Literary Rogues (26 page)

Literary rogues of past generations had tried to quit using substances, but most failed without support groups that understood the nature of their problems. Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in 1935 to help addicts fight their drinking problems, but it took many years for the “rehab” movement to gain a foothold in the popular consciousness. It wasn't until 1956 that alcoholism was officially recognized as a disease by the medical community.

However, it's wishful thinking to try to imagine the output of Edgar Allan Poe or Charles Baudelaire if they had access to substance abuse treatment—AA and other rehab programs have not proved to be the panacea for society's substance abuse problems. Drug and alcohol use has continued unabated, and, as we'll see in the next several chapters, writers continue to struggle with these age-old demons in the modern era.

“We both got
processed by the hype machine
.”

—
JAY MCINERNEY

F
ollowing the drug-addled youth movements of the 1950s and 1960s, the United States stepped up its antidrug campaign. Congress passed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, the first step in an offensive dubbed “the War on Drugs” by President Nixon. A new federal agency, the Drug Enforcement Agency, was created in 1973 to oversee the administration's open-ended war. Other government agencies, including the CIA, soon entered into the fray.

The crackdown failed to clean up urban environments like New York City. The middle class had been fleeing big cities for the suburbs since at least the 1950s, and by the 1970s poverty-related crime and drug abuse reached epidemic proportions. According to
Jay McInerney
(b. 1955), getting mugged was a rite of passage for New Yorkers in the 1970s. His first two apartments were both broken into, and his 1966 Volkswagen was stolen—not once, but twice.

Things seemed to change with the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan, the former television actor with the megawatt smile. “
In 1980, it became clear
that New York had pulled up its socks and reversed the fiscal, physical, and psychic dilapidation of the seventies,” McInerney wrote. “The stock market began a steady ascent, which created new jobs on Wall Street. At some point, the influx of ambitious young strivers [‘yuppies'] started to exceed the exodus.”

While New York City appeared to be on the rebound in 1980, McInerney was at his lowest point. The twenty-five-year-old had been fired from his job as a fact-checker at
The New Yorker
, and his wife had left him. About all he had left was his aspiration to be a novelist like his idol, Raymond Carver. When McInerney met Carver following a reading at Columbia University in New York, the meeting had to have exceeded the struggling writer's wildest dreams: Carver “
enthusiastically tried cocaine
with McInerney” and persuaded the younger writer to put in more time studying fiction upstate, with Carver, at Syracuse University's MFA program. McInerney's sabbatical at Syracuse led to the first draft of his novel,
Bright Lights, Big City
, which Carver blurbed upon its release in September 1984.

Since, like McInerney, the protagonist of
Bright Lights
worked as a fact checker for a New York magazine, it was generally assumed that the story was largely autobiographical. Even if it wasn't, it was still a tour de force that transformed the literary landscape of the 1980s in fewer than two hundred pages. “Certainly
Bright Lights
was just
a bull's-eye into yuppie
consciousness,” novelist Douglas Unger, a Syracuse classmate of McInerney's, said. “I remember one time I was walking around the Upper West Side of New York City and just about every other person—in the coffee shops, on the street—had a copy of Jay's book.” Despite the narrator's decidedly unglamorous job,
Playboy
called it “
Catcher in the Rye
for the MBA set
.” In a 1985
People
story, McInerney was described as being “
dusted with cocaine
, disco glitter and the faint promise of a literary future.”

Every generation is defined, to some extent, by the drugs it does or doesn't use. To extend the life cycle of the tell-all drug memoir, it was necessary to invent new drugs—or at least rediscover old ones: Benzedrine and heroin in the 1950s; LSD and mescaline in the 1960s. In the 1980s, the new drug was an old one. “It was as if
I suddenly invented cocaine
,” McInerney said about the public reception of
Bright Lights
.

Natives in South American mountain ranges had used coca leaves as a stimulant since antiquity, but it wasn't until a “maximum strength” version was synthesized in 1855 that the rest of the world caught on. Chemists isolated the stimulating drug from the leaves and dubbed the resulting white powder “cocaine.” The European medical community quickly recognized the drug's power, and it was prescribed as a safe alternative to opium for conditions such as depression and pain. Unfortunately, enthusiastic doctors, such as psychologist Sigmund Freud, did not yet understand its addictive properties. Cocaine was included in all sorts of tonics, including, infamously, the original formulation of Coca-Cola. Georgia druggist John Pemberton's first cocaine-containing concoction, French Wine Coca, was advertised in 1885 as a “delightful remedy” for all manner of diseases ranging from mental and physical exhaustion to constipation. The ad copy expressly recommended French Wine Coca for people whose work required them to be sedentary for long periods, such as “
clergymen, lawyers
, and literary men.”

Pemberton removed cocaine from Coca-Cola in 1903 amid growing concern over the drug's effects, and Congress banned cocaine in 1914. It remained a popular drug throughout the twentieth century, though its usage did not grow to epic proportions until the late 1970s and 1980s, when an influx of cocaine into the United States from Colombia. Cocaine quickly became a status drug for those who could afford it.

According to McInerney, cocaine was “an elitist downtown thing” in Manhattan, “the perfect drug for bright, shiny overachievers. It seemed harmless. It helped you stay up all night, and the next day, if you felt a little comedown, it was a far more effective pick-me-up than a double espresso.” Cocaine was so popular that 43 percent of all Manhattan arrestees tested positive for it in 1984.

