Gary Paulsen,
Pilgrimage on a Steel Ride
A Monday morning, late January, I had an alcoholic fit. Doesn’t get more serious than that. Put me smack back in hospital. A doctor looming over me said,
“Mr Taylor, have you any idea what happened to you?”
“No.”
“The next attack could kill you.”
“I’ll be careful.”
He looked down at my chart, shook his head, said,
“Care isn’t what’s needed. You cannot drink.”
The episode terrorised me. When I got out of the hospital, I didn’t drink. But I’d been down that road a thousand times. Sooner or later, the edge of the fear dropped off or I got to “Who gives a fuck?” and drank.
I sank into deep and deeper depression. Getting out of bed became increasingly difficult. During the night, massive anxiety would pull me from sleep, on the hour, every hour. Drained, I’d crawl from bed and have to force myself to the shower. Food held no interest, but I tried. Asked myself, “Why bother?” Shaved my beard and was horrified at how sunken my face was. But hell, I’d great teeth.
In my last case, two brothers had come after me. If they lived in America, they’d have been trailer trash. Here, they were “bachelors”. Implying, it was their choice. Among their agenda of hatred were tinkers. I’d been working for the travellers. Coming home from a funeral, I’d been pissed and eating chips, the Irish Nirvana or, as purists might say, “Tir na nOg”.
The brothers had hit me in the mouth with an iron bar. Weeks of dentistry resulted in a smile that glowed.
I’d once heard depression described as being under murky, fetid water and not being able to break the surface.
That fit.
Each day was drearier than the one before. The high point was going to bed so I’d be able to just cease. If comfort could be squeezed from anything, it was the thought of suicide. It is deep shit when that’s the only light. Months before, I’d been drinking in a dive off Merchant’s Road. What drew me was the menace, palpable in the very air. A Russian sailor, dry-docked for eight months, sold me a .32-calibre Heckler & Koch. It’s a nasty piece of work; I was amazed to get it, and so cheap.
Most nights, I’d hold it in my hand and think,
“One movement up, then squeeze the trigger.”
I cannot say why I didn’t. Tried to return to books. There had always been reading. No matter what went down, I could always read. Wasn’t working any more. All my old reliable ones,
Thomas Merton
Nelson Algren
Walter Macken
Francis Thompson.
Nope.
Weren’t doing it.
Returned to a writer who’d give me the blackness. Derek Raymond, the founder of English noir. Also known as Robin Cook. He had a lifelong affinity with the criminal, the damaged. Educated at that “hotbed of buggery”, Eton, it was, he said, “an excellent preparation for vice of any kind”. Prompted by an almost terminal boredom, he absconded, first to Paris and the legendary Beat Hotel, then New York’s Lower East Side. The first of his five marriages went down the toilet after sixty-five days.
My own marriage had run almost parallel. I didn’t plan on four more.
He said,
I knew things were going wrong when I got home, put the shop-ping down in the kitchen and the table gave a terrible cough.
No wonder I loved him.
He wrote a spate of books that drew a cult following. Translated as good reviews, no money. It didn’t worry him unduly. He said,
I’ve watched people like Kingsley Amis, struggling to get on the up escalator, while I had the down escalator all to myself.
Here’s when I like him best.
Nearing fifty, he began the Factory novels. Unremittingly black thrillers, the protagonist haunted by personal tragedy and obsessed with the deaths no one else bothers with, they show London in despair. Scoured by “vile psychic weather”.
