London, that great and garrulous sponge of lost souls, was the ideal city in which to cultivate a taste for things best left uncultivated. I moved there in 2000 for no other reason than people I knew were doing the same. To borrow from the lexicon of the lost, I was rudderless, a ship in search of a storm, but if you’d met me you’d have been forgiven for thinking I had a compass. I appeared like I knew what I was doing.
Fresh out of university, London provided the perfect environment to nurture my reliance on drink and drugs. I dare say I’d have found it anywhere (the King Baby persona I was tasked with studying in treatment suggested a path to addiction is a matter of when and not if) but London provided me with a shield of anonymity and a vast array of places to consume whatever was on the menu that day. People in the city are too busy, too distracted and too involved in their own melodramas to notice one more melodramatist.
Working in PR afforded me plenty of opportunities to booze, possibly starting at lunchtime and loaded with a chance I might not make it back to the office in the afternoon. I went to the pub after work most days, standing at the bar, strident with my ‘Hoxton fin’ haircut paired with a t-shirt that sneered at itself and bootcut jeans that flared with misplaced optimism. Ten pints down, lungs lacquered with Marlboro Lights, I was a walking advert for youthful delusion. It wasn’t drinking. It was my version of performance art. And I was the canvas, the brush and the mess on the floor.
On and on it went. Pub after lunch, pub after work, drinks that bled into dinners, conversations that slurred into arguments and weekends with little or no sleep. The lines were being consumed and blurred all at once. Wearing hangovers with hubris, pushing things too far while having the physiology and exuberance of youth to wear it. Just.
In truth, the net effect of my entire London experience (I left for the countryside in 2013) was that I earned and learned nothing of any note. Constantly living in my overdraft, I loaded credit cards with the high life. While friends bought several properties or started businesses I sat back and blithely imagined the same would happen to me. Then I simply clock watched until I could cut loose again. A doom spiral of waste.
My behaviour was always at the more extreme end of what was happening around me. While others nursed pints and polite anecdotes, I was busy flicking drinks and starting arguments. Nights could end (or begin) with me wiping a table clear of drinks, being thrown out of pubs, rowing with folks where there was no quarrel, throwing punches and generally making people feel uncomfortable. That’s where I scored the points in a game only I was playing. It wasn’t rebellion. It was ritual. A liturgy of discomfort.
In one sorry episode, heading home at closing time, I kicked away a busker’s guitar case full of his hard-won money, the coins dashing the walkway and swirling around the banked walls of London’s Underground. I don’t recognise that person in me anymore. I honestly mistook notoriety for charisma. Behaviour that should have rung alarm bells was, in my skewed world, evidence that I had a place. If I had insecurities that I wasn’t doing as well as the next man, then I was going to beat him in my chosen arena. The boozer. That’s where it mattered.
My intake of drink and drugs was teetering on the brink of unsustainable from the early days. Work was suffering, not happening or I wasn’t showing up for it at all; money was being burned without any thought; and long-standing personal relationships were fraying or were severed completely.
That said, like most unsustainable things in England, it’s propped up by communal delusion. Surround yourself with the cheerfully complicit, and your worst instincts are transformed into group norms. Everyone drinks to excess, don’t they? The pub is open now, isn’t it? London was somewhere I lurched from drink to drink but when I came home to the Cotswolds my PR talents enabled me to spin a better story than belied the reality. The ‘best life’ I performed was just a campaign to outrun insecurity and my lack of application to anything – I just didn’t know how to operate. The problem was not London, nor the drink, nor the company I kept. The problem was the world I’d engineered to keep truth and consequence at bay.
My booms and busts from Kevin’s chart (see previous post) were a constant but whatever the fallout, be it another failed relationship, a job lost, or a friend who quietly slipped out the side door, it was never my fault. Their loss I would think to myself. Only it wasn’t. It would take another decade, and a lot more losses, before the penny finally dropped. Not with a clink, but with the dull thud of truth landing in an empty glass.
Leave a Reply