Decision

Dylan sighed, a well of weariness drawn up from deep inside, pulled from far away back home. He was tired. Tired and sick. Tired and sick and unable to sleep. And drunk. Most of all, Dylan was darkly drunk. He let his lids sink and gently massaged his temple. Breath escape his ragged lungs and then, whilst the release had been calm, the attempt to snatch air back hacked and thracked his whole body. Stifling his coughs, Dyan indicated at his empty glass on the bar’s counter. The barman nodded and duly obliged to pour a slug of whisky.

Plagued by looming insolvency and the probable collapse of his marriage - poor Caitlin lost to the winds of her fancy and equally swallowed up by the drink - Dylan had readily accepted the lecture tour of America. A thousands pounds a week would solve his money problems, would leave him free from work and blissful in the arms of his musing, but America wasn’t suiting him. He’d enjoyed himself when he’d last visited. Or so he imagined. He couldn’t quite remember. They told him that he felt up the movie starlet and urinated in Charlie Chaplin’s pot plant, the sort of ego deflation that was within his gift to deliver. But this time, in New York, the air was laden with smog; worse even than London. A dank, smouldering cloud that penetrated life and moodily sagged.

Not that he truly felt any better in Wales. Dylan rarely felt well anymore. Instead he felt dragged down, weighed on by the burden of the need for words. The blackouts were almost a release. A gift of a few moments away from the throb inside, in his gut.

He necked the whisky. It glided down with ease to join the others.

The barman tipped the bottle. Dylan nodded. Amber honeyed peace sloshed in the glass.

Unable to sleep, Dylan had left his hotel and prowled his way through Chelsea to the bar. Dylan liked to drink in the same places. He enjoyed the nod of recognition, the slight apprehension over what he might do, who he might speak with, what he might offend. Dylan enjoyed his reputation. He’d carefully built up the myth of a drinker. He was a poet whose words bought the truth that beer and whisky cleared the mind for. Life was nothing save an interlinked mess of dreary beauty but for a drink, ah a drink and the people one found at the bottom of the glass, made it worthwhile. Yet there was no-one that night. There was just Dylan and New York, cold and distant, the murmur around the bar, whisky and the memories of words that might have been.

Should he have another? He tried to count how many he’d already had and to work out whether it would make any difference the following day. He felt mildly sick, but then booze increasingly made him nauseous. And whilst he wondered, he pointed at the empty glass and it was duly topped up; his semblance of a choice in the matter shattered by his body acting on its own accord, broken by reality.

There was no choice. No matter how much he pretended otherwise, no matter how much he longed to retain control, he would drink either until he was broke and could charm no-one to join him or he blacked out.

Choice was but an illusion caused by wants.

Later Dylan stumbled home through the smogged streets of Chelsea. He didn’t pause, he didn’t clutch drunkenly at lampposts, Dylan was used to walking whilst drunk and he adapted his step to accept his stagger. Arriving in the red bricked entrance of the Chelsea Hotel, he nodded at the receptionist with a sly yet troubled grin.
‘I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies,’ he proudly proclaimed to no-one in particular. He paused and rubbed his temple as though easing thoughts of nothing out. ‘I think that’s a record.’

He stumbled up the stairs to his room not realising that when he lay down in the cool crashing forgiveness of the sheets he would never rise again. Even the hacking cough had rescinded, but the deep blue horror of his lungs reached out to his heart and embraced it. Sometime in his slumber Dylan slipped into a coma.

There he lay, at peace at last, in amongst the future ghosts of the Chelsea hotel. The rooms where Charles Jackson had chugged down sufficient pills to never wake from his final Lost Weekend; where Kerouac had battered out On The Road on a single endless tube of writing paper; where Dylan’s namesake Bob would compose his early calls to arms and sorrowful laments of love lost; where Andy’s glamour and vice would be filmed for fleeting fame; where Jimi and Janis and gravely Tom and Dee Dee and Johnny Thunders and Rufus before he got straight would all lose a sliver of their souls; where Sid would murder Nancy in his drugged oblivion, where in the twenty-first century Joseph O’Neil would compose a novel of loneliness and isolation, of being lost in a city that belongs to the world. Dylan’s breath rattled and rolled, cracking amongst his dreamless sleep. His soul drifted into the walls, the foundations, the plaster and the time.

Eventually a doctor arrived, sent him to hospital and incorrectly administered too much morphine and that was poor Dylan gone. Gone to the wind of the world.

“And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.”

-And Death Shall Have No Dominion by Dylan Thomas.

Years later, Caitlin would write, as though we didn’t know, “ours was a drink story not a love story, just like millions of others.”

Just like millions of others? How despairing Dylan would have found all his efforts to be for naught.

When I first came to London, ten years ago this summer, I was a young man suddenly gifted a disposable income. Unexpectedly finding myself flush for cash after years of penniless studenthood and poorly paid bar work, I wasn’t, initially, interested in saving for anything. After all, what did I have to save up for? I had a rented flat I could afford and property ownership seemed a distant hassle. I had a patched together car. My interests were records, books and, well, going to the pub.

So I did. Lots.

