Wasted (3 page)

There was never a moment when I thought drinking three or four nights a week was cause for concern. In many ways it wasn’t. Society didn’t frown upon it, parents never questioned it
and friends were all doing the same, if not more. Not much room for a reality check there, then. The first summer after college was spent in Cape Cod, as was the subsequent one, and in both cases
drinking took on a daily regularity. I got work in an old hippie store called Yellow Orange, on Main Street in Falmouth, which sold Beatles
T
-shirts and Indian jewellery. I
spent two summers behind the till, getting an education in the 1960s counterculture three decades after the event, and got to know an assortment of drifters who used the shop as a hangout. Included
was Chris, an ex-fisherman, by this stage a heroin addict who had
HIV
/
AIDS
and sold the shop his monthly supply of uppers and downers in order to
feed his habit. Others, such as Happy, a dope addict, or Christine, an amateur hairdresser, would stop by and buy the pills for $2 a go, asking for ‘blue’ or ‘pink’ toilet
paper, depending on which ones they wanted. Steve, the owner, who missed out on Woodstock because all his staff took the day off, was glad of the company behind the counter and let me have the run
of the place. I had thoughts of staying on and taking over the shop, perhaps writing the Great American Novel or picking up work on a fishing trawler out of Woods Hole in the off season. Steve
introduced me to Eddie, an Irish-American mobster whose father had been shot dead by the Mafia in Boston on his tenth birthday. Eddie was on the Cape getting away from a life of hustling, and sold
grass to keep things ticking over. I bought it in enough quantities to make sure I didn’t have to pay for my own use, while Eddie would lecture me from time to time—‘Hey Bryannn,
you make sure you call your mudder in Oireland every week, ya hear?’

Another guy who came into the shop was Brian, an Irish-American who never worked a day in his life, living off his wife’s income and eating in the local Chinese restaurant every day. He
carried a photograph in his wallet of his dead father lying in his coffin, which always struck me as very odd.

Last I heard, Chris died, Happy was destitute, having moved from grass to crack, Christine was placed in a psychiatric hospital for murdering her daughter, and Brian still eats in the same
Chinese restaurant every day. The shop is now a laundry store, with Steve working administration for a power-tripping college graduate, having failed to make astute investments down through the
years. His only regret is not closing the shop for Woodstock.

Those summers were seen as time off from college, and so anything went and was excused. Bottles of Michelob, shots of tequila, bags of grass and insect bites were the extent to which I engaged
with wider American culture outside Falmouth. For my nineteenth birthday, I decided to pierce my nose,
DIY
style. Several bottles of beer later and I applied an ice pack to
the right nostril while smearing the whole area in Preparation
H
, which numbed the skin. A safety pin culled from behind a couch did the piercing, and from then on my right
nostril was the proud owner of a gold stud, which grew up to be a silver ring when college started back. Presumably, by doing this I was rejecting conformity, although if I had my time back,
I’d much rather have a scar-free nostril than rail against the ‘system’.

My social thinking was all skewed, confirmed when I had to come back early from the States to repeat one of my subjects, which, appropriately enough, was sociology. Without having handed in any
course work, I had gotten a respectable 23 per cent in my end-of-year exams. Not quite Noam Chomsky, but not a bad return for having missed every Friday morning seminar since the academic year
began. I repeated and got the exam and was back in time to take my place on the annual rag week booze cruise. My only other memories of that rag week were dressing up as a student nurse for the
Rags Ball and being thrown out of the nightclub for doing lines of speed in the female toilets.

Of my three years as an undergraduate I only have selective memories. I’m slightly wary of writers (James N. Frey take a bow) who can recall whole episodes involving their past drunken or
drugged selves. If you indulged enough, then you shouldn’t be able to remember! My attitude to drugs was that I could take or leave them. Invariably, of course, I took them, mostly cannabis
and the occasional brew of magic mushrooms, later on ecstasy, cocaine,
MDMA
, acid and speed. There were some fellow students who entered Sir Henry’s nightclub in first
year only to re-emerge years later, 3 stone lighter and a lot more paranoid. I exposed myself to the dance scene in limited bursts, maybe every second Sunday night or on bank holiday weekends. I
still had a fear of what drugs could do, and had seen several Ennis natives whose lives were destroyed young enough for me to realise I needed to creep up slowly on this particular animal.

