The Bard Stripped Bare

Eventually, my heart healed and I got fully over the break-up with Rachael, but that didn t happen for quite some time, and the process of recovery was every bit as painful as it was slow. I brooded for a long, long while unable to get the whole thing out of my mind. I couldn t bear the thought of her being with anybody else and the bitterness and jealousy just ate me alive. I practically memorised all of her old love letters literally dozens of adoring missing-you-missives that she d posted every second day, without fail, during her student summers in Paris and Cambridge and couldn t help but laugh at how the tables had turned so completely in our relationship. I knew I probably should have burnt them but, although I put them in the fireplace more than once, I could never actually bring myself to light the match. Or is that just my memory playing tricks? Hah!

When I wasn t taking what little comfort I could from her letters, I d read Nick Hornby s High Fidelity over and over again, to remind myself that I wasn t the only guy in the world ever to have had his heart broken. Nick Cave s The Boatman s Call and U2 s Achtung Baby! were also on permanent rotation on my stereo, constantly sound-tracking my sadness. Christ, I was miserable. So were my neighbours. They d often bang angrily on their walls in protest at the volume. Keep the noise down! I d sometimes call back, if I was drunk or high enough not to care. Usually, though, I d turn it down immediately. I didn t want anyone coming to my door and seeing the awful state I was in.
The funny thing was, at the very back of my mind, I actually knew that she had been right to leave. We really weren t suited to each other and, had she come back to me, it undoubtedly would have ended again almost immediately. I had no intention of becoming the kind of quiet, responsible man she wanted me to be, and there was certainly no way she was ever going to change and suddenly decide that she enjoyed the litany of nefarious night-time activities in which I so regularly indulged.
We didn t really have very much middle ground certainly not enough to sustain a proper and fulfilling relationship. It was her rejection that had hurt me, far more than the actual loss of her presence. Knowing this and accepting it were two entirely different matters, however, and it took me ages to come to terms with the fact that she really was gone for good, and that it was better for both of us that she was.
In the meantime, I was completely and utterly devastated by what I self-indulgently saw as her complete betrayal of me. Still somewhat traumatised from the election anyway, I threw caution to the wind (and much of my pride along with it) and embarked on a marathon bender, the likes of which my system hadn t had to endure since the mindless binge that had followed my sudden departure from home, eight years before. I checked my excuses at the door - (1) heart broken, (2) head wrecked, (3) nerves shattered and went utterly off the rails. Quite easy to do when you re a rock journalist anyway but, even by the debauched standards of the music press, I was pretty over the top.
Even today, it s quite hard for me to write about that whole messy period of my life - partly because it s all relatively recent and I m still riding some of the ripples, but mainly because I can t actually remember huge chunks of it. There are big blanks. However, the parts I can remember, I m completely mortified by, and there s no reason to believe that I behaved any better during the bits I ve blacked-out. To this very day, there are numerous people who still aren t talking to me or who hurriedly cross the street when they see me coming, and I honestly have no idea why. Nor do I particularly want to know. I have vague memories, but when people torture me with details of those terrible lost nights during which I acted up and disgraced myself, I genuinely don t recognise the cruelly arrogant and obnoxious drunk they re talking about.
The cannabis campaign had made me a minor celebrity, of sorts, and I abused the privileges that this status afforded me with almost as much vigour as I abused my mind and liver. I quickly became a skipper of queues, a stealer of wives, a causer of scenes, a crasher of parties, a fucker of ups. I d sometimes come across pictures of myself in the social pages standing beside people I didn t recognise, at functions I couldn t remember having attended and I d put my head in my hands and groan, as the picture brought on a series of embarrassing flashbacks from the night in question. Things I had said. Things I had done. Terrible things (though, in fairness, often less terrible than I remembered them as being but the shame was always immense).
