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I’ve been writing about the drunken poet Alan Justiss and I’ve been visiting a childhood friend who’s dying from cirrhosis in the hospital. I’ve written here and elsewhere about my own struggles with alcohol in the past. Alan and my childhood friend are bookending me as witness to tragic worst ends of the bottle.
I didn’t know Alan Justiss well. I had told Nestor Gil, Alan’s longtime friend and the shepherd of his manuscripts, that though I’d met Alan several times over the years and read my poems in some of the same places Alan read his, Alan never seemed to remember me. So I was surprised last week to see my name in a few places on the calendars where Alan kept meticulous saw-whom-went-where notes.
I saw Alan and Nestor interact at a café called Midnight Expresso once in the early 2000s in a way that made me see both of them differently than I had before. Alan had been a mentor to Nestor and Nestor had become a sort of caretaker to Alan even then. Alan was drunk and was heckling other poets and Nestor walked purposely toward him, put his arm around Alan’s shoulders, and gently escorted him outside.
Nestor Gil has a great big gracious soul. He sees beautifully. He calls Alan both terrible and wonderful, says probably nobody grew angry at Alan more times in his last 20 years than Nestor and that he misses him “acutely.” I try to see Alan through Nestor’s seeing, while also observing Nestor’s sight itself.
Alan drank every day, most of the day long. When he didn’t drink in the 1980s, he also didn’t write. He drank Schlitz beer (and later, ironically, IPAs) and aimed for 10 poems a night. Some of the poetry is beautiful. Some of it’s bad. Now Nestor has guided Alan’s 20,000+ pages to the Jacksonville Public Library’s Special Collections.
Here irony abides. Alan wasn’t a genius. He was either a poet who drank or a drunk who wrote poems. Neither existed without the other. Will the poems of the non-alcoholic genius Bill Slaughter, professor emeritus at the University of North Florida, whom I took class after class from 20+ years ago, receive the same treatment as Alan’s?
Two weeks ago, as I listened to the poets Anna Jacobson, Fati D. Ashley and Michelle Lizet Flores read their work at Happy Medium Books in Riverside, a drunken voice from across the bookshelves became increasingly disruptive. It irritated and embarrassed me when that voice shouted my name. I knew by then to whom it belonged.
I knew he was an alcoholic. My childhood friend. I hadn’t seen him in seven years and the sight of him after the reading shocked me a bit. Never mind the fedora and eyepatch. His teeth were bad. I knew he was in a wheelchair. I didn’t expect the distended belly from ascites due to liver failure. I didn’t expect that yesterday I’d be visiting him in the hospital. He’s had paracentesis twice a week, toxins drained from his abdomen since his liver now is one big scar and couldn’t function if it wanted to.
I first met him when he was 14 and I was 16. I can still see the teenager he once was in my mind. I’ve never seen someone so literally drink himself to death. Yesterday, of course, he was sober. Same strange sense of humor that I’ve known now for so long. He doesn’t have long left.
I don’t know exactly what an alcoholic is, but I know what problematic drinking is. That seems the more important distinction. I’ve attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, but for lots of the usual reasons, did not like them. The writer in me couldn’t help but scribble notes after each meeting when I got back to my car. What’s said in those meetings is supposed to stay anonymous and though I didn’t write down names, I couldn’t help but transcribe stories.
Everyone knows how those meetings go, right? Some of the testimonies sound like braggadocio, like showing off the scars you’ve earned. The guy who drank a bottle of tequila a day and when his wife took him to task, nailed shut his bedroom door with enough tequila for a month. The guy who blacked out from five o’clock one afternoon until nine the next morning when he came to in his car, at a stop sign, his foot on the brake. Don’t compare your situation to anyone else’s, they all advise. There’s apparently always a worse drunk than the last drunk.
I’m uneasy with the subject of Alan Justiss and drinking. Artists have no special status when it comes to substance abuse. I get where the notion comes from. Perhaps you can’t really understand the special category that is art without understanding how art divorced itself from its religious purposes centuries ago and took that religious aura with it.
The philosopher Walter Benjamin writes about this transference of aura. Along with that transference came the idea of “sacred instrumentality.” I grew up with fundamentalist Baptist preachers using it – most sickeningly, Bob Gray of Trinity Baptist Church and Trinity Christian Academy, saying “Touch not mine anointed” and giving himself exemption, as man of God, to abuse children sexually. So no, I don’t buy the sacred instrumentality exemption any more for artists than for preachers.
And does alcohol lubricate creativity? Was Jim Morrison right? Or Arthur Rimbaud that “The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses”? Alcohol disorders thought and makes from that disorder new orders. And creativity creates nothing from nothing, but makes new orders of old things. If it were easy as putting those two facts together, however, any drunk would be a genius.
I conclude, for now, with no conclusion. Mostly I’m just on guard. What makes Alan Justiss, for me, worth writing about are the questions he keeps me asking. But are they questions of the art, or of the life, and where does one end and the other begin? For my childhood friend, I feel mostly sadness. When we were kids, he was one of only a couple of people I knew who read poetry. The substance abuse followed some intense suffering of a kind nobody else I’ve known has experienced. It’s too late for anything now but to let him know I still love him. That much, at least, I know and can do.
I am an artist and also have autoimmune hepatitis , with cirrhosis. My own immune system is killing me. That’s ironic, too. Very tired, a nice Naples yellow. I struggle always to make art.
It's good, really good.