There were exceptions, of course, including a heavy weekend in Amsterdam with a trainee doctor who was always up for a night out. We were staying with a Canadian friend, and had partied through
the night in anticipation of the weekend’s delights in the Dutch hedonistic oasis—Amsterdamaged, as we liked to call it. The three days there are now distilled in my mind to about four
or five freeze frames. On day one we sourced herbal Ecstasy tablets and some cocaine from a local street chemist. The cocaine had the same effect as an anaesthetic from a dentist, albeit with a
splitting headache thrown in for good measure. We got it into our heads that the herbal pills were having no effect so doubled up on dosage. The rest, as they say, is a bit of a blur. I remember
ending up at a squat party in a former embassy somewhere and walking past neo-Nazis training their alsatian to attack members of the public. ‘Come to Amsterdam and suppress the memories for a
lifetime’ should be the Dutch Tourist Board hook.

Other memories flash back every now and then—getting hit by a car outside Sir Henry’s nightclub while on Ecstasy, limping off before the Guards arrived and spending the remainder of
the night rolling around the Mardyke Cricket Pitch. Generally I felt socially awkward and found getting drunk or stoned a way to sidestep those feelings. I never would have seen it that way; at the
time I was just doing whatever everyone else was.

——

Knuckling down in the second year of my studies, I finished the year with a respectable result, enough to suggest I had a shot at a decent degree. I was living with a girl at
the time, a childhood sweetheart from the end of our schooldays in Ennis, and the stability of that relationship had an impact in limiting multiple benders in any given week. I had vague notions of
becoming a teacher, so it was important to make some bit of an impression with second year’s grades in order to secure the postgraduate course. In the main, I felt academically slight.
Perhaps it came from being surrounded by a new intellectual discourse. Before attending university, my reading was mainly limited to Stephen King novels and whatever was demanded on the Leaving
Cert curriculum. Hopkins appealed, so too Kavanagh, and on a personal level, I could relate to Othello’s emotional frailty. I didn’t know much about New Romanticism, right and left
political argument, postcolonial theory or Bob Dylan. I probably couldn’t even have told you what the main difference between Communism and capitalism was. I struggled with the apostrophe
(still do!), and given that I was the first in my family to go down the academic road, I found it difficult to relay my experiences when home. Dislocated, both physically and psychologically, would
be how best to describe it. Ours wasn’t a bookish house in any event, which isn’t a criticism, just a statement of fact. I was often struck by the reality that my dad worked hard in
those early years to be able to keep the family finances on track and send me to college. Yet, the more time I spent in university, the further away from him in outlook and experience I got. We get
on well now, but it took time, and in a way, and I guess this is the same for many parents of his generation, he was enabling the distance between us by virtue of the fact he was doing an
honourable thing and financing my studies. Zadie Smith put it best when writing on her relationship with her father, and the feeling of alienation brought about by furthering her
studies—‘It was university wot dunnit,’ she remarked.

At the time I could also be desperately socially awkward (what Irish person isn’t at some level?). Walking into lecture theatres late was a major ordeal, and so too was walking past groups
of colleagues in the bar and having to speak in small tutorial groups. It came from a feeling of inadequacy which would later be suppressed by the faux camaraderie of the bar scene. Back then,
though, I was unsure and idealistic. Later in this book, Des Bishop talks about the generations of shame and guilt Irish people carry around with them, of how much of a wounded society we Irish
are. Perhaps there was some of that, an inner feeling that here I was in university, debating the constructs of Beowulf or Banville’s
Book of Evidence
, when only a few generations
earlier my ancestors struggled for their very existence. Both my parents’ families were from rural areas of west Clare, and would have had to contend with eviction, famine, war, and religious
extremism. Perhaps, and not to get too Jungian on you here, that collective energy needed venting at some point, or was passed through the generations needing an outlet. Or maybe I was just
unlucky—maybe I had emotional issues I didn’t fully address and they hid like dormant fleas, waiting for the right personal habit to come along which they could attach themselves to and
achieve liberty of sorts. Whatever the reasons, my drinking during those years changed and became more and more a badge of who I was and how I thought.