There s no denying or excusing it I acted atrociously, but my attitude was that it didn t really matter how badly I behaved in public, or who I fucked or fucked over, as I probably wouldn t live long enough to regret anything anyway. Certainly, in the early stages of the binge, I was fast headed towards the cliched destination of dying young (though my prospects of leaving a good-looking corpse were diminishing by the day). I didn t so much drown my sorrows as power-hose them with alcohol. I d often drink a full bottle of vodka mixed with freshly squeezed orange juice (for health reasons) before deciding whether or not I was going to drink that day. I avoided hangovers by staying drunk and, on the rare occasions when I d abstain from alcohol, I d usually do something else instead. More often than not, I d do both.
My drug intake rapidly escalated to a ridiculous level. I chain-smoked joints and serial-popped pills everything from Xanax to Ecstasy not so much dulling my senses, as completely obliterating them. Cocaine, in particular, swiftly went from being my drug of choice to being my drug of no-choice, in the sense that I felt I couldn t function properly without using it. I had a permanent sniff and couldn t walk for more than a minute without breaking out in a hot prickly sweat. Everything I ate (which wasn t very much) tasted sharply of chemicals.
When I was doing coke, my paranoia levels soared in tandem with my high opinion of myself, but as William Burroughs once sagely observed, just because you re paranoid, it doesn t mean there s nobody out to get you. Throughout the campaign, people had been warning me that I could expect a visit from the drugs squad at any time. I knew they were wrong I felt somewhat immunised by publicity and figured there was no way they were going to harass me while I was standing for a Dail seat but, now that the election was over and the dust had started to settle, I was fully convinced that they were going to kick my front door in at any moment. I had seriously insulted John O Donoghue in the run-up to the election, after all, and he was now the Minister for Justice. Suddenly I had reason to imagine that I had enemies in very high places. The more I contemplated it, the deeper the paranoia became.
Thing was, I was spending most of my time in very high places myself places that thoughts of Rachael couldn t reach and so I truly didn t give a fuck. For a short time it got very bad. I was using so much powder that I felt completely invulnerable. As far as I was concerned, I was above the law and different rules applied. My name was no longer Olaf Tyaransen it was Tony Montana, and if anybody fucked with me then, well, they d soon find out who they were fucking with. I convinced myself that if I got busted for cocaine possession, I d be able to take my case to the European Court of Human Rights and because I was undoubtedly the cleverest human being on the entire planet and could convince anybody of anything I d effortlessly win the legal right to put whatever substances I wanted up my nose, and become the patron saint of coke users and a national hero in Colombia. Or something like that anyway. And it was self-deluding bullshit, all of it.
I was like Henry Hill in the latter stages of Goodfellas completely wired to the moon, jittery as hell and hugely suspicious of the Garda helicopter. Still, there were funny moments amidst all the madness. One afternoon I was bulleting out of the main door of my apartment block, completely coked up and hyper paranoid, when a middle-aged man in a grey suit standing in the doorway of the opposite building blatantly took my photograph. Enraged, I stormed over to him and started screaming abuse. IS THIS WHAT YOU WANT? I roared, pulling a series of the most ridiculously over-the-top poses I could. TAKE MY FUCKING PICTURE YOU FUCKING ARSEHOLE!!! He didn t say anything the blood draining conspicuously from his face, he turned and ran for his car and burnt rubber. Afterwards, I realised that he worked for a local estate agents and was actually photographing the building, not me. It was hardly like anybody needed a picture anyway my earnest-looking mug had appeared in just about every national newspaper over the previous few months (usually captioned underneath with lame puns on words like dope and potty ).
I really couldn t afford to sustain a serious coke habit, so I opted for a very serious one instead. For a time, I went through blizzards of the stuff, blasting through life at high speed without a care for anything or anyone but myself. By now I was writing again, but I don t remember much about what else I was up to, other than that I had lots of unnecessary rows about things that weren t particularly important (but seemed to be critical at the time), and abruptly terminated a couple of long-standing friendships for very silly and paranoid reasons. Mostly it s all a blur, mere static. Worse, nasty. I was a prick to certain people. Especially, come to think of it, myself.
