Part One

This blog is, of course, just another example of my self-destructive behavior. John Harkin and the rest of those pious little shits in St. Michaels will probably try to demand their retainer back when they find out I'm releasing the results of my work without their permission.

But fuck 'em; they won't want the publicity of a lawsuit. And it's not like anything I could post here would undo the work I did for them. Good work. Quality work. Work I didn't want to do at all.

I did it for the money, same as everybody else.

There was a time when I wouldn't have needed their money and I would have laughed in their faces if they'd even suggested I work on a project involving Preacher Haywood. I had published three books -- two of them pretty good -- and I was tenured and the speaking circuit alone was enough to keep the liquor cabinet full.

But if you're Stephen King and you write a shitty novel (Dreamcatcher comes to mind) you still sell a zillion copies and cash in on the film rights. You write biographies and it only takes one clunker to bring down the whole house of cards. Everybody liked Alexander Hamilton. The Schuyler Colfax thing started as a joke ("I'll write a book about someone NOBODY cares about!") but it came out right when the Clinton impeachment heated up and made me a pundit overnight.

OK, so The Racketeer tanked. First off, I should have just called it Smedley Butler, like my publisher wanted. But I was tired of using my subject's name as the title. Second off, I was drunk off my ass for most of the research and all of the writing. For a biography largely written while loaded, it's not that bad.

So strike one, I put out a mediocre (OK, bad) book.

Strike two, apparently when Dylan Thomas comes to speak at your college and is an inebriated lecher, it's cool, but when some two-bit historian tries to pull the same thing, it's "you're paying for the damage to your hotel room" and "step back from the podium, you disgusting drunk" and "she's only 19!"

Somewhere in there I was on an NEH discussion panel with David McCullough and gave him the finger. That probably didn't help.

Then there were all the bridges I burned being a cocky shithead at dear old A.U. It's true -- the people you piss upon on the way up will be there waiting for you to piss on them on the way back down. Turns out that if you don't show up for half your classes -- and you're wasted when you do make an appearance -- they can fire you, even if you're tenured. Although I stand by what I said at the "peer council" hearing when they put me on trial and revoked my tenure -- I was a better professor drunk than most of them were sober, and any student who couldn't stand to see his instructor barf into a trashcan during the lecture wasn't American University material anyway.

In between the shitty book and the firing was the divorce, and I won't make light of that. I more than deserved it.

So what to do when you've lost everything? And the fuckers that run your publishing company are screaming for the return of their advance on Eldridge Gerry (they gave up screaming for an actual manuscript months earlier)? And you have no home, no job, no wife, no nothing, because you drank it all away, because you're an asshole?

That's right -- you go to a bar. Let me tell you, there's nothing even remotely glamorous about being a drunk. It smells of piss and vomit, and after while you don't even taste it anymore. It's just pathetic.

I had twenty-seven dollars. Plus I had my secret reserve -- a sealed bottle of Johnny Walker that I found when emptying out my office. It was cold out -- the saying about Washington having northern charm and southern efficiency applies to the climate in the District, too, it's rarely pleasant and sunny or crisp and clear, it's either muggy and oppressive or bitter and raw. I'd been living out of a motel out on New York Avenue for the past month, and the funds for that had run out a week ago. So I needed to make those twenty-seven dollars last. I hoped the bartender wasn't expecting a generous tip.

Maybe it was the rare effort of drinking slowly; maybe it was the prospect of me and my Ph.D. actually spending the night in a Washington D.C. homeless shelter; maybe I just pussied out. Anyhow I called Jenny.

My sister knew nothing of what was going on in my life, of course. I mean she knew that Racketeer blew, but she didn't know I was broke, divorced, homeless, jobless. And when she answered the phone (for her sake I'll leave the name of her giant New York firm out of it, but that's where I called her) I didn't know where to begin. So I tried to make idle chit-chat. Hi. How are you doing. How's (pause -- blanked for a moment on her husband's name) Bryan?

She saw right through that. Ernest Hemingway once said that every writer needs a built-in, shock-proof shit detector, and for me it was Jenny.

So she wanted to know what was going on, and I said, well, I'm in this bar, right across the street from the National Cathedral, and it made me think of you.

There was a moment's silence. It's 11 a.m., she said.

It's four o'clock somewhere, I said, trying to sound witty.

Yeah, London, she said. What's going on?

I hung up then. Big mistake. My sister is one of those bulldog sort of attorneys. She called my office and found out that I no longer worked there, and called Sarah, my ex, and got a brief synopsis of my self-destruction, and she rented a car and left work at noon and drove from Manhattan to Washington to get me.

When she pulled up a little after four I was actually across the street shooting the breeze with a priest. Not in the cathedral itself. He was standing on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette and I had finally gotten thrown out of the bar after five consecutive hours of loyal patronage. Twenty-seven dollars doesn't buy as much Scotch as it used to.

"This," I said to the priest, without showing a flicker of surprise at the unannounced arrival of my sister from 250 miles away, "is who you want to be talking to. An actual faithful Catholic, all the way from the Big Apple, my sister, Jennifer D'Alessio!" I started clapping. My sister threw me in the car and drove away (after, I'm quite certain, apologizing to the priest, although I don't really remember that).

I told her the whole story all the way up the Jersey turnpike. And when we stopped so she could eat pancakes in Maryland (if I don't stretch my legs I'll get an embolism, she said). She listened and made a few phone calls of her own and she hand-delivered me to an inpatient program for rich boozehounds on Long Island.

Do you know what keeps me sober nowadays, more than anything? It's the fear that if I start drinking again, I'll end up back in treatment. Twenty-eight days of treatment -- of group therapy, of working through "the steps," of making amends -- was almost as bad as being a drunk.

Jesus, I'm tired of writing, and I haven't said anything about Preacher, or Worship, or my connection to any of that.