Tim MacGabhann: "I was never very good at maths, but I was good at a particular calculus – low effort, low energy expenditure, and a high yield of getting buckled"

Having previously published the novels Call Him Mine and How To Be Nowhere – both which drew on his experiences reporting on the Mexican drug wars – Irish author Tim MacGabhann has now published a hugely powerful memoir, The Black Pool.

The book chronicles how he struggled with anxiety throughout his upbringing in Kilkenny and student years at Trinity, with his attempts at dealing with his condition through drugs eventually giving way to addiction and heroin use.

It’s a fascinating story – but what prompted him to write the book?

“I was trying to write this stuff as fiction, but it was really not working at all,” reflects Tim, speaking from Normandy, where he’s on a short break from his usual base in Paris. “So I was advised by Brendan Barrington at The Dublin Review to just strip away the artifice and get to a first person voice.

“One touchstone was Colm Tóibín's essay in the London Review Of Books about his illness. It was totally deadpan, reporter-ese kind of writing. That can be so stingingly funny if you do it right, so I was destined to get into that. There’s another writer I really like, Donald Antrim, whom I’m actually just revisiting this week.

“He has the same thing – if you can tell something plainly enough, with enough topspin on it, you can make anything at once grotesque and moving. There’s a short story, ‘Another Manhattan’, which is about toting a $600 bouquet of roses through the street while he’s having a fucking breakdown. I was definitely trying to go for some of that comic tone.”

How did he find the experience of writing about his addiction?

“It wasn’t as hard as you might imagine,” says Tim. “I tend to go to meetings still, which isn’t a secret – I mention my first meeting in the book. I talk about it a few times a week with people, so it’s not so hard in that respect. Also, if you have a tight five or ten minutes, you can try it out, and it might become a tight two minutes – so you can rehearse your stories there, I guess.

“What was difficult was how I can still remember all of it. I was hoping I’d have it all forgotten. It’s like, ‘Oh fuck’ – it still bothers you, even though you’re no longer interested in converting it into art or something. I guess that is the sort of deeper release. Some things are too much of a pain in the arse for catharsis to come about.”

He considers the subject further.

“What I did hope was that I might exhaust my own interest in trying to revisit the material,” he continues. “I’d tried to revisit it in fiction, but had failed. So to have failed – or failed less – in non-fiction, it would be like, ‘Okay, this is as much as I ever had to say about this.’

“But every now and again, I’ll be on a cliff walk through Normandy – like I have been today – and I’ll just start groaning silently to myself about how it’s still there. But it’s fine! (laughs) That’s just how it is. I mean, I could still be doing the stuff.”

Certainly, as he details his experiences with anxiety in the book, drugs seemed to act as a kind of escape.

“Yeah, I think so,” nods Tim. “Additionally, if there’s distress you can’t control, then at least there’s a distress you can control. It made stressful stuff happen, but at least it was my fault. When you’re in recovery, the emphasis tends to be on surrender, and giving yourself over to the care of something greater than yourself – rather than the control of something greater than yourself.

“Whereas when you’re using, it’s all about, ‘Can I control this feeling? Can I make this feeling go away – and can I make this other feeling last, or be better? Can I make happiness happier? Or sadness sadder?’ And then in recovery, it’s like, ‘Well, I can’t control this, it’s just what’s happening.’

PARTICULAR CALCULUS

“Something in the way of things – not a god necessarily, but the shape of something larger than you – is working through it, and nothing necessarily bad is gonna happen. So a group of drunks is pretty helpful for that, and the great outdoors as well.”

I wonder if the artistic association with heroin, with various writers and musicians having also been noted users, also gave it a kind of outlaw appeal.

“It was more, ‘How buckled can I get?’” replies Tim, candidly. “I was aware of all that precedent, but the thing about me is I’m tremendously arrogant. So I was like, ‘It’ll be fine for me – the way it wasn’t for people who were way more talented and powerful.’ I was very young and stupid, and to be fair, it’d be easy to exaggerate how far into it I got. Cos I’m a coward fundamentally, and additionally, very lazy.

“I have a friend I talk to a lot about this. And we’re both like, ‘We just did the things that were easiest to get.’ It was about getting to that kind of nowhere as efficiently as you can. I was never very good at maths, but I was good at a particular calculus – low effort, low energy expenditure, and a high yield of getting buckled.”

Having started his writing career in Ireland, including contributions to Hot Press, Tim eventually moved to Mexico and began reporting on the drug wars. Reading The Black Pool, he seemed to crave a certain kind of adventure in his life.

“I’d always dreamed of going there, cos we have family who are Mexican-Irish,” he explains. “It never felt terribly exotic to me. They live in LA, but they’re Chicano and Irish. So it just felt like I was continuing the trend – you turn left at Greenland and keep turning left. I wasn’t very good at anything but writing – and I’m not even that good at it! – so I thought, ‘Fuck it, I’ll sell articles.’

“I was writing book reviews and travel bits, and it sort of took off. I’d been doing English teaching, which I wasn’t much good at. I found standing in front of a class a lot more stressful than, for example, going somewhere, looking at stuff, hanging out with people and making notes.

“I’d