High Sobriety (13 page)

He advises me not to drink at all while I'm writing the book. Alcohol will make it harder for me to think clearly, and it won't enhance my writing. Contrary to what I fear, creativity needs clarity, not intoxication, he says. It's unexpected advice from an author who has written newspaper columns that are practically love letters to hard liquor. But there's an element of performance to that, he says. He's an entertainer, who plays up his public image as ‘some sort of crazed beast'. And his drinking always occurs after his writing day is done. He blames Hunter S. Thompson — the creator of gonzo journalism, whose work was heavily coloured by his use of alcohol and hallucinogenic drugs — for creating the myth that good prose requires chemical assistance. ‘I get young baby writers and journalists who want to meet me, and I'll do that a couple of times a year almost as a public service, and a number of them turn up with fucking six-packs and bags full of dope. They just want to get on it. And I have to say, “You're here to fucking work — and more importantly, I've got a meeting with my accountant and my agent this afternoon. I'm not doing this shit.” Thompson has almost an iron hold over the imagination of a particular type of young writer. They just assume that they've got to do the same stuff. What they don't see is that, yeah, he was rat-shit while he had those adventures, but when he sat down to write, he did it completely fucking straight. And he would often rewrite a page 18 or 19 times to get it just right.'

As I wind up the interview, he reminds me that many of the great writers who relied heavily on alcohol ultimately ruined themselves by drinking — often through fear of failure. ‘To sit down and decide to write a book is, in some ways, to take one step along the path to your eventual doom. It almost certainly isn't going to work for you, it almost certainly won't sell, and there are so many people who have gone down that path and it's destroyed them. You're putting down that first step yourself, you're embracing it — and to suddenly start drinking while you're doing it is to almost hurry yourself down that path.'

Well, if I am on a path to my eventual doom, at least it might take me longer to get there by not drinking. But as I look for non-alcoholic ways to fill the gap left by wine and beer, I realise that some substitutions aren't much better than booze. Instead of sitting down to write with a glass of pinot, I'm inhaling chocolate as if it were oxygen. It's turning into quite a problem. This isn't a couple-of-Tim-Tams-a-night kinda thing; I'm talking a sell-the-family-heirlooms-and-sew-your-stash-into-the-mattress type of habit. I had low-level dependency issues with the brown stuff before I stopped drinking, but now my addiction has morphed into a beast that won't be sated by anything less than a chocolate fountain hooked up to its veins. If I don't have chocolate every night, I get antsy.

Easter didn't help. By the end of the holiday weekend, I'd eaten my weight in foil-wrapped eggs and was in fear of developing a body shape to match. At first I told myself that this was my treat: a girl's got to have some pleasures in life. I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't drink coffee, I don't do drugs — apart from that ill-considered joint over Easter, which, the next day, caused me to have the closest thing I've felt to a hangover in four months — and I've even managed to kick my two-can-a-day Diet Coke habit. Chocolate is my only guilty pleasure. But the ‘treats' I'm mechanically shovelling into my mouth aren't rewarding anymore; it feels out of control, a bit like my drinking was just a few short months ago. The significance of that is something I'm not yet ready to explore.

As I start planning the book, and another eight months without alcohol, I ponder where it might take me. Will I, by year's end, have changed my relationship with booze so much that the mere thought of an amber ale will make me nauseated? Or will I plunge back in, as if the year off the piss never happened? I suspect that finding out is going to be a bumpy ride.

May

I'M SO SICK
of soft drinks. I can't be held responsible for the safety of the next barman who serves me another glass of lime and soda. The world of non-alcoholic beverages, I'm discovering, is infinitely boring. Lime, water, and dreariness appear to be the core ingredients. Sure, if you go to one of Melbourne's trendy inner-north bars, you might be able to persuade a grumpy hipster to mix you up a mocktail made from hummingbird tears and the juice of Himalayan goji berries, but in your average boozer, it's slim pickings for the non-drinker. There are only so many lemonades or Diet Cokes you can have before you start to feel bloated, and sick to the stomach. If I try to match my friends beer for soft drink, I risk sending myself into a sugar- and caffeine-induced frenzy that will see me licking pub windows and barking at passing cars. Nobody wants to see that. Two sugary soft drinks are about my limit, and then I move on to water. But it makes shouting drinks very difficult, which is of course quite un-Australian.

