Leith, William (27 page)

Michael said, 'This is where he crashed out. The drugs and the booze just wiped him out.'

`Apparently,' I said, 'when they found him he was a ghastly purple colour. The blood had pooled on one side of his body.' `He put himself through a lot of abuse.'

`He sort of ... didn't like himself. He made people laugh, and he was a huge star. But he couldn't get the same respect as a leading man.'

`Imagine that last night of his life. He would have collapsed about here. When he died, his head would have been ... here.'

I was in Los Angeles researching a story on Don Simpson, another man with a terrible appetite for food and booze and drugs, another fat boy who couldn't keep still. Simpson, a big fan of cocaine, produced films, along with his partner Jerry Bruckheimer, such as Flashdance, Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, and Days of Thunder films that would later be dubbed 'high concept'. Simpson's movies always featured Young people from the wrong side of the tracks, people who

couldn't keep still. The films, like Simpson's life, were full of loud music and sexual innuendo, and endless conspicuous consumption. According to Simpson's biographer Charles Fleming, Simpson himself owned forty pairs of cowboy boots; he once bought thirty-one Armani suits on the same day. He favoured black Levi's jeans, but would only wear each pair once. 'The color drops off just that much,' he told an interviewer. 'I like black to be what I call technical black. I can afford it. One time only, and they're out.'

Fleming tells us about Simpson's heavy booze and drug consumption. One friend of Simpson's told Fleming, 'He'd be like, "Two lines? I'm doing ten lines, motherfucker."' The same friend said, `If you took a shot of tequila, he'd guzzle half a bottle.'

I'm thinking about this, about Simpson's gluttony, about what one Simpson acquaintance called his 'Inner fatboy', and about Belushi's inner fatboy, how his most famous moment was the scene in Animal House when he filled his mouth with food, puffing out his cheeks, and pressed on his cheeks so that the food spurted out, and said, 'I'm a zit!' This is what I'm thinking about as I walk down the stairs and into the kitchen, wondering if I should have one last drink.

It doesn't take much. As soon as I take a swig of the milky liqueur, I don't feel good, not good at all, and after two or three swigs, I'm back in the sitting room, rocking on my feet. I can feel the nasty retribution of the blood leaving my head, saliva filling my throat, and at first I think I might not pass out, and then I think I might not be sick, and, finally, I think there is a chance that I will not do both of these things at exactly the same time, which is similar to the feeling I imagine

Don Simpson might have had on 18 January 1996, when, after bingeing for years on coke and food and booze, his heart finally gave out, and which might also be similar to the sensations I imagine John Belushi had, when, after bingeing on coke and booze, he had a seizure and died in the early hours of 5 March 1982. And how the Chicago comedian Chris Farley, by then grossly overweight, who 'dreamed of being John Belushi ... I wanted to follow him' must have felt when, on 18 December 1997, he did indeed follow him. And the feeling I imagine Michael VerMeulen had when, on 30 August 1996, after a night on the tiles, a night bingeing on coke and booze, he, too, collapsed, passed out and died.

I've never vomited and passed out at exactly the same moment before. It's only in retrospect that you realize how dangerous it is. It would be salutary and rather neat if my thoughts, as I passed out, were 'What makes me binge?' or 'I need help,' or `I'll get help.' It would be interesting if, as oblivion beckons, you realize that oblivion is not what you want, not what you want at all. But actually, things happen much too fast for that. As you begin to lose control, as your stomach heaves, and as you begin to collapse, you just have time to wonder, briefly, what it will be like when your head smashes into the pile of CDs.

I never find out; I lose consciousness before I hit the ground.

A Forgettable Song

I wake up and I walk to the window and pull back the curtains and look out of the window for a while. I'm on the

side of a hill and I can see right along the river valley, seven miles to the sea, and it's a clear, clear day so I can see beyond where the river hits the coast, right up the coast I can see, and then I get back into bed and lie there for a while, thinking nothing much, doing nothing much, just letting my mind go blank, which is something that, after seventy or eighty hours of therapy, I'm getting better at.

Diets are not the solution.

Of course diets are not the solution.

The problem is not the food.

The problem is far, far worse than just the food.

