Double Double (3 page)

“Dude! Can you still get us in?” one cried.

“Sure. In fact, you can cut in line right here.”

I watched as members of the group attacked the piles of shrimp and ordered drinks from the bar while one held their place in the photo line. Books were stacked on a table near the door, and people waited patiently to meet Trump and Wynn, who stood in the middle of the room shaking hands and taking pictures. Through the dusky gloom of the ballroom, I could see the Deadheads closing in on Trump and Wynn. When they reached Wynn—who is legally blind and wears dark glasses—he seemed completely nonplussed by this assault on his person. Trump visibly gritted his teeth and looked around wildly for his PR people as the Heads gleefully snapped photo after photo and had their free books signed.

Just as quickly as they arrived, they disappeared.

“Ken, are you checking invitations in this line?”

I jumped and turned around to see the CEO of my company staring at me through her pink-tinted glasses.

“Of course,” I said.

“There seem to be some people here who don't look like they belong.” She paused. “So make sure you check the invites carefully.”

“Absolutely,” I answered, beginning to sweat despite the subzero air-conditioning.

Somehow, I returned to New York City in one piece and with a
third-tier talent agent from Los Angeles stalking me by phone. We had met the night of the Trump party, and she fully expected me to take her up to my hotel room. I wasn't feeling it. I had her drive me around Vegas in her convertible and stop in one of the seedier sections of town so I could buy a cheap present for my assistant in New York. The whole weekend was weird, reminiscent of
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,
by another of my literary heros, Hunter S. Thompson. Without the bravado and drugs. Only the weirdness.

A week after Las Vegas, my boss called me into her office to confront me about my behavior, starting with bellowing at my colleagues in the booth that I didn't have time to meet a radio producer. Then she threw a newspaper on her desk. A story in a Connecticut newspaper about the book party reported “an employee of the publishing company said that he wouldn't stand in line to meet Donald Trump.”

My boss looked me straight in the eye, her bushy hair standing up in the air. “So, Ken, did you say this? We're in big trouble if Trump or the editor of this book reads this paper, which is likely, since the editor lives in Connecticut and it's his local paper.”

I lied so coolly and calmly, it reminded me later of lies I had told my mother for years about my drinking, friends, and general whereabouts. “No, that wasn't me. I don't know what that reporter was talking about.”

My boss stared at me and said, “Okay. I believe you. But consider yourself under review. One more mistake and you'll be fired.”

I left her office trembling and walked down the hall to my office. I stared out the window. If I lost this job, I lost everything. What would I do? Where would I go?

Back to Vegas?

I
t was somebody's birthday. A couple of friends, my agent, and her husband came over for a couple of drinks. For them, it was a couple; for Ken, it was none; for me, it was as many as I could put away before dinner.

I was the one who furnished the bottle of wine and made an inroad on the vodka and vermouth.

The next day I was leaving Manhattan for my house in Pennsylvania, where my friend Chris was deconstructing a 1950s bathroom for me. It occurred to me that it wasn't fair to Ken, who'd stopped drinking and joined A.A., to leave vodka in the apartment (that having been his favorite drink after beer), or wine, or vermouth, for that matter.

I poured the wine down the drain, then the vermouth. Bravely, I poured out nearly a fifth of Stoli. Then I was faced with the problem of the empty vodka bottle. The other two bottles had gone
in the trash can. I was about to put the empty vodka bottle in but thought: Wait. If I do that, will Ken think I drank the whole thing? The empty wine and vermouth bottles didn't bother me, but an empty bottle of Stoli?

Here was my solution: I packed it in my suitcase.

An empty bottle to lug all the way to Pennsylvania. That made sense.

I got there; I unpacked. I took the empty bottle to the kitchen and was about to toss it in the trash when I thought, No, Chris might think I drank the whole thing. So I took it outside, up to the road, and deposited it in the trash that would be collected that afternoon.

