a novel by Don Birnam
To Helen, with all my love
He stops typing. He stands up. He removes his coat, his hat. He wipes his silver-sweat brow. He paces. He lights a cigarette. Cue the theremin’s shimmery wail, enter the seductive, dancing devil. Don searches desperately for his hidden bottles, just to set it on its feet, until at last he spots the shadowy overhead glow of a bottle tucked in the ceiling light sconce and drinks himself to near oblivion. The next morning he rips his page from the typewriter, goes to hock it, but all the pawn shops are inexplicably closed. (A friendly Jew on the street informs him it’s Yom Kippur. Which Don and a general audience might not know is the Jewish Day of Atonement, but is surely a deliberate wink by Billy Wilder, a Jewish refugee from the Nazis.) Back at the bar, he begs for a drink, until Nat, disapproving as ever, pours one, just one, wisely intoning:
NAT, THE DISAPPROVING BARKEEP
One’s too many, a hundred’s not enough.
And the one certainly isn’t. Don hustle-flirts a Bar Floozy out of some cash (the lower-stakes male equivalent of Sarah T.’s whoring herself out), falls drunkenly down a flight of stairs, and lands himself in a hospital ward full of shaking, sweating, screaming men. Bars on the window, locked doors, a wiseacre Male Nurse who welcomes him to “Hangover Plaza! The Alcoholic Ward!” and warns of the oncoming DTs, the pink elephants and beetles Don will soon be seeing. . But Don manages to escape. He threatens a liquor store guy for a bottle of rye and back at home guzzles, gulps, swallows, belts, as the theremin wails. He spies not pink elephants or purple cockroaches, but a whiskery, beady-eyed mouse chewing its way at him through a hole in a living room wall, and now a bat, yes, a Halloween-style bat, all witchy flapping wings, swoops battily around the apartment, attacking the mouse as black blood trickles down the wall. Don screams and screams, in full-on delirium tremens frenzy.
He is saved by the loyal Helen, of course, whose leopard coat he steals and hocks, this time not for booze-fund cash, but for a gun. Helen finds the gun; why, she asks, why?
DON
It’s best all around! Don Birnam is dead already. . of alcoholism, of moral anemia, fear, shame, the DTs. .
Helen pleads he has so much to live for, his talent, his ambition (and her love, it is implied), when Nat the Disapproving Bartender deus ex machinas with Don’s typewriter, miraculously found by someone on the street. Helen insists this is a sign. Don is destined to be a writer, see? It is his purpose in life, see?
DON
Write, with these hands, and a brain all out of focus? I’ll be sitting there, staring at that white sheet, scared. .
She shows him the title page of his novel, The Bottle—see? He must write about that!
DON
About a messed-up life, about a man and a woman and a bottle, about nightmares, horrors, humiliations, all the things I want to forget?
Yes, Helen insists,
HELEN
Put it all down on paper! Get rid of it that way!
Of course he can write the story, now that he knows the ending, the happy, happy ending! He can help so many people with his story! All he has to do is write it down (oh, that little part. .).
And Don envisions the finished book, yes, he will put the whole Lost Weekend down on paper, every minute of it! We pan out of the apartment — to notably non-theremin music — and return to our opening shot, of that dangling, suspended bottle, while Don wonders how many others out there are like him?
DON
Poor, bedeviled guys, on fire with thirst. . such comical figures to others, as they stagger blindly to another binge, another bender, another spree. .
It is nice that an appeal to Don’s empathy is what seems to work its magic here (clearly embracing the alcoholic label is not in itself sufficient for transformative epiphany), and equally nice it is limited to the last three sentimental minutes of the film, allowing Wilder to spend his and our time in shadows over sunshine. But this happy ending, like Sarah T.’s, seems tidy, tacked on. Is this, in fact, a “happy ending” for Don, or the first of several false starts, just one more cure that probably won’t take? Is empathy truly so motivating? Is the creation of art so effective and cathartic an exorcism? And if it is, then why does that not stave off the devil, why do artists become Failed Artist-Drunks in the first place?
I watch The Lost Weekend during my “Afternoon Movie” phase when I am twelve or thirteen, my after-school homework-delaying habit. I’m intrigued by the mostly bleak nihilism of Don’s story, but, as with Sarah T., there is a comfortingly unrelatable level of dysfunction, here; I have never seen adults scream about bats and mice during my parents’ wild bashes, hospital stays are for surgeries and broken bones, and Don’s middle-aged, male, 1940s experience is even further away from me than Sarah’s contemporary troubled teen-girlhood. I don’t really long to emulate, or recognize myself at all in this sad, tortured man. But I am still made uncomfortable and wary and tense watching this old movie over my cookies and milk; it disturbs and stays with me, and it will be a long, long time before I understand it is not because I see myself in Don’s messed-up life and despairing bedevilment — it is because I see my father.
My father is a talented artist, a sculptor in wood and clay. He grew up poor, isolated, and fatherless, in the backwoods of Wisconsin, where whittling was a cheap and available form of both entertainment and industriousness — a knife, a stick, and there you are: A toy, a Christmas present, a slingshot — and the concept of being an artist simply did not exist. A man finished up some schooling, got a decent job, married and raised a family, and didn’t dream of more. His trajectory speed-bumped when at seventeen he got his high school girlfriend pregnant; he dropped out of school, they married, had five children over six years, and my father scrambled to earn that living, often working two or three jobs at a time. At some point his wife “threw him out of the house,” and my father, who boasts himself an open book on the vagaries of his life, has always been a little vague on those details. He left Wisconsin without looking back, eventually landed in Los Angeles, and got that decent job working for a toy company, slowly working his way up the corporate ladder and away from the loser backwoods hick he once was, or thought he was. One night he spotted my voluptuous, sophisticated mother (black sheath dress, cigarette holder) in a Hollywood bar and sent over a drink. She sent it right back, but her gesture was meant as flirtation, not dissuasion, and they were married soon afterward.
My father’s “first family” was not a secret. There was a framed photo of my father, his first wife, and their five children in his bottom nightstand drawer, and I was mildly curious about it: Who was this first wife, who were these three little girls and two little boys with my father’s blond hair and serious Midwestern faces? But growing up, I didn’t feel what people seemed to think I should: Intense curiosity about these half brothers and sisters, a familial longing to connect with them, and/or — the most typical assumption — feeling threatened by the existence of these children my father could so casually leave behind. Wasn’t I worried, it was implied, that my father might also abandon me, my brother, my mother, his “current family,” someday?