PREFACE
DRUGSTORE
Martinis are my drug of choice, straight up, on the rocks,
vodka, gin, lemon peel, olive, onion, ten to one. Any martini
drinker knows what I’m talking about. Liquid silver, that’s
how my old friend Harry described it.
Not, believe me, that I disdained other drinks—none of them,
as I recall—being partial also to an old-fashioned, a daiquiri, a
whiskey sour. But nothing could win me over like a dry martini,
although one has to acquire that taste.
I was introduced to drugs when there was really only one hand
to shake: alcohol’s. Cocaine, heroin, marijuana, crystal meth: I
was unacquainted with this happy quartet. I was school-age at a
time when you could go to school without getting shot. That was
a long time ago.
It makes no difference for the purposes of this book. Heroin
and cocaine still rank as numbers 1 and 2 (despite the government’s
obsession with crystal meth), the baddest of the bad. Why
split hairs? When it comes to addiction, they’re all bad.
I’m going to avoid the big-ticket health issue, not because it isn’t
important but because it tends to obscure other issues. (When you
set it against an X-ray of a cirrhotic liver, can you really convince
someone that the drink on the bar is necessary?) You know, we all
know, how dangerous addictions are to our health.
Nor will I talk about addiction as a disease. I don’t know
whether it is or isn’t, but I don’t care whether that martini shows
I have a disease or an unquenchable thirst. I think I’ll knock the
“willpower” card off the table. It’s way overplayed.
Most of life is engaged with filling a prescription. We fill up with
whatever works at the moment: food, drink, smoking, shopping.
A few hours at Target isn’t quite as tasty as a few hours in Barneys
New York, but it serves the same purpose. If you’re starving,
it doesn’t matter who the chef is. And what works best is drugs.
After the official drugs like marijuana and cocaine, alcohol (which,
for some reason, gets separated from the others, for we speak of
drugs and alcohol), we’ve got a long list: food (oh, what a drug lies
there!), cigarettes, shopping, television, Internet, gambling, chewing
gum, romantic love—anything that can fill the emptiness for
a few minutes or hours or months, anything that comes from the
outside, something that you don’t have to work at. It allows you to
escape, no questions asked, just go.
The whole world is our drugstore. We must be drawn out of
ourselves by something.
Maybe that’s why Invasion of the Body Snatchers keeps on being
remade. The body snatchers are only after empty husks. Whatever
was inside—call it mind, call it soul—is long gone, as with Gregor
in The Metamorphosis.
In my hometown, there was a movie house, only one theater
and only one screen and one balcony—no longer there, of course.
When I was young, I would look around at the rows of people,
the glow from the screen bathing their faces in ambient light. I
was struck by how innocent the moviegoers looked, unguarded
as children. They were drawn out of themselves; in a sense, they
no longer inhabited themselves. This condition could change at
any second: At the moment when the film fails to grip them, they
become aware that they’re in a theater watching a movie, which
is failing to keep their attention, but suddenly, it can be captured
again. Anything that erases us from time to time, that loosens our
grip, relaxes us, and lets us breathe again. Anything except death,
although at times I think that’s where all of this is headed. We
don’t “breathe easier”; we’re on life support. We’ve got all sorts of
stuff skating into our systems to keep us alive, and we take this as
good, even great, since we’ve left ourselves behind.
For the body snatchers.
We say we can’t have a good time without a drink. Yet I remember
years when I could have a sublimely good time without one.
I was a little kid, or a bigger one, or even an adult. So why did I
tell myself later on that I couldn’t have any fun without a drink in
my hand? A dinner party or any sort of gathering where we stand
around and share small talk? No. You need to have a drink just to
bear it.
A few years ago USA Today did a series of reports on dieting,
a challenge they invited readers to take. One doctor or nutritionist—
who did an incalculable service for all of us dieters—said that
dieting is hard: “You might as well learn to play the violin.”
That’s how hard it is. Willpower be damned. Some USA Today
readers probably thought the good doctor was brutally discouraging.
I thought just the opposite: She told us what we were up
against and why we failed time and again. When you fail in a diet
you feel like a fool or a lout. Surely anybody should be able to turn
down a doughnut. No willpower.
Stopping drinking is like this.
You might as well learn how to play the violin.