"Shutter Island"

 A par­tic­u­larly Murnau-esque image from Scorsese’s film. 

A lot of people don’t like Shutter Island. I get that. It’s excess­ive, lur­id, and even those who’d argue the excess is part of the point will per­haps admit it does duty above and bey­ond in that respect. Mystery mavens will tell you the film’s plot is laugh­ably obvi­ous. It’s argu­able that the film con­jures up tropes of the atro­cit­ies of 20^th cen­tury his­tory far too glibly.

I praised the movie when it was released in February of 2010, but these days when it comes up on social media I don’t offer too full-throated a defense of the movie, if any at all. And if the movie comes up in con­ver­sa­tion with friendly acquaint­ances, and one of them pro­claims “Well that sucked,” or some­thing along those lines, I just zip my mouth tight and shrug.

Almost all my adult life I had been a hard drink­er. When my fam­ily moved from Dumont to Lake Hopatcong in the mid-‘70s, when I was between my sopho­more and juni­or years in high school, I was ter­ribly irrit­ated to be con­signed to the sticks, but I wound up doing well there. I was a social pari­ah in Dumont, some­thing to do with my brash per­son­al­ity, but at Jefferson Township High School I found friends, quite a few of them, and many of them are friends to this day. There were social hier­arch­ies there but they didn’t seem to be taken quite as ser­i­ously in the more cos­mo­pol­it­an realms of Bergen County. The jocks and the self-described “band f*gs” kind of got along, and they drank togeth­er at a bar called Rudy’s that sat at the top of one of the moun­tains sep­ar­at­ing Hopatcong from Milton. It was there that I did not learn how to drink. I remem­ber try­ing to do a “flam­ing shot” of Green Chartreuse and spill­ing it, pretty little flames dan­cing on the lino­leum. The pro­pri­et­ors were pretty tol­er­ant of that sort of thing. Of course they were serving sixteen-year-olds without even mak­ing a show of card­ing them.

In any event. Once I began writ­ing for a liv­ing almost a dec­ade later, I had your stand­ard issue per­spect­ive on the pos­i­tion of alco­hol in the life of a scribe. One friend would refer to what he con­sidered my “inter­est­ing rela­tion­ship” to spir­its, which he did not take as alcoholism.

Whether I had been an actu­al alco­hol­ic dur­ing the bet­ter part of the rela­tion­ship is, at least from this per­spect­ive, neither here nor there. But the rela­tion­ship took a decis­ive turn when I lost my office job (at the web­site spun off from Première magazine, a job I should not have accep­ted in the first place, but that is, again, neither here nor there) and was obliged, for the first time since the mid-1990s, to work as a freelancer.

This was in 2008. My tick­et to Cannes was already bought, and I star­ted the blog you are read­ing now. I got a lot of sym­pathy and not a lot of work. For the third time, neither here nor there in the lar­ger scheme of things. I drank like more of a fish than I ever had,  I got fat­ter than I’d ever been, I was invited to play a fat mon­ster in a Steven Soderbergh movie.

Some time in 2009 it occurred to me that because I felt I had to have a lot of alco­hol every single day, I might have a prob­lem. This was pretty plain to my wife Claire as well. My routine was some­thing like this: I’d get out of bed a little before noon. (My wife, on her way to her office job, would cheer­ily repeat a little man­tra she’d for­mu­lated, remind­ing me to per­form a few actions, includ­ing shower­ing and put­ting on fresh cloth­ing.) I’d do a little work. I’d won­der if I should go to Hanley’s for lunch. And wheth­er, when there, I’d just have one drink. There was a pretty lively after­noon crew at Hanley’s, includ­ing a car­penter who had inex­plic­ably cut off a part of his fin­ger recently. The bar­tender was a god­dess with the buy back. Some time after five, I’d ooze on back to my house, and try to arrange myself as if I had not spent the after­noon get­ting utterly hammered. It was kind of tedi­ous for me, and really sad for my wife. I had long past burned my way through my Première sev­er­ance and was in the pro­cess of oblit­er­at­ing our shared savings.

I tried some of them there “meet­ings.” (I like how Paul Williams describes his sober path in the book Trust and Gratitude: “The path I took to get here is the old­est and best hope for any alco­hol­ic of addict who seeks help.” He does not refer to it by name and I’m going to fol­low his example.) They did not work for me. I lit­er­ally walked out of one mut­ter­ing to myself that I was entirely entitled to my resent­ments. Claire asked me to go speak to a coun­selor at the New York office of Hazelden. We had an ami­able chat. I told him that I did not care much for the chair of one of these meet­ings; I sus­pec­ted that he ran the num­bers game in our neigh­bor­hood (he didn’t). “So you’re con­cerned that he doesn’t walk the walk,” the Hazelden coun­selor asked with what I did not recog­nize at the time as exquis­ite sar­casm. “Exactly,” I said.

That was in the sum­mer. I drank through the fall and the winter. I white-knuckled a week at my in-laws’ place. There was a bottle of Maker’s Mark in a cab­in­et under their microwave and I con­trived to drain just a little of it for myself one day while every­one was out shop­ping or some­thing. (The bottle is still there, and it’s at the same level I left it.) When we came home after New Year’s, I had giv­en up all pre­tense. Every day when I woke up I  imme­di­ately con­trived to get my first drink. My most cher­ished time was Happy Hour at Blue Ruin, a still-extant dive (and I mean that in the nicest way) on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan. Two-for-one from four to eight. That’s a lot of Wild Turkey 100 Proof with a Stella pint for rel­at­ively little money. I’d sit in the bad light­ing with a bunch of poor creepy guys like myself and play Stooges songs on the juke­box. And drink.

