American on Purpose Read online

  My life had been careless and selfish. Pleasure in the moment was my only thought, my solitary motivation. I had disappointed whoever had been foolish enough to love me, and left them scarred.

  I was a very long way from being the best a man can get.

  29

  Reboot

  My rehab counselor, Brian, explained that I had been suffering from a disease, that alcoholism was not just the expression of a morally incompetent mind but rather an unavoidable malady for those afflicted. It was a spiel I’d heard before and I thought it was a cop-out, an excuse for my behavior. Brian, a mega-tanned, mega-handsome ski-instructor type who looked unnervingly like the dudes in the Gillette commercial, said he didn’t give a shit about what I thought or how I felt, whether I or anyone else accepted the concept of alcoholism as a disease didn’t matter; what mattered was that when treated as a disease, those who suffered from it were most likely to recover. Therefore why debate it?

  That made some sense, I had to admit. Brian also assured me that I would not be excused from making amends to everyone I had harmed. In order to get and stay sober I was going to have to clean up the wreckage of my past. I found the prospect daunting, but somehow comforting, too, because the counselors insisted it could be done, and, after all, many of them were recovering alcoholics themselves.

  I had two roommates, let’s call them Matthew and Lucerne. Matthew, a Church of England vicar, was sixty years old and in treatment for the first time. After one of his parishioners came to him complaining about some drunk he’d seen sleeping on top of the tombs in the churchyard, Matthew decided he’d better get help before anyone figured out it was him.

  Lucerne was a rail-thin hope-to-die junkie in his twenties whose father, a rich Swiss banker, had thrown him into Farm Place in a last-gasp attempt to save his son’s life. It worked.

  It worked for all three of us, actually. We all made it through those grueling weeks of harsh self-examination and evaluation. There are a million books about recovery and rehab, some written by charlatans and some by people far more qualified than I to discuss the subject, and if you want to stop drinking you could do worse than read a few, but you could save yourself a good deal of money and time by just looking up an organization very near the front of the telephone directory.

  When Jimmy came to pick me up two months later, I was, in the words of Raymond Chandler, “clean and sober and didn’t care who knew it.” My confidence didn’t last long; it was already waning on the drive back into London. We passed what seemed like a million pubs and I felt terribly vulnerable. How was I going to stay out of pubs after spending my life in them? Jimmy said he thought I’d figure it out.

  “I don’t know how I can ever repay you for what you did for me,” I told him.

  “Just do it for someone else one day. Pass it on,” he said.

  And so I have, many times.

  I believe it’s the only way I can retain the right to remain sober.

  I stayed with Jimmy in London for the first few nights but then headed back to Glasgow because I actually had a job there. Philip Differ, the BBC producer who’d worked on a Bing Hitler special a few years before, had offered me a series of my own. It would be broadcast on BBC Scotland, not throughout the U.K., but it was a great offer, and one that Philip didn’t take back even when he heard I was in Show-Business Hospital; he just delayed the start of production till I got out. As a prominent TV producer, Philip had encountered plenty of alcoholics, but I think I was the first he knew who’d sobered up, and it fascinated him. When the suits wanted to shitcan the production because of my adventures in rehab, Philip defended me, and we went on to make a couple of series together. Philip’s kindness and steadfast loyalty were hugely helpful in putting my life together.

  The first series Philip and I did was a half-hour sketch-comedy show called 2000 Not Out, and I wouldn’t call it a high point in either of our careers. The persona I created was meant to be a mysterious yet comic Rod Serling sort of character, but I was still rusty and tweaked from being newly sober. The makeup people got overly enthusiastic and turned me into what looked like an anxiety-ridden Pakistani maître d’.

  The good thing was that I’d be spending the first few months of my sobriety writing and filming the show in Glasgow, where I would be less likely to fall into old patterns. By this time I had not actually lived in the city for five years and didn’t even know where the cool bars were anymore. Thank God.

  Through Jimmy I met John Naismith, a Scottish businessman and former drunk who lived in London and who would become a kind of guardian angel to me.

  Some people turn to a priest or minister or other clergyman for spiritual guidance, or, if they live in L.A., perhaps to their Pilates instructor or publicist, but I turn to my friend John.

  He grew up just outside of Glasgow and had lived a very similar life to my own, but was fifteen years ahead of me, both chronologically and in terms of giving up drinking. John had shown great promise as a young man but was constantly being dragged down by his alcohol intake. Having managed to stop drinking long before I did, he agreed to help me along on the path to something more closely resembling normalcy. Given the remarkable parallels in our backgrounds and life stories, it seemed a convenient symbiosis. John would look out for me and help me through those first few difficult months of abstinence, while I would serve as a reminder of what it was like to be crazy, and of how foolish it would be ever to try drinking again. What started out as just one ex-drunk helping another became a deep and valued mutual friendship that survives to this day.

  Some people, I suppose, are restored to sanity the minute they get sober. That was not true in any way for me. I think I got even more peculiar after rehab but was just a little more effective than most at hiding it. My mind rumbled like a bad neighborhood. To be stuck in there alone felt dangerous, particularly at night. Plagued by terrible fears, I had nightmares almost every time I closed my eyes, making sleep very difficult, and for a while I experienced frightening bouts of rage that I had difficulty understanding, let alone controlling.

