The Pimp on Facing Alcoholism

Insignificant and occasionally interesting contributions to the cognition of reality…

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Illustration by Andreas Hykade. Courtesy of Chris J. Robinson. [1]

So such is life that it writes itself
Trying to right itself
But there's nothing wrong with it
There's nothing wrong

It’s a lovely irony. I stopped drinking in February 2001, yet since then I’ve received more reader comments suggesting that I must be intoxicated while I write this stuff (and, of course, only a month ago did I notice that little subtitle “Drunken ramblings from the North” under the Pimp heading) than ever before.

Quitting
Anyway if you’re like me, you’re a recovering alcoholic; one who did not follow the AA route. I went a few times over the years (from 18-34) and each time I found it depressing as hell. Sobriety, for me, should be a celebration of sorts (sometimes), and the last thing I want to do is hang out in a gymnasium with a bunch of somber, chain smoking, coffee guzzling people as they take turns reciting horror stories from their drinking years before holding hands and thanking God. I always left feeling thoroughly depressed and even sort of freakish, like an outcast from society. I didn’t want to feel that way. Drinking already gave me that feeling. Drinking already made me feel like physical and mental excrement most days. Being sober was supposed to be a good thing, a happy occasion. Anyway I stubbornly refused (and still refuse) to attend AA. It works for some people. Great. Groovy. Dandy. But hey…I got myself into this mess (although there are some who argue that it is an illness or a disease) and I’m sure as hell not gonna sit on my ass and let God or some other higher power take the responsibility of sorting my own shit out for me.

I won’t go into what motivated me to quit. Let’s just say it was an incredibly sappy nostalgic moment. Real cheese quality. It was anti-climactic really…even a mysterious broken ankle the year before failed to prevent me from returning to the cause. After I quit, I went to a few more AA meetings but then decided to find a counselor to help me one on one; someone who could give me tangible tools to deal with going to a festival, for example, (where I had really become a brilliant drinker), and not drinking. Those weekly one-hour meetings did the trick. I didn’t buy into all the spiel I was given, but I got what I needed to get through my days and nights without booze. Granted…the first festival (in Finland of all places!) was a nightmare. I was moody, depressed and lost. I didn’t miss the booze…but I found that now I had added almost 12 hours to my day…and I didn’t know how to fill them. I also realized that festivals had become little more than sitting around bars to talk, eat, and mostly to drink, between screenings (when I actually made it to a screening). Anyway…Finland was hell. I remember screaming at my travel agent on a payphone in Turku begging for him to find me a flight home. I remember that during a panel on festival organization, I spoke from a horizontal position atop a bunch of metal chairs. I was also rude to the Quay Brothers, but that’s okay, I would be today too.

Depictions of Hell
What really helped me through the whole process were, first of all, a few animator friends who were recovering themselves, but mostly I found therapy by just writing about it (I wrote articles on Paul Fierlinger, actor Sterling Hayden and am currently writing a book on an old hockey player, Doug Harvey — all alcoholics). I also found some form of comfort (or an illusion of it) in a variety of songs, books, movies, plays, poems, etc… I rented Drunks (some Richard Lewis film), The Lost Weekend (an amazing depiction by Billy Wilder), a Canadian film The Woman Who Drinks, and Pollock (which by the way is an amazing alcoholic film — it’s almost like that film was made for alcoholics…a little series of secrets that only us freaks would dig). I read Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend, Long Day’s Journey into the Night, every Nick Tosches word, and even found obscure titles like this 1940s German book called The Drinker. And best of all there are songs…so many to choose from…but my favorites: Drunk Again (Willie Nelson), However Much I Booze (The Who), Angel Eyes (Frank Sinatra), Hey Brother Pour The Wine (Dean Martin), Blood Shot Eyes (Wynonie Harris), almost any drink song by George Jones, Bowlegged Drunk Again (Lonnie Johnson), and two alcoholic masterpieces: Now To War by Guided by Voices and I Can’t Escape You by Hank Williams. Seeking out alcohol stories became my therapy and yes…of course…another addiction.

