On the Rocks: Writing on Addiction

The editors of Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast dedicate this collection of writing to ‘Our companions in recovery.’ From this you might imagine needles hanging from arms and bottles held to lips. Shooting and snorting and tipping back the glass. But an addict can just as easily be strung on the end of a cigarette, or the control pad of a games console. Perhaps looking into a full-length mirror at perceived curves they feel just do not belong to their body. Addiction can be to a substance or activity; habit enveloped in ceremony. In Addicted, Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane have collected brutally honest and brave essays from writers who have struggled with dependencies on everything from gambling to gaming; on sex, food and pharmaceuticals.

And why writers specifically? There’s always been a myth around artists and mind-altering substances – that it’s fuel for creativity, it kicks open those doors of perception for boozy bards and the like. We feel we know and understand those hip bacchanalian artists like Bukowski or Burroughs, who drank or dug drugs. But the truth generally is that talent shines despite rather than due to dependency.

This collection does much to debunk the dangerous romantic bullshit, showing the soaring highs – because to ignore them is deceitful – and then, of course, the crashing lows. The shame and embarrassment, burned out friendships amid pools of vomit, damaging memories and a terrifying lack thereof. Thankfully these pieces show that while the fight is long and hard, the war is winnable. Light pierces through, into the dark places that life can sometimes inhabit. We look below at one such story in an abridged extract from poet Sheri-D Wilson's contribution to Addicted.

Blackout by Sheri-D Wilson

I wasn’t going to be the goody-goody bunhead from Calgary, Alberta, who married, had kids, and dreamed of all the things she might have seen and done. Oh no. I was going to go out into the world and do something different. I would be the outspoken girl who said and did everything. I would be the one who smoked and drank and swore and did drugs and had wild sex and wrote poetry and made jazz till dawn like the women I had read about. My behaviour would not be limited by my gender. Somehow, I was going to reinvent myself from a sweet, starry-eyed, working-class small-town innocent into an irreverent, well-travelled, well-read, exotic, free-spirited jazz poet.

I’d be the dame who’d outdo any man. Drink them under the table in a rally of hilarity, vulgarity and intellect of light-speed and bullwhip slash. The only question was how. My transition from bunhead to bard began when a friend suggested I attend acting school. Since I had no money, university entrance or other modus operandi, that is what I did. At acting school, the excitement of literature entered the skeleton of my being, making me vibrate with tintinnabulations of euphoric discovery. It was as if all the acting students were coming to life together, and the world stood before us like a big ripe Bing cherry. I would attend classes dressed as Mata Hari or Patti Smith or Virginia Woolf and deliver long diatribes of invented bravado.

… One Saturday night I walked across the 10th Street bridge en route to Ten Foot Henry’s, the hip hot spot for Calgary’s late-70s alternative art crowd, with the elongated stride of my nineteen years. The Mistress of Wintriness snapped her subzero fingers and the river steamed in hoarer on the verge of shape-shifting into a standstill. My feet moved in sync with my impatience to party, almost percolating a permafreeze tap dance along the glass-glaze runner of the sidewalk. When the secret door to Henry’s opened, a blast of warm air and loud music came cascading out onto the street, sweet as a long swoon. I paid my cover, and I was off to the rampage. Postdisco inferno on a Dionysian night. Nothing could stop my strut.

(Continues below)

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I drank shooters from my body flask for the feeling of contraband inebriation. Smoked Cheech and Chong spliff, and snorted lines as long as Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from oversized purse mirrors in toilet stalls. Bodies snaked sensual as a belly dancer’s undulation around the curves of beatitude, free love, passionate poetry and R&B loud enough to boom through my bones like a Goliath timpani. There were madcap projections of art on the walls, couches downstairs for the greenroom-cool and me and the band. Everyone seemed to have a flair for the unacceptable. This was the scene. I was in it – and I was out of it. Totally. I remember someone handing me a joint, and then there was... a Cat on a Hot Tin Roof click, and then there was. . . spinning, and then there was. . . nothing. I don’t remember the river that took me home that night, but somehow that’s where I ended up.

The next afternoon I was in the bathtub dreaming of the South Seas, looking deeply into the postcard of the Cook Islands taped, with curling corners, beside the four-legged tub. Every hue of tropical blue was trying to distract me from a metal-bending headache when my roommate knocked. “There’s someone here for dinner.” “Okay, I’ll be right out,” I bellowed, before whooshing underwater. I didn’t have any idea who was coming for dinner. Blub, blub, blub. I hadn’t invited anyone. But the doorbell kept ringing and ringing. When I finally dressed and entered the living room there it was, an octopus with a bottle in each arm—eight men and eight bottles of wine. Not bad for a girl who couldn’t get a date in high school. A scene from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, happening in my own living room. May the best sucker win, I remember thinking, may the best sucker win.

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Blackout is taken from Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast

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… I knew by now that my drinking was out of my air-traffic control, but I didn’t know how to put myself out of my misery. I knew I wanted the noise to stop, but I couldn’t locate the stereo. There had been a time when I had control over the alcohol, and then there was a turning point when alcohol took control over me, completely. Initially the blackouts had happened only when I was drinking. But I had started having gaps in consciousness even when I was sober. Everything had become muted and distorted, as if I were living underwater.

One of my last full-on drinkathons occurred in Montreal. All I remember of that trip is arriving with several thousand dollars and leaving with none. After I quit drinking I ran into several people who saw me at that time, but I have no recollection of them or of the events. One of those people, a poet friend, was still horrified when I bumped into him a year later. He said he’d had to leave the party during my binge-fest in Montreal because he couldn’t watch me any more. He told me he’d actually wept. He couldn’t bring himself to tell me what he’d witnessed and, to tell the truth, I didn’t want to know. When you’re playing blackout roulette, it’s difficult to remember how many clicks there’ve been. How many blanks does the gun hold?

… I knew I was in big trouble, and I felt ugly to the core. My life no longer seemed humorous or intriguing. I was utterly sick of being sick: sick of puking my guts out into a pail beside my bed every second night; sick of crawling up the front stairs of my building and sleeping on the landing ’cause I couldn’t make it to my door; sick of apologizing for things I couldn’t remember I’d said and done; sick of the massive phone bills for late-night drunk-o-logues; sick of the excuses and the accidents and the ambulances. But most of all, I felt sick of being someone I wasn’t. I was sick of the Sheri-D Show.

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Addicted is out now, published by Greystone Books, RRP £12.99

Sheri-D Wilson has published six collections of poetry. Her most recent, Re:Zoom (Frontenac House), won the 2006 Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. Sheri-D is the founder and artistic director of the Calgary International Spoken Word Festival. sheridwilson.com