Wasted (6 page)

I was to start in Ennis on a Monday morning. Because relations with my family had broken down, I planned to leave Cork on Sunday afternoon and stay in a
B&B
in Ennis.
A few media friends and a girl I was seeing at the time suggested meeting in the HI-B bar in Cork for a few last jars and a toast to new beginnings. The HI-B is a curious spot, with the eccentric
owner Brian O’Donnell at the helm, barring everyone from coffee drinkers to mobile phone owners. (I once heard him shout ‘SPACE INVADERS’ at a couple who had been sitting on the
only couch in the pub and nursing one drink for two hours.) It had a core group of daytime professional drinkers, and was a perfect oasis in the middle of an afternoon.

My plan was to have two drinks and make an afternoon bus, which would have me in Ennis for early evening, leaving plenty of time to get accommodation for the week sorted. Two drinks became three
and the crowd got bigger and the bus time got later and later. I was now intent on making the last bus, at 7.25 p.m., which would have me in Ennis for half ten or thereabouts. By 8 p.m. I was still
ordering drinks and had been drinking steadily for five hours. Not exactly ideal preparation for your first morning in a new job. At 9 p.m. I said my goodbyes, convinced my female companion to come
with me, walked out the door and hailed a taxi on Patrick Street in Cork.

‘Where we off to, lads?’ the driver asked.

‘Ennis, please,’ I said, ‘or Power’s Pub in Clarecastle if we make last orders.’

The job lasted a matter of days, and I was back in Cork, drinking with the same media colleagues who a week earlier had toasted my departure. It was farcical. My living situation at this time
was still chaotic. I had left a house where I was sharing in order to rent a place on my own, but a month or so in I arrived home to find the locks had been changed. I was already several weeks
behind on the rent, and the letting agency decided to take action. After that, I stayed in different locations, mostly spare rooms, and kept whatever possessions I had held onto under the stairs of
a friend’s house. I used to change clothes and freshen up in public toilets, generally art galleries or theatres, washing my hair in the sink and giving under my arms a wipe with toilet soap
and paper. When staff began to recognise me, I made up a story about the plumbing at home being on the blink. I did this for a few weeks, especially if I was in the middle of a bender and felt
rough. Warped needs must.

——

One day, my parents, with whom relations had been strained for several months, called and told me they wanted to see me. I met them at St Finbarr’s Hospital in Cork,
where the rest of my family had arranged for a treatment counsellor to help them confront my drinking. I sat there, silent, as they expressed their concerns. None of them knew me any more. My
brothers and sisters had no real relationship with me. They wanted to know if I was willing to do something about it. Would I go back on my own the following week and provide a urine sample? I
probably would have tried anything at that stage. I had become ‘sick and tired of being sick and tired’, as the manual says, and I wanted out. After the consultation, my family headed
for Clare and I went on a two-day pub crawl, ending up getting barred from my local late-night bar and crying my eyes out on a side street as dawn broke. As an 11-year-old child, watching JR Ewing
in ‘Dallas’ reach for a crystal decanter full of whiskey and pour, you don’t anticipate that that initial spark will lead to such inglorious finales. I knew myself at that point
the game was up. I had been full of increasing self-loathing in the preceding weeks, would wake up with a sudden shock of anguish, frantically trying to remember the night previous or rampage
through my pockets to find out how much money I had left. But it was the paranoia, the self-hatred and the insecurity that comes with heavy drinking that is rarely spoken of which got to me most of
all. It’s the feeling deep down that you know you’re better than the existence you’ve settled for, but you know also that alcohol keeps those thoughts at bay. It waters the
self-denial. It can also be a hell of a lot of fun, don’t get me wrong. I had some great nights, days and early mornings because of alcohol and whatever else went with it. And if my parents
hadn’t intervened, who knows, I might even still be there in the land of mid-week benders and bullshit. I’d like to think, though, I’d have crawled out of the hole myself at some
stage. Few people ever said to me, ‘You should do something about your drinking,’ but the thing is you end up surrounding yourself with the type of people who you know won’t be
upfront with you. You depend on them and vice versa. In Ireland, we have such a high tolerance for the problem drinker, and in the circles I was moving—arts and media—it’s
accepted even more.