In late January Claire left town, to tour the coun­try in a pro­duc­tion of Gravity Radio, a music/theater piece by Mikel Rouse, who also was the primary per­former. Claire was the news­caster whose stor­ies, which she chose from the real news every day, punc­tu­ated Mikel’s “radio” songs.

The cat being away, I played. I don’t want to get too spe­cif­ic, and any­way, as the Rutles once sang, “Do I have to spell it out?”

I don’t even remem­ber just what I was doing for work at that spe­cif­ic moment in time, but one of my cli­ents was the MSNBC web­site, which ran all sorts of ori­gin­al edit­or­i­al at the time, and paid okay for said edit­or­i­al. My edit­or there called me up the morn­ing of January 27. Would I be inter­ested, he asked, in doing the video jun­ket for the new Scorsese movie, Shutter Island? I would be inter­view­ing Leonardo Di Caprio and Ben Kingsley, but not the dir­ect­or. This des­pite the fact that Scorsese was someone I’d inter­viewed not infre­quently back when Première magazine was still a magazine. A magazine where I ruled the roost to the extent that once, two fact check­ers quit because my boss wouldn’t fire me for yelling at them all the time.

I was not keen — I try not to appear on cam­era if I can help it, hon­est — but then Dave, for that was my editor’s name, said the labor paid five hun­dred dol­lars. That was good, because at the time of our con­ver­sa­tion I had more or less no money. I had no sub­stances. I had little alco­hol:  A can of Sapporo Premium Beer — one of those fluted 22 ounce jobs. So, you know, who cared who I inter­viewed, or didn’t interview?

After the phone call, I drained that fluted can and went about try­ing to make myself present­able. And coher­ent. The screen­ing was on the early even­ing of the 28^th, which was the next day, and the jun­ket was on the morn­ing of the 29^th.

While I was an avid Scorsese per­son, I had not been fol­low­ing the mak­ing of the film; I had oth­er things going on. So I went in rel­at­ively clean. And I was knocked this way and that for a while — a lot of the time it seemed that Scorsese was aim­ing for a high-toned vari­ant of a Hammer film. Which was fine with me, provisionally.

Almost two hours into the movie, there’s a flash­back involving the film’s cent­ral char­ac­ter, “Teddy Daniels”, played by DiCaprio. It’s from a time when he was an officer of the law, mar­ried, with two chil­dren. At this point, unbe­knownst to him, his wife, who’s severely depressed, has drowned those two chil­dren and has laid them out on the back lawn. It’s been shown that through­out his mar­riage Teddy has ignored, or at least been ignor­ant of, his wife’s men­tal ill­ness. In the scene pri­or, Teddy has hal­lu­cin­ated a con­ver­sa­tion with his wife and one of his dead chil­dren. Now, in the flash­back, he is return­ing to a beau­ti­ful house of stone. “I’m back,” he bel­lows, see­ing no one in the house and  expect­ing that Dolores (Michelle Williams) will hear him out­side. He takes off his jack­et, folds it over his arm. “We got him just out­side of Oklahoma.” He takes off his hat and puts that and the jack­et on a chair. “We must have stopped ten places between here and Tulsa, I could sleep for a week.” He moves over to the kit­chen sink.

Now the audi­ence already is aware of what has happened to the chil­dren, and of the state Dolores is in. If you’ve been able to achieve any kind of emo­tion­al con­nec­tion to the movie by this point, it weighs heavily.

Teddy opens a cab­in­et, pulls a bottle of whis­key out of it, says “Dolores?” and pours a not-all-that stiff belt into a glass. He downs it and shows his teeth, tem­por­ar­ily sat­is­fied. It wasn’t that big of a drink. But it was some­thing that he put in front of everything else. He looks behind him and yells “Dolores” again.

This was my white light moment. My moment of clar­ity. I do not exag­ger­ate when I pro­fess that it hit me like a thun­der­bolt. In an instant. This is me. And this is what is going to hap­pen: I am going to lose my mar­riage (by des­troy­ing it) and I am going to lose my mind (by des­troy­ing it) and I am going to die.

I looked at my watch and did a little math. If I did not drink between now and six-thirty the next even­ing, I could go to one of those meet­ings and pro­claim that I was an alco­hol­ic, and I could ask for help.

The next day I got to the jun­ket site early. It was the Hotel Parker Meridian and the jun­ket­eers were offered a stu­pendous break­fast buf­fet and I sure did appre­ci­ate it. I was her­ded into a wait­ing area to do my first inter­view, with Di Caprio. A journ­al­ist of my acquaint­ance noticed me with some sur­prise. You don’t usu­ally do these kinds of things, he noticed. “Have you got a one-on-one with Scorsese?”

“No,” I said glumly. “Essentially I’m Tyrone Power near the end of Nightmare Alley.”

“I don’t know that movie,” he said.

That night, at the meet­ing, the guy I thought ran the num­bers took one look at me, ashen in my over­coat, and said “Tis the sea­son.” That was January 29, 2010. I haven’t had a drink since then. Thanks to every­one who helped.