American on Purpose (9 page)

I
have spoken to a lot of people in my life. I’ve read a lot of books, I’ve seen a lot of movies and plays, and I’ve heard a lot of opinions on a wide variety of topics, but on no topic have I encountered more uninformed random bullshit than alcoholism. To me alcoholism is a little like L.A.: everybody thinks they’ve been there and they know the place because they’ve seen
Entourage
or visited Disneyland, but only the people who have lived there for a few years really get it. Alcoholism is like this. You don’t know shit about it if you drank a few too many beers in college or once blacked out or fell off a bar stool. Even people who have suffered from alcoholism for years can’t comprehend it if they are still drinking, and those who have recovered from this seemingly helpless condition of mind and body seem to agree on only a few things. It is cunning. It is baffling. It is powerful, and it is patient.

People still ask me how much did I drink every day and the answer is, I don’t know. I didn’t keep a journal. There is no tally sheet be
cause it wasn’t fucking Weight Watchers. I drank what I had to, every day. That’s how much I drank. And here’s the sneaky part. It’s not linear. I didn’t drink every day, not until the end. I simply could never guarantee or even guess what my actions would be after only one sip of alcohol.

Understand this, if nothing else. It’s not about how much you drink. It’s not about the alcohol really at all. It’s about what the alcohol does to the alcoholic. That’s why I would never advocate temperance for those who don’t need it or prohibition for those who don’t want it. If I could drink like a normal person, then I would drink. Since I can’t, I don’t.

Here is something else that proves, to my mind, anyway, that I am an alcoholic. If I could drink alcohol like a normal person,
I would not be interested in drinking alcohol
. This is sometimes very difficult for nonalcoholics to understand. That’s what makes them nonalcoholics.

Alcohol ruined me financially and morally, broke my heart and the hearts of too many others. Even though it did this to me and it almost killed me and I haven’t touched a drop of it in seventeen years, sometimes I wonder if I could get away with drinking some now. I totally subscribe to the notion that alcoholism is a mental illness because thinking like that is clearly insane.

What is true is this: every decision I made from the first panicky craving in Mrs. Henderson’s car, which according to my best guess would have been sometime in 1981, until the 18th of February, 1992, was the decision of an active alcoholic. I do not believe that this absolves me of any guilt or moral failure. I do not believe either that it means everything I did in those years was wrong or every emotion I had was false. It is only, perhaps, something of an explanation for my more flamboyant choices.

The shift in my alcohol intake was noticed by others. I never used to drink before a show, but now I had to have a beer or three
just to settle my nerves. There was a kind of panic that stalked me nearly all the time. As long as I was occupied by drumming or dancing or listening to very loud music or doing drugs or having sex or, of course, drinking, then I felt okay, but as soon as I was left with no money or opportunity to get out of myself, I would feel the terror creeping up. I felt that I might go completely insane at any moment. I couldn’t sleep unless I was drunk, and when I did pass out I was tormented by awful dreams. Decapitations and stabbings and mutilations. One nightmare rolled around every few days. I would be walking toward Buchanan Street bus station in Glasgow on a clear day and see, in the distance, the unmistakable shape of a mushroom cloud forming in the clear blue sky. I was seeing the end of the world twice a week.

Then, for a few hours, or a even few days, it would stop. Just like that. I did sleep, I didn’t drink with quite the same urgency, and I began to feel a little more human. It returned just as abruptly. I would never know when the terror would strike. In a car, on a bus, in bed. Sometimes I would wake up screaming. I knew something lived inside me that was out of my control. It could be sedated and calmed with alcohol, but one of the side effects of that particular medicine was that when I sobered up, the panic would be worse. A very vicious circle. I have been asked many times since then why I didn’t seek help, but the truth is, I didn’t really know what was wrong with me. I thought, “This is just who I am, a terrorized man, a lunatic, a neurotic,” and thought the only way through was to try to maintain some outward semblance of normalcy or else I’d be locked up forever in a padded cell. Internally, I lived in almost constant panic.

The Dreamboys began to fall apart, which broke my heart but was inevitable. The filmmaker Bill Forsyth spotted Peter and offered
him a big role in the movie
Local Hero
with Burt Lancaster. It was a huge break for Peter, who had always harbored the notion of being an actor, but to shoot the movie he would have to leave town for three months. This seemed as good a time as any to break up the band. Peter and Roddy and I had started to hate Temple anyway because of his sunny disposition and wealth. He really was a smug prick. I heard he went into advertising, best place for him. His art was bland and derivative. He was a mediocre bassist and just too damn cheerful to be trusted. Also his teeth were creepy—too big, like a cartoon horse.

The rest of us tried to remain friends. We even started another band called the Guests for a little while, but Peter’s heart was no longer in it. He wanted to be in the movies, and Roddy wanted to go back to the Western Isles to live among his own hobbit-like island people, so it bled out pretty fast. Peter made the effort to include me in his new world of actors and filmy types, but I was insanely jealous of his good fortune and huffily refused to be happy for him. I decided to feel patronized by him instead. Without band practice I had nothing to do, so I signed on the dole and used my unemployment check to get drunk as often as possible. One night Tricia came to my flat and found me passed out in bed with another woman and poured a bucket of ice water over us. She correctly surmised her life would be better if she didn’t squander any more affection on me and moved on.