Eventually, when I could advance no more money from work, borrow no more from family or friends, and had nothing of any real value left to sell (my formerly extensive book and CD collections were the biggest casualties of more! ), my only remaining option, if I wanted to continue my snowblind waltz, was to start dealing cocaine to cover my own use. I drew a line at that, and decided not to snort it. It had nothing to do with moral qualms I just knew that, with my public profile, I d be caught almost immediately. I certainly didn t fancy a stretch in Mountjoy. Coked up and deluded as I was, I still knew that my pampered middle-class ass wouldn t last five minutes in jail. I decided to ditch the drug. But not completely.
I stopped buying coke, stayed obscenely drunk for the messy comedown and, from then on, I decided to use coke only when people were giving it to me for nothing! Given the kind of dodgy company I was keeping and the media circles I was travelling in, that still happened quite a lot. Occasionally I d give in to temptation and buy a couple of grams with the rent money. Sometimes, I d keep it together and wouldn t do any for weeks. Still, I was an on-off user for quite a long period, and my mood swings, fits of paranoia and levels of debt fluctuated accordingly.
Some of the paranoia was justified, though, or seemed to be at the time. I was pretty sure, for example, that my telephone was bugged. There were lots of weird clicks and echoes on the line, and sometimes it would suddenly go dead for no apparent reason. One day I had just finished recording a phone interview with the comedian Sean Moncrief and, when I picked up the receiver to call somebody else, I was shocked to hear the conversation I d just had playing back down the line. I spoke to somebody who worked in the security industry about it, and he told me that the fact that I had recorded the conversation myself may have triggered a playback on a separate device. I wasn t sure who would want to monitor my conversations or why they would want to do it but, the sad truth was, I was somewhat chuffed. It made me feel important.
But then, perhaps it was all in my head. I called a friend at a pre-arranged phone booth one day and said, there s three ounces of cocaine here come and pick it up. I waited for hours and nobody came to arrest me. I was almost disappointed. Maybe I wasn t so important after all. Or possibly they just weren t that stupid. I certainly was I d been so out of my face when I d put my cunning plan into motion that I d forgotten to clean the apartment out first. There was obviously no cocaine there (well, not three ounces of the stuff, at any rate), but there were personal stashes of lots of other things littered around the place more than enough to have me in serious trouble for possession had the Drug Squad arrived.
Anyway, if my phone was bugged, looking back on it, I feel truly sorry for whoever was listening. For the most part, they d have heard nothing more edifying or revealing than me self-pityingly pouring my heart out, about how much I was missing Rachael, to whatever long-suffering friend was being patient enough to listen. We had two mutual friends, one lived in Madrid, the other in London, and I ran up enormous bills calling them on alternate nights. Other people shared out the ear abuse roster. I d often be wasted when I d ring sometimes so much so that I d have forgotten that I d already called my misfortunate quarry earlier-on that day. I was both a high and high-maintenance friend. Luckily, most people stood by me. Some didn t but, thinking about it now, I can t really blame them.
Rachael herself called every now and then, to see how I was getting on. I think she felt sorry for me, which made me feel even sorrier for myself. We were scratching at scabs just as I d be starting to get over it all, she d call and the mere sound of her voice would immediately open up all the old wounds and slide me straight back down to square one again. Sometimes I d get really out of it and call her. Often we d fight and she d hang up within moments. Other times we d spend ages talking about how much we d meant to each other and how we d always love each other and how sad we both were that it hadn t worked out. Whatever way our conversations went, I d always get completely fucked up afterwards.
