I met my oul fella recently for a few pints at eleven o'clock in the morning. We had six in an hour and a half and knew that our day was finished. We'd be able to do nothing except crave drink for the rest of the day if we stopped. If we kept going we'd be starting a minimum three-day bender. That was the fact looking out at us from across the counter. It wasn't smiling and it wasn't frowning. It was just looking straight deadpan and telling us the crack. Then the oul fella said something he'd never said to me before.
"Do you know something, I think I'm an alcoholic. I was just thinking about it last night, about how much I drink and how I drink and I worked out that I'm almost definitely an alcoholic."
"I think you probably are. I think I probably am as well." The oul fella was very taken with his new notion. Whenever a friend of his came in that day and a discussion started, he'd turn theatrically away like Bruce Forsyth pretending disappointment at the misfortune of a Generation Game guest and say "Don't mind me, I'm only an oul alcoholic."
The next day he told me he'd changed his mind. He wasn't an alcoholic, he insisted, he was a heavy drinker. There was a big difference. My mother tells me he said this to her at least once weekly for 20 years.
What does it matter? What's an alcoholic anyway?
"I'm an alcoholic" is an inexact statement the way "I'm in love with you" is and "I have no money" isn't. Alcoholism is supposed to be a disease. It might be. But there is no certainty that you have the disease the way there is when you get measles. You can cod yourself you don't have it. You can hope you don't. You can call yourself a heavy drinker. Because maybe you are.
There are very heavy drinkers who will never be alcoholics. They are the amateurs. They're in the game out of choice rather than necessity. So I don't know if my oul fella is an alcoholic. I can't make claims for him. I think I am. I wish I didn't think that. I wish I wasn't.
All my favourite Rovers moments involve drink. When I sit around at night with a spliff or a few cans and talk about all the best trips and best games and best wins, the fact that I got completely plastered afterwards is always fairly prominent in my mind.
I'm not the worst. There's a guy I know from The Shed who I meet when we're on the beer. We acknowledge each other. He talks to me and tells me he's been back in the Mental trying to stay off the beer, loading tablets into himself and fighting brain seizures. He tells me the docs have given him just a few years to live if he doesn't kick the sauce. He's in his 30s. I know he talks to me like this because he thinks I'm someone who'll understand what he's talking about. I understand. The last time I had this conversation with him, I was just coming from a game against Shamrock Rovers on a Saturday night. I'd started drinking on Friday evening in Hargadons. I had six pints of Guinness there. Then on to another pub with a mate where we had two pints of Guinness and two rum and blacks (one thing about being an alcoholic is that you can and will drink any oul shite for variety).
We took home a bottle of brandy and a bottle of vodka and finished them off just as the sun cleared the roof in the morning. A couple of hours' sleep on a floor and then off to a north Sligo pub. Three pints there beside the bacon-slicer. Three pints in the pub across the road. A drive into Sligo town which included the driver falling asleep at the wheel a couple of times. Four pints before the match. Six or seven after it. Sleep. Jitters for three days that could only be killed by getting the healer in the early house. A lot of drink. But not exceptional for either of us. And I remember every bit of the match. We won 3-0. Jimmy Mulligan got two brilliant goals. When I think about Rovers I think about drink. The pints in Hargadons or Carrs and always Harloes across the road from the ground before the kick-off. Then the pints after it and ending up trying frantically to buy three drinks at once as the shutters go down in Toffs nightclub or The Blue Lagoon.
And when I went on the dry last year the toughest thing about it was going to matches without drink. It seemed like a different game. The ritual had changed. I know that the great nights of victory in 1994 wouldn't have been the same if I was sober. Even the language we use is charged with drink: "You'll go for a few pints to celebrate." Even the way the Rovers team celebrated their goals in 1994 was by doing the pint-swinging dance made famous by the rehabilitation-bound Paul Merson.
There is only one way the boozing is going to end. Everyone who drinks for a living knows this. And we still do it because something about alcohol is powerful enough to make you keep going even when you've seen the disastrous consequences of it all your life.
And sometimes they hit you. I went on an irretrievable two-week batter a couple of years ago and I ended up on a stool in Mulligans of Poolbeg Street not able to move. I couldn't move and yet I didn't want to stay where I was. But I was frozen with the tiredness and the dread and the panic. I couldn't work out how I would ever be able to move again. Like John Berryman in The Dream Songs I stared at ruin and ruin stared right back.
