Dead Writers in Rehab. Paul Bassett Davies

to a few recovery meetings where fights have broken out – having started many of them myself – and it always restores my faith in human nature.

      Okay, how do I feel? I feel serene. It’s not just the usual calm that descends on me after a good fight, or the satisfaction of being punched in the face by a very good writer. It’s something else. The part of my brain that should be gibbering with terror as it tries to process what the fuck is going on here seems to have shut down. It reminds me of something that used to happen to me when I was about 12, in bed waiting to go to sleep. I would suddenly be overwhelmed with dread. My mind would try to jump out of itself, like a terrified horse tethered to a tree in a forest fire, as I apprehended the full enormity of the following information:

      Time is endless. The universe is infinite. I am going to die.

      I would try to imagine what it would feel like to be dead. Try to understand the endlessness of time and space, knowing I would never reach the limits of a limitless void. I would become more and more hor­rified by the inescapable facts of eternity, infinity and death, willing them not to be true, and despairing because I knew they couldn’t not be true. And then, slowly, a wonderful serenity would begin to spread like rich, warm syrup flowing through a system of pipes inside me. There is nothing I can do. Surrender.

      I began to associate all this with the idea of God. I became convinced that what I was experiencing, after the tempest of discombobulation, was ‘the peace which passeth all understanding’. After about a year I seemed to grow out of these attacks, although this cycle of feelings – terror followed by tranquillity – continued to recur in various circumstances, often involving the threat of violence or the promise of sex. And that’s what it feels like now. Whatever’s happening, there’s nothing I can do, so why worry? Once again, I am filled with that familiar transcendent peace. But I really want a drink.

      I always want a drink after a fight. And in the old days, if I’d been hurt I always used it as an excuse for an opiate binge, too. I’d justify taking some codeine, or morphine, or heroin on the eminently reasonable grounds that I was in pain and therefore entitled to a painkiller. After a few years in the recovery game you can handle the sudden cravings because you can go into your drill, but rationalisation is the bitch. So that’s how I feel, since you asked. I want a drink and I want some opiates and I’m not going to get any so I may as well stop wanting them. And now I come to think of it, writing all this makes it a bit easier not to want what I thought I wanted, so maybe all this works. Thanks, Doc.

      Anyway, I was gazing at my black eye when I realised I’m younger than I used to be. I look pretty good. I’ve never thought of myself as being particularly vain, which is probably a very vain thing to say, but I’ve been told I’m quite handsome by women who’ve been fond of me, and I’ve never had much of a problem attracting them. Mind you, I’ve found that women don’t really care about how men look, or about how I look, anyway. Of course, once they get hold of you they try to make you look presentable, especially if they marry you. They can’t help doing that, and who can blame them. Other women are constantly judging them on the degree of control they can exert over their mate. But when it’s only about sexual attraction I’m always amazed by what women will tolerate in a man if they want to fuck him. They don’t seem to mind if you’re drunk and they often don’t even care if you’re dirty and you stink. I think women get far more carried away by sex than men do. They become crazed with lust. Men tend to be a bit more fastidious and I can think of times when I’ve been getting down to some oral sex and I’ve been compelled by deficient feminine personal hygiene to reverse and head north again in a hurry, licking a hasty nipple on the way and making my excuses by moaning that I’m about to explode. But if a woman really wants to have sex with you she’ll tear off your vomit-stained clothes, ignore the skid marks in your underpants as she rolls them down your grubby thighs, and attack a seriously unwashed cock like a starving refugee with a lamb kebab, before shoving it inside herself and squirming all over you without the slightest concern about where you might have been and when you last saw a bar of soap. Amazing. Of course, if they don’t want to fuck you it makes no difference if you look like a Greek god and you’re drenched in the rarest fragrances of the world’s most accomplished parfumiers, they still won’t fuck you. But they’re capable of doing the most senseless things just to be with men they want, and if the men are despicable vermin it just seems to drive them to even more irrational extremes. Perhaps the difference is that a man will happily screw a woman who may be mad, bad, or dangerous if she’s sufficiently alluring but he rarely makes the mistake of loving her, whereas women will allow love or desire to blind them completely to a man’s true character, and pay for their mistake in terrible and tragic ways.

      All this was swilling around my brain as I leered at myself in the mirror, entranced by my virile good looks. I appeared to be about 40. Maybe 42. Then it struck me that everyone else I’ve seen is relatively young. I mean they’re younger than they were when they died. I think Coleridge died in his early 60s, and he looks about 30. Dorothy Parker doesn’t look quite as old as I thought she was when I first saw her; I think she’s about 35. Paddy looks only a few years younger than he did when I last saw him alive but it’s a definite improvement. It’s hard to tell with Hemingway. When I first saw him he looked about 50. But in the meeting today he seemed younger, more like 40.

      But I think I get it. Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls when he was about forty, and sometimes I think that was his best book. But sometimes I prefer The Old Man and the Sea which he wrote when he was past fifty. Then I get infuriated by all the mythical, pseudo-religious crap in it and go back to liking the books about war and the way the characters seem to tell the truth without making a big fuss about it. Yes, I tell myself, that’s how I’d be. Terse. Laconic. A manly reticence concealing a fine soul. Grace under pressure and all that. So maybe I’m seeing all these writers at the age when they did their best work, and the only reason Hemingway seems to fluctuate is because I can’t make up my mind about when that was. It’s not a problem with the rest of them: everyone knows Dorothy Parker was at her peak when she was between thirty and forty and that Coleridge declined after his twenties. Wilkie Collins looks about the age he must have been when The Moonstone was published. Furthermore, I’m now certain the guy who was asleep (or pretending to be) in the group therapy session is Hunter S. Thompson. Fuck knows what he looks like under those shades and the hat, but I’ll bet he’s the young maniac who wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and not the raddled old hack of his later years. He never wrote anything much good after about 1975, and the stuff he came up with in the last 15 years of his life was mostly awful. However, while he may have lost it as a writer, he remained an exemplary drunk until his dying day and beyond, when they sent his ashes up in a rocket in accordance with his will. He might be good company.

      Meanwhile, the person admiring me from the mirror is exactly the age I was when I was at the top of my game, although I didn’t know it then.

      This black eye is getting really painful. The adrenaline from the fight is draining away now that its job is done. The adrenal glands are amazing little buggers. Most of the time they just lie there, curled up on top of your kidneys. But as soon as they get a stress message from the cortex, they spring into action and squirt out the hormones like a pair of Jack Russell terriers waking up and pissing all over the place, yapping and snarling at anyone who tries to stop them. Bless the adrenal glands. Probably my favourite glands, apart from the testicles.

      I’m going to lie down. That fight took it out of me. Interesting that when Dr Bassett burst in, her first concern was for Hatchjaw. There’s something going on there but I don’t think it’s going on very smoothly right now. My guess is that those two have been in each other’s pants at some point but an obstacle has derailed love’s young dream. I know the signs only too well. Passion still smouldering but severe frost in the air. It could go either way: let the fire go out and freeze to death or stoke it back up to a merry blaze, strip off, tumble to the sheepskin rug in front of the fireplace and rut like stoats. We’ll see.

      It’s dusk. I was about to close the curtains when I saw a movement among the trees on the far side of the lawn. Someone was standing there, gazing at the house in the sunset, and just as I caught sight of them they flitted back into the woods. I’m pretty