happen or how, but the lack of scientific interest is understandable, if not excusable. DTs are merely a curious symptom of an altogether familiar chronic condition. The Valium will smudge the visions and they make no difference to the underlying illness. They are a strange illumination that may have something to do with GABA receptors and the greed for dopamine and the serotonin of joy, the well-being chemicals that are the usual suspects implicated in addiction. Someone has suggested that the DTs may be the result of the brain’s attempting to reinstate homeostasis—the body needs to maintain equilibrium, a stable internal environment to correct its psychic balance, to combat the constant intervention of alcohol. That doesn’t sound plausible. The latest hypothesis, I’m told, is that DTs are something to do with scratches on the retina and the exaggerated or altered focus, which sounds even less plausible. Why is it that drunks should all find these prehistoric animal familiars, see the creatures of caves and stones, of cracks and holes? Are they perhaps found in the unvisited blackness of our mental archaeology, down beneath the conscious and the subconscious, down, down past the mysterious id into the layers of natural selection, the mille-feuille of experience pressed hard in the fossil of collective memory—this scuttling, slithering, ossified fear? There is no truth in alcohol, but it may wear away and seep down into the remembrance of things that are best left unrehydrated.

DTs were the most dramatic of my alcohol-induced symptoms, but I got them only twice. The second time, my conscious knew what was happening. I woke to find a fat toad watching me with its peculiarly evil eyes like a malevolent Eccles cake on the slime-green-algae dead raped carpet. I got out of bed and poked the phantasm with my toe. It stepped aside, slowly, theatrically. It was a real fucking toad. God knows how it had got in. It must have traveled across Wandsworth to find a sympathetic environment. Toads are notoriously choosy. I had a bedroom that was an ideal toad habitat. Getting rid of a live toad is far harder than getting rid of a hallucinatory one, but for a drunk, the method is the same. I got a bottle of whiskey and trusted that it would get bored and go away.

I picked up a pigeon in the street once. The pigeon had been hit by a car. It was alive, not noticeably damaged or bleeding, so I put it in my pocket. A pigeon will fit quite neatly into a jacket pocket. I went to the pub and forgot about it, then on to The Lindsey Club. The next day I was looking for cigarettes and there was the pigeon—head cocked, round-eyed, blinking. I was surprised to find it in the coat dropped on the floor, incubating five Gitanes.

Pockets were a constant source of surprise. A lamb chop, a votive candle, earrings, lockless keys, a photograph of an old man with a mustache and a harmonium, scribbled phone numbers, addresses and cards, notes written on paper ripped from books and menus—“Don’t ring the bell,” “This is the last time,” “You owe me five” crossed out, “fifteen” crossed out, “twenty”—the bone of an ice lolly with a strawberry dampness. Morning pockets were like tiny crime scenes. And then there was the pigeon. I put it on the bed with the dog. They stared at each other. I threw a slice of bread on the bed, the dog ate it. I put another under the pillow, expecting the pigeon to find it. The pigeon lived on the bed for days—I don’t know, maybe weeks. The dog on one side, the pigeon on the other, me in the middle. It didn’t move much, just crapped a little. It didn’t seem to get any better or any worse, never complained or asked for anything. A girl came over—this was after Cressida left—and complained about having to sleep with a pigeon. I said I’d sleep next to the pigeon and it wouldn’t touch her—it wasn’t that sort of pigeon. It wasn’t carrying anything, it had a right to be there. We all had to sleep somewhere. There was something biblical about the pigeon, like Noah’s flung prayer of hope against hope. When everyone else is dead because of God’s capricious “Fuck it, let’s start again” tsunami of petulance, and the earth is a soup of floating cadavers, the dove brings back an olive twig. There is a tree, there is land, there is something to begin again. To be redeemed. The pigeon is the bearer of God’s apology, although he doesn’t actually ever say sorry. Omnipotent, omniscient, just not big enough to apologize. It’s his covenant—never again will he give in to his own righteous rage and break everything. So the pigeon becomes the symbol of Christ. He is the newfound country, the born-again beginning. I wrung the pigeon’s neck and threw it in the garden. And the thing is, I rescued it and killed it for the same reason—out of kindness.