I was too tired to even have the horrors, where every second you know that you're going to die just right now and your hands are shaking your heart seems to be trying to break free from its moorings and little fluttering waves pass inside your head and make it impossible to look straight at anything. I phoned my father. He bundled me into a car where I lay like a frozen carcass heading for a meat factory and drove to watch Rovers in The Showgrounds against Saint Pats.
This batter had started after a Rovers game away against Bohs. We won 1-0 with the only goal of the game scored when me and a mate were still in the Dalymount Park club bar after chancing an extra pint. Out of superstition, we decided to continue the tradition. The year after, we won 2-1 with the winner scored when we were still in the club bar. This season, we won 2-0. The opening goal was scored while we were in the bar. Next season, we'll venture late out for the second half again. Before we did this, Rovers had not won in Dalymount in 20 years. Now we can't stop.
The batter ended in Mulligans. I had to be helped out of the car and propped up in The Showgrounds. We went 1-0 up early on and 2-0 up early in the second half. Pats pulled back to 2-1 and looked like they'd equalise and suddenly I didn't care about the horrors. No matter what happened the most important thing was that we won this game. We scored twice more and won 4-1. I was back drinking by the end of the night and wondering what all the fuss had been about. I was OK. I'd got through, hadn't I?
THIS chapter isn't a boast about drinking. Because being on batters is horrible. As an American friend of mine once said, it's not cute. You fall asleep on the floors of filthy pub toilets, you puke over counters and get thrown out of pubs, you wear the same clothes for three days.
The self-deception is one of the best bits. I met a lad once who told me he was worried a friend of ours was becoming an alcoholic.
"Why do you think that?"
"Because I keep meeting him in the early houses."
The guy who said that to me didn't think he had a hassle with the jar at all. Because you don't. Sometimes I don't think I have. Not at all. Just that moments like that don't bear up under the strain of any amount of self-analysis. All the jobs lost because drink was more important. All the fractured relationships. The strain of trying to keep jobs. The bottle of wine in the fridge every morning which had to be drunk or else you were spending the day in bed. The spliff in the jacks at work to calm the horrors before lunch when you could knock back four quick pints to keep the show on the road. The trips to the early houses and the looks of the taxidrivers when you tumble out of Kennys or The White Horse and explain to them that you want a cab into work. The escapes because it just doesn't occur to people that someone is going to be half-cut at half-nine in the morning.
And the money. The spending of the money. And the worries about money. Because you never feel that you have enough money. The money you've earned gives you no pleasure. You cash a pay-cheque for a couple of hundred pounds on a Friday and after you've had even two pints you're already worrying. That's just £195 now. And if I go on the beer the next two days and have 16 pints both days, that brings it down to £130. And what about food, OK I'll cut that down to a couple of takeaways. But that leaves me £115, it mightn't be enough. And there's rent and TV rental and all kinds of bills and what is the point? Have a few more pints and a couple of shorts and forget about all this shit. Have a good time. You've earned it. Loads of people like drink and get locked the odd time. Maybe they even get locked every weekend. But it's not the same. You realise it's slipping away from you when the company changes. When you're on a constant skite, you want to be surrounded by other people on constant skites. There's an unspoken reproach from people who want to check out early and it's hard to handle.
And then you notice how the reminiscences about drink have changed. Once, a few years back, they were all happy stories about getting really blasted and taking fire extinguishers off walls and having massive hangovers and forgetting people's names and getting sick in taxis on the way home. But if you drink with alcoholics, they're different.
"I had three blackouts this week. I think I might check back into the Mental."
"I lay down on the road last night because I wanted to see if the cars would go ahead and kill me."
"Remember the time you puked all that blood all over the place and we had to bring you to the hospital to get pumped out."
"I had part of my intestine cut out last week because it was so damaged."
"I couldn't eat that fry, I thought the food was going to attack me."
"I can't settle. Just leave me alone the lot of ye. I can't f---ing settle. Stop looking at me."
"Has anyone got any of those f---ing anti-depressants, I'm having a bad morning?"
And so on. And so forth. Even if sometimes the stories have their own crazed logic.
"I got some of these anti-depressants and I asked the doc how many I should take. He said one a day but I was feeling desperate so I took six. I woke up in the bath with a shovel in me hand."