 • • • 

Anyone whose relationship to alcohol isn't quite as obsessive would have done one of two things: left the bottle or taken it along. Why didn't I just take the full bottle to Pennsylvania? Chris was a big drinker. We could have swilled down the Stoli's together.

This, mind you, is what's called “alcoholic” or “addictive thinking.” The whole approach to drinking is crazily mazelike. You turn left, you turn right, you go along, you go back.

Now, you—standing outside the maze, having heaps of laughter at the idiot in there who can't find his way out—please note: The idiot in there doesn't know it's a maze; he thinks this is the Capital Beltway or some other annoying, clogged-up, circular multilaner, but for all of that minor annoyance, it's the only way he can travel. This kind of thinking can also be called “denial.” There are exits from the Beltway, clearly marked; there's an exit from the maze, unmarked. Much harder to negotiate.

So, you, standing outside at the exit, yell, “It's over here, stupid.”

But for her, where's here?

A
n alcoholic who is now in a twelve-step program, or who has otherwise stopped drinking, often cringes at the thought that others will notice and wonder why she's turning down that drink. The addict is sure everyone else at the party has a burning need to find out why she's refusing that drink. For the addict, it's all about her; it's all about me. Everyone will turn to look at me. Then, as if in a cartoon, these others will grow into huge, elongated shapes, taller and taller, and there's little me in the center.

If you take the more aggressive approach of telling your party acquaintance up front that you're an alcoholic, he'll be embarrassed to hear about it, unless he suspects that he's an alcoholic, too, and then he'll quickly disappear, or else he won't let you alone; he'll annoy you for the rest of the evening. He'll look at the
drink in his hand as if he's never seen it before, as if it flew in out of nowhere, an alien with strange powers.

“Am I an alcoholic?”

Good question.

I'd say to the worrier, look at it this way for a moment: See that half-drunk martini sitting on the table over there? Whoever left it there isn't an alcoholic. Alcoholics might abandon their mates, their children, their jobs, or their cars along the road, but they're not about to leave a half-drunk drink sitting on a table.

Do you wonder whether you're an alcoholic? It's quite possible, if you're reading this book and can't find any other reason for it: You might be a parent worried about a child, or a child worried about a parent; you might be doing research on the subject; it might be too early to head to the cineplex around the corner. Reading this book will hardly brand a scarlet “A” on your forehead.

Here are a few standard questions a person might answer if he or she is wondering.

The first one, of course, is are you worried? The thought is that if you're worried, you have a problem; if you ask the question, you have a problem, because those who aren't alcoholics wouldn't think to ask the question (unless it occurred simply because you picked up this book).

Those who most willingly own up to drinking too much may not be alcoholics, since denial is the alcoholic's stock-in-trade, her first line of defense. (If one tries to eschew the notion of being an alcoholic by putting in its place “drinking problem,” watch out.)

What about this—do you think about drinking when you're not doing it? A nonalcoholic wouldn't bother unless she were afraid that she wouldn't get to the liquor store in time to pick up the wine for the dinner party.

Another familiar question: Do you drink alone? Say yes and you're down a point or two in the magazine quiz. Drinking alone doesn't in itself peg you as an alcoholic. But if you say no, it probably tells you you're not.

I was told of a woman living alone who had exactly two highballs (if they still call them that) in the evening, sitting in her wing chair, reading a book. One could argue that anyone who is locked in to such behavior is probably an alcoholic. Well, maybe. It doesn't appear to be ruinous behavior, nor does her drinking increase over time. She stops with two drinks. Also, her tipple is the highball. Alcoholics don't mess around with that sort of dilution. Oh, an alcoholic might start out with a highball, but very swiftly, she's leaving out the water and down to the real business of drinking. (And it is a business, usually with set hours of operation, managed with meticulous care.)

I believe the craving for solitude is almost endemic to alcoholics. I've never known an alcoholic who didn't drink alone. Drinking and solitude appear as confederates in so many stage directions that there's probably a link.

