The Lost Weekend
The 1945 Billy Wilder movie The Lost Weekend stars Ray Milland and Jane Wyman. It is about a four-day bender taken by a chronic alcoholic and it explores the depths of a wounded human soul. I too just had a lost weekend or sorts.
I am not a drinker, so alcoholism is not my vice. Back in 1968 at the age of fourteen, I traveled to Italy with my family on the Italian liner the Michaelangelo from New York to Naples. It was a seven-day crossing and we were taking it to move our household to Rome for my mother’s new job with FAO/UN. I had been in a boarding prep school the prior schoolyear and the alcohol thing never really entered the picture. Plenty or other vices took root during that year at Hebron Academy in south-central Maine, but drinking was not one of them. So, when we boarded and joined the crowd in the salon for the steaming-out reception as we passed the Statue of Liberty and out the narrows to the wide Atlantic. The waiter took our drink orders (it was just me and my mother since my sisters were off somewhere else on the boat) and my mother turned to me and suggested I have a cocktail. I have a picture of that event and I was wearing a shiny blue suit, a white turtleneck and a medallion of some sort around my neck. I was 60’s stylin’! I ordered a Manhattan in honor of our port of disembarkation and cannot remember if I even finished the sweet and stinging drink. What I do recall was that throughout the next week onboard my posse of other kids returning to school in Rome and I had plenty of alcohol.
The end result was that by the time we docked in Naples, the alcohol bug was out of my system and I decided that I had little or no interest in the substance. I do not pretend that it was some great act of willpower or abstinence. I just didn’t care for the stuff. All through high school and college I ignored the stuff. During college it was easy to stand back and see others just turning of age (it was 18 in those days) making fools of themselves with alcohol and/or dope. I even had the good fortune of having a sister who ran with a fast crowd in high school so I got to witness the drug scene from a safe distance and decide that it belonged with alcohol as a something I could easily live without.
In my early banking days in the mid-to-late-seventies I did get dragged into a few more Dewar’s and sodas than I would have liked for business etiquette reasons (those were the days when the three-martini lunch was just starting to fade from the business-day scene). But I managed to set that aside quickly enough and have never found a problem choosing to not drink at social or business occasions. When I do have a drink (a handful of times in any given year) people tend to sit up and take notice and consider it a red-letter day. To this day I have probably consumed on a lifetime basis no more than the average college student consumes in a month.
So if I don’t drink and I don’t do drugs (never have, never will) what was the basis of my lost weekend? I think the concept of giving into a weakness and taking an easy and non-productive or even destructive path is what a lost weekend is all about. If you are a stamp collector, maybe you spend a weekend doing nothing but looking at your stamps and dreaming of stamps you don’t yet have in your collection. If you are a hedonistic motorcyclist, maybe you spend a weekend riding in the mountains or desert faster than you should and without regard for anything but the few square inches of where the rubber meets the road. This weekend for me was spent staying out of the heat and watching TV and writing stories. That’s the same sort of indulgence I engage in when I am on long international or transcontinental flights. IT somehow seems OK on a plane or in an airport where the objective is to stay calm and carry on. On a weekend living in Manhattan it seems very indulgent and decadent to stay at home and screen-out in the comfort of sub-authorized air conditioning levels (there, I admitted we kept the thermostat lower than Mayor DeBlasio mandated).
If you asked me what I accomplished over the weekend I would tell you I fed my lust for anti-Trump, anti-Fox sentiment by watching the first five episodes (all there are so far) of The Loudest Voice. This is the Showtime series starring Russell Crowe as Roger Ailes, the now-deceased perpetrator of the Fox News propaganda machine. What I learned would make Ray Milland sober up pretty fast I suspect. Ailes was drunk on power and drunk on self-centered, self-righteous conservativism while pursuing a deplorable and harmful misogynistic lifestyle that disrupted many of the lives around him. Besides the women that he abused and exploited, he rattled many of the men who worked with him who had to contend with his evil intentions and his vulgar ways. The director makes it hard not to see into the eyes and the souls of those around him as they gradually but inevitably recognize the true nature of the beast that leads them. We see them make feeble attempts to correct his course and we see them all eventually (usually sooner rather than later) cave in to his baser instincts.
This is indulgent behavior on my part because there is nothing I didn’t already know about Roger Ailes that gets revealed, but seeing it live and in such a convincing visage as Russell Crowe represents is startling and has a certain prurient attraction to it. I could not look away and had to watch all five episodes and hankered for more. The fact that the series opens with Ailes lying dead on the floor matters not. We all know how this ends, but the revelations of how corrupt the making of Fox News and, indeed, the making of the new Republican party and Trump administration is simply startling reality to watch. I call it reality, because I believe it is more or less true, despite whatever dramatization has been put into this for the audience. Art is imitating life and life is pretty damn disturbing right now.
I hope it is cooler next weekend and that I can find something other to do with my time than wallow in the self-pity that results from drinking from this intoxicating bottle of horribleness. I can only afford a lost weekend like this once in a while or I will surely lose hope with the world.