Read Online The Wet and the Dry by Lawrence Osborne - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Lawrence Osborne
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later said that she could not have suffered to go back to Naples, to see its slow decline. But a decline from what? The city she knew was feral, the dark metropolis of Norman Lewis’s brilliant book Naples ’44 . It must have been the first city in which she had been free, far from priests and family. The first place in which she had been able to be a woman.
There was a fearless insolence about her, a quality I saw years later on her deathbed. The suburban life of Haywards Heath after Naples, marriage after the life of a reporter on the lam, must have been a shock. As the years passed, she began to drink. My sister told me one day that she had noticed the family piano sounding a little strange when she played. Opening the lid, she found a bottle of vodka hidden under the strings. This was a secret between us, and we didn’t talk about it for years. My own taste for drink, meanwhile, might be genetic, and it might have something to do with the Irish. Around us in those years in Haywards Heath hovered the shadowy outer family of the Tyneside Irish clan, the Grieves, the O’Kanes, and the O’Malleys, the male boozers who occasionally appeared at Christmastime and then disappeared like circus tricks, a nightmare fringe of shadow-puppet men with bright blue eyes and wet lips.
My uncle Michael, who died in a halfway home for alcoholics in Scotland, his foot recently amputated from diabetes, a manwho had disappeared for a quarter century, abandoning his wife and children, to whom he had become a mysterious stranger. My great-uncle John O’Kane, publisher of the Liverpool University Press, who appeared every Christmas Eve with a different girl fresh off ocean liners and airplanes from Madrid, who would walk in the front door covered with snow and sit at the piano, pull up his cuffs, and begin to play and sing, uninvited, mad and drunk. A man who was convinced that he was admired and loved, and maybe even feared, but who was none of those. As a child, I adored him. He wore tweed suits and Italian ties and brought me jazz LPs from stores in Paris and Barcelona; his hands shook all the time, and he had those bloody oyster eyes that did not preclude tenderness. I remember, as he lay next to me in bed listening to “Purple Haze” (not the Jimi Hendrix song), his smell of booze and cologne mixed up, the inadvertent vibration of his body.
Here was a male gorgon who stormed around the world on “business” liquoring himself at a thousand bars, “that drunken Irish loafer,” as my father called him, who didn’t care about gathering moss as he rolled like a stone through his ramshackle life. I admired his fearlessness. I admired the way at Christmas dinner he toasted everyone singly and did it with neat Glenfiddich, and then burst—still uninvited—into one of his own inane compositions. What sound track must have been playing inside his formidable and erudite mind? The alcoholic wants to be loved, and just as fervently he wants to be hated and reviled.
Dreaded but unavoidable, the drunk is always at the bar oflife, like the man in Tati’s Playtime who, despite being ejected from the lounge by the seat of his pants, always manages to reappear at the same spot. He is always there, irrepressible and stoic, doomed and melodic, while the teetotaler is home in bed, snoring next to a glass of water.
The moods of alcohol are like dabs of color on a psychotic palette that can be mixed at random. There are moments when intoxication induces a feeling of immersion in a vast and shadowy element. Walt Whitman ventures down to the shoreline and dissipates like “a little wash’d-up drift” into the ocean:
Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I have not once had the least idea who or what I am,
But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d,
We know this feeling. Crudely but also subtly, the bottle facilitates this solitude, and the drinker knows it all
There was a fearless insolence about her, a quality I saw years later on her deathbed. The suburban life of Haywards Heath after Naples, marriage after the life of a reporter on the lam, must have been a shock. As the years passed, she began to drink. My sister told me one day that she had noticed the family piano sounding a little strange when she played. Opening the lid, she found a bottle of vodka hidden under the strings. This was a secret between us, and we didn’t talk about it for years. My own taste for drink, meanwhile, might be genetic, and it might have something to do with the Irish. Around us in those years in Haywards Heath hovered the shadowy outer family of the Tyneside Irish clan, the Grieves, the O’Kanes, and the O’Malleys, the male boozers who occasionally appeared at Christmastime and then disappeared like circus tricks, a nightmare fringe of shadow-puppet men with bright blue eyes and wet lips.
My uncle Michael, who died in a halfway home for alcoholics in Scotland, his foot recently amputated from diabetes, a manwho had disappeared for a quarter century, abandoning his wife and children, to whom he had become a mysterious stranger. My great-uncle John O’Kane, publisher of the Liverpool University Press, who appeared every Christmas Eve with a different girl fresh off ocean liners and airplanes from Madrid, who would walk in the front door covered with snow and sit at the piano, pull up his cuffs, and begin to play and sing, uninvited, mad and drunk. A man who was convinced that he was admired and loved, and maybe even feared, but who was none of those. As a child, I adored him. He wore tweed suits and Italian ties and brought me jazz LPs from stores in Paris and Barcelona; his hands shook all the time, and he had those bloody oyster eyes that did not preclude tenderness. I remember, as he lay next to me in bed listening to “Purple Haze” (not the Jimi Hendrix song), his smell of booze and cologne mixed up, the inadvertent vibration of his body.
Here was a male gorgon who stormed around the world on “business” liquoring himself at a thousand bars, “that drunken Irish loafer,” as my father called him, who didn’t care about gathering moss as he rolled like a stone through his ramshackle life. I admired his fearlessness. I admired the way at Christmas dinner he toasted everyone singly and did it with neat Glenfiddich, and then burst—still uninvited—into one of his own inane compositions. What sound track must have been playing inside his formidable and erudite mind? The alcoholic wants to be loved, and just as fervently he wants to be hated and reviled.
Dreaded but unavoidable, the drunk is always at the bar oflife, like the man in Tati’s Playtime who, despite being ejected from the lounge by the seat of his pants, always manages to reappear at the same spot. He is always there, irrepressible and stoic, doomed and melodic, while the teetotaler is home in bed, snoring next to a glass of water.
The moods of alcohol are like dabs of color on a psychotic palette that can be mixed at random. There are moments when intoxication induces a feeling of immersion in a vast and shadowy element. Walt Whitman ventures down to the shoreline and dissipates like “a little wash’d-up drift” into the ocean:
Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I have not once had the least idea who or what I am,
But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d,
We know this feeling. Crudely but also subtly, the bottle facilitates this solitude, and the drinker knows it all
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