Some of the world’s great drinkers were successful writers – Hemmingway, Dorothy Parker, Charles Bukowski. I’m a great drinker who knows successful writers… who don’t drink. With tee-total friends like these, you totally don’t need enemies.
What are technically called black-outs I’ve always called white-outs – they always happened when I drank white wine and like the typing correction fluid, they obliterated any sensible thing I had said or done earlier. I decided to blame the wine industry. I became convinced that, since white wine had become such a popular drink with women, heartless grape growers were adding hormones to white wine so it would ferment faster and get distributed to dipsomaniac dolly birds double quick. And these growth hormones reacted with female hormones to create a volatile combination of tears, tantrums and tyrannic behaviour which I named WWW aka the White Wine Witch.
I checked in with a few female friends and they too admitted that white wine made them tipsier faster and prone to hysterical outbursts. One friend in particular was very interested in my theory, so much so that when she wrote her book on how she quit drinking and got a so-called life, she purloined the phrase and ‘www – white wine witch’ became the selling point of her memoirs and popped up in all her press releases and reviews. Grrr… when I saw it repeated in Cosmopolitan and other women’s magazines, I realised that my adroit moniker had entered the social lexicon with no credit to its creator. But what was I to do? Walk into a bar and demand a free glass of Chablis? ‘Hey buddy, you’re looking at the original White Wine Witch. Now pour.’
What I did do was go to her book launch, fork out 10 quid to buy the book, then walked up to her and asked her to sign it. ‘And please can you address it to Glenda, the original white wine witch?’ I asked sweetly. She looked embarrassed, mumbled something about how it was her publisher who had pushed the phrase in the press and scrawled what I had requested. I felt more benevolent after that, hung around the party (even she had to capitulate to intransigent book launch rules and have free booze) and departed with a tentative promise to meet up for coffee, it had been years.
Then I actually read her book…and understood why it had been years.
I realised the woman with whom I had once, for fun, mixed vodka and Berocca, had been squirreling away tales of my ‘nuttiness’ to enhance her new-found sainthood of sobriety. Now I don’t mind being referred to as the ‘Zelda Fitzgerald’ of drunks but it’s a bit rich when you are written off as merely a source for people’s party anecdotes and then are used for exactly that throughout a book. All the stories were there….the time I took my trousers off and danced on a table at a bar in Cannes, the time I smuggled ecstasy into Mallorca, the time I woke up in Barcelona and said ‘How the fuck did I get here’? Even the story about how I bought a KFC bucket one night, threw it at my husband, and wondered why there were chicken bones all over my Brixton flat in the morning. Shame she didn’t just stick to the international tales – perhaps it was making my life sound, god forbid, interesting as well as amusing.
But hey, she had written a book and I hadn’t. As Gore Vidal says, ‘Whenever a friend of mine succeeds, a little something in me dies.’ Gore knew that sinking feeling in your gut when a friend has done something you wish you had. Apparently there is a German word for it – Erfolgtraurigkeit – but don’t ask me to spell it, especially when I’ve had a few.
To use another German expression, did I feel a twinge of Schadenfreude (delight in another’s misfortune) when I heard that shortly after being published my friend had a stroke? Um, a bit, and when she started to milk it for myriad newspaper articles, I realised all is fair in love and words.
Then there was the time I dated a Booker prize winner. Despite living in France for years, he didn’t drink wine or any other alcohol. We first met at a more minor literary award evening, pre-Booker, where he had scooped up a not-so-minor amount of 3 grand for his first book of short stories. He took me out to dinner and I ordered a half-carafe of wine. He had hot chocolate. When the bill came, he split it and then asked if I would pay for my wine, since of course, he hadn’t drunk any. ‘Where are you going?’ he said as I left the table in a huff. ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘Well,’ I explained frostily, ‘I’m going to the bank machine. I’m not the one that just won 3,000 dollars.’ He looked suitably abashed and agreed he could cough up the 5 buck cost of the carafe.
But when he sent me a letter, saying I should visit him and that, hey, he would pay for my bus ticket, but only if I went on a weekday because of the 10% discount, I grasped that here was a bona fide cheapskate. All that money he was saving from not drinking he was obviously not spending on the art of seduction. I mean, Maus, a graphic novel about the Holocaust, is obviously a worthy book but not one to give to a gal you are trying to bed. It was when he offered to buy me lunch at the all-you-can-eat-but-absolutely-nada-to drink Hare Krishna vegetarian buffet restaurant that I decided, successful writer or not, this boy was not someone I wanted on my bookshelf.
About a year later, he won the Booker prize with an odd novel about a shipwrecked boy and tiger. Perhaps tee-totalling is a trigger for your imagination. I’ll never know. All I know that, in the words of the cynical NYC band, Interpol: ‘Friends don’t waste wine when there’s words to sell.’