At Cherry Rock, a laneway music festival held by Cherry Bar, I ask the bartender for a soda water. ‘We don't have any,' he tells me tersely. ‘Try the outside bar.' Fair enough — soda water's not very rock 'n' roll. I push my way through the crowd in AC/DC Lane, to a trestle table groaning under the weight of VB cans, and ask what booze-free beverages they have. The only option is a five-dollar can of Coke. I haven't drunk a full-sugar Coke for years, but maybe the ten teaspoons of fructose will give me a buzz — and if I'm lucky, I might feel just a teensy bit like I'm drunk. Most of the time I enjoy being sober, but the desire for the buzz of those first few beers is starting to creep up on me again. I'm beginning to wonder if the longer this challenge goes on, the more I'll hanker for those feelings.

The can of Coke doesn't do it for me: it gives me a headache and makes me feel sick. It seems that there's a real gap in the market for an entrepreneurial business that can come up with a range of tasty, alcohol-free drinks, and convince bars not only to sell them, but also to promote them as a sexy alternative to booze. As it stands, a sad glass of water with a wedge of lemon floating on top is not enough to entice people away from their frosty beer or full-bodied glass of wine. When I ask bar owners about the lack of choice, they say there's no demand for a wider range of non-alcoholic drinks. Then they usually remind me that serving alcohol is a pub's
raison d'être
. The inference is that I should stay at home or go to a cafe if I want to drink juice and hot chocolate. But cafes mostly shut by 5.00 p.m.; as a non-drinker, where do you go if you want to catch up with friends in the evening? Going for a drink in a pub isn't such an appealing option, when all my local has to offer, for example, is lemonade or tap water. Besides, publicans don't like it much when you drink nothing but water for four hours.

After doing some research, I discover that a sober social scene may actually be a money-spinner. In Ireland, alcohol-free nights at clubs in Dublin's Temple Bar pub district have taken off. One permanently alcohol-free nightclub, now in its third year, draws crowds of up to 400 a night, pulling in punters with a range of organic drinks, massages, face painting, and a cafe. It's proved so successful that the club's creator has expanded into Galway. Another sober night at a nearby dance club is thriving, offering its clientele, who are largely in their late twenties to early forties, smoothies, juices, and herbal teas. In Liverpool, a new venue that owners claim is Britain's first ‘dry bar' is proving popular with a diverse crowd, including people battling drug and alcohol addiction, Muslims, and single women who want to enjoy a night out without being harassed by drunken yobbos.

If there's demand for non-drinking venues in Ireland (the birthplace of Guinness) and Liverpool (which has the highest rate of alcohol-related hospital admissions in Britain), there's surely a market here. I call the Victorian branch of the Australian Hotels Association, the industry body representing pubs, clubs, and hotels, and ask them if they know of any alcohol-free bars or club nights in Melbourne — and if not, if they think there would be demand for such a venue. The deputy chief executive, Paddy O'Sullivan, usually an affable chap, sounds annoyed. It doesn't make any sense, he says in a tone that suggests he thinks I may have gone slightly mad. ‘I've been trying to get my head around it, and in an Australian context, running a pub that doesn't actually serve beer or liquor sounds rather odd, actually. I can't think why on earth it would work here in Australia.'

Perhaps Slim Dusty was right about a pub with no beer. But still, Paddy humours me and refers the question to his chief executive, Brian Kearney, and I wait, hoping there's a hidden network of non-drinking publicans poised to open Melbourne's first alcohol-free bars and offer a smorgasbord of interesting soft drinks to see me through the rest of the year. When the response comes back, in an emailed statement, I'm disappointed. ‘Hospitality businesses respond to customer demand and this is prevalent in the hotel industry where a wide range of non-alcohol drinks are also available for customers.' We may have to agree to disagree on that one.

