INTERVIEW: “ENABLERS”

Story: “Enablers” (<-Click there to read the story!)
Genre: Short Fiction
Keywords: The Drunk-Driving Dream Team; Characters Named “Shamalama Dingdong;” Cirrhosis
Soundtrack: "The Michael Jordan of Drunk Driving" by Andrew Jackson Jihad

Tell us about the genesis of this story.
The friendship and conversations in this story are an amalgam of ones I’ve had with a number of different guy friends. The most obvious one is my friend Ron, who's in the photo with me that's posted at the end of the story. Most of the anecdotes, about him being a playwright and placing third in an Elvis contest and being homeless and going to college in Ireland, are ripped directly from his life.

He’s seen this story, and liked it, which pleased me a lot. (I wouldn’t have used the photo of him and me right there with the story if he hadn’t been OK with all that.) As a writer, he understands that “you” in a story is not necessarily you in real life, so he wasn’t bothered by the parts that weren’t about him.

For example, a key thing: The conversation about drunk driving was actually one that I had with someone else, but heavily fictionalized and "embroidered" for dramatic effect. To my knowledge, Ron doesn’t have an issue with drinking at all, and I can’t recall his ever having mentioned driving drunk. So uh, that’s a pretty big part of the story that I attributed to him but that doesn’t match up with the real-life Ron at all.

How does this story relate to your own issues with alcoholism?
Part of why I wrote this story was because there are certain things you can say in fiction – words you can put in a character’s mouth – that you would be excoriated for if you said them as yourself in real life. For example: Saying that you’re good at drunk driving. Of course, that’s a stupid thing to say, and no one is actually good at that. But some of us think that we are, in that moment when we’re drunk. That’s a shame, but that’s life, and art is supposed to reflect life. People do stupid things. To pretend otherwise would be inaccurate.

I mean, I could have written a story in which McGruff the Crime Dog tells you not to drink and drive – but the reality of drunk driving will probably come across in a more real and poignant way if you have a couple of idiots talking about how doing it is not so bad. 

I also wanted to touch on some of the perceived bohemian glamour that some people associate with drinking – Bukowski writing poetry in a whiskey haze or whatever. I have very talented writer friends, such as my friend Dave, who write very well when they’re drunk. As for me, anything I ever wrote while drunk just looked – later, to my sober eyes – like the melodramatic stuff I wrote as a teenager. I do better with some kind of (literally) sobering filter. I don’t know why that is.

The part at the end about my dad’s cousin Gail is key, I think. (That part’s true, by the way, including what my dad said about how she always seemed happy.) The two characters have been flat-out told that drinking so much can kill them; here's this example in the narrator's own family. And what do they do? They make a toast to Gail, and then they drink. Sometimes when you love to do a thing, you don’t want to stop, even when you know it’s bad for you. In your faulty logic, the pros outweigh the cons, or the cons seem like things you can live with.

What’s the main thing you want readers to take away from this story?
That people will tell themselves all sorts of beautiful and self-aggrandizing lies to justify their self-destruction.