Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [102]
Only one thing jarred. There seemed to be a kind of conspiracy to keep me from knowing that all the guys were boozing and doing a lot of blow. It was happening in secret, and it was as if they didn’t trust me to handle it. I became very angry. “Somebody’s been holding out on me,” I told them. “I’m not a kid. I want to know everything that’s going on.” But when I voiced my disquiet, they just kind of shouted at me in a joking way and said, “But you don’t do it anymore!”
Before I left home, my attendance at twelve-step meetings had dropped, and I had neglected to find out if there were any where I was going. On my arrival, I had noticed that in the kitchen of the chalet I was staying in was a courtesy gift of a bottle of local rum on the sideboard, but instead of picking it up and deliberately pouring it all down the drain, I just put it away in a cupboard, thinking, “I’m not going to overreact to this by throwing it down the sink. I’ll just put it somewhere where I can’t see it.” But one night, soon after my row with the band, I went to a club on the far side of the island where I convinced myself that it would be all right to have a couple of drinks. I then went back to my chalet and polished off the bottle of rum in one sitting.
As a celebration, the next day I set about seducing the manager of the studio, Yvonne, a beautiful lady from Doncaster whose father was a Montserratian guitar player. She was very witty and funny, a dark-haired flirtatious beauty who seemed to be interested, and next thing I knew we were embarked on a very passionate and reckless affair, taking no precautions whatsoever. Like the drinking, my rationale was, “Nobody will know, we’re miles away from anywhere.” At the same time, it’s as if I wanted to get caught doing something that would rock the domestic boat at home. My disillusionment with my marriage was touched on in some of the songs I had written for the new album, like “She’s Waiting,” “Just Like a Prisoner,” and “Same Old Blues,” all very personal numbers about the relationship between Pattie and me.
For some time I had been finding it increasingly difficult to find a place to exist in my marriage and, at the same time, have a practicing sober life. The two things weren’t really jiving very well; I was going to a lot of meetings and also trying to fit in with our social life. But it was difficult going to dinners because I felt like I was under a microscope, and it was hard too for our friends, who were having to moderate their behavior and act in a way they hadn’t had to before. On my return from Montserrat, I chose to hide the fact that I had relapsed by not drinking, and though I managed to do this to begin with, the strain soon became too great.
I was doing a lot of fishing, which helped keep me calm, and one evening I was driving home from the river when I saw a pub by the side of the road. It was just getting dark and I could see through the windows a throng of people drinking and having fun, and at that moment I had no resistance. My selective memory of what drinking was like told me that standing at the bar in a pub on a summer’s evening with a long, tall glass of lager and lime was heaven, and I chose not to remember the nights on which I had sat with a bottle of vodka, a gram of coke, and a shotgun, contemplating suicide.
Suddenly I was at the bar ordering a beer, and it did exactly what I thought it would do. Because I hadn’t had a drink in a while, it made me quite tipsy, and I drove back to Hurtwood with some difficulty. When I got there, I decided I would tell Pattie what I had done and present it as good news, my thinking being that our marriage wasn’t working because I was sober, but if I could find a way back into a moderate drinking situation