Low life
Spaghetti junction
Jeffrey Bernard
t seems to me a little unfair that I should feel so sick without having had a vodka now for nearly five months. At least I could understand rolling about in great pain it I had been boozing away, but this is too much.
Not only that, but Vera has taken her granddaughter to Folkestone, of all places, for a week's holiday. I asked her why on earth she wanted to go to a dump like Folkestone — an exit from this dirty place to the land of know-alls — and she said that there was a good hotel there where she had spent a pleasant time on a holiday just after the war. 'But Vera,' I nearly yelled at her, 'that was nearly 5(1 years ago!' She has left undeterred and I wouldn't be surprised if her hotel is now more awful than it was in the days of rationing and aus- terity. I would almost rather go to Lan- zarote than Folkestone, or is that going too far? Vera's stand-in is perfectly kind and good but Vera is the real McCoy.
It is with Vera in mind that I sometimes reflect that in my physical condition I would probably be dead and homeless in any other country in the world, even in san- itized Scandinavia, and particularly in the United States where you would he left to rot. Twenty five years ago, I had an attack of acute pancreatitis in my cockroach- infested hotel room somewhere in the sleazy garment district on the West Side. I was so ill I staggered to the nearest precinct station where I counted 16 memo- rial plaques on the wall to commemorate officers from that one station who had been killed in the line of duty. They took me to the Roosevelt Hospital where they put me to bed next to a man who was under arrest so that there was an armed policeman always at the end of my bed, which was slightly more disturbing than the looks of the would-be murderer next to me. Every time the man said anything or asked for anything, whichever policeman it was on duty would just say, 'Shut fucking up.' The nurses were lousy by English standards but I was very lucky to he put in the hands of two young doctors who were very like the two stars of M.A.S.H.
At the end of my stay, fit again and crazi- ly wanting to get hack to the whisky bottle, I was presented with a bill for about $1,000. At the time I had roughly $5 and a carton of Lucky Strike which had been brought to me by a girl I had previously picked up who had the extraordinary name Ricky Rhein- gold. A chance meeting, which I have men- tioned in this column before, when Francis Bacon saved my day. From Bacon to Bot- tomley. Truly a 'downhill struggle' and the title of the autobiography I never wrote.
All these things and possibly the drugs I have to take cause me to have some rather odd dreams. The other night I watched the Antiques Road Show on television in which a woman was showing a china doll to an expert on the subject who valued it for her. The doll was broken but was worth sending to a doll hospital as it had some value. One of its legs had fallen off because of mildew. I feel rotten too. Later, having dreamt about my own mildew, I woke up and tried to blot it all out by taking yet more sleeping pills. That didn't work. I then dreamt that I was dead and looking for the long tunnel with the light at the end of it that has been mentioned so frequently recently by nuts who have actually been dead for a matter
of seconds. If they don't claim that they're in this wretched tunnel, they say that the experience of being dead was as though they were hovering, disembodied, above their deathbed scene. I neither hovered nor tunnelled, in fact it reminded me of falling asleep in a restaurant with my face in a howl of spaghetti. Warm, but stifling.
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