You just get a bit dissociated. I went to a party in London once which was so swish that you got thrown out if your name wasn't Guy or Miranda. Drunkenness does a better job on your self-image than if you'd hired Saatchi and Saatchi for a multimillion pound campaign to tell you how great you are. I was chatting up a woman whose laugh made her sound an attractive each-way bet for the Epsom Derby when I decided I'd go and refuel both of us with wine. When I arrived back, I continued our conversation for about 15 minutes until I was told "I'm very sorry. But the woman you were talking to is standing on the other side of the room."
The English. They're very polite. I'VE done dope, speed, E, acid, mushrooms, jellies and tablets which have been prescribed for anything ranging from backache to period pain. (OK, only some of them worked but I've steered clear of Corega-Tab denture cleaners and Bob Martin dog worming pills and some people haven't.) And none of them have had the effect drink has on me. For good or evil. Mainly for evil.
Like most Irish teenagers, I was subjected to a Drug Education Programme when in secondary school . . .
I went to school in Boyle, Co Roscommon. I'm from Gurteen, Co Sligo. The guys who sat beside me were from places like Frenchpark, Castlebaldwin, Geevagh and Corrigeenroe. Heroin addiction wasn't really a serious problem in Frenchpark. And they never really got into "smoking the dragon", as a well-meaning religion teacher of ours used call it in Corrigeenroe. I might be wrong, but I doubt if the number of heroin addicts who once attended school in Boyle is massive. The number of alcoholics would be a different story.
So there we were wasting our time going on about a drug which most of us would never be offered, before going out that night to get stuck into one which some of us, at least, were destined to have problems with. Strange one. Gurteen is no better or worse than any other village in the country, but drink has been responsible for an amount of suicides, deaths, mental illness, violence and marriage break-up that's fairly frightening. Drink, to put it plainly, is the heroin of rural Ireland.
And no, I'm not saying you should prohibit it or stop people enjoying their pints just because some people can't handle it and will eventually die way before their time because of it. But then I don't think you should ban E because some people have died because of it. What people put into their own bodies is their own business. That's my line. But how do you square the fact that the National Vintners' Association recently announced that they were going to help the Gardai to stamp out drugs in rural Ireland with the fact that they've been shovelling beer into alcoholics for years? Drugs in rural Ireland generally means a few young fellas smoking dope. It might even be better for them in the long run.
In John McGahern's short story Crossing The Line, an old alcoholic teacher explains to a younger teacher: "During the times I don't drink, I read far more and feel better in every way. Unfortunately, drink's very pleasant."
And that's the problem with it. Because I can still go into Harry's Bar, where they have the cheapest drink in Sligo at half-ten on the morning of a game and have a couple of pints there. And go across the road to McLoughlins with its long wooden bar and then to Hargadons which is a maze of snugs lit by a strange blue light when the sun shines and head up to The Stables or McGarrigles and then to Carrs and then to Harloes before the match and afterwards hit The Arches or Shoot The Crows, which was once The Opera House but is now full of hippies and motorbikers and too loud Miles Davis music and has a new stained-glass window at the front every week.
And maybe go to the club where you throw stones up at the window to get let in late and the same two lads in Dunnes Stores sweaters seem to have been playing the same game of pool for the last 10 years and you usually meet earnest young females vaguely connected with the arts who are the same the world over because when they invite you back to their flat for a few cans there is a poster of Bob Marley in the jacks and probably some amusing poster vaguely connected with cannabis and a poster for some gig which when you ask them about it they say they weren't at but their friend who has now gone to America was and there are empty wine bottles in the kitchen covered with red wax at the side and short stubs of candles stuck in the top of them and a guitar lying behind the door as well as dishes with traces of something pasta-like in the sink and books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Seamus Heaney and Angela Carter - always Angela Carter - and A Suitable Boy well I started it and I enjoyed it but I never got around to finishing it on a coffee table and while you're there and listening to Achtung Baby and calculating how many cans are left and saying yes, I went Inter-railing too and waiting for the neighbours to start banging on the wall and reading the little Post-Its asking anyone who makes a phone-call to enter it in the book and people to leave the kitchen tidy as we all have to live here and it doesn't take much of an effort, it strikes you that it's great.
Drink is great. It is. While you're at it. That's the problem.
There's Only One Red Army by Eamonn Sweeney is published by New Island Books (£7.99)