  I was still looking long and hard at my life thus far—where I had fallen down, where I had tripped, where decisions I’d made could at best be described as unwise. John helped me through this painful process without ever making me feel that he was judging me. Many times, as I talked through some difficult or embarrassing incident in my past, he would bring one up from his own that matched or even bested mine in some way. It was hard not to be impressed by how crazy he had been. My moods became a little more even. I felt less afraid, and a lot less angry.

  I was ready to begin trudging through the amends process, getting in touch with many people I knew I’d treated badly, telling them that I was sorry and if there was any way to put things right I would. Some people I didn’t call: John said that the best way I could put things right with them was simply never to bother them again. But my ex-wife wasn’t in this group.

  The most difficult move I had to make, the one that I dreaded more than any other, was contacting Anne. I just felt so rotten about how I had treated her, I didn’t know where I would find the nerve to call her, and couldn’t begin to guess how she’d react. Fate forced my hand in the end. Walking home from the BBC one day, I turned a corner and there she was. I asked if she had time for a coffee and she said of course. We went to a nearby café and I laid it all out, told her how I felt about having been such a prick and how badly I wanted to make it up to her, to make it right between us. She started crying. Then she told me she was happy I had found a better way to live and didn’t feel I was totally to blame for the failure of our marriage—a staggering notion that I, in my self-obsession, had not considered. Anne said that she had been so wrapped up in her own desire to settle down and build a family that she couldn’t or wouldn’t see how crazy I was, how incapable of giving her what she wanted. She still cared for me, and the best way I could make amends to her was to be happy.

  I do have a knack for finding great women.

&
nbsp; Helen and I tried and failed to repair our relationship. She visited me in rehab, and once I was sober and working in Glasgow she came there, too. But something had ended, something had died between us, and we couldn’t resurrect it. Maybe we had both become too sad to find a way back. I realized that the best thing I could do for Helen was to let her get on with her life.

  Eventually I sold the cottage in Dunwich, at a horrible loss that racked up even more debt, but first I had to make the miserable eight-hour trip down there from Scotland to remove the last of my belongings, which was no simple affair, as I had been banned from driving after my DUI.

  By now I’d learned that when things are really tricky it’s best to rely on the people you know you can trust in a tight spot. I called and asked Gunka James for help, and he drove me in his beat-up Volvo. I was very glad to have him there because loading up the car and leaving that house was enormously sad, and I was filled with sorrow. Gunka is the right sort of guy to be around when something troubling is going on, as I had discovered when I was eight years old.

  On the way back I reminded him about the time he took me to that record store and how deeply it had affected me, and how he got the driver to stop the bus in Moodiesburn so that I could take a wee boy dump in the old lady’s magic lavatory.

  He of course had no recollection of it but made sure we took plenty of bathroom breaks on the drive home.

  30

  Buying a Knife

  After six months of the sober life I began to feel a little better. I was in good physical shape because I was working out every day; I was more confident, and happier, and, frankly, horny. My work in Glasgow was finished and I didn’t feel that I belonged there, but as I was still too raw to try America, I went back to London.

  I don’t know what happened to the city of London when I was away for those six months but something had changed. It didn’t seem as dark and gloomy, it didn’t seem as frightening or dangerous. And, by George, the girls were beautiful. That town was vastly improved by me getting sober.

  I stayed in my friend John’s spare room for a few nights while looking for an apartment. I didn’t have much money to spend on a place to live and I was still paying off debts. Though I had considered declaring bankruptcy, John told me I had to pay everyone back, with interest. By the time I was clear of all the money I owed, I’d been sober for seven years.

  I found an attic flat in central London just off St. John’s Wood High Street, near Regent’s Park. Through John I met two more expat Scots, Philip McGrade and Alan Darby. Neither of them drank, for reasons of their own, but they still knew how to have a good time and set about teaching me that skill.

  Philip, a giant, ginger man with an astonishingly quick and profane mind, taught English to Pakistani kids during the day and did stand-up comedy on the London circuit at night. Alan was blond and pretty and a very successful musician who was playing guitar in Eric Clapton’s band when we met.

  With John, we formed a little Caledonian mafia, a wee Scotia Nostra. These men are like brothers to me and to this day are my closest friends. Philip, who later emigrated to America, now works alongside my sister Lynn as a writer on The Late Late Show.

  In London we’d meet in coffee shops and restaurants, see movies or bands or comedians, and, most of all, chase girls. Not that they ran too fast.

  English girls, especially those in London, are friendly and saucy and confident and funny and fun and want to have a good time. They also really seem to like boys with Scottish accents who aren’t falling-down drunk. The affable women of Chelsea lit up my first two years of sobriety and I shall always remain grateful for that.

  The first woman I dated in London was a striking redhead who worked as a counselor in a treatment center during the day and as a drummer in a band called the Lower Companions at night. She introduced herself to me at a party, telling me to call her Rock and Roll Susie, which I was happy to do. She was older than me and lots of fun, a woman who really sucked the marrow out of life. Susie knew I was newish to sobriety and in no way a good bet for anything long term. This was fine by her since she didn’t want a real relationship anyway. A win-win, I suppose.

