Wasted by Brian O'Connell Read Free Book Online

and pick up a shopping basket. I would then walk around the
store filling the basket, as if I was doing my weekly shopping. Half way through, I stopped at the hot food counter and got a few chicken drumsticks, sausage rolls and maybe potato wedges. These
were eaten on my way around, before depositing the basket with an employee and asking him/her to mind it while I went outside to withdraw more money. ‘You only come in for one thing and
suddenly you have a basket full,’ I remember telling one dubious employee. I never returned with the money and this became a weekly, sometimes daily, occurrence. Thankfully, I was never
apprehended—I suspect the embarrassment of having to go down because of a few drumsticks and a flaky sausage roll wouldn’t have lent me much cred on the inside.
    Towards the end, the highs were still fulfilling, but the lows were now more commonplace. Panic attacks began to set in, and I struggled to bring myself to look in the mirror. I drank on the
breakdown of relationships. I drank on not being able to provide a proper home environment for my son. I drank out of loneliness. I drank because of insecurity, unfulfillment and arrogance. I drank
because everyone else did. I drank to fit in. I drank out of frustration. I drank to feel normal. I drank and drank and drank and drank.
    If I could get away without paying for anything that didn’t involve alcohol, I did, and most of the time I owed money to someone or other. I surrounded myself with male and female
companions in the same boat, hiding from some aspect of life. Two episodes brought home to me that the party had to stop. The first was at the end of a two-day drink-and-drug bender, which ended up
at a get-together at a friend’s house after closing hours. I was waiting on a delivery of Ecstasy, to keep the party going, when I witnessed a death. It was one of those shocking and
traumatic, time-stood-still moments almost too monumental to take account of. To be honest, my first thoughts were whether or not I should still take the chemical delivery. Afterwards, I drank for
two days—any excuse—and went to the funeral and sympathised with the family in a dazed state. Many months later, I gave a witness statement to Gardaí and broke down, in a
windowless room with a sergeant nearing retirement scribbling frantically. Only then did I deal with what I had seen, did I realise the extent to which my life had become out of control and how
fragile emotionally I was. It was a telling moment that brought me some way towards self-realisation.
    The second moment that sticks out was in October 2004, at a World Cup qualifying soccer match in Paris. A group of us had decided to go to the game, taking the ferry over and driving down to
Paris via Normandy. The drinking on the ferry was shocking, kind of like being at a Wolfe Tones concert for 20 hours. The ‘best fans in the world’ tag was nonsense—it was a
drunken free-for-all. Teenagers slept in the cinema cradling bottles of vodka; ferry staff were abused repeatedly, while the ship’s internal PA system was taken over
by drunks shouting obscenities. Marauding groups searched the cabins below for an empty bed to lie down in, while vomit and beer redecorated the carpets and decks. We found a quietish bar and
sipped away nicely for the journey—the party had begun. I even managed a chorus of ‘Boys in Green’ and ‘A Nation Once Again’. I was with older friends at the time, and
was in a financial mess, barely scraping together what little money I could in the week previous to have enough to get through the couple of days’ drinking in Paris. I overcame financial
shortfalls by buying cheap bottles of wine. So while the others sat in restaurants or drank in bars, I hung around outside on the steps and drank, or joined them later with a bottle of wine
concealed up my sleeve.
    Inevitably, though, I was broke half way through the three-day trip, and so, one night, while my roommate