—

HOW BAD DID IT GET, people ask, meaning how physically bad. Well, apart from the DTs, there was peripheral neuropathy—numbness and tingling in the extremities—and guttate psoriasis—I was covered in scabby flakes of skin and my nails bled. There was a fatty liver that just dodged cirrhosis. I had jaundice—imagining that my yellow eyes were actually stained with nicotine. The liver function returned to normal over time, the liver, as drunks will endlessly tell you, being the only organ to regenerate itself. In fact, it restores only function, not form. It isn’t born again. Once crucified, it stays crucified. I got pancreatitis, which I didn’t discover until I’d been sober for two decades. The doctor who told me was nervous, he fidgeted behind his desk, shuffling my results. “Look, I’m sorry,” he said, “but there’s no way round this, you can never, ever drink alcohol again. I know that sounds terrible, particularly for someone in your line of work.” He could have meant a food critic, or just a journalist. “Really, no alcohol at all, it will be fatal. I’m awfully sorry.” I let him shuffle and twitch for a moment and then pointed out that he plainly hadn’t read my notes. I hadn’t drunk for over twenty years. “Oh, thank God for that.” His shoulders slumped, and he reached into a drawer, took out a cigarette and flicked a light. “I’ve been dreading having to tell you all day, really all day. Tell a food critic he can’t drink, Jesus.” Overcome by his relief and purloining it as my own, I forgot to ask him what pancreatitis actually was or meant. I’m still not entirely sure.

And then there was the alcoholic gastritis—a condition I developed at art school. My stomach took against alcohol, became allergic. I think that’s what a different doctor said. I was throwing up a lot. I thought it was food—lunch and dinner didn’t agree with me. The specialist said I should cut down on my drinking, leave out the spirits, only a little wine with meals, you know. I did know, but that wasn’t an option. Doctors have an uneven and emotional relationship with alcohol advice. For most of them, it’s not medical, it’s personal. So I learned to live with the vomiting and gave up eating instead. The worst was the morning. I’d slump onto the bathroom floor and heave and heave bitter teaspoons of yellow bile until my ribs ached like I’d been beaten up, and I’d burst the blood vessels in my forehead and in my yellow eyeballs—it was painful and foul and humiliating. It became my morning routine, like running a bath that would invariably grow cold without my ever stepping into it, and making a bone-china cup of Earl Grey tea that I would never drink. I always made sure I had scented soap and loose-leaf tea. If I couldn’t drink like a gentleman, then at least I could greet the day like a retired governess.

When people, sensible, drink-aware people, ask how bad it was—What is the difference between terminal velocity of alcoholism and amateur dabbling, simply being bibulous? When does a boozer, a quaffer, a bon viveur, a trencherman, become an incapable drunk?—they always want a figure, they want volume, they want a fixed point, a map reference, and I don’t really have any idea. I don’t know how much I drank. I suppose it was probably a bottle of Scotch, half a dozen cans of Special Brew and then five or six or twelve pints in the pub . . . I don’t know. I didn’t want to be drunk all the time. I just didn’t want to be sober ever. After the first slug of whiskey or flat Special Brew had been negotiated, winched up to the mouth using a towel as a sort of sling pulley so as not to break my teeth, the shakes would subside, like settling tectonic plates, and I’d have a sweaty bitter moment to consider the day and offer a morning prayer. I’ve always been doubtingly religious, faintly irresolutely spiritual with a cowardly fawning low Christianity. I’d ask God to send me an incurable illness, a fatal condition. Sometimes I’d include the loss of a limb or the addition of a prosthetic; I’d ask for swellings and lumps, wasting and sloughing, a cough and the expressionism of expectorant blood. Perhaps speaking tubes and head wands, alphabet boards, crutches, a wheelchair, dialysis, cardiac paddles, emergency boxes of needles and ampoules, oxygen tanks. I prayed humbly and sincerely and without regret for an irrevocable death sentence. I didn’t ask from rage or irony, not to shake a fist at the uncaring heavens, but with honest sincerity. I prayed like a self-mortifying hermit for terminal cancer. It seemed to be the only thing that would make sense of the pathetic ashes of my life, in all its grubby foul-breathed motiveless hopelessness. A tumor would give it purpose, would be the key, the excuse for the self-pity, the Rosetta Stone that would render the random hieroglyphs of incomprehensible waste a coherent story. I suppose, if you want to place a milestone—that was how bad it got. Of course, it was only in retrospect that I realized my prayer had been answered by a benevolent loving god—I was asking for the one thing I already had—alcoholism is an incurable condition that leads to the death of almost all who contract it. Anything that’s bad enough to make Huntington’s chorea look like an escape is pretty damn terminal. Of course, if I couldn’t have a biblical illness, then I’d have to make do with whatever shards of misery were on hand. I could make the most of a broken marriage.

