Leith, William (21 page)

Of crack, Frey says, `It's still the only thing I can't be around comfortably. It still freaks me out to this day. There are weird triggers for it. Like, the last time I had an urge for it, I was sitting in a bar waiting to meet somebody. I had a pack of cigarettes, but I didn't have any matches. So I asked the bartender if he had a light. He pulled out a lighter, and it was a butane lighter. Flip, click just the hiss of the lighter ignited just this fucking crazy urge. Because that hiss is something I very much associate with smoking. Every time I hear a butane torch, it's immediately what I think of. I don't always have the urge, but at that time . . : you know, I didn't feel very good, I was emotionally not very happy at that moment, and the combination of not feeling good, and the sound of that hiss, and the association of those two things with crack knowing what that does, knowing how it could make it all go away, makes me want it. I think: oh, wouldn't that be great!'

`Say people were to capture you and tie you up and put a gun to your head and make you smoke crack. What would happen? Would you be addicted again?'

I would definitely have to go through the process again, yes. I don't believe that I could ever use anything again, recreationally or in any way whatsoever.'

Frey believes that, 'The source of addiction is emotion. And I think, over a long period of time, I have associated, internally, certain emotions and certain feelings with the use of chemicals.'

He grew up in a stable, wealthy background. His father

was a lawyer who spent a lot of time abroad. As a child, he suffered from what he calls 'infant ear infection', which went untreated, and, he thinks, might be the source of his troubles.

But he hates the idea of blaming his parents. 'For me,' he says, 'it was very important to accept the blame. To take full responsibility. If I went back to using, it wouldn't be because I had infant ear infection. It wouldn't be because my parents couldn't get me to the right doctor. It wouldn't be any of those things. It would be because I, in an immediate moment, made a decision to reach for something, pick it up, bring it towards me, tip it ... and swallow it. That's a process of decision making that I am responsible for.'

`And you'd never consider drinking again?'

`It's no issue at all. I know what the repercussions would be

if I started drinking again, and it's not something I wanna do.' `Like, if you stepped out into traffic, you'd get hurt. And so

... you just don't. So why do it, unless you want to get hurt?' Frey says, 'Right. That's a great analogy.'

He started drinking when he was ten. 'My parents were very sociable. I always watched people drink. There was alcohol everywhere. I noticed that when people drank, they changed. People who were in a bad mood, if they drank, they were in a good mood. Everyone seemed to be having a great time while they were drinking. And neither of my parents had a drinking problem. They were recreational drinkers. I can't remember any time in my life when I've seen my father or my mother drunk. I've never seen either of them slurring their words or stumbling any of that. Anyway, I was fascinated from a young age with alcohol. So one night, when my parents were out, the babysitter fell asleep, and I went tothe drinks cupboard and took a big sip of vodka. It was awful. But a couple of minutes later I noticed it made all that shit that I felt go away. All the anger. All the rage. All the

confusion.'

So Frey started drinking more and more heavily, and then

moved on to drugs. Oblivion, he says, was always his goal. `Have you ever drunk for enjoyment?'

`No. My goal was always to get fucked up. I don't know the pleasure of a nice glass of wine. Or a beer on a hot afternoon. That was never anything I understood. I understood that I used things to get fucked up. To achieve oblivion. To achieve a state of no emotion. And when I think about drinking, even now, it's always when I'm in a heightened state of emotion either very angry about something, or very upset about something. And I don't think about having a drink. I think about having a lot of drinks. I think about having

enough to drink so I don't have to feel what I'm feeling at the moment.'

`And so ... how do you deal with everything? The drinking, the not drinking?'

Frey stops to think for a moment. He lights another

cigarette. He says, 'Have you ever had a broken heart?' `Whaff

`Have you ever had a broken heart?'

,millions of times. Well, you know. A lot of times. Well . we all have, haven't we?'

`Do you know what it feels like?' `Well ... yes.'

`You can draw on that if you so desire?' `I Suppose ... I

`But do you carry it around with you? Does it affect your every waking moment?'

`Um ...

`In this immediate moment? Right now?'

`Not ... really.'