While I was in Finland last May (2001), I had organized a screening of films about hell. Initially it was just gonna be one of those cartoony horn rimmed demon hells, but then I thought it might be interesting to do a screening of animations that dealt with the personal hells of the creator (films about desire, war, stress, and alcoholism). Along the way I found, not a lot, but a strong body of films related to alcoholism.

That there is a strong connection between alcoholism and animation (and art in general) is not really a surprise. There is a long list of bottle friendly animators (from Tom Oreb, Pat Sullivan to Norman McLaren to Ryan Larkin [2] and John Callahan — although everyone tries to deny McLaren’s problems as if it’s a friggin pestilence — further contributing to that prevalent societal belief that alcoholism is a character flaw or some sort of immoral activity — which, my friends, is utter bullshit). And hey it makes sense…artists, any good ones, are obsessive, compulsive, self-centered and quite often anti-social (especially without a substance) people. Hell…William Faulkner wrote his best (and worst!) work while tight…academics spout on about his stream-of-consciousness or symbolic style…but they were just beautiful, often, incoherent ramblings of a drunk (prolly not unlike Pollack’s so-called Abstract Expressionism). Animation, in particular, is an intense art that often involves a lot of isolation, patience and concentration. Why do you think there are so many parties at animation festivals?

Animated Tales of Booze
Okay...sorry…I’m digressing again (see…ya don’t have to be drunk to ramble)…while I was digging through all these personal hell films (which really was just an excuse for me to confront my own addiction), I found a handful of interesting animation films about alcoholism: And Then I’ll Stop by Paul Fierlinger [3] (1990), I Think I Was An Alcoholic by John Callahan (1993), One Way Street by Bernard Longpré (1980), Michèle Cournoyer’s The Hat (1999) and, strangely enough, I even found a listing of two Estonian animation puppet films about alcoholism. Both Seven Devils (1985) and A Tale about His Majesty (1974) are directed by Heino Pars -- one of the grandpas of Estonian animation.

Now Michèle Cournoyer’s The Hat (La Chapeau) is not directly about alcoholism, but sexual abuse. As a stripper dances, she recalls an encounter with a faceless man with a hat. We see that this man has perhaps abused this woman as a young girl. And yet, and this is what makes the film so bloody courageous, there is a suggestion that this girl-woman desires the sex as well, as if she is addicted to it. She knows it’s not good and yet she wants more of it. In a sense, sex abuse is just a beard here so that Cournoyer can get to the crux of the matter — a woman addicted to something that gives her pleasure and simultaneously destroys her.

When we screened One Way Street (Les Naufragés du Quartier) during the opening of the Ottawa '02 festival, I was immediately struck by how much The Hat (La Chapeau) had been influenced by the thick line metamorphosis style that occurs throughout this story (especially when the daughter becomes a stripper) about the destruction of a family through alcoholism. One Way Street is an absolutely stark and unforgiving film that deals with alcoholism as both an environmental and hereditary sickness. The father drinks to forget his lousy job. His daughter drinks to forget her lousy childhood.

I haven’t seen Seven Devils, but apparently Heino Pars was simply looking for a subject matter and learned about a man in treatment for alcoholism at a neurology hospital in Tartu, Estonia. The man was apparently having visions of devils and wanted to get rid of them through treatment. Pars, obviously not an alcoholic, fails to see that these devils are common traits of delirium tremors, which an alcoholic often suffers during the few sober moments between drinking bouts.

Before he made Seven Devils, Pars made another alcohol tale called A Tale About His Majesty (Priit Pärn even worked on it). The story takes place inside the body of an alcoholic where a team of workers (á là the “What Happens During Ejaculation” scene in Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex) attempts to deal with the man’s generous helping of booze while out on the town with a lady. This heavily moralistic tale traces the decline of the man as he continues to consume heavy amounts of alcohol. It’s one of those good scare films for teenagers, but probably not enough to convince a veteran guzzler.

What can I say about the stick figure film I Think I Was An Alcoholic? It’s one of the funniest films I’ve seen about an alcoholic becoming a quadriplegic.

