Alcohol & Addiction in Action: The Life and Death of Joe Rowley

to whom she probably lied anyway. After I left I heard she was admitted to hospital with a diagnosis of some kind of “nerve problem.” Ha! I’ll say. From Grace and Gordon I think I remember half hearing in some dim hallucinatory state, the story that Joe had once owned a nightclub in South London, but had had it taken from him by the coercion of some brutal gangsters. That would account for his air of toughness. And then, during his descent, his wife had deserted him. You might think this was Joe’s tragedy, but I now see it was so much more than only that.

One night, around one or two am, Joe shows up at Grace and Gordon’s. He is as stoned as we are, and sits slumped in silence, almost collapsed, in an armchair. The music is turned down low, and the conversation sluggish and intermittent, all of those present being in their own sunken state of chemical torpor. All of a sudden, during a pause, a moment of silence, Joe begins to speak. To recite actually. Joe is reciting a lengthy poem.. from memory. And not only that, he is expressing himself with a phenomenal artistry. Every nuance of feeling, every scintilla of meaning, Joe is wringing it out of the poem, displaying the delicate, sensitive, subtle sensibilities of a truly poetic soul. His eyes are dull with a distant look. It is almost as if he is semi-conscious, and some other inhabitant of his inner world is speaking through him. Some deeply buried part of him has sprung to life, and Joe himself seems almost unaware of what he is doing. In the doom ridden besotted gloom we are entranced, enthralled, held spellbound by his words and their meaning, in one of those rare jeweled moments of timeless eternity that are occasionally found set amongst the dregs of drugged and drunken time warps. Who could of known Joe had this in him? I cannot even recall the poem at all, but I know it had greatness, a loveliness that Joe crystallized out of his own being. I only recall the feelings of sacred awe at witnessing the beauty of Joe’s hugeness, and the quality of his intellect and sensitivity, that could penetrate and encompass on every level, each and every nook and cranny of his poem. For all I know, he wrote it himself.

So the real tragedy of Joe Rowley was one of this more significant loss. The prostitution of his talents, wasting himself to survive. That sadness in some place inside breeding such guilt, remorse and self-hatred, “We’re such bastards Brian, aren’t we? Such bastards!” As he was forced to abandon and betray himself over and over again. Never knowing that his addiction to alcohol was relentlessly consuming his life and being, completely out of any control by who he thought he was. The victim of a state of mind and body of which he had no comprehension. Never knowing of his own goodness. Never cognizant of his own great heart and the sweetness of his shining spirit, which stood so briefly revealed in those phantasmagoric moments, when the curtain of his lesser being was drawn aside. Driven down to ever-lower depths of self-degradation and self-destruction by the scourge of his alcoholism. Till he reached that inevitable terminal nadir, that deep pit, so deep that the only escape from it is through the still deeper bottom that is death. The news I received, later and so far away, was that Joe had choked on his own vomit, while unconscious from a combination of alcohol and sleeping pills, like so many before and since. This was his swansong.

And my sorrow for Joe.. perhaps is not only for him.. perhaps this is the explanation for that fleeting recurrent source of tears. I see so much of me and my life reflected in Joe and his life.. so much of what was true of him has been true of me. And then there are the myriad matching marching cohorts, past present and future.. treading some such path to some such similar an end.

I never had that film Joe took of me developed.. I lost it some time ago… somewhere along the way.

Brian Green. c. 2007. http://www.mindmagic123.com

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