—

THE MORNING AFTER CRESSIDA LEFT, there was a man on a scooter at the door. Few miseries are as intense as the mornings of the freshly dumped. I don’t want to get into a snot-spitting grief contest—there are more worthy inconsolables than the deserving lovelorn—but for sheer mortification, having your love broken over a knee, your yearning epaulets ripped off and the puppy-eyed buttons of desire cut away is right up there. The fact that no one’s actually died shamefully makes it worse, and the addition of alcohol makes it much, much worse. Almost everyone has found drinking and unrequited love is not a great cocktail. There is no solace in dribbling slump drunkenness. Booze is a depressant, a close relative of anesthetic. The symptoms of getting drunk are like those of being put out for an operation—initially, fleetingly, it offers a lift, a sense of transient joy, of confident light-headed freedom; it’s a disinhibitor, it relaxes your shyness and natural reserve so you can feel socially optimistic in a room, can make a pass, tell a joke, meet a stranger. But this is just the free offer to snag a punter. Drink is, at its dark pickled heart, a sepia pessimist. It draws curtains, pulls up the counterpane. It smothers and softens and smooths. The bliss of drink is that it’s a small death. The difference between you and us, you civilian amateur hobbyist drinkers and us professional, committed indentured alcoholics, is that you drink for the lightness, we drink for the darkness. You want to feel good, we want to stop feeling so bad. All addictions become not about nirvana, but about maintenance. Not reaching for the stars but fixing the roof.

The doorbell. There stood Peter Carew carrying a moped helmet and wearing an old Barbour over his suit. Peter is about my age, does something in an office, and he wore the uncomfortable English face of embarrassed commiseration. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I heard. Bloody business. I expect she’ll be back, though. But look, no argument, I’m taking you to the country for the weekend. I was going home anyway. It’ll just be you and me, it’ll be fun. I’ve got to go to work now, but I’ll pick you up this afternoon, pack a bag. Just a toothbrush, we’re not dressing.” At four he was back, handed me a beer, we got into the car and headed west. Cornwall or Devon, Somerset, possibly, a long journey, Friday-afternoon traffic. I expect I sniveled and Peter chatted amiably and encouragingly, the way Etonians are taught so they can lead sniveling people to wickets or out of trenches.

The house was comfortable, discreet and confident in its rightness, like dozens of similar houses folded into the English countryside like the buttons on clubbable sofas. We went for long walks and shot rabbits, and I cooked them with wine and mustard and rosemary. I did a drawing of the two of us and the rabbits, it was pale pencil and watercolor, men fading apologetically back into the paper. I met Peter’s bed-bound grandmother, a lady fading back into the pillows. She seemed to be a character from Henry James. And there was a swaggering family portrait by John Singer Sargent that had been too large for the room allotted to it, so they’d cut off its bottom. An act of bravura vandalism. It was retold as an embarrassed apology with amused pride. Here is an aesthetic dichotomy—without people who think little of chopping up paintings to fit through doors, Sargent wouldn’t have had anyone to render into art. On Sunday afternoon we drove back. Peter dropped me off and gave me a bottle of Famous Grouse and wished me well.