I took on board what my family had said. I was the eldest and somehow meant to lead by example, yet here were my younger brother and sisters giving it to me straight. They didn’t have a
brother anymore. They couldn’t believe a word I said. They said I had no interest in them and they were right. I had become completely self obsessed—my pub friends were my family by
that time. It’s pathetic and shameful to think back on it, but it’s the truth.

I admitted that I was drinking too much and that it was a problem and gave a commitment to returning to the treatment service the following week. In the room with a family counsellor, I began
discussing my life and how out of control it had become. By this stage, I had recently been evicted from another house I was renting, again after only six weeks, for non-payment of rent. I found
this out one night, when I had persuaded a girl to come back for coffee and perhaps some third-leg boogey, only to realise all the locks had been changed. Having tried and failed to scale the
outside wall, she quickly left in a cab and I settled into the coal shed. George Clooney eat your heart out. When I was sober and had some clarity on the situation, I was aware that alcohol had
wreaked havoc on my life and my headspace. I knew that whatever difficulties life would have thrown up in the normal course of things were compounded 100 per cent by my overdependence on the
booze.

But, as the definition goes, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I kept waiting for my life to get going, and it never really did.

I remembered a boat trip to Croatia the previous summer. It was an organised trip and I was the only single person on a boat of couples for a week. Every night, when the captain went to bed, I
would help myself to the tap of beer in the main galley. It got to the point where I even poured drinks for the rest of the passengers. But something happened on that trip. I became more withdrawn,
more depressed. I was prone to crying in the middle of the day on my own. Looking back, I probably had something of a mini-breakdown half way between Split and Dubrovnik. I called my mother and
told her I wanted out, that the life I was living had to give. I cried and apologised.

She organised for me to take a call from my local
GP
in Ennis, who told me to call to a doctor soon as I got home. I did and arrived in her surgery in a mess. She said
she felt really sorry for me, gave me sleeping medication and advised me to call Alcoholics Anonymous. I called, arranged to go to a meeting, and expected to be cured by the time it finished. Some
of it I could relate to—the emotional toll it takes, the madness and mayhem, the skewed logic. But much of it I just couldn’t sit through—the acquired dialogue, the nostalgia and
so on. I left and never went back. Six months of drinking later I was in a prefab on the grounds of St Finbarr’s hospital and it was only then that I finally began owning up to my problems. I
discussed my living situation and the type of friends I was hanging around with. I talked about the panic attacks and the morbid thoughts. The counsellors listened compassionately, and following
two or three meetings decided that outpatient treatment wasn’t going to work for me. I was still moving in social circles where drink was freely available and partying was ongoing. Although I
had managed to stay off the drink for over a week, it was only a matter of time before I would fall back into it again, they suggested. They asked would I commit to rehab for a month. To paraphrase
the poet, I said, ‘Yes, Yes, Yes.’

Mid-November 2004, and a friend dropped me off at Tabor Lodge Treatment Centre in West Cork, with a bag full of books and a head full of belligerence. To be honest, I was glad of the time out,
of fresh sheets, three square meals a day and the chance to start over. My life had become one long hangover, punctuated by bouts of self-pity and short flashes of self-realisation. In Tabor Lodge,
I wasn’t quite as bad as other cases; some had been to jail, others begged on the streets, while one guy snatched handbags from old ladies. Yet all of them had been at my stage on the way up,
and I could relate to enough of it to know I needed to be there. The thing with alcohol or any other dependence is that it is a progressive disease. I had an insight into the future, brother, and
it was murky.