A pragmatist could say you like to drink alone because you can drink more, and drink unsupervised by whoever is dying to say, “Haven't you had enough?,” to which the answer is “No.” The answer is always “No” as long as you've the wits to speak at all. Why don't people say what they mean? “You've had enough!” No one wants to take responsibility. Not the alcoholic but also not the wife, partner, child, or friend who asked that stupid question.

The alcoholic is irresponsible and undependable, it is said. At least I always turned up for my drink. You knew where to find me at five
P.M
.: in the kitchen or the living room with my ice-cold martini. I might have been the most dependable person in the state.
Right here. On the spot. Hard by the telephone in case anyone wanted to check up on me.

Solitude is the wild card in the drinker's deck. The love of it goes beyond avoidance of surveillance.

“Beyond all this the wish to be alone,” wrote Philip Larkin. I've never understood people who can't bear to be alone. Frankly, I think they're worse off than alcoholics. People like that are usually nonstop talkers. Noise is the whole point. Noise, motion, lights, camera, action! Let me know I'm alive, for God's sake! Such people strike me as desperate.

“But you're a writer,” someone might point out. “Solitude is necessary; to write, you've got to have it.” I've written in restaurants, bookstores, Starbucks(es), airport lounges during flight delays, and so forth. Perhaps solitude is a state of mind you can carry around with you.

But solitude is necessary much of the time. Without it, I think I'd be made up of Post-its, sticking a bit of myself upon anybody or anything that happened along.

 • • • 

Here's my favorite anecdote about identifying an alcoholic. It might be apocryphal, but I think it did happen:

Dean Martin, Ronald Reagan, and William Holden decide to go for a drink. They walk into a bar. They have a drink. Then Deano and Bill agree: “Let's have another.”

Ron says, “Why? We just had one.”

Based on that evidence, you may not be able to argue that Dean and Bill were alcoholics, but you can bet the farm that Ronald Reagan was not.

“
Why?
We just had one.”

That “why?” is a dead giveaway. “Why?” I cannot imagine myself asking this question in a million years. I cannot imagine myself asking the question even now, after all of this time, were I dumb enough to accept the first drink. “Why?” is not an alcoholic's question. “Where?” would be more like it.

If you were in that bar, who would you want to be sitting next to?

Me, I'd want to be wedged right between Deano and Bill. Cheers.

A
fter I had lived in New York City for two years, my mother offered to help me move out of my tiny coffinlike apartment over an airshaft. My roommate and I shared about 150 square feet. He slept on the pullout couch in the living room/kitchen, while I crammed my miniature water bed into an eight-by-ten room.

My mother's mysteries had just started to appear on the
New York Times
best-seller list. She had put me through several private schools and college with her shrewd buying and selling of real estate. She volunteered to buy an apartment in Manhattan that she would own, on which I would pay the maintenance. It was a real gift for me on my eighteen-grand-a-year salary.

I found a real estate agent to guide me through Greenwich Village. The romance of Bob Dylan and the Beats and the renegade status of the Village was my poke in the eye to the typical post-college drunken frat boys who lived on the Upper East Side.

I trudged through the Village with my real estate agent, trying to find the best deal possible. It became clear to me that I wasn't the only one looking for parentally aided rebellion—everything was out of my price range. I slowly made my way north to Chelsea, a forgotten neighborhood that hadn't been gentrified.

Chelsea was the home of one of my favorite bars, Peter McManus, a hundred-year-old establishment on Nineteenth Street where you could sit and smoke and drink for hours without any irritating yuppies or dance music. I had spent many hours in the grand old Irish joint, with its delicious beer, a huge oak bar, massive mirrors, and surly bartenders. I needed to live in this neighborhood.

I found a very small one-bedroom apartment three blocks away and started making regular treks to Peter McManus. I was happy.