Six months yesterday the last drop of ethyl-alcohol I’ll ever knowingly ingest slipped down my throat. Or at least, I hope and pray that will be the case. For obvious reasons, I don’t remember the exact details of that day, but I do remember that it was early on a Saturday morning in a place called West Tweed, which is the rough part of the already unlovely town of Tweed Heads, directly south of the Gold Coast. The drink in question was cheap red wine from what the Aussies call a ‘goon’, or a box the English call it. In the 10 or so days prior I’d drank litres of the stuff. Having been partially rescued from outright, on-the-streets homelessness, by a friend, I found myself at ‘John’s place’ (names changed to protect the guilty), which was a den of iniquity peopled by transients like me, drug addicts, criminals, teenage transsexuals, drug dealers, people with obviously severe mental health problems and a dangerous knife-wielding maniac called, erm, ‘Stanley’, who was kind of my mate, in the broadest sense of what friendship in such circumstances might mean. One of the first nights I was there Stanley had sat brooding in the corner staring darkly at everyone before suddenly leaping up and thrusting his knife against the throat of some random bloke, whilst screaming ‘Stop giving me the FUCKING EYE!’. I’d felt reasonably, if warily, comfortable in Stanley’s company up until that point, so I’d taken it upon myself to intervene in the unfolding murder scene, and talk him down. ‘You’re the only one NOT giving me the FUCKING EYE’, he raged, and I swear I saw his eyeballs swivel in their sockets. However it was, the murder didn’t happen, Stanley cleared out the next day and a collective sigh of relief went round the opium den. I’m told he’s in jail now for extortion with menaces and maybe armed robbery, we can’t be sure. Anyway, I got on alright with him, which was probably for the best, all things considered.
Time drifted and flowed into one very long day at John’s place. John himself was a nice enough old boy, who suffered from terrible short-term memory loss, which meant someone had to always to accompany him to the corner shop lest he forget where he was and what he was doing. We lost him for a good hour once in central Tweed, with a number of us running all over the place shouting his name. My mate Russ found him eventually waiting patiently outside the library, because it was a building he’d recognised and felt safe to be near. Russ himself was a highly intelligent individual, who I would have strange and involving conversations with. An eccentric if ever there was one, he would sit huffing a pipe of methamphetamine whilst holding forth knowledgeably on the meaning of Kierkegaard’s existentialism.
The night before that fateful Saturday, I’d been kicked out of John’s house because I’d started smashing the place up for no apparent reason, swinging punches at people and raving about how everyone was a police informer. Clearly by that stage, I’d reached peak marble-lossage and was fit only for some kind of confinement. ‘Your mate belongs in the looney bin’, John had suggested to a close mutual friend, and she couldn’t help but agree. Anyway, that Friday evening I’d sat down by the city river with Russ and had a heartfelt chat. ‘You’ve got to get out of here’, he advised. ‘Go to rehab and get well’. He was right of course, and the very next day, that’s exactly what I did. I have no idea what happened to Russ, although I have it on good authority that he left town, taking with him the knife that I used to carry around, just in case. No idea how he got his hands on it and I hope he uses it wisely. I wish him only the very best.
When you live the kind of life that I’ve sketched out above, you live in a close embrace with death. Existing day to day, starving mostly because you spend all your money on intoxicants, real life is something that goes on without you. You have, to all intents and purposes, ceased to be of relevance, both to yourself and others. You’re at an end of sorts, even if you keep going. Plenty and colourful are the anecdotes I could summon from that time, but for all dark laughs that were had, believe me when I say I’d rather be dead than go back to that.
Since then, thanks to the kindness of friends, strangers and family, and by the ostensibly simple method of not drinking any alcohol, I’ve had six glorious months of life. Days and weeks filled with daylight, fresh air, coffee (and how), new friendships, creativity, laughter and an increasingly confident sense that this, here and now, is my time. Like all of us, I have no idea what will happen tomorrow, and if I’ve learned anything from these past few years, it’s that life can throw any of us a seriously vicious curveball that you may not see coming. However that is, here in the moment, life is better than it’s ever been, and I say that with eyes wide open to everything that has happened before. I work, I read, I rest, I watch movies, I play with my son and I drink more coffee than you may ever have thought possible. And above all, for once and at last, I’m happy.
One day at a time.
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