`And that's how the Rage lives within me now. It's something I know very intimately. It's something that is a part of me. It's something that I have experienced and remember.'

`Right.'

`But it isn't something that affects how I live every day.'

Appenzell

I can have avocados, and steaks, and chicken, every kind of meat, every kind of fish, particularly oily fish, which, as nutritionists are beginning to say, contain fats that are good for the heart, now that's not something you thought you'd be hearing, fats that are good for the heart, and I can have tomatoes, courgettes, asparagus, garlic, cottage cheese, all kinds of cheese in fact, although I don't like the idea of going overboard on the cheese, 'the corpse of milk', I remember somebody calling it, and I also remember getting very animated and anti-cheese at one point, this is when I was with a girl who was vegan, or who was considering taking the step from vegetarian to vegan, and I remember saying, 'You just have to look at it, don't you? You just have to look at it to realize it can't be doing you any good.'

But I have cheese every couple of days. I like cheese, I like the taste, although I can't help feeling that cheese is sinister in

a way that, say, bread isn't. I didn't like cheese when I was a kid, when sweet things were my goal, and savoury things, in contrast, were burdens to be borne my first experience of food was suffering the ham, the eggs, the cheese, with the apple pie or chocolate mousse or whatever as a reward afterwards. As people get older, they want increasingly disgusting things anchovies, rare steak, inhaled smoke, oyster sauce, whisky, powder that stings the nasal membranes.

I'm sitting in my flat. My girlfriend has left me. Emotionally, I am numb. Of course, I knew the relationship was not working out. But perhaps I wanted to be trapped for a bit longer. Now I am free. Now I can do what I like. We were in a restaurant when it happened. We had ordered food I'd ordered lamb shank with cabbage and something else, and she'd ordered some mess of carbs with bits of stuff in it, spaghetti with tomato sauce probably, something crowd-pleasing and unhealthy anyway, and the exact sequence went something like this: she lit a cigarette, the woman at the next table complained, loudly and rudely, tears sprang to my girlfriend's eyes, she slid her hand across the table, reaching for mine, my mobile phone rang, and I picked up my mobile instead of her hand.

That was the start.

And now she's gone, this was yesterday, and I'm sitting here alone, and I feel a powerful urge to leave the premises and go somewhere and flirt with, and possibly kiss, and Possibly have sex with, women. Maybe it's just like Billy Connolly says these urges continue to grow inside you, even during the abstinent period. It's the excitement of going out, the challenge of catching someone's eye, the first touch of hands, the first suggestive thing one of you says to the other.

The sex itself I can take or leave. Waking up in the morning afterwards? No thanks. And then the guilt, the feelings of emptiness and hollowness, the worries about what you've caught, what you've passed on. I think about this, but I manage only to think about it for a moment, a second, and then it's gone.

I've been to the deli a lot recently, sampling all sorts of cheeses. Today I tried jarlsberg, and Gruyere, and Appenzell, which is creamy and slightly foul or mildly rotten at the same time, seductive and punitive, and therefore rather addictive, and my mother called and said, 'Oh, Appenzell, we had that when we lived in Germany, and you liked it, I think,' and I remember seeing photographs of us, myself at ten and my brother six, in Appenzell, by the Rhine waterfall, but I can't remember the cheese. I think they must have had the cheese on another occasion, probably after I had flown back to England to go to boarding school.

And I can have tomatoes and raspberries and blueberries, and tuna stir-fry. My girlfriend, or rather my ex-girlfriend, liked to stir-fry. She would chop vegetables, peppers and courgettes and aubergines, I remember, and broccoli, and fry these things with chunks of chicken, not organic, and therefore worryingly battery, possibly full of injected hormones and fed on ground-up bits of animal protein, and suggestive anyway of bad karma, and she would sprinkle soy sauce on top, and have it with rice.

I of course have it without rice, and with chicken that is organic and free-range. I can have cauliflower, mushrooms, onions, and vodka, as long as I drink the vodka with a sugar-free mixer.

