Under the Literary Influence

I can't remember the last time I so thoroughly enjoyed a piece. In one of today's NY Times blogs:

Under the Literary Influence
By Brian McDonald

Standing behind a bar for much of my early adulthood, I wasn’t a big reader. My literary inclinations were limited to the New York Post’s sports section and the Daily Racing Form when a friend handed me a Raymond Chandler novel. “Go ahead,” he said. “It won’t kill you.” I read just the one, put it down, and really didn’t give it much thought.

But this is how addictions begin, subtly and then suddenly. Soon I found myself devouring every hard-boiled word of Chandler’s. And then I read them again. I started talking in similes and metaphors. One day I told a dear friend that he had a face like a collapsed lung. I couldn’t help myself. A progression took hold. Chandler led me to Hammett and from Hammett I staggered to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald led me to Hemingway.

Sure, what drew me to these writers were their words: some terse and declarative, others colorful and descriptive. But the attraction also held something far more sinister: the subtle sound of ice clinking in a glass, the muted laughter of an inside joke told a few tables away, the seductive swirl of cigarette smoke climbing to the barroom ceiling. I couldn’t get enough.

Throughout my early 30s, my reading addiction began to conspire against me. I found myself working behind the bar at Elaine’s and there I came face-to-face with my demon.
For almost 50 years Elaine Kaufman has attracted writers to her restaurant as though she were giving away royalty checks. And though not all of them turned me on, there were a few who, when they walked through the door, had me jonesing like a street junkie. Late one night Hunter S. Thompson sat by himself at a back table lighting shots of Bacardi 151 rum with his Zippo and firing them down the hatch. I don’t remember how many flaming shots he drank — but I do remember the last one. Something had gone horribly wrong with his technique. When I looked back at him he was on fire. Only the quick thinking of Carlo the waiter, who snatched a nearby tablecloth and used it to smother the blue flames, saved Dr. Thompson from escalating into a three-alarm blaze.

If you were there that night at Elaine’s, no doubt you would have seen a drunk, crazy man who had set his own hands on fire. But what I saw was a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers … and a pint of raw ether.

The day after the Thompson immolation, I read “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” in my studio apartment, the door locked, the phone turned off, the shades drawn. I found myself wandering the streets for more. Thompson led me to Jack Kerouac and Kerouac to Charles Bukowski. Eventually it was the plays of Eugene O’Neill. My bookshelf began to sag under the weight of drunken writers.

I knew things were bad when I started buying the biographies of the writers I craved: Truman Capote, Fitzgerald and Chandler. From these texts, I learned that Chandler would sober up when he wrote. He would retreat to his cabin in the California hills and white-knuckle his words onto the page, every one of them bringing him closer to his next drink. I knew that Capote often drank martinis while writing “In Cold Blood.” I read Scott Fitzgerald’s letters from France begging his editor, Maxwell Perkins, for money to pay bar tabs and buy cigarettes.

It was all so intoxicating. Capote once said that he drank because “it’s the only time I can stand it.” His reasoning probably sounded convoluted to most, but seemed perfectly logical to me. When your addiction begins to swallow you the only way to endure the pain is to swallow back. I got to the point where I read my favorite writers because I couldn’t stand it.

The reality of my favorite writers’ lives, at least the ends of their lives, wasn’t romantic at all. Hemingway and, later, Hunter chose the coward’s way out; Chandler tried his hardest to join them. He went into the shower one day with a loaded pistol and pulled the trigger twice. Only by the grace of God — and the fact that he was schnockered to the eyeballs — did he miss both times. Most of the rest of my bookshelf had drunk themselves into early dirt naps.

All seemed hopeless. That night I lay on my couch clutching an old, stained copy of “The Long Goodbye” to my breast and cried myself to sleep.

The next morning, I awoke, emotionally weakened and physically drained, and made my way to a nearby Barnes & Noble. There a salesperson named Daniel gently led me to the memoir section. At first I recoiled. No, I cried, anything but this! I needed a whiskey-soaked fiction bad. But Daniel handed me Pete Hamill’s “A Drinking Life.” I read it slowly, doubting every page. But then something miraculous happened before I was halfway through: I liked it. I liked it a lot.

This new reading life wasn’t easy. The urge to slip back to my old ways was strong. I took it one book at a time. Hamill led the way to Mary Karr’s “Cherry,” then “Home Before Dark,” Susan Cheever’s memoir of life with her father, John Cheever. Soon I had a whole new bookshelf given over to writers who wrote just like my beloved boozers but did so in the past tense.

I haven’t felt the need to pick up a Chandler or Hammett for five years now, and my reading horizons have opened considerably. I still enjoy a good boozy memoir every now and then — J.R. Moehringer’s “The Tender Bar” is one that comes to mind — but I’ve discovered that there are libraries filled with writers who never needed liquor as a muse.

Still, it’s not like Hammett, Chandler and the rest don’t call to me. They do. They exist deep in my soul, having their bourbons and hammering away at their typewriters. I keep them safely down there by helping others addicted to drunken writers. They’re easy to spot. They gather in front of the Strand scouring the $1 racks, they have rings around their eyes from all night reading sessions, they talk in similes. The other day one of them told me I had a head like a bucket of mud.