Alcohol & Addiction in Action: The Life and Death of Joe Rowley
“John”, a breach of ethics really, you don’t con your own tribe. But I was not a close member, a hippy, with long hair, a full beard, unusual for that time and place. I had financial status too, owner of a car and a three-bedroom house, host of noisy weekend revels to the town’s gallimaufry of colorful characters. But his likeability was disarming, the amount of money was small to me, and I enjoyed the pitter of his patter and the easy grace with which he propositioned me, taking it all in with detached amusement while knowing exactly what he was doing. I also knew, he would take something back from whatever I gave him, at the special cut rate that he was using to tempt me, (after all we were friends weren’t we, so he was offering me a good deal on that basis). I just knew he would screw me somehow. My intuition was vindicated later when he gave me the roll of film he took, leaving me to pay for the cost of developing it, with some barefaced shameless flim-flam explanation of why he was doing so. I just laughed. Now I see the covert desperation was his driving need for money to drink. Perhaps on some inner level I knew and sympathized, feeling more fortunate, as my need for drink and drugs was just as driving, but my means were more equal to my needs.
I would also see Joe in another bar, or a pub as they are also termed in England, a mostly weekend evening hangout, where I often sat in with the musicians. This was one of the several pubs we frequented that sold British apple wine. Because it was home produced and carried no import tax on it’s alcohol content, it was comparatively pretty cheap, as strong as sherry, relatively palatable, and with the well-deserved reputation for creating a crazed drunkenness. This of course only added to the popularity of Merrydown, as it was named with a touch of drollery. Several times, early in the evening, which perhaps accounts for the fact that I was conscious enough to retain the memory, Joe would join me at the bar. This was in fact where he returned the undeveloped roll of film to me on one occasion. He would order a glass of Merrydown, which arrived in a capacious tumbler, full to the brim, and leave it on the bar. He would ignore his drink, chatting casually, as if it were of no interest, as if he had half forgotten it. After a few minutes or so, as if catching sight of it, as if vaguely remembering what he was engaged in, “Oh yes, I have a drink somewhere don’t I?”, he would pick it up with a smooth rapidity, raising his glass as he tilted his head back, and drain the entire contents in one set of swift gulping swallows. Then swinging the glass down in a wide arc to crash it on the bar, he would look at me and state rhetorically, “We’re such bastards Brian, aren’t we? Such bastards!” And then order another, and another, and another, each accompanied by a repeat performance. The dissembler with beads of sweat on his forehead. That were not created by the warm evening. Now I realize how badly Joe needed those drinks, he had reached the stage of physically addicted alcoholism, and I was close on his heels. So why the charade? What was he hiding from whom? Not wanting to admit his “weakness”, I guess he wanted to keep some shred of self-respect, some façade that hid reality as much from himself, as from others. Pretending he wasn’t so desperately in need of the drink that in actuality he was so desperately in need of.
Now if the party, i.e. the drunken debauch, was not at my house, mostly we would congregate at Grace and Gordon’s basement flat, and Joe would infrequently show up there too, late into the night. Grace was known even among us as an as an outrageous alcoholic. Arising around noon, she would spend two hours putting on her makeup with shaking hands, while consuming large glasses of Merrydown, or anything alcoholic that had been donated by a guest the night before. Or lacking a commercial product, resorting to her still cloudy homebrewed wine, that had barely finished fermenting. Ugh! Every morning, without fail. By nightfall she was roaring drunk and ready to party. Gordon was a fabulous, almost mythic figure. Sporting a military moustache, a relic of his service in the army, which he detested, the thinning hair was drawn back into an incongruent silky blondish ponytail, barely concealing his balding crown. Again an even more unusual deviant appearance considering his age, at this time and in this place. Gordon loved his drink too, was highly enamored of pot, and took far more amphetamines than he let on. Grace smoked weed if it was around, as did most on this scene, but booze was her first true love without any question. Both of them were some ten years senior to myself, at that time in my early thirties. Grace latterly was taking pills for the flashes of light across her vision, and the sudden pains shooting down her face. It was so obvious her drinking caused them, except to her Doctor of course,