Lo and behold, I was in the first of the free-falls. Sober alkies are often asked: “When did you hit rock bottom?” but a more informed question might be: “How many times did you hit rock bottom?”

For the first time since leaving school I had no job, no band, no girlfriend, and no brakes on my behavior. I still lived in the big apartment with Temple; the Dreamboys bassist and I would arrive back there hammered and angry at all hours of the night with all sorts of company, sometimes even more unsavory than myself.
There was no love between Temple and me now that we were no longer bandmates, and as it was his name on the lease of the place, he had all the power.

He suggested—quite rightly, I might add—that I leave and never come back.

He did it cheerfully, of course.

I
had made friends during the two years I was tubthumping in the Dreamboys. I had played with other bands and recorded demos and worked on a single or two as a session player. As a fixture on the alternative-rock circuit in Glasgow, I had plenty of places to crash for a few days. A couch in a communal flat, the floor of a buddy’s room, sometimes in the warm bed of a friendly barmaid who should have known better. Occasionally I would slink back to Cumbernauld and mooch cash, food, and laundry services from my parents, but that didn’t sit too well with me. I felt a failure when I was there, and my family’s obvious concern for me made me uneasy.

My reputation as a bit of a wild drunk actually helped a little in getting work with other bands. It was true in punk rock as in other areas of showbiz that bad behavior is often rewarded instead of chastised. A dipsomaniac train-wreck drummer was just the kind of thing that some groups were looking for. I joined up with a camp, artsy outfit called On a Clear Day that was getting some attention. Their singer was a flamboyant queen, which, in Glasgow at that time, was pretty unusual, not to mention courageous.

I became great friends with the bassist Robbie McFadyen, a
rickets-thin fellow alkie who loved to party as much as I did and in fact had more of a constitution for it. He must have weighed less than 150 pounds with his coat on, but Robbie could drink anyone under the table, and on those rare occasions when he passed out before me I could easily throw the man over my shoulder and carry him home. Unfortunately for poor Robbie, he had to do this a lot more for me than I did for him, but, luckily for me, his slight physique concealed a remarkable potency.

At thirty, he was almost ten years older than I and had his life together a little more. He worked part-time waiting tables at the Spaghetti Factory, a restaurant in Glasgow’s West End that was hip with illiterate gastronomes. The type of people who’d ask for a
giraffe
of red wine to go with their
spagbol
.

Robbie was hilarious and smart. He was also gayer than a parade, although when I first met him he was still pretending to be straight and professing great lust for the impossibly glamorous Jayne Henderson, the beautiful and willowy sister of the Hellfire Club’s owner. Robbie sent Jayne flowers and took her out to dinner and to the movies, but it was very clear to all of us, Jayne included, that Robbie didn’t want to sleep with Jayne, he wanted to
be
Jayne. Or at least play with her hair.

Robbie and I became roommates when he found a sublet that was available in a large basement flat near the art school. The place was available for a year, and the only problem was that while the owners were out of the country we’d have to look after Ken, their enormous white cat. Ken was a sonofabitch, he must have weighed forty pounds and could actually open the refrigerator door by himself. I would never have believed this had I not seen him go into the kitchen, open the fridge with his big, meaty paw, and steal a cooked chicken that Robbie’s mother had sent as a care package. I yelled and tried to catch him but he grabbed the chicken and jumped on top of the cupboards, out of my reach. He stared me down defiantly as he enjoyed his lunch. He hated me, and I, in turn, loathed and
feared him. Sometimes I would wake up in my small damp bedroom and find him staring at me, a look of smug pity written on his whiskery face. I always felt Ken was judging me, and I think I was right. Ken thought I was a lazy alcoholic stoner who would never amount to anything other than babysitting cats, to whom I was an intellectual inferior, and I don’t suppose I can blame him, given the evidence. My continuing distrust of cats stems from my dysfunctional relationship with Ken.

One night, while stoned out of my gourd on fine Pakistani black hashish, I was lying in bliss on the moist, plaid sitting-room couch when I heard Robbie enter the flat. He had gone out drinking after he had finished work and he tumbled into the room drunk and in the company of a mulleted, tattooed muscleman named Colin. Robbie said Colin was going to sleep on the floor in his room, would that be okay with me? I said I didn’t think it had anything to do with me, and then Robbie told me he wasn’t gay.

“Okay,” I whispered. I was really too wrecked to carry on a conversation. Even one with so rudimentary a subtext.

“Colin’s not gay either. He works on the oil rigs.”

“Right-o,” I smiled stupidly.

The two not-gay men went off to Robbie’s room to not sleep together and to not have sex. Ken gave me a knowing look from his perch on the mantelpiece and I nodded in agreement before drifting back into my opiate-laden reverie.