I'm looking around the bedroom, at the line of books along the wall, and the sink, and the crack in the ceiling where the water comes in when it rains. I'll go downstairs to make some coffee in a minute, and a few slices of toast. Sometimes, these days, I switch the radio on in the mornings and lie there, half-listening. But that's not what I do today. My girlfriend is still asleep. Sometimes she dozes longer than

me.

I get out of bed and walk down the stairs and into the kitchen. I put the coffee on. I cut four slices of bread, two for me and two for her, making sure the slices are roughly even by turning the loaf around as I cut, which is something I never used to be able to do, but am fine about now. Before, I sliced downwards in a straight line, pushing into the bread and sawing at it at the same time, and often ended up with wedge-shaped slices, which bothered me, but not enough to modify my technique.

As the coffee percolates I stare out of the window, at some trees, at the sky, at the planes angling up through the cloudsfrom Gatwick airport, miles away when they appear, tiny dots at first and then perceptibly planes, and if I stand in the right place I can make the planes disappear in the exact corner of the window.

I drink the coffee outside the front of the house, sitting on a bench in the sun. I'll tell you something: I haven't stopped drinking. I just don't drink very much any more. But I won't forgo the pleasure of what James Frey describes as 'a nice glass of wine', or 'a beer on a hot afternoon'.

And I'm not on any particular diet. I eat bread and pasta and rice, and meat and fish and vegetables. There's a trifle in the fridge, and I want some of it, possibly even for breakfast. But I'm not so hungry all the time these days; I'm learning not to be so hungry.

I say, 'I am learning.'

I don't say, 'I have learnt.'

I haven't stopped believing that carbs make you hungry. I still think that the Glycaemic Index is important. It's easing itself into the culture. People are starting to say, 'Forget Atkins it's all about GI now.' But, really, these are just two ways of spinning the same idea. Anyway, I don't think You should eat refined carbs if you can help it, unless you do a lot of exercise. But it's much easier to practise moderation if You're not hungry in the head. When you're hungry in the head when you're spiritually needy it's hard to resist your cravings. When you're happier, you can eat carbs and feel hungry and just ride it out. Go easy on the carbs, then, but

don't flip out about it.

Drugs? Well, I don't want drugs so much any more. I'm less interested in oblivion. I think alcohol and drugs, and food

understand the question. If I left half a glassful of wine it would sing to me so strongly that I would have to go back to it to finish it off.'

Well, there have been times when I haven't been able to leave half a glassful of wine, either. But I can now. It doesn't sing to me any more.

Or rather, maybe it sings a bit, but it's a forgettable song, not one of those songs you get on the brain.

Vomit

When I woke up that morning, all those months ago, with my head in a pile of CDs, I felt better than I thought I would. First of all, I was breathing. Aside from that, I was caked in vomit. I had vomit in my nostrils and hair, vomit on my shirt, vomit stiffening the front of my jacket, which I had not, of course, taken off. The curtains were still open. The sun was bright. When I opened my eye, I felt savagely exposed, like a man on a battlefield under a flare. I could see the sun broken down into individual rays, which rippled off the broken pyramid of CD cases like heat-haze. There are many bad things one might pass out into while vomiting, and some are better than a pile of CDs. They are sharp, they are shiny, they cut into

Your face.

I opened my other eye. I had pain in my eyes, pain behind My eyes, a pulsing tide of sickening discomfort clutching the Inside of my head. The alcohol I had drunk had dehydrated the inside of my skull. Consequently, the dura, the cellophane-like membrane that encases my brain, was no longer

and sex for that matter, are no longer so dangerous when it's not oblivion you seek.

I've had four periods of problem drinking in my life one when I was a teenager, for two years, one in my late twenties, for two years, one in my thirties, for about six years, and the recent one, which lasted a few months.

In my whole adult life, I've only been dry for twenty weeks.

So what was happening the rest of the time, when I was neither dry nor bingeing? Well, I drank a couple of times a week, mostly one or two drinks, sometimes a few more. I was drunk once in a while, but not often. I'd go into a bar and wonder what I wanted and sometimes decide on a coffee or a glass of water. During these times I didn't think about alcohol very much, but I remember going swimming or playing tennis and afterwards having maybe two beers and absolutely enjoying them, totally savouring them. And that's a better relationship to have with beer, I think, than abstaining from it and being frightened of it.