  While dating Susie, I was hired to play a small part in a BBC-TV Christmas special called One Foot in the Grave. It was shot in southern Portugal and they flew me out there for two weeks. I was delighted to get the job, not only because I needed it but because it reunited me with Peter Cook, whom I hadn’t seen for some time. Our filming schedules were a little different, so I arrived before him, shot a scene, and had a few days off before I was slated to return to the set. Susie flew out from London during the hiatus and I picked her up at the airport in the very battered and smelly Renault 5 I had rented.

  “Nice ride,” she said. “Hey, I was looking at a map on the plane. It’s not that far to Africa. Just a few hundred miles. Let’s drive there.”

  I told her that would be a little scary.

  “Really?” she said. “I had no idea you were such a girly-man. I sometimes wonder if fear isn’t just God’s way of saying, ‘Pay attention, this could be fun.’”

  I thought about that for a moment. Then I hung an illegal U-turn, much to the beeping consternation of the Portuguese commuters, and headed east across the Portuguese border into Spain. We drove down the southern coast, on the hot, dusty, and deserted roads lined with orange and cork trees until we reached the seedy port town of Algeciras. We crossed the Straits of Gibraltar on the car ferry that night, the Renault stowed away in the hold. There was no wind and the sea was glassy and calm and a low crescent moon hung above the dark silhouette of the Atlas Mountains. As we neared the Moroccan coast I could hear the call to prayer coming from the minarets, signaling the final devotion of the day.

  When the boat docked, we rolled the Renault out past the noisy and intimidating hordes gathered on the quayside and started driving along a bumpy unlit road until a broken-down fleabag hotel loomed ahead. We checked into a room and reunited enthusiastically.

  The next morning we walked around the town of Tangier, Susie bought some beads and dangly earrings, and I bought a big curly scimitar with fake jewels encrusted on the decorative handle. We had a glass of mint tea with a Bedouin tribesman who tried to sell me whatever he thought I might buy—a carpet, hashish—and then we got back in the car, returning to Portugal in time for me to get back to work. We made the whole strange and wonderful trip in three days. It occurred to me that had I still been drinking I would have lain by the hotel pool, getting smashed the whole time. I felt I was really starting to get the hang of the sober thing. I felt good.

  Peter Cook arrived just as Susie returned to London and seemed as happy to see me as I was to see him. After the day’s filming we went out for dinner, just the two of us. I didn’t bring up my not drinking and if Peter noticed he didn’t say anything, though he happily drank wine all through dinner. Some of the other actors and crew members came into the restaurant as we were having dessert and an impromptu party got going. From there, we all went to a local nightclub and after dancing to bad house music for two hours we moved on to the beach, where those so inclined could smoke their wacky tabacky and drink their duty-free brandies. It was dawn before everyone staggered back to their hotel rooms, many of us hooking up with people we shouldn’t have.

  Later that day, having finished filming my role, I was packing my bag to go back to London when there was a knock at the door. It was Peter, looking ever so serious and uncomfortable. I had never seen him like this before.

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?” he asked.

  “Of course,” I said, ushering him in. “What is it?”

  He told me that he’d been watching me closely the night before in the restaurant, at the nightclub, on the beach, and had not seen me take a single sip of wine or hit from a joint. I told him he was right, I had not.

  “Yet you seemed to have a great time.”

  “I did,” I told him, my cheeks flushing at the thought of the conversation I had to have
with Susie when I got back to London.

  Peter considered this for a long moment, and then, in a quieter voice than I had ever heard him use, he asked, “How do you do that?”

  I told him it took a little getting used to but I could introduce him to some people in London who could help him out if he wanted me to. He said he did and agreed to call me when he got back to town.

  It was a while before I heard from him, months and months, but then he called and said he was about ready to get sober. He caught me at a terrible time—I was literally walking out the door with my bags packed to start a two-month tour of Britain playing Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple. I gave him a few telephone numbers and told him we’d meet up when I returned.

  Peter was dead before that could happen. His body finally gave out against the constant onslaught of alcohol. To this day I wish I had done more help him.

  31

  Providence

  In 1994, I returned to the Edinburgh Festival. The Odd Couple revival was a big hit and it was packed every day for its afternoon show. At night, in the same theater, I performed a stand-up show I had written called Love, Sex, Death, and the Weather. This also proved to be a hit. It seemed that I performed better sober than drunk. Who knew?

  I was riding high and feeling pretty good about things when, one night after my stand-up show, I walked into the artists’ bar, the same place I had seen Helen wearing that orange dress years before, and ordered my (now) usual club soda and lime. When I turned around I stood face-to-face, better make that face-to-chest, with Rick Siegel, the giant-sized American talent manager I had met in Montreal in ’87, the guy who first told me Bing Hitler wasn’t such a great name for a long run in showbiz. He’d flown in from L.A. to work with a client of his, the comedian Robert Schimmel.