For a while, McInerney played into the press's hands, hitting up clubs and alluding to drug use in interviews. “There was a point when
I was competing against my books
—and my books were losing,” he said. “People were writing about me, and not my books.” McInerney dated and
married a string
of heiresses and models. “
One of the hardest things
to acquire is a persona,” Norman Mailer once told McInerney, “and you've got one.”

The truth was, by the time
Bright Lights, Big City
was published, McInerney was several years removed from his drugged-out disco days in Manhattan. Prior to graduate school at Syracuse, McInerney “thought of
writers as luminous madmen
who drank too much and drove too fast and scattered brilliant pages along their doomed trajectories.” Carver taught him that writing was 90 percent perspiration. To write, “
You had to survive
, find some quiet, and work hard every day. Carver saved me a year of further experimentation with the idea that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. I'd already done a fair amount of the destructive stuff.”

Unfortunately, the wheels had been set in motion. Jay McInerney was a hot commodity that publishers were eager to copy. In 1985, just one year removed from
Bright Lights, Big City
, a twenty-one-year-old writer was already being touted as “
the new Jay McInerney
.” That writer's name was
Bret Easton Ellis
(b. 1964).

Ellis had been working on a novel since he was sixteen, and his college professor (a writer, Joe McGinniss) immediately submitted the manuscript to his own agent after reading it. When
Less Than Zero
was published in 1985, Ellis was only twenty-one—scarcely older than the drugged-out rich kids he was writing about. “
It wasn't a documentary
, but it seemed like one,” McInerney said.
Less Than Zero
later became a movie starring Robert Downey Jr., who
went club hopping with Ellis
, further blurring the lines between fact and fiction.

Ellis and McInerney became poster boys for the 1980s, part of a generation that was growing up in the shadows of their parents' rebellion. Prior to the release of
Less Than Zero
, Ellis was asked whether there was any rebellion in his generation. “No,” he deadpanned. “I'm going to this
really small liberal arts
college which likes to think of itself as the last bastion of bohemia, but the two most popular places on this campus now are the computer room and the weight room.” Regardless, he and McInerney were lumped together by journalists as the “
toxic twins
.” They became fast friends, almost out of necessity.

There were some critics who wondered whether Ellis would let the money from his advances—and the drugs, and the sex, and whatever else they imagined he was up to—go to his head. “He's in a good position to be
chewed up by the time he's twenty-three
,” an editor told the
Los Angeles Times
in 1986. “It's hard to live up to this kind of early splash in a town that's always restless for the next hip novel.”

Ellis, a Los Angeles native, moved to New York after he graduated from college. He had long been in love with the romanticized portrayal of the Big Apple in books and movies and saw it as the place a young writer had to go to make his or her name. His second book,
The Rules of Attraction
, wasn't the commercial success that his first book was, but his third book would turn out to be his most controversial and talked-about.

After the stock market crash of 1987,
Newsweek
declared the yuppie extinct. “Various commentators have been
writing obituaries of the yuppie
ever since, the most powerful of which was a novel called
American Psycho
, published in 1991 by Bret Easton Ellis. Ellis's send-up of the materialism of the era is exhaustive to the point of feeling almost definitive,” wrote McInerney.

“
Not since Salman Rushdie
ticked off the Ayatollah has a book stirred up so much anger and hatred,” the
Los Angeles Times
critic Bob Sipchen wrote in 1991. “Bret Easton Ellis hasn't had to go into hiding, but his new novel,
American Psycho
, is so offensive that Ellis would be well advised not to show his face in some places.”

Even before its publication,
American Psycho
drew outrage from women's and family values groups such as the National Organization for Women for its protagonist's (literal) skewering of the opposite sex. The story follows twenty-six-year-old Harvard graduate and junk bond trader Patrick Bateman through the upper echelons of Manhattan society in the 1980s. Ellis used the same detailed language to describe Bateman's designer clothing and tastes in music as he did when writing about Bateman's serial killing. The book was “
about me at the time
, and I wrote about all my rage and feelings,” Ellis later said. “I was living that yuppie lifestyle. I was the same age as Patrick Bateman, living in the same building, going to the same places that Patrick Bateman was going to.”

Due in part to consumer boycott threats,
American Psycho
was dropped by its original publisher, Simon and Schuster, before its release. A rival house quickly picked it up.

The book received not one but two terrible reviews in the
New York Times
; critics from coast to coast called it boring and humorless, a cynical attempt to generate sales. Ellis was subjected to interviews such as this one, from
Entertainment Weekly
, in 1991
:

EW
: In your novel
Less Than Zero
, a twelve-year-old girl is raped. In
The Rules of Attraction
, a college girl has a violent sexual experience. Do you see yourself as a completely demented misogynist?

ELLIS
: Yes. Yes I am. I am a completely demented misogynist.

EW
: Are you saying this facetiously?

ELLIS
: What would you say if you were asked this question?

“
This is not art
,” Tammy Bruce, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women, told the
Los Angeles Times
. “Mr. Ellis is a confused, sick young man with a deep hatred of women who will do anything for a fast buck.” Only Norman Mailer rose to Ellis's defense. “
The writer may have enough talent
to be taken seriously,” he wrote in
Vanity Fair
, praising the writing but criticizing the book.

Ellis received death threats, but stuck by his book. “
Bateman is a misogynist
,” he agreed. “But I would think most Americans learn in junior high to differentiate between the writer and the character he is writing about.”