I still remember this weekend as a supreme act of samaritan kindness. It meant, and it still means, a great deal to me. I often think of it. Retold like this it amounts to no more than a diary entry, but kindness—like comedy—is all in the timing. It was a gaping weekend of garment-rending Greek misery, whose memory has been made over as one of friendship. Peter was one of the libraryful of friends I’d married into. They were Cressida’s people, these county, literary, escutcheoned rakish folk with family portraits. I liked Peter, was entranced by his easy charm, his air of fatalistic optimism. But we were utterly, utterly different. He was Eton and Oxford, cavalry and the City, one of the founders of the Dangerous Sports Club, a collection of hoorays who skied down precipitous mountains dressed in kilts and dinner jackets or sitting at grand pianos. He took to life as if it were an inheritance, which of course it is, but not for me. I was going to write that, standing on the doorstep that Friday, Peter might have been a Martian. But it was me that was the Martian . . . I had no innate, spontaneous idea of how to cheerily hum a coherent harmonious life that came with a rhythm and a tune. I looked at Peter and men like him and wondered how they did it. How did they know what to do? Say? How to be? Where did they learn the silky confidence, the certainty that everything would be all right, that they would always belong and be welcome in any room they walked into? I’d been to dinner at Peter’s. Everyone drank a lot and shouted and laughed. There was, in most of Cressida’s friends, a dangerous loucheness, a brilliant fatalism. It was what attracted and interested her. I expect there was a dose of it in me. We married into the golden age of dinner parties. Right at the end of the Conran chicken brick and before bean sprouts. The most popular wedding present had evolved from a silver toast rack to the stainless-steel asparagus steamer. Dinners would start with fish mousse, carrot-and-orange soup and cheese straws, and end in tears, port and infidelity. Everything in their lives ended in tears, port and infidelity. In this particular dinner party, after the beef Wellington but before the lemon sorbet palate cleanser, I went to the loo to be sick and take drugs. I looked in at Peter’s bedroom and on a pissed whim took off my jeans and jersey and put on one of his bespoke suits. I left in it. Peter called the next day and laughed and said he’d swap it for something of mine. I couldn’t imagine what. He strode into the gallery where I was exhibiting etchings and stole two of them off the wall. He was the sort of man who could do that. Thirty years later we are still friends. Once a year we pass in crowded rooms where he is still more at home than I am. He is pleased to see me because he’s pleased to see most people. He was kind to me because he is a kind man.

—

A MAN, an apocryphal everyman, is traveling in a strange, imaginary land and in it he meets a stranger traveling the other way. “Excuse me, pilgrim,” he says, “what are the people like in the town ahead of me?” The stranger replies with another question, “What were they like in the town you just left?” “They were kind, hospitable, generous and wise.” “Well, I expect that’s what you’ll find they’re like in the next town,” answers the stranger. What a nice man, thinks the traveler. See, that’s Peter, he’s the traveler, I’m the stranger. I still look at him and feel like a Martian. Over the years I’ve method-acted some sort of learned English version of human, I can do it convincingly so that people are surprised to find that I’m not a native. But I’m not. And the town I’ve just come from was full of incomprehensible, anxiety-inducing social Freemasons talking in tongues, and the one I’m going to will be worse.

—

IF YOU’D ASKED ME what the most grotesque thing about alcoholism was, I’d have said—indeed, I did say over and over to anyone who asked—and plenty who didn’t—it wasn’t the physical stuff, it wasn’t the sordid, humiliating death stuff . . . it was the sadness. I called it my angst. A suitable august Germanic word for a basement depression that was fathomless and occasionally erupted in gasping panic. And even when locked away, it would seep out and sour every other emotion, like bitters in milk. Alcoholic despair is a thing apart, created by the drink that is a depressant, but also the architect of all the pratfall calamities that fuel it. Alcohol is the only medication the drunk knows and trusts, a perfectly hopeless circle of angst, and it is all powered by a self-loathing that is obsessively stoked and fed. And it’s that—that personally awarded, vainly accepted disgust—that makes it so hard to sympathize with drunks. Nothing you can say or do comes close to the wreaths of guilt we lay at our own cenotaph.

There is something infuriatingly comic about drunk unhappiness, with its operatic tragic warble so out of proportion to the seedy, spivvy slapstick of its reality. From the outside it’s so obvious, so easy to resolve. Just stop. Stop drinking. Stop crying. Go to the dentist. Say sorry. Get a job. Be nice.