Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [92]
I was immediately admitted into United Hospital, and the following morning Roger spent his time canceling the remains of the tour, which numbered fifty shows. It was a big enough insurance disaster for the bell to be rung at Lloyds. They kept me in the hospital for about six weeks, treating me with a drug called Tagamet. I remember one of the first questions they asked me was, “How much are you drinking, because we think that might be your problem.” To which I replied, “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m English. We all drink there, you know. It’s part of our lifestyle, and we drink strong ale, not Budweiser.” So they said, “Well, would you ever consider trying to cut back?” And I replied, “Of course.” The funny thing is that I don’t recall missing alcohol at all while I was in the hospital, perhaps because I was on so much medication. They also allowed me to smoke, out in the corridor or outside. I actually enjoyed feeling well again and being in good health.
When I was finally released from the hospital, I felt like I had a new lease on life because my physical condition was restored. My sanity, however, hadn’t been addressed at all. The doctors who treated me had cured my ulcers with drugs and repaired my overall well-being, but my mental state was still the same. I was totally ignorant about the whole subject of alcoholism. I was quite happy to admit to being an alcoholic, but only in a jokey way. I wasn’t prepared to admit that it was a real problem. I was still at that stage where I would say, “I don’t have a problem. I never spill a drop.”
They did address my situation mildly by telling me that it would be good for me to give up drinking altogether after I left the hospital. So I made deals with them along the lines of, “Well, if I moderate and cut it down to two or three scotches a day, would that be all right?” And they would say “Fine” without realizing that they were dealing with a chronic alcoholic to whom two or three scotches was just breakfast. When I did eventually get home, for the satisfaction of Pattie I made a halfhearted attempt to moderate, but it was really no more than me saying, “Let’s have a glass of wine at lunch today instead of Special Brew.” After a couple of months I was back to two bottles a day and didn’t give a damn about my health.
One person who inadvertently shocked some sense into me regarding my drinking was Sid Perrin, whose health had rapidly deteriorated over the past year, much to the distress of my mother. He first of all had to have a colostomy, which hit him hard. His dignity and self-respect were destroyed by having to wear the bag. Then he developed liver and kidney problems, all drink-related, and really lost his will to live. On the last occasion I saw him, visiting him in the hospital with Pat, he was hallucinating and talking to people who weren’t in the room. I had never seen anything like this before.
Sid died early in November and, to a certain extent, for me Ripley died with him. It was the end of the good times. Uncle Adrian and I got incredibly drunk at his funeral and behaved in the most awful way in front of everybody, our excuse being that it was the way Sid would have liked us to behave. It was unforgivable and my mother was livid with fury. I was very upset by Sid’s passing, and in a way it showed me where I was heading. I thought to myself, “It won’t be long before this kind of thing is going to happen to me,” but instead of slowing my drinking down, it spurred me on to drink even more in a desperate attempt to try and blot it out.
The fallacy about drinking, however, is that when people say they drink to forget, all it does is magnify the problem. I would have a drink to banish the problem and then, when it didn’t go away, have another one, so the end of my drinking days were really insane, because I was constantly spurred on by the