Benchley, Peter - Novel 07 Read Online Free PDF Page B

anyway? He bet
that if you put a hundred people into a room, you couldn't get three of them to
agree on a definition. Legend had it that Ulysses Grant was an alcoholic, but
then Lincoln was supposed to have said something like: "If liquor fueled
the job Grant did for this nation, then I'll have a case of whatever he's
drinking." Winston Churchill kick-started every morning with brandy and
kept pour-ling it on all day long. The stereotype was the bum who slept in a
doorway and drank Thunderbird from a bag, but maybe he was the same guy who
used to sleep on a couch in Pound Ridge and drink Cutty Sark.
                   It was all a question of perceptions.
                   He didn't blame Dolores Stark for her
perceptions. She was in the salvage business. She had to believe he was a wreck
wallowing in despair. She had to label him and try to convince him that the
label fit. After all, she (Could hardly coax somebody into treatment—which
,was, remember, the way she made her living; more than a little element of
self-interest there—by hinting that now and then he overserved himself with
margaritas. She'd be out of work in a week.
                   And Preston wasn't knocking treatment. There were people who needed it. No question.
Especially for drugs. When drugs got their claws into you, they didn't let go.
You had to be cleaned out, then broken down and built up again. And there were
probably people for whom booze was like that. They couldn't give it up. They
were hooked. Treatment was the only way out.
                   For him, though, it was overkill, like
treating sniffles with penicillin. He could have quit on his own. It would have
taken him a few more false starts, but he could have done it. Sure, sure, he
knew the old joke: "I have no trouble quitting; I do it all the
time." But what had been missing was motivation, and now he had that. What
distinguished him from the true alcoholic who could never quit on his own was
the fact that (except on certain days like today), Preston didn't need alcohol. He liked alcohol. There
was a difference.
                   But he would humor them, at least for a while.
He'd join the roster of movie stars and country singers, rock drummers and
middle linebackers, who had put The Banner Clinic on the map. A stint at Banner
was almost a required credential for the Beautiful People these days.
                   Mostly, he was going in because no matter what
he thought, Margaret's threats and Warren 's were real. Maybe they were overreacting,
maybe they were misguided, but they had the power to cause him a lot of pain, and
he had quite enough pain these days, thank you very much. How long he would
stay was another matter.
                   Besides, who could say that he wouldn't get
anything out of it? He might learn something. The worst that could happen was
that he'd dry out for a while. On full salary. That couldn't hurt. Everybody
could use a good flushing. He might even meet some celebrity lush who would
write about his or her experience.
                   Sign 'em up. Celebrity confessions were
selling like Big Macs.
                   Everybody benefits. Virtue plus twenty
percent.
                   Meanwhile, he had to concentrate on how to
wrap his fingers around a couple of quick pops before he met he driver from
Banner. He had been told that the driver would meet the plane, which he assumed
meant—what with airport security precautions—that he'd be waiting it the
baggage carousel.
                   He stood up before the plane stopped—incurring
from 1 stewardess a baleful glare but no reprimand because, lie figured, she
was still afraid that if she said anything aggressive he might go into apeshit
DTs—and worked his way to the front. It had to take fifteen or twenty minutes
to unload everyone from an L-1011, so if he was first off, he'd have plenty of
time to down