Portrait of the Artist as Partially Rat-faced
In later years he would wonder how close he’d been to death, that afternoon when, home early from school and to a Jerry Garcia soundtrack, he’d downed the full bottle of Gordon’s and three cans of Carlsberg Special Brew, dappled by the fidgeting tree-shadows of a suburban bedroom. There were no explicit suicidal intentions behind Project Drink-Myself-into-a-Coma, but equally, as he remembered it, his adolescent consciousness was burdensome enough for its irreversible cessation to seem, at the time, a risk scarce worth examining and easily worth taking. Strange, though, that forty years on, he could so clearly recall this accelerated descent into the carpeted Hades of paralytic inebriation, at least from the point at which he found himself, finally, lying on the floor, surrounded by vinyl silence, unable to move a single useful muscle. Strange because the paralysis that had overtaken his body might be expected to lead, as drinking often does, to amnesia: yet he could still remember, a...