I met others in treatment I could relate to and we all sort of undertook this voyage of honesty together. It was a relief to be away from the mayhem of my life for a prolonged spell. A relief,
too, to get something of a second chance with family and friends. For four weeks we had daily counselling sessions, where we accounted for our actions and looked at ways to prevent them recurring.
I struggled with the word ‘alcoholic’ and began to question the tenets of Alcoholic Anonymous. We were shown a video of a priest on the ‘Late Late Show’ years earlier who
took a broad definition—if drinking causes you problems, then you are an alcoholic. Christ, I thought, no one in Ireland was safe! Addiction treatment was searingly honest, and offered a
multifaceted approach to understanding how my life had gotten so out of control. Yet I wasn’t quite willing to buy into the one-size-fits-all formula necessary for addiction treatment. I
found compulsory
AA
meetings tough going and couldn’t relate to the adopted diction and repetitive slogans. How many of these stories were borrowed from each other, I
wondered? We’re a nostalgic race at the best of times; throw sentimentality into the mix and it felt, to me at least, like romantic war stories. That’s a personal opinion, said in the
knowledge that
AA
is the only thing that works for so many people.

What rehab gave me, most of all, was structure and space. There was daily meditation, and long walks in the surrounding country lanes, several hundred yards from the wooded centre. Three weeks
in, several of us were taken to Kinsale for an
AA
meeting and that was as much contact with the outside world as we had up to that point. I could take phone calls, but
noticeably, few of my ‘friends’ picked up the phone.

It wasn’t without its lighter moments either—I established strong friendships, some of which endure to the present day. Several compulsive gamblers were part of the group, and often,
serving dinner, I asked if their preference was for ‘Beef or Salmon’, a well-known racehorse at the time. Games of football at break time pitted the alcoholics against the drug addicts,
while the first Friday night in the centre we were allowed watch a movie as a way of dealing with the weekend edginess. The choice, ironically enough, was
The Shawshank Redemption.
The most
popular book doing the rounds in the centre, after the
AA
manual, was Howard Mark’s
Mr Nice
, his account of his years as one of Europe’s largest soft-drug
dealers. Not exactly ideal reading for a bunch of addicts trying to turn their lives around, is it?

The toughest parts were when family members came to the centre to speak frankly about how my drinking had affected their lives. Or when I had to read out among the group what family and friends
had to say about my drinking. There was nowhere to hide in those moments, which, of course, is exactly the point. As a group we confronted each other daily, probing our fellow addicts, and
comparing and contrasting their stories with our own. It was a genuinely cathartic experience and a nurturing time spent bonding with people from outside my social and moral circle. In many ways it
reaffirmed for me the universality of human experience.

For some people, the fact that I was attempting to give up drink meant the natural end of our friendship—if you could call it that. I remember one friend, who took me aside just as I was
committing to the 28-day residential treatment programme. We met in a Cork bar at evening time, and he’d come up specially from the countryside to deliver his verdict. His take on it was that
once I went in for treatment, it would always be a negative mark on my medical records and go against me in future life. He urged me to reconsider. All I needed was regular work, he said. A
nine-to-five and everything would be fine. Needless to say, we haven’t stayed in touch. There were others who drifted away naturally, and in many cases, I only realised afterwards the extent
to which certain friendships were based around alcohol and how little I had in common with those people once I left that life behind. The natural break with many of these associations came on
entering rehab and there were very few of those friendships I look back on as being of value.

Studies show that only a small percentage of addicts, some say one third, others say it’s as low as 15 per cent, come out of treatment and remain sober or clean. Of the group of 18 people
I was in treatment with, incorporating overeaters, gamblers, drug addicts and alcoholics, I know that some have committed suicide, others are in jail, and perhaps four or five maximum have remained
on the straight and narrow.

I was one of the lucky ones. While I have every respect for Alcoholics Anonymous, I determined to stay sober largely of my own accord, and somehow it worked. I didn’t have the staying
power for weekly meetings or group sharing. I felt I had given up alcohol to leave that world and its experiences behind. There was also a religious aspect to the movement, mainly Catholic, which I
didn’t share, and while the association points out they are appealing to a God of ‘your own understanding’, I felt it was kind of like Sinn Féin saying they were not part
of the
IRA
. But within
AA
are some incredible people, with amazing insights. Few other social groupings or organisations have the ability, through
dialogue, to effect such change in their members, and I would encourage anyone in need to at least give it a try. After a month of treatment, two days before Christmas in 2004, I left Tabor Lodge.
It was surreal re-engaging with Christmas decorations, packed streets and the reality of having to forage for myself again.