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There’s no other place to start than to come out and say it. Saying it’s half the battle.
It is hard to love a man who is in love with alcohol. Because you know where you are in the hierarchy. If you ask him to choose between you two, you know you’ve already lost.
For me, there was never an elephant in the room. That’s what they always say, don’t they?
It was more like a viper. Right when I first walked into James’ life, I saw it, right there, coiled up in the center of the room. You certainly can’t miss a fucking viper. You know what it is when you look at it, the intrinsic danger it poses, and that you have to try to navigate around it as best you can. If you take a step too close it rattles at you, another and it might strike at you.
There’s a difference between enjoying a drink and being an alcoholic. Five bottles of vodka tucked in a drawer in his road case. Pajama pants with plastic whiskey containers in the pockets. The vomiting rotting his back molars out of his mouth.
The problem is that no matter what you do, it will never be enough. The all-encompassing patience that you try to offer in spite of all the ways that they hurt you, directly and indirectly, and the ways that they end up hurting themselves, no. The grace you give when you try to forgive them for the things they did or didn’t do when they were drunk, the promises they break, for the times that they try and inevitably fail to get sober despite their best or half-assed efforts. If unconditional love saved everyone, our world would be a much better place. But most of the time it never even mattered to begin with.
I was in love with two people. Both of them were named James. One of them was my boyfriend when he was sober, with a unique sense of humor, and incredibly keen musical abilities, and a tenderness that would make my heart so overwhelmingly ache. The other was my boyfriend, but he started his day with one, sometimes two, 24 oz cans of Budweiser, and he couldn’t remember things we did or talked about and any previous affability or rapport was replaced with a general viciousness. When he did a stage appearance with Motorhead the summer before I quit, in 2000, he was so sloshed, enough that he couldn’t play, could hardly sing, and Lemmy Kilmister of all people called me the next day to ask if James was okay.
Lemmy Kilmister. The man who had undoubtedly spilled more than any other person on Earth has even drank, and he called me to ask if James was okay.
That really did end up being the first time that I began to feel that this had gone too fucking far for too fucking long. Something had to change before we encountered a disaster scenario we couldn’t come back from. Whatever that may be. Dying, getting arrested, disgracing himself that ends everything we had worked for, our relationship ending. The external symptoms that come with the end stage of this disease before you exorcise this malevolent spirit or let it eat you and everything around you alive.
Except it does. Ever and always, even when you didn’t think there’s anything left.
If alcoholism was the viper, then I was the snake charmer. The image of men on the streets of Cairo, playing the flute to a hissing serpent in a woven basket, until it is subdued by the music, bobbing to the sound until it retreats back into coiled submission. Knowing the right moves to try and keep this thing under control. But I guess that in the end, there’s two ways out. Getting bitten, or walking away.
When he told me I couldn’t have Echobrain, after everything we had been through, and everything I had put up with, and the sacrifices I made to love him and be with him, from the moment I met him, and it made none the difference.
He looked me in the eye.
“Other arrangements can be made.”
Two hours before, I saw him out in the parking lot of the studio in his car taking hits off an indistinct glass bottle, and I could smell it on him then, the sting of his words and the absolute fucking betrayal felt in my nose and in my eyes, pricking with tears.
And then we had to keep filming the making of the Black Album documentary like nothing had ever happened, with my heart sunken down to my stomach and James never having cared at all.
Maybe he had, once. There were times I certainly thought so.
That’s me being pessimistic. It’s hard not to be.
He loved me. I just know where I ranked, and it was lower than I thought. And that was not acceptable to me.
In the backseat of the taxi back to the airport, with Kirk sitting in the other seat, it had occurred to me that I had to leave right then or else I never would.
“I’m thinking about quitting,” I told him. We were both sitting at the airport bar, and he choked on his beer.
“You better think about that,” he said. “You really better think about that.”
I knew I would. But I knew that I had made up my mind.
That viper in the middle of the floor, the one that I thought I had so under control, had just struck me.
The snake charmer who had held his lover’s hair back when he vomited, who laid with him in bed through the shivers and shakes every time he had tried and failed to quit drinking, who figured out every hiding spot for liquor bottles and dumped them. Isn’t that always what happens to animal trainers? They get bitten, maimed, killed by the thing they thought they had control over.
I called him after Christmas but before New Years. That we were over. That there was no more room for me anymore. That I would be leaving the band too.
“You can’t just…”
“What, I can’t just do that? Why?”
“Because I…” he paused. “I need you. We need you.”
Want me? Sure. Need me? Never.
“You’ll find someone else,” I said. What I meant to say was that I didn’t believe him, that it’s too late to try making amends, that he should’ve thought about that before being such a fucking prick, that fuck you asshole, I gave you everything and nothing was good enough, it’s been this way since I met you, and Metallica and alcohol always came first, don’t think I can’t hear it in your voice, don’t think I didn’t hear you drink something even though I know what it is.
“No-one like you,” he slurred.
I shook my head to myself. “But when you had me it didn’t matter.” I paused. “You need serious help. I’m talking rehab. I can’t do any of this anymore while you hurt yourself and everyone else.”
Alcoholism is the second hand smoke of mental disorders. The other person’s use hurts you just as much. What can you do about it anyway, other than hold your breath? Except that you have the breathe. You have to. You can’t hold it in forever.
I put the viper's head underneath my bootheel and ground it into the dirt like a lit cigarette.
I placed the receiver gently down and started breathing again.