Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [112]
The company I was hanging out with during this period certainly did little to curb my excesses. Back in 1986, and throughout the summer of ’87, for example, I spent a lot of time with “Beefy” Botham and David English, and the three of us would go on mad sprees. David had been a friend since R.S.O. days, and between us we had formed the E.C. Eleven (which later evolved into the Banburys), a ragtag team of musicians and sportsmen who liked to play cricket for fun, and although some of us would take it fairly seriously, I for one treated it as another excuse for a grand piss-up. Sometimes I would just drive up to watch Beefy play for his county, Worcestershire. He’s a wonderful man, very gregarious and generous, a great player and a natural leader with a scaldingly cruel sense of humor. More often than not, poor David would be the recipient of our scornful attention and suffer extraordinary abuse at our hands, much as Stiggy had with Ahmet and Earl. We were pretty merciless, but I just loved watching Beefy play, and drove all over the country to watch first-class county games. Drinking is a big part of the cricket social scene, and Beefy liked the odd quencher, too, so I fit right in.
This then was the pattern of my life over the next year, which reached its climax when I was touring Australia in the autumn of 1987. By then there had been such an erosion of my capabilities that I couldn’t stop shaking. For the second time, I’d reached the point where I couldn’t live without a drink and I couldn’t live with one. I was a mess, and so far as my playing was concerned, I was just about scraping by.
One day, cooped up in my hotel room, a long way from home, with nothing to think about but my own pain and misery, I suddenly knew that I had to go back into treatment. I thought to myself, “This has got to stop.” I really did it for Conor, because I thought no matter what kind of human being I was, I couldn’t stand being around him like that. I couldn’t bear the idea that, as he experienced enough of life to form a picture of me, it would be a picture of the man I was then. I called Roger and told him to book me into Hazelden again, and on November 21, 1987, I went back into treatment.
My second visit to Hazelden was, on the face of it, much like the first, but on a deeper level it was very different. This time I had no reservations about why I was there—I had tried to control my drinking and failed—so there was no more debate, no more gray area for me. Also, my life had become very complicated and completely unmanageable during my relapse. I now had two children, neither of whom I was really administering to, a broken marriage, assorted bewildered girlfriends, and a career that, although it was still ticking over, had lost its direction. I was a mess.
My counselor this time around, a great guy named Phil, having first established a strong bond with me, employed a sort of ridicule method. It threw me completely. I had grown used to people treating me with a certain amount of reverence, maybe just out of fear, and here was this guy laughing at my pomposity and arrogance. I didn’t know how to deal with it. It caught me off balance and helped me see myself as others saw me, and it wasn’t pretty. I was captivated, and tried to engage him as much as I could, but he was rarely available, or made it seem that way. Like my half brother Brian, he had something I wanted. More than that, it was something I knew I needed. I was like a blade of grass in the wind; one day I would be blown up, scornful and full of myself, and the next I was in a pit of despair. But I kept coming back to the thought of Conor, the reality of his life and what it required of me, and the horrible possibility that if I didn’t get it right this time, history would probably repeat itself. The thought of him going through all that was what finally made the difference. I had to break the chain and give him what