The company I worked for mythologised drunken editorial staff. It actively encouraged lunchtime boozer visits with managers just as effortlessly tired as the rest of us. I quickly became accustomed to journalists turning up at lunch time having stopped off for a morning stiffner and that feeling of sinking weightlessness as the only lunch I’d had was two pints of lager. Friday afternoons were a void. I stumbled back to my desk at about three-thirty and tried not to screw up.
But I was young and didn’t know any better. Besides it was what everyone else did.


By the Christmas of that first year I deemed it appropriate behaviour to turn up to a dinner party with a four pack, two bottles of wine and a half bottle of brandy, largely for my own consumption. The resulting walk home saw me, so I’m told, nearly fall head first under the wheels of a taxi followed by an empty head and a flooded stomach the morning after. This three day hang-over did lead me to calm down somewhat, but slowly over the years it snuck back up.

The Boy John had his stag do right in the middle of Lent. That was okay. It was a countryside weekend away, not one swamped in drink and the typical distractions of male bravado around girls and fights and sights. I offered to make life easier and drive everyone.

As we walked away from the racecourse, the others were slightly flushed from midday drinking, but my head clean and clear. I watched the throngs of staggering bodies we passed. The red-stung face of the young man in his shiny grey court suit being held back by his mate as he raged at the world around, filled with anger for every living injustice; the orange skinned over-exposed girl tottering on implausibly high heels as she tried to navigate the kerb; the older guy with his head resting on his arms supported by a handy wall at the end of someone’s drive, the puddle of sick over his shiny shoes; the lad groaning under the weight of his girlfriend in his arms, who berated him in slurred words as he carried her from the melee. I was never like that. I just used to sit quietly, drink and turn off.

Time eased by. I started to hang around the less salubrious pubs in South-East London, chatting merrily to people with speckled red faces and faded love and hate tattoos on their knuckles. But still, it didn’t feel any different to all those who went and passed out on a Saturday night. At a party in Peterborough I remember sitting under the barbecue sky and an Australian girl with a bottle of whisky hanging out her dungarees asked us why weren’t getting drunk.

‘I don’t think,’ I replied, ‘there’s any real danger of us missing out.’ I knew I’d get there, I had ample ale to get through and fancied poaching some of her scotch, but I couldn’t see what the hurry was.

In many ways I almost preferred drinking alone, even occasionally leaving a work drinks early to go home, sit and watch TV and chug back cans of lager and a couple of hard measures. It wasn’t because I preferred my own company, but simply because sometimes it was easier that way. I didn’t need to impatiently wait for someone else to finish their drink and get a round in, or be bought a drink by me so that I wasn’t at the bar just for myself.

At the time I lived with my then-girlfriend, but we were never permanently entwined. She had a tendency to work into the early hours of the morning leaving me to my own devices. It wasn’t that hard to sneak the additional recycling out the flat and pretend to have had less than I had.

I started to take whisky to bed with me. Not every night, but often enough. A large glass of scotch balanced on my chest as I lay and read words in books I wouldn’t be able to remember the next day and when I’d finished, I would hide the glass somewhere underneath the bed. Down amongst the sleeping bags and the places she wouldn’t go.

Friends began to cut back, to be able to enjoy a couple of drinks and then call it a night. They claimed that any more and they would be incapacitated the following day. I nodded and pretended to be the same, but really I couldn’t understand it. If anything my tolerance appeared to be growing stronger and stronger. For a while my whisky habit became something like a bottle a week. Plus beer and wine and other assorted spirits. I would deliberately arrive early to meet friends and nip into a different pub around the corner for a solitary pint. I would try to find a late night bar still open on the way home and miss the last train in favour of the night bus. Failing that I’d acquire a can for the journey somewhere and still take a nightcap once finally home.

At some point I started drinking things I’d never touched before. Cider and vodka, for example. Not necessarily the nice stuff either. The cheap and the strong, those that typically have little purpose beyond being lost. I stopped buying single malt scotch and switched to blends, partially out of sheer financial necessity, but also because it felt wrong to drink and without true appreciation.

And in the mornings, I’d awaken in the chair, in a bathtub, on a sofa, somewhere across town from home, somewhere I had to quietly slip out from letting the door close on the people I just met. Locking away the night for another day.
Somewhere around this time I stopped getting hang-overs. Which seems somewhat weird, but it’s true. No matter how much I drank, I would feel, if not fantastic, then at least okay the morning after. A bit tired, somewhat irritable, but nothing a walk in the fresh air and several strong coffees wouldn’t fix. I tended to sag slightly in the mid-afternoon, but if there was no debilitating, gut wrenching God-awful pain then what was to stop me?

Is any of this true? Or am I self-mythologising too? Was it habit, boredom or frustration? Maybe all three, maybe none. Maybe I’m picking out infrequent incidents in a ten year period.

It was all such a long time ago, why am I even telling you all this? Who am I confessing my sins to? Who am I saying sorry to?

Ray didn’t need to open his eyes. He could smell where he was. Again. The stench of cleanliness burned. He’d hoped for a moment, it that brief pause between the disturbed sober slumber and being fully awake, that he had dreamt the two previous days.

