Into The White

"I never meant to cause you pain. I never thought I'd be the one who took the fall. I got lost in the moment."

I have an addictive personality. As a child, I was hooked on milk for years. Yes, milk. I'd drink four-pint bottles at a time. Which is probably why I've never broken any significant bones and have such beautiful teeth. I grew up on a diet that was 90% calcium.

I took up smoking at the age of fourteen. I was a three-a-day man for about four years, but when I got to university, that suddenly shot up to twenty-a-day. It's stayed there ever since, apart from the occasional, half-arsed attempt to quit.

I had my first alcoholic drink at around about the same time I had my first cigarette. I didn't really enjoy drinking, though. As a teenager, I'd hang around on street corners with my friends and drink Diamond White or cheap Belgian lager from Tesco, but I never did it when I was by myself. To be honest, it was always a peer pressure thing.

My first real experience of drinking was at university. I described it briefly in the post that precedes this one. I went off the rails in quite spectacular fashion for several months. It wasn't that big a deal, though. I recovered from the wobble, and life went on.

Two things happened to change this. First, I became friendly with a guy called Chris. We worked together at Borehamwood cinema, and quickly discovered a shared love of the Evil Dead films and loud guitars. We started hanging out, going to see films and hitting the pub...all the usual things friends do. Then, one night when we'd only just begun to enjoy our drinking, it was suddenly eleven o'clock. We found ourselves back out on the streets with nothing to do and nowhere to go. It was pay-day, though, and we both had money in our wallets. Enough for a jaunt into London? Indeed.

Chris and I had such a good time that we vowed to have a proper night out every Friday, whether others came with us or not. After a while, this became every Friday and Saturday. Then every weekend and occasionally on weeknights.

At the start, we weren't drinking all that much. But the more often we went out, the harder it became to get drunk. The amount we spent on booze increased dramatically, and our nights out became the stuff of myth and legend amongst our friends and co-workers. They accompanied us less and less often as our trips into the city slipped further into the realm of the insane. I would wake up aching and ill, unable to clearly recall what I'd done the night before. I lost count of the times I regained consciousness to find myself in some unexpected location. Park benches, bus stops, benches, strange beds. Over a period of eighteen months or so, I did them all regularly.

The second thing that happened was that I took a management position at The Coronet cinema in Notting Hill Gate. My monthly pay doubled and I found myself out on the town almost every night, rarely taking the time to think about what I was doing or why.

I worked at The Coronet for almost two years. During that time I was hospitalised on three separate occasions, once for splitting my head open whilst attempting to jump off a table at the LA2, and twice for drinking myself into unconsciousness. My third and final visit to the casualty department of University College Hospital came about when I drank so much absinthe I nearly died.

I took care after that. I knew my limits, and I stayed well within them. Nonetheless, I was still drinking heavily on a regular basis until I left the cinema and had to cut back for financial reasons. It helped that I was in a long-term relationship at that point. While my girlfriend was no stranger to the depravities of excessive drinking, she didn't have the problems staying away that I did. Her influence was good for me and - with a couple of exceptions - I stayed relatively straight for a couple of years.

I took the eventual break-up well, I think, and there was certainly no repeat of my previous behaviour. I still drank, but always in moderation.

Such a relative term, that one. Moderation. Without the financial burden of a full-time relationship over a considerable distance, I began to retreat into myself as I always do when there is nothing of note going on in my life. Chris had found his own long-term relationship, and it took him out of my life and away up north, where he and his partner bought a house together. I continued to struggle with my first novel and took a part-time bar job. I'd work three or four nights a week and wrestle with words the rest of the time, usually accompanied by a bottle of supermarket-brand bourbon. Looking back, I'd guess I was getting through maybe four of these in a week.

That trend continued when I moved away from home. I was living above a pub, and it was all too easy to get hold of alcohol. This wasn't helped by the fact that one of my managers was clearly afflicted by the same disease.

It's now almost a year since the end of that last relationship. I moved back home just over three weeks ago and immediately settled into the familiar routine. I wrote, I worked on the blog and surfed the internet, and I drank.

In a way, it was writing this little journal that made me take a long, hard look at my life. It got me analysing myself in a way I'd long since forsaken. The image in my head, of the alcoholic, chain-smoking writer, sitting in front of his computer trying to write the poison out of his soul, no longer seemed so attractive. I was putting on weight. I wasn't sleeping. I felt spaced out and mildly ill most of the time.

I realised it was the limits. Always the limits. For Chris and I, the drinking and the partying started out as fun and then mutated into what it truly was: An escape. The more we realised this truth, the more we tried to outrun it. The faster we ran, the more likely it became that we'd hit the wall. And part of us, part of whatever that strange symbiosis was, desired the impact. The night this became clear to me was the night of the absinthe binge. And I know, with the benefit of hindsight, that what I did that night I did deliberately. I didn't run for the wall, I threw myself at it. I saw my limit, and I decided to go through it. Into The White, as the song goes.

It isn't the taste of alcohol, though I enjoy it. It isn't the feeling of being drunk, though I thrive on it. It's the limits that attract me. Something in me has to know them and flirt with them. I feel dead sometimes. I feel empty. And when you feel that way, knowing that there's a place where you can creep right up to the edge, where your body screams and burns and your mind has to process more than it can handle and you feel so fucking alive...well, it's an attractive proposition.

I quit drinking last week. Not forever, because it's a crutch I know I'm going to be needing again. But for now. I've taken up cycling. I've started looking for a new kind of limit. It's out there, I know it is. Tonight, riding hard up a steep hill with my lungs on fire and my thigh muscles spasming in protest, I felt it.

Adrenaline and alcohol are both about heat, and in a lot of ways they're alike. I know this because I lay on my bed a couple of hours ago, sweating and shaking and struggling for breath, my body protesting at the harsh regime I'd imposed on it. And you know what?

I wanted to go out and try a little harder.