It was a terrible period a time of constant drunkenness, erratic drug abuse and permanent self-disgust and it lasted on and off for over two years (though the first twelve months were by far the most intense). For a lot longer than I should have, I just screwed up constantly and almost everything I touched immediately turned to disaster. Anything I touched that didn t turn to disaster, I kicked hard until it did. I upset several orchards worth of apple carts. At Hot Press, I missed deadlines, flights, interviews regularly holding up production and really pissing off the design staff but, luckily, I never got sacked for my extreme unreliability. I did other stupid things. I arrived drunk and an hour late for a prestigious debate in Trinity College and arrogantly refused to apologise for it. I got much too high one night in Amsterdam and was mugged as a result nearly knifed in the red light district for acting like a dumb tourist. I got caught doing cocaine in the bathroom of a salubrious Dublin hotel one I d regularly frequent doing interviews and very nearly got barred for life. An influential RTE producer took me out to lunch and I arrived at the restaurant already obviously out-to-lunch on booze, and spent about two hours explaining to him the myriad reasons why he shouldn t give me any work.
My love life became like some kind of highly intense and ridiculously melodramatic soap opera only with an X-rated plot. I had a couple of unwise affairs: there was always someone out to kill me. Every new relationship I ricocheted into ended in disaster. I was looking for an instant replacement for Rachael and my obvious neediness quickly drove most women away. Anyone who reacted positively to my desperation, I d instantly dump because the truth was I wasn t ready for another real love affair. Only a couple of my relationships ended in friendship. Most ended, however, not because of neediness but because I was permanently out of my tits.
You re a complete fucking hypocrite! one brief conquest loudly informed me (and most of my neighbours), shortly before taking permanent leave of Planet Olaf. All your talk about legalising drugs and look at the fucking state of you! You re a complete mess from drugs! I calmly informed her that it wasn t drugs that were fucking me up. I was fucking me up. By choice. My choice. Besides, I reasoned, I wasn t really all that bad anyway. I knew lots of people who were much worse than me.
Unfortunately, I was lying on the bathroom floor at the time, my shirt covered in blood and vomit (as it happened, neither bodily fluid was mine but the story s too long and ugly to tell here and, seeing as she didn t believe me, you probably won t either). It was a tableau that somewhat lessened my credibility. You re killing yourself good luck! she snapped in unfond farewell, slamming the door hard on her way out. A lot of my relationships around that time ended that way with people slamming doors. Whenever anyone left, I d always use it as an excuse to drown my sorrows again. And whenever anyone stayed, I d drink, snort and generally try their patience until they d eventually had enough and leave.
It was a horrible, hopeless time. I hated myself. I hurt myself whenever I could. I wouldn t eat for days on end. Throwing up parts of my stomach lining every morning became part of my daily routine. When I stayed home I was sad and melancholic, when I went out I was bad and alcoholic. I staggered around the place, my judgement permanently impaired, fucking up everywhere I went. I think it was obvious to everyone around me that I was a mess but I kept rotating the shoulders I was crying on all the time and tried not to test anybody s patience beyond breaking point.
Sometimes there d be periods when I was relatively alright and together but, during certain strained stretches, my worried parents called me almost every single day trying everything from sympathy to screams to get me to pull myself together. My sisters called regularly too even Emma (who was now living in the States). At Hot Press, Mairin Sheehy and Mette Borgstrom both meted out tongue-lashings and sympathy in equal doses. People took me aside almost everywhere I went, for the proverbial quiet word. I basically ignored everything everyone said to me, though I did take a certain amount of comfort in the fact that they all cared enough to say it.
Thinking back on it all now, it just seems funny to me that I wallowed in self-pity for so long. What the hell was I thinking? Still, it wasn t funny then. It was the unhappiest period of my life. And probably of the lives of many of the people around me. Particularly my neighbours. When I eventually moved out of Harold s Cross in early 1999 having finally realised that staying in the apartment was constantly reminding me of Rachael and certainly not helping me get over things the look on the face of the woman from the residents committee was that of somebody who s just realised that they ve won the Lotto. You re leaving? she said, suddenly beaming like a lighthouse when she saw the boxes on the stairs. No, I replied, just clearing the flat out for a paint job. I m having a big party next week and I want the place to look well.
I d never liked her anyway and had no intention of making her day.

The Story Of O The Autobiography of An Irish Outlaw by Olaf Tyaransen is published by Hot Press Books and available from all good bookstores, price #9.99