Wired

I can’t say exactly when the original seed was planted; some distant and subliminal Freudian moment so long ago and far away as to be of no real concern to anyone but the most determined psycho-analyst, but planted it must have been. What I do remember, quite clearly, is the moment that my well-developed appetite for self-destruction took on a more strategic, albeit rudimentary, shape, and that came with the reading of Bob Woodward’s book Wired. Subtitled, The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi, the writing’s kind of on the tin, with regard to the subject matter. Many of you, both old like me, or younger, will remember the ebullient Albanian-American actor and comedian, who rose quickly to the giddy heights of cult fame in films such as Animal House and The Blues Brothers, and was about to go massively mainstream with the role in Ghostbusters  that was ultimately played by Bill Murray. Of course, the reason Bill Murray became super-famous and Belushi didn’t was because, on the night of March 5^th 1982, he was found dead in an apartment at the deluxe Chateau Marmont Hotel, having overdosed, aged only 32, on an intravenous cocktail of heroin and cocaine – a ‘speedball’, for those of us who know.

Readers even older than me, may recall that the author of Belushi’s biography, Bob Woodward, was one of the journalists who brought President Nixon to his knees, by revealing the full extent of the Watergate scandal, first in a series of articles for the Washington Post, and then in his book All the President’s Men, co-written with Carl Bernstein, and then of course the film, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman respectively.

Despite his advanced presidential kneecapping skills, Woodward is a notably conservative journalist who has some form when it comes to defending the established order of things. A surprising candidate perhaps for the biographer of an anarchic movie star who pretty much rewrote the rule book when it came to off-the-scale Hollywood excess. Researching the book in the weeks and months after Belushi’s death, Woodward himself conceded that he cut an unlikely figure amidst the LA party crowd, by turning up in neatly pressed business suits, stone cold sober, to nightclubs of the type that that only opened their doors at 5am. One imagines him politely declining lines of cocaine, whilst struggling to get his voice recorder to pick up his subject’s answers over the din of an 80s nightclub in full flood.

But, like any good journalist, Woodward was simply after one thing: a story. And with the tale of the glittering rise and truly disturbing fall of John Belushi, he certainly found one. I’ll leave it to you to read the book if you choose (SPOILER: it doesn’t end well), or failing that the relevant Wikipedia entries, but it certainly makes for a grimly thrilling read, albeit with a resoundingly awful ending. Without preaching too much to his audience, Woodward is nonetheless something of a moralist, and the book is clearly aimed at telling us that Hollywood is a pretty sick system that chews up vulnerable talent and spits it out with distaste when done. An analysis that clearly has some merit.

But the problem comes, as it so often has done in the past, with me. You see, my teenage self found Wired not so much as it was intended, a cautionary modern fable of the dangers of excess and empty fame, but as an instruction manual for how to go about one’s life. The sleazy clubs, porn star sex, frenetic drug use, morbid alcoholism, easy money and cheap glamour sounded, to me, like The Way. I wanted this, and I wanted it bad. The early burnout death particularly appealed. As the poet Keats, another doomed ‘John’, once noted, ‘I have been half in love with easeful Death’. So it was for me:

‘That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim’.

Keats himself had, of course, also kicked the bucket at the untimely age of 27. All this struck me as terribly romantic and tragic and, worryingly, to be desired. Around about the same time, I’d developed an equally unhealthy obsession with the similarly ‘live fast die young’ American author Jack Kerouac and the more measured, but still gloomy, French author Albert Camus, who didn’t particularly want to die young but somehow managed to anyway.

Perhaps it was a teenage romance thing, this weird obsession with dying young. The idle, and to be frank ignorant, musings of a young person not yet exposed to the mundane realities of actual death. My view on what is and isn’t heroic have changed radically since then, partly as a result of my ongoing recovery from addiction, but mainly through the wonderfully humdrum process of growing up.

These days, I’m more likely to find a true hero in the measured words of a thoughtful Roman Emperor, or the dignity of a sexual abuse victim, determined to transcend that brutality and live again. Repeatedly jabbing a speedball into my arm, in a desperate attempt to emulate poor, doomed John Belushi, suddenly doesn’t seem like such a great idea anymore. Of course, becoming a father has had a lot to do with this. I want my children to know me as a person, in the flesh, and not as a memory, my shade shaped by the pointed words and hazy reminiscence of others.

In short, I want to live. But I don’t suppose for a moment that my appetite for destruction has completely gone away. It’s a part of who I was, and who I still am, and I’m learning – over time – to stop apologising for that. I’m learning also that life, in all its banal ordinariness, is something I very much want to be a part of. Objectively speaking, I don’t fear death so much, but I have learned that it’s possible to hold the thought of death close, whilst continuing to love the life I have, and the people in it.

When I think of John Belushi now, I don’t get the same heart stopping, adrenalin-rush feeling that I used to, a terrible burning itch to do what he did (although neither have I completely lost it). What I see in Belushi’s death is a person caught up in a situation that he couldn’t control, a trap if you will, but one that, paradoxically, was probably wholly avoidable. A man with no natural enemies but himself, Belushi found himself beloved by the public, but driven to extremes of self-loathing by whatever it was that caused him to hate himself. Increasingly desperate to avoid drugs, but trapped by circumstance, he would find himself dancing on stage with the Blues Brothers, watching in astonishment as the crowd threw him wraps of cocaine.

Belushi’s good friend and fellow Blues Brother, Dan Ackroyd (who comes across in Wired as a thoroughly decent man, by the way) found himself powerless to help his friend as the studios continued to indulge Belushi’s insatiable demand for cash, drugs, booze and sex. Clearly here was a man in need of real care and serious mental health support, but instead – to the despair of both his friends and, ultimately, himself – found that his only respite lay in the barrel of a loaded hypodermic needle, and the ultimate quietus of death itself.

I still find it hard to explain my younger self’s reaction to Wired, but for me it was a genuine urtext, a life-changing tome that would fuel much of my behaviour in the decade after I first read it, and beyond. And I think what I found in Belushi was a kind of brother, a distant, romanticised version of the needle buddies I was later to find in real life. That I didn’t end up on a slab like poor John is a matter for some astonishment and, of course, relief. And, as noted above, I still have to watch out for my ‘Wired John’, because he’s very much still in there, waiting, watching from the shadows, half-smiling, breathing his last.

Nick Jordan

You can purchase Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi, by Bob Woodward here.