Next to Callahan’s film, Paul Fierlinger’s And Then I’ll Stop, is probably the most known of alcohol related animation films. Using the interviews with rehab patients, each story takes us through the habits, downfall and subsequent acknowledgment and recovery of each addict. Fierlinger gives each voice their own drawing style ranging from dark, grey sketches to Steinberg influenced geometric drawings. Accompanying the story is a haunting, minimalist track. The power of the film lies with the combination of Fierlinger's strong graphics, the soundtrack and the frank, unsentimental stories of these real people. There is not a drop of sentimentality in this film. The films’ biggest twist comes at the end when we are introduced to a new character, Paul. It turns out that during the making of the film Fierlinger himself quit drinking.

A New, Strange Road
I guess it’s like what I said about death [4]. It ain’t goin' anywhere so why try to ignore it. Just accept it as part of life. I know some milquetoast ex-boozers who won’t go near bars or can’t stand to be around other people drinking. That doesn’t bother me at all. Alcohol is ubiquitous, I can’t run from it so instead I just try to face it head on and embrace the tales of those who’ve been drunk by it.

Sobriety is a strange road…but I must say…it’s been pretty dandy overall. I’ve lost weight, I don’t wake up with a stinging headache…those late afternoon drink cravings are behind me…I don’t get thrown out of bars anymore…I don’t jump sound men at concerts because the band sucks. I don’t puke. I don’t stick my tongue down stranger’s throats…I don’t have blackouts…I don’t do as many stupid things anymore…and it's a great feeling to say, “I’ll meet you at 9 a.m.,” and actually be there. Hell...it’s a great fucking feeling just to wake up in the morning.

But ya know I also don’t want to transform into some self-righteous, all hail the big book, recovery salesman. I had a lot of good times with alcohol, especially at festivals. Problem was that I tried to bring my festival drinking fountain home. Not a good move. And I admit I found it really hard to socialize in Ottawa [5] this year. Alcohol can be a great social tool and there’s no better example than when you go to a festival. It loosens up inhibitions and helps people step outside themselves for a few hours so they can better engage in some chitchat with others. I think that’s a damn fine thing. I have a lot of good drinking memories…but the problem is that I also have too many memories I don’t recall. Too many nights where you keep drinking and drinking until you’ve gone from stepping outside yourself to losing yourself altogether. Too many nights of not giving a shit what I was drinking as long as it got me where I needed to go. And on many times, I drank into blackness. There is nothing more frightening than a blackout, until the next one.

During Ottawa '02 there were a few encounters with people who said they liked the Pimp columns [6] (yeah…a few slobber jockeys cornered AWN publisher, Dan Sarto and demanded to know how he could justify printing such “hateful and racist” material as the Pimp. Strangely these crusading backboned bastions of morality didn’t mention their objections to me the entire week.), but the sweetest, most chillaxin’ words emanated from those mouths that expressed surprise at how different I seemed from the Pimp they envisioned (hey…don’t feel bad...even some of my friends now think I wanna talk about Greeks [7], titties [8], Kant [9], and Jimmy Neutron [10] too). That be snug on the ears mon chums…(and PART of the reason why you see this new Pimp logo). Naturally there is a large chunk of me in the Pimp. How could there not be? But it’s just one snot from the mucus, one shake from the spurt stick. That being said…before I quit drinking I was certainly closer to the Pimp’s temperament. As some of ‘you’ know, one of the biggest worries alcoholics have is that we’ll become a mediocre herbal tea drinking Enya lovin’ slug; all that hipness and superior intelligence we firmly possessed as alcoholics will follow the Canadian Club down the drain. But hey, a raging, bloated, lecherous, bombastic puke stained drunk ain’t exactly a rare bird. And whatever unvarnished ire I inherited before has simply become more polished (or at least gets read twice now before being sent to the editor). Beyond that, nothing’s changed, I still use writing as a vehicle to try and sort through all the confusion, ugliness, ignorance, anger, beauty and horniness, that feeds this Stuff within which you and me, being we, piss, shit and breathe.

Chris Robinson is but a man. His hobbies include squirrel taunting, goat thumping, meat dancing and elderly peeping. You can find the results at http://asifa.net/robinson