——

In final year I managed to rediscover quite a bit of self-discipline and from January that year onwards, I socialised very little. Course work was going well, complemented by
two drama courses, which allowed for performance-based modules. Studying history sparked an interest in Irish land agitation, specifically the west Clare region where my ancestors had farmed. For
my final year undergraduate thesis I focused on the Vandeleur Estate, part of the Kilrush Union, where a series of evictions occurred in the mid-nineteenth century. Halfway through, a history
professor took me aside, enquiring whether or not I had thought of a career in academia. Of course I hadn’t but said it would be something that appealed. And why wouldn’t it, with the
chance to spend a few more years milling about campus, living the student life? It became clear during the final year that I was headed for a good result, and still with vague notions of teaching
at the end of it. I fell in with a good group, where academic competition was high, and we all strove for the elusive first-class degree, egging each other on. After the exams I headed to Edinburgh
for a summer, where my drinking returned to pre-final-year levels, although this time there was an edge to it not present in previous years. Whiskey, and more specifically Canadian Club, became my
drink of choice; I often downed shot after shot between rounds or on my own when no one else was looking. It enabled more erratic behaviour and blackouts became more and more frequent. I worked in
a Mexican restaurant, usually in the mornings and evenings. In the afternoon, in fact every afternoon, I went to the Green Tree Bar, and found camaraderie there among the regulars at the counter,
which appealed to me throughout my drinking life. Every day, the regulars participated in the Channel 4 game show ‘Countdown’, with military-style concentration—whoever got the
conundrum was assured free drinks for the rest of the evening. I got it once, and it was a great day indeed. I longed to return to America and one night/early morning came home from an all-day
whiskey session, packed my bags and informed my room-mates, including my girlfriend at the time, that I was heading for Boston and would see them all at Christmas in Ennis.

I had £45 and a passport in my pocket and it was close to 2 a.m. The cab driver dropped me to the departures terminal and wished me luck. A national airline had a flight to Boston the next
day, so I queued at the check-in desk and waited for it to open. My plan was to tell them I had received very bad news from Amerikay, and that it was imperative I got on the next flight. To me, the
plan was foolproof. While waiting for the desk to open, I fell asleep, and awoke several hours later, in the airport, with no recollection of how I got there or why I was queuing for a flight to
Boston. A taxi ride later and I was back in bed, trying to sleep off the rest of my hangover, before my flatmates had got up for breakfast. Boston would have to wait.

The summer’s drinking was fuelled by a variety of odd jobs—handing out flyers at nightclubs, waiting tables, working in factories. At the start of the summer, a few others and myself
managed to bluff our way onto the British welfare system, and once every two weeks we took a bus to a local employment office to claim £88 benefit. This had usually been drunk by the time we
arrived back to our rented accommodation.

The feelings of social awkwardness present since early adolescence accelerated during this period. I felt like I had something to say, but couldn’t find ways of saying it. I never fully
fitted in with whatever group I happened to be with, whether it was the daily drinkers on the Cowgate or the artists taking part in the Festival. I leaned on alcohol more and more as a means of
unlocking social situations, of easing myself into company. It was a self-confidence thing. Perhaps it’s an Irish thing. Every Sunday night we headed to Taste, a weekly event at the Honeycomb
nightclub, and began experimenting more with Ecstasy. One, maybe two pills at most. The atmosphere was part hedonistic, part quasi-spiritual, summed up by the fact that doormen searched you down on
arrival and then hugged you afterwards! I had vague notions that I should be part of some creative group—an actor, maybe, or a writer. The Dublin actor Mannix Flynn was in town that summer
with his one-man show
Talking to the Wall
, and afterwards in the bar over vodkas and orange juice he got me thinking politically. The acting seed was planted in my head. Mainly, though, I
honed my skill as a drinker. Scottish society welcomed the daily drinker into its open arms—every night there was a party, or even a quiet night in with plenty of stimulants.