Hella Nation - Evan Wright [4]
The job at Hustler offered a steady paycheck, health benefits and a structured, nine-to-five existence that I hoped would tamp down my proclivity for increasingly reckless sprees. It seemed the logical end point for my nihilistic beliefs. Being confronted every day with segments of humanity locked in joyless, dead-eyed coupling in front of cameras was proof of the total lack of meaning of things, confirmation of my essential belief in the bankruptcy of the human experience, which was of course highly comforting. The job at Hustler was also the first time anyone had ever paid me to write. And getting paid to write, as most people know, is the ultimate and most coveted slacker profession. I lived in fear of losing my job.
In early 1996, Hustler assigned me to cover the Adult Video News Awards ceremony—the “Academy Awards of porn”—in Las Vegas. The ceremony took place in conjunction with a nearly week-long convention in which thousands of pornographers descended on the city, schmoozed, partied and sometimes brawled—all while filming impromptu adult movies in hotel suites. I could picture an almost infinite variety of disastrous scenarios I might find myself in if I embarked on a bender in the midst of the porn convention.
I traveled to Las Vegas with a colleague who wrote for another adult magazine. He was a committed heroin, diazepam, crack and meth addict who somehow had struck a chemical balance that enabled him to function. Years earlier he had been an aspiring playwright, doctoral candidate and instructor at a prestigious university. His career had ended after a week-long meth binge in which he’d pulled a loaded gun on a fellow member of his English department with whom he’d been arguing about Faulkner. He was someone I felt comfortable with because he was well-read and at least partially insane enough for me to tell him anything.
When we checked into our rooms at the Frontier Hotel, I pulled him aside and told him that if we ended up at a social gathering where cocktails were being served, he was to make sure I drank no more than six. I confessed to him that any number greater than that might lead to catastrophe. “No matter what I say, no matter what I do,” I told him, “get me out of whatever bar or party I am in. If you have to,” I told him, “punch me in the face.”
He agreed to help but could barely conceal his contempt for my lack of self-control. He’d been slamming heroin, smoking crack and meth for years, and except for his three-week stay in a mental hospital after the Faulkner episode, he had never missed a day of work. Staring at me through his dark black sunglasses—worn at all times of day or night to hide his pinpoint pupils—he asked, “You ever think you might have a problem?”
I managed to stay out of trouble in Vegas. But fearing some other incident that might lead to the abrupt termination of my job, I began trying to clean up. When my own efforts failed, I started to attend a 12-step program. Though the program was based—it seemed to me—on a magical faith in a make-believe “Higher Power,” after I had strung together a few weeks of uninterrupted sobriety through my participation in it, the empiricist in me had to concede that it worked.
Waking up clearheaded every morning