Drugs? Well, maybe at a wedding, or on New Year's Eve, or if you see a group of old friends you haven't seen in a year or two.

I went to see Dr Robert Lefever, who runs the Promis Centre, a place for recovering addicts, as the terminology has it, and Dr Lefever, he's a former alcoholic, gambler and overeater himself, said that he once asked his wife how she can leave half a glassful of wine. She told him she could leave it because she didn't want it any more. Lefever then said that he hadn't asked her why she'd left the half-glassful of wine, but how.

He said, 'She looks at me blankly because she doesn't

fully supported. Cells inside my brain were being traumatized, and had responded by releasing chemicals ordering nerve-endings in my head to tell my brain the bad news. My brain, in turn, was trying to get my attention, and succeeding. I was in pain. It felt as if something inside my head was being gently pulled away from my skull, which it was.

Quite apart from that, the cocaine I had snorted and the cannabis I had smoked, having raised my levels of serotonin and dopamine to unrealistically high levels, had created the knock-on effect of making my brain mop up these feel-good chemicals like a sponge.

The radiator was on. My head was pressed against the radiator. My eyes and mouth were encrusted with vomit. The radiator was encrusted with vomit. My head was heating up at an alarming rate. My cheek was pressed into the carpet. The carpet was tough and bobbled, hard knots of sea-grass abrading my skin.

And when I moved my head, I felt as if a rotating implement had pared my brain from my skull. My throat, once again, was lubricated with juices. I considered my position. The grand ambitions I had entertained moments before to wipe down the CDs and the radiator, to sponge the worst of the vomit off my clothes, to somehow pick the carpet clean with a knife or some other implement, to air the place came and went. For a too-brief moment, my lesser ambition, of sneaking out unnoticed, so that I could retch in the street, unconstrained by the awkwardness of being in someone else's house, seemed a definite possibility.

And when the door opened, and the hostess of the impromptu party, the lady of the house, walked through thedoor, and said something, and walked straight back out, and slammed the door, I thought: I need help.

And: I don't need help.

And: I need help. And: I'll get help.

`I'm Hopeful'

Susie Orbach, slim and girlish although she's well into middle age, opened the door to her office, which is a very neat, well-kept basement in north London, and welcomed me in, and we walked into her office and sat down, and we talked about why people become compulsive eaters. We agreed that people

I I 'dated by impossibly thin role-models in magazines wereintimidated nu

and on television, by the cult of thin; we agreed that the cult of thin, in the end, made people fat. We agreed that girls were dieting at a younger age than ever before. She said she thought that 'very very early on, babies' appetites are being thwarted'.

We talked about the fashion for women to lose weight very quickly after giving birth, and how women often stop breast-feeding too early. We talked about Elizabeth Hurley, how Hurley lost her 'baby body' soon after giving birth to her son Damian. We agreed that body-fascism, which used to intimidate women, and hardly used to intimidate men at all, is now beginning to intimidate men. We discussed the theories Of Susan Faludi, who believes that men are undergoing a terrible crisis of identity.

And then we talked about the rise of men's magazines, and

how they were really vectors for advertising male grooming products, which means that, to be successful, they need to make men feel insecure, so they will want to buy the grooming products.

`It's a very very lucrative business,' said Orbach.

We discussed the power of the cult of thin. The cult of thin is about wanting what you can't have, striving for impossible perfection, slipping into narcissism, judging yourself by your own dismorphia, and eventually becoming isolated, compulsive. I said that skinniness was such a ubiquitous and positive image in our world that it seemed almost hard-wired in the brain.

Orbach said, 'No, absolutely not. I completely disagree. I think it's totally socially constructed. And the social construction is so powerful that it feels hard-wired. Look you go around the world. Look at Fiji. In 1995, you've got commercial telly going in. In 1998 they've got 12 per cent of teenagers being bulimic. Now that is staggering. It's a very clear result. You've got economic penetration, and visual penetration.'