Girls

And over the next few days, the next few weeks, I meet girls, and I talk to them, hold their hands, kiss them, whatever, and the worst of it is that one day I'm walking along the street with a woman I've slept with, and will sleep with again later on, and I look up at a poster of another woman in her underwear, and I can't stop looking at it, I can't stop looking at it, the woman is holding herself in a certain way I find very appealing, and the woman I'm with notices and I make a joke about it, but I'm not sure, in the end, if the joke is good enough.

Revenge of the Killer Carbs

Research published in the New England Journal of Medicine appears to demonstrate that people on the Atkins diet lose more weight than people on low-fat or low-calorie diets. In one study, conducted by the University of Pennsylvania's Weight and Eating Disorders Program, sixty-three middle-aged people were divided into two groups an Atkins group and a low-calorie group. After twelve weeks, the Atkins group had lost an average of 6.6 kilograms; the low-calorie group, on the other hand, had lost an average of 2.6 kilograms. In the second study, conducted by the Philadelphia Veterans Administration Center, 132 obese men and women were divided into two groups again, an Atkins group and a low-fat group. The lowcarb group lost around twice as much

weight.

Time magazine, a significant cultural beacon, reports something equally important: 'What was perhaps more interesting even baffling was that the group on the Atkins lowcarb diet showed lower levels of the blood lipids that contribute to arterial disease.'

Time magazine also says, 'Of course, the mere suggestion that the Atkins diet and others like it are worthy of scientific attention still makes many experts bristle. Yet it is also clear that the low-fat paradigm has developed some cracks in its fagade.'

Yet more research, published in Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders, a journal devoted to the bodily process of metabolizing food, seems to solve an important Atkins riddle: why do people lose more weight on a lowcarb diet than on a low-fat diet even when they consume the same number of calories? For Atkins, this 'metabolic advantage' was the holy grail. For a while, the scientific community has begun to grudgingly accept Atkins' other main claim, that carbs make you hungry. OK, they say, some carbs, maybe refined carbs, might make you hungry. OK, they say, the Atkins diet might work, therefore, because when you feel less hungry, you eat less. So really, they say, the Atkins diet is a low-calorie diet of sorts. Which means that actually, they, the advocates of low-calorie diets, were right all along.

The paradigm is cracked, but remains in place.

But here, in Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders, in an article by Dr Richard Feinman, a biochemist from the State University of New York, and Dr Eugene Fine, a clinician from the Jacobi Medical Center in New York, is something radical. In the article entitled 'Thermodynamics and Metabolic Advantage of Weight Loss Diets', Feinman and Fine explain why the theory of Metabolic Advantage has not been refuted, 'but rather largely ignored'. It's been ignored, they say, because it apparently refutes the laws of thermodynamics, which state that energy generated by one type of calorie must be the same as energy generated by any other type of calor
ie.

`in this review,' say Feinman and Fine, 'we show that there is no such violation of thermodynamic laws.' Of course! It's so simple! Protein calories and carb calories arrive as energy in the body via different pathways! And the protein pathway is longer and more complex. The body, therefore, needs to expend more energy in the process of metabolizing a calorie of steak than it needs to metabolize a calorie of bread. Carbohydrate, as one doctor puts it, is like local currency: you get a big bang for your buck. Protein, on the other hand, is like foreign currency. An exchange rate applies. When you change foreign currency, you leave a little bit behind at the bureau de change. Fineman and Fine conclude by saying, `There is no theoretical contradiction in metabolic advantage and no theoretical barrier to accepting reports describing this effect.'

Now, the paradigm is toppling.

Slowly at first, but with deadly inevitability, the Atkins backlash, like some complex piece of machinery, comes into being. Politicians and the media loyal, as always, to the manufacturers of products that make the most money come out against Atkins. We read in newspapers that Atkins dieters suffer from constipation, bad breath, narrowing of the arteries. Those that have done Atkins, and suffered setbacks, are given a sympathetic hearing, even if the setbacks cannot

has to work harder to metabolize protein than other food types,' she says. 'This means that on a really hot day, people on the protein-based diet who are facing, say, the Underground could have problems. My advice would be to avoid the Atkins diet in hot weather.'