In the morning, after Colin had sneaked out, Robbie told me that although nothing had happened, he thought Colin might be gay.

“Even though he works on the oil rigs?” I asked.

There was a bit of a beat. Then we both laughed and Robbie cried a little bit and he was out and that was it.

After this, the partying ratcheted up a notch because Robbie started frequenting the Glasgow gay scene and would take me along with him. Those discos were a riot, I had no idea that anyone
from Scotland could dance that well, or that enthusiastically, and for some reason there always seemed to be at least a few beautiful women in these clubs as well. At least I think they were women.

Robbie loved his new gay buddies, and I thought it was very cool and daring to be homosexual. I would have tried it but could never find a man I wanted to have sex with, they all seemed so…not womanly enough.

On one particularly memorable evening I even made out, after a fashion, with some dude called Stu. He had managed the Dreamboys for a while but I had no idea he was gay until he sat next to me in a notorious club Robbie had taken me to called Bennets. We were catching up, talking about the good times with the Dreamboys, when Stu suddenly planted his big scaly lips on my face and stuck his meaty tongue into my mouth. I almost shat my pants. I pushed him away and I remember how surprised he looked, although I’m sure I looked a lot more surprised. I also remember feeling physically ill at the sensation of the bristle on his chin against mine and I’m still haunted and creeped out by that. My gay male friends tell me they have felt the same about experimental physical encounters with women.

Stu told me I was a cock teaser, expecting me to be insulted. The weird thing is, I kind of was.

I got fired from On a Clear Day when the guitarist found out I was shagging his girlfriend, a thin, clever girl, Jill, who also managed the band. For a brief time she and I shacked up in a pokey apartment, and though the sex was flamboyant and athletic, she was older than me and I think she wanted something more. Intimacy, for example, and I was a long way from being capable of anything like that. She dumped me and I moved out.

Although I’d been booted from the band, Robbie and I remained close, and to help me get over the breakup with Jill he got us a few tabs of acid one Saturday night. We dropped the little pink pyramid pills in a pub about half an hour before it closed, eleven p.m. in those days. We were heading home across the gothic expanse of Kelvingrove Park just as the acid began to kick in. It was powerful stuff—I had tripped many times before and never been close to the intensity of this. The Victorian statues in the tree-lined roads followed us with their eyes, the wind in the leaves was whispering vague sinister threats, and mysterious ripples bubbled up from the myriad of dark ornamental ponds. Robbie for some reason kept turning into Adam Ant. I asked him to stop but he said he couldn’t help it. Terror flashed like lightning. Then it passed, then it came back a couple of more times, then quiet again. Then it switched on and stayed on like a fluorescent light. Blinding terror. Robbie felt it, too. We started running but to our horror we found that, even going flat out, we were traveling painfully slowly. Then we heard them. A long way off at first, behind us and getting closer.

Ducks.

First one rogue quack. Then another. Closer still. One of us shouted, “Killer ducks!” We were petrified and doubled over with laughter at the same time. Very unhinged. Very bizarre.

We redoubled our efforts to escape the domain of the man-eating mallards, and just as we reached the park gates it started to pour down rain.

What fresh hell was this? I felt I would drown. I looked in panic at Robbie, which was a bad idea at the best of times, given how thin and scary-looking he was. The exertion and rain was making his eyeliner run and he appeared, for all the world, like a walking Jolly Roger. I shrieked like a wee girl and ran away from him; he tried following but I threw him off.

I stumbled, weeping uncontrollably, through rainy cobbled side streets until I found myself wandering Great Western Road, an ancient and wide thoroughfare that leads out of Glasgow to the Highlands. The rain had transformed the streets into black mirrors, which was hugely disconcerting because they reflected the green of the traffic lights, turning my whole world green.

I have never been that scared, lost in a town I know like the back of my hand, and about to asphyxiate in a color.

Then things turned from green to orange, then red, then green again, and I ran as fast as I could to God knows where.

I needed help. I was in a very bad way, so I decided I should call home. I found a phone booth and before dialing I looked at my watch. It was four a.m. I had been in this state for five hours. I listened as the phone rang and rang in my parents’ house. Finally my mother picked up, her voice fuzzy with sleep.

“Hello?”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. I covered the receiver so that she wouldn’t hear me breathing and think I was some kind of weirdo, which of course I was.

“Hello?”

Silence.

“Craig, is that you?”

I hung up.

The storm had passed.

I think just hearing her voice was enough to pull me back into myself. Years later I finally admitted it had been me on the phone that night, although I suppose she always knew.

I wandered back to the flat with my head zinging and popping but not quite as bad as before. I was terribly anxious and stayed awake for about three days afterward, watching crappy television or staring at Ken. At last I finally drifted into oblivion and slept for sixteen straight hours.

I vowed never to take acid again, and I haven’t, but just writing
about this experience, twenty-five years later, makes me feel uneasy and afraid, like I could fall back into it.

Something happened inside my mind that night that should not have happened. Acid gave me a clinical, unblinking look at madness, and I discovered I wasn’t brave enough to be insane.