But that was a pointless wish, for Ray hadn’t dreamt in years. His sleep, when it finally came, was deep and black and undisturbed except by the aches.

He really was back in hospital. His stomach lining had loosened again and as he’d vomited there’d been blood and a slight stink of faeces. Someone more coherent had decided to call for help and so there he was again. On the ward. The fourth time in under a year. They didn’t want him there. They weren’t interested in those who wouldn’t try. He didn’t want to be there either. He just wanted to be left alone.

He was stuck. They all were. Ray, the failing writer, and all his drinking chums with nowhere to go. The guy to his right rolled under the sheets and scratched at his bare flesh as though something wriggled under the skin. The man diagonally opposite had drunk a bottle of vodka every day for twelve years and had given up too late to save his liver. It had stopped functioning leaving him prone to swelling with fluid; unable to process waste his gut had ballooned out to the size of a beer barrel with his belly button sharply protruding like a the tap to draw off a beautifully golden fizzing beer, all hoppy and bliss. The man down the far end of the ward needed an operation to remove a weeping abscess on his bladder and who liked to drink thirteen bottles of cooking sherry a day. The bed to Ray’s left was empty, the occupant from the day before was barely an indent in the sheets as though he’d never been there.

They were all part of the club; everyone had a drink of choice and sometimes they even had a reason to drink. But more often they didn’t. More often to drink was their reason. No excuse was offered. Telling the truth, for once, they would shrug and admit that it was just because. Because there was no choice.

Ray closed his eyes again. The problem with hospital was that there was so little to do. At least at the rehab out clinic there was structure, meals to be made, tasks to be done, games of cards and chess to be played, a routine to exist by. In the hospital there was just boredom. Boredom made Ray want.

No. That was a lie.

Life made Ray want.

He tried to think of a single line, a phrase to cut to the heart of where he was. Something that described the futility and resigned acceptance of hospital stays as a part of the drinker’s life. He would have been able to do so once. Once when he wrote. He missed writing, but he’d had to give it up. It took up too much time. It got in the way of his fulltime drinking.

One of the men eeked his way past Ray’s bed, his hospital gown flapping open at the back to reveal his wart covered behind. Every few steps he giggled and raised the front to expose his shrunken and wrinkled genitals. His movements were slow and ached, fragile as though he might shatter. Not that he would have cared. Yet sufficient force to self-shatter was clearly beyond his wasted muscle. He looked as though he’d been collecting his pension for ten years. The nurse had said he was forty-three.

The bed to Ray’s left was still empty.

Ray’s stories had been collected the year before. Written in the gaps between various blue collar jobs in hospitals and stores and wherever to get by and the teaching of writing to others and the far more serious business of getting wasted, Ray had been pleased that it had been released. And yet it wasn’t enough. He could do better; he just needed the right amount of whisky to find the sweet spot between drunkenness and sobriety to have the courage to reveal life.

He sighed quietly to himself and craved a cigarette. A cigarette and a drink. He wished the pretty nurse would come round and arrange his pillows, just to give him a wink and a reason for hope, just to break the monotonous repetition of nothing.
He felt hollow. His insides could have vanished, been pulled out and cast aside as the useless addled dead weight they’d soon become. He was hooked up to a drip that intravenously feeding him all the stuff whisky lacked. His wrist throbbed slightly but nothing hurt so he guessed he must be on morphine. It gave a distanting sensation, so different to alcohol which pulled the world in tight and then slammed the door in its face.

Ray closed his eyes and tried not to think about his wife and kids. About the mistakes he’d made. About the wrongs it was too late to make right. About the world and words he couldn’t write.

The bed to his left was still empty. Ray knew that the man who’d slept in it fitfully the day before, Ralph or Jimmy or Frank or Mike or whatever his name was with his poison of choice had died. That was the quickest way out of the hospital. Ray didn’t want to die. He wanted to write. He wanted to not want to drink. He wanted to be free of the drag to get drunk, the urge that demanded to be fed. He wanted to tell the world some truths. He knew how to do it, he knew what change he had to make, but it was so easy to say and so impossibly hard to think of doing.

'No other word will do. For that's what it was. Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving, and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. "Don't weep for me,"
he said to his friends. "I'm a lucky man.
I've had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure Gravy. And don't forget it."'
-Gravy by Raymond Carver.



This week’s David Marston Writes dramatises scenes from the lives of Dylan Thomas and Raymond Carver. They are not intended to be strictly accurate representations nor are they intended to cause any offence or distress to the estates of either man.

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) wrote numerous poems, short stories and scripted short films for the BBC during the Second World War. He was arguably Wales’ finest poetic voice. His most famous work, Under the Milkwood, was due for release when he died suddenly of pneumonia complicated by alcohol abuse in New York. Caitlin Thomas was his wife.

Raymond Carver (1938-1988) gave up drinking in 1978 and went on to write two short story collections, Cathedral and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love as well as numerous poems, before he died of cancer. He is frequently acclaimed as the greatest exponent of the short story form in the twentieth century. The term Carverish tends to refer to a bleakly minimalist style.

Much of the inspiration for the hospital ward came from Christopher Palling’s 2009 Guardian article.