Still, at least a night-time diet of soft drinks is saving me money. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the average Aussie spends $31 a week on booze. That's the equivalent of about eight full-strength pots of beer. Interestingly, people of my vintage, Generation X, spent slightly more per week ($33) than Generation Y ($30). I'm not sure who they surveyed, but it certainly wasn't anyone I know. After some back-of-the-envelope calculations, I'd say that, at a conservative estimate, my spending on alcohol was about three times that amount. I'd usually buy at least one $20 to $25 bottle of wine a week, to bring either to a restaurant or to a friend's house for dinner. If I went out one night on the weekend, I'd usually have six or seven drinks (probably more if it was a late night). I prefer bottled beer over tap beer, so that's about $7 a drink. Then there's the taxi home, which usually costs about $25. All up, that's about $100 a week on booze. If I went out two nights over the weekend, which I often did, I could almost double that amount. That places my annual spending on alcohol at somewhere around $10,000. In 20 years, I may have spent $200,000 on booze — that's almost somebody's mortgage. A sobering thought indeed.

I discuss this with Chris Raine, who's in town for the Australian Drug Foundation's International Conference on Drugs and Young People, where he's giving a presentation about
Hello Sunday Morning
. He saved a whopping $12,000 during his year off the booze. Catching up with him is like getting a glimpse into my future: he's one of the few people I know who's been sober longer than I have. He seems to have survived. In fact, he's thriving. At the conference, he begins by trying to persuade the Melbourne Convention Centre audience to have a crack at a three-month non-drinking challenge, and there are few takers. Then he tells them about the freak-themed costume party he went to during his year without alcohol. Dressed in a gimp mask, a superhero cape, red undies, and not much else, he turned up completely sober and had what he describes as one of the most emotionally revealing moments of his life. He realised that if he could do that without alcohol, he could do anything. The red undies came to symbolise all that
HSM
offers: bravery, confidence, fun, and inspiration. Drinking water when everyone around you is knocking back beers is like wearing your undies on the outside — you're exposed, vulnerable, and different. It forces you to be fearless. Chris tells the room that there are now 700 people around Australia embracing the
HSM
challenge. Watching him speak, I'm overcome with a sense of pride and purpose. This is how you change a culture: one person at a time.

LIFE HAS A
perverse way of kicking you in the teeth when things are going well. When I bounce into work today, it is waiting there, like a bomb, in my inbox: an email from Fairfax management. Our subeditors are being made redundant. Their work will be outsourced, effective almost immediately. About 90 staff from
The Age
and
The Sydney Morning Herald
will lose their jobs. Shock and disbelief ripple through the office, as more people turn on their computers and discover this nasty surprise.

A meeting of the
Age
house committee — a delegation of journalists, including me, who work with the union to protect jobs, entitlements, and the quality of our newspapers — is called. We're all stunned. Redundancies are never pretty. There will be shock, grief, and anger. But these job losses represent a bigger truth: newspapers are dying. How many more cuts can we endure before there's no blood left to spill? We worry that getting rid of our subeditors — guardians of the quality, accuracy, and integrity that have been the hallmarks of these proud papers for nearly 160 years — will be like removing the foundations of the building. How long before it comes crumbling down around us?

As the day goes on, disbelief turns to fury. There's talk of a strike. Reporters feel powerless, and want to show their support for the subs. During the last round of redundancies, in 2008, editorial staff walked off the job and went straight to the pub — where else would you go to show your solidarity? We drank and hugged, and raised a cheer when our strike action appeared as one of the lead items on the ABC evening news. It was a four-day strike, and I drank a lot during it: to relieve stress, to bond with workmates, and to obscure the obvious. I wonder how I'm going to get through this without alcohol.

The announcement makes me fear for the future. Apart from bar work, the newspaper game is the only career I've ever known. It's what I've wanted to do since I was a ten-year-old, producing newspapers and magazines with craft paper and glue on my parents' kitchen table. But my job, at least for now, is safe. Unlike some of my colleagues, I'm not facing unemployment or contemplating selling my home. In light of that, drowning my sorrows in booze seems a little self-indulgent. It doesn't stop the urge to reach for the bottle, though.