Of course, alcohol had its downsides. As I grew older, my alcohol consumption grew. As did my reckless behavior. One time, quite long ago, when I’d had way too much to drink, I ended up crawling in a public park, screaming, “I want to die!” at random passersby. I guess my disposition hadn’t changed much over time.
Sometimes I also became aggressive while under the influence of alcohol. But although it took alcohol to turn me into Mr. Hyde, that didn’t mean that Hyde wasn’t there all along. He only needed a small push, in my case in the form of alcohol, to come out.
Despite all this, I continued to drink and to drink constantly. Was I addicted to the chemicals in the alcohol? No. Was I trying to fill a hole in my heart, which over time had become bigger and bigger as life kept chipping more and more pieces off it? Perhaps. Did it help? Sometimes. But was there any drug that healed a disease with a hundred percent efficiency? I could think of only one. And it was reserved for people on death row.
So what else could I do but drink? Normal people drank in order to celebrate. But what the fuck was there to celebrate? Being alive? Hell, that was why I drank in the first place. I wasn’t man enough for this world, you see. And I wasn’t going to fake it. The writer of Leaving Las Vegas was also not man enough for this world. And he didn’t fake it either. Instead, he shot himself in the head. Yet he somehow managed to write a few books before doing so. He was a hopeless alcoholic, yes. But he was also a writer.
Although I had always wanted to be a writer, I wasn’t very good at it. And I wasn’t very good at being an alcoholic either. So what was I good at? At being against things. Including existence itself. But there wasn’t much of a career in that. In fact, it didn’t even work as a hobby.
Drinking my third beer, I recalled another writer that had committed suicide. Ryunosuke Akutagawa. I considered him the best short story writer I knew of next to Bukowski. Akutagawa committed suicide when he was thirty-five, shortly after finishing a brilliant mini biography of sorts titled The Life of a Stupid Man. Another Japanese writer, Osamu Dazai, who wrote the semi-autobiographical novel No Longer Human—which I adored—also committed suicide in his thirties. He did it by jumping into a river with his lover.
One alcoholic writer who didn’t commit suicide, however, was Bukowski. I didn’t know how he had managed. He sure talked about it in his stories. He even attempted it a few times. But he managed. Alcohol helped him in that, I’m sure. Also, he was a tough guy. From a different era. When life kicked him, he kicked back. It was his toughened hide that had helped him in not giving up. Alas, I had almost none in comparison.
The writer of The Lost Weekend, which was yet another favorite of mine, was an alcoholic whom the publication of his book had possibly saved. At least for a while. For quite a long while actually. Close to ten years. Yet he still ultimately ended his life with a barbiturate overdose.
So what was so different about me and all these writers? They must have been at least as depressed as I was, yet they had still managed to create beautiful works of art. Perhaps I just didn’t have the willpower that they did. I expected so little of the world at this point that I scarcely had any effort left in me to try. Even though deep inside I wish I did.
But the well inside my soul felt dry. If indeed it had ever been full.
16
I was still sitting in the bar when I suddenly had an idea. What if I paid a spontaneous visit to my father? He lived in Helsinki and, if nothing else, the ferry ride there would be a change of pace from the monotony of bars. And of course… ferries also had bars.
My father had always said that I could drop by anytime I wanted to, which I rarely did. Once there, I could tell him how miserable I had become. Not that he’d be able to fix it of course. He’d never been able to fix a single thing in my life. Next to my mother, he was in large part responsible for me being the way I was. He had left when I was very young and I had lived with my mother who had likewise neglected me throughout most of my life. Deciding between which of them was more responsible for my misery was like deciding between whether Fred or Rosemary West was more responsible for the nine people they murdered.
Of course, no one was ultimately responsible. For anything. Free will was only an illusion and we were just puppets that couldn’t see our strings. We thought ourselves free only because evolution had built this illusion into us. In the end, both parents and serial killers had about as much freedom in their choices as a bullet exiting the barrel of a gun. And yet, I still blamed my parents. I had no choice not to.
Anyway, if not my father, then perhaps I’d at least find somebody interesting to talk to on my little trip. Preferably someone with lines of worry in their face, for I was about as tired of happy people as I was tired of breathing. And if not, then maybe at the very least I’d get to fuck some Finnish woman. Merely wishful thinking that, but I decided to buy the ticket anyway.
I left the bar and walked out of Old Town to a ticket office. There was a ship for Helsinki leaving in one and a half hours. I didn’t even bother calling my father before I bought the ticket. Somehow, I knew he would be home.
I then walked to the harbor. The weather had turned dark and windy. The ferry that I had gotten the ticket for was a small catamaran and there would probably be plenty of waves in the sea. But I didn’t mind. Although I constantly got sick of things, I never got seasick.
At the harbor I lit a Marlboro Red and called my father to announce that I was coming over for a visit. The call started with the usual empty pleasantries:
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello, how are you?”
“I’m fine, and you?”
“I’m fine too.”
I then asked him whether I could come and visit him in the evening. He said sure, adding that he was working right now but would be home in a few hours. When he asked me about the suddenness of the visit, I told him that I was just going to be in the neighborhood. I didn’t like to lie but I couldn’t tell him it was actually because I was depressed and needed a change of scenery. Like a million other fathers, he wasn’t the kind of person you could talk to about your feelings.
The ferry pulled up to the pier. The engines turned off and they started lowering the gangway. There weren’t many passengers, but the few that there were rushed towards it, as though they might get left behind. I waited until they got on.
Once onboard, I headed straight for the bar. I bought a beer and sat down by a window.
After the ferry started moving, I looked out across the dark choppy waves outside until the city lights faded into the distance. I then took out my copy of Will O’ the Wisp and began reading:
Alain wanted to cry, waved goodnight, turned on his heel and ran down the stairs four at a time.
I was about halfway through the book when I saw the lights of Helsinki come into view from the ferry’s window. I got up from my seat and walked outside to the deck on the back of the boat.
I lit a cigarette and looked around. The water surrounding me was black as ink. It looked as though the ferry was suspended in darkness.
But then, wasn’t the entire planet?
17
When I stepped off the ship, it was drizzling rain. My father lived on the outskirts of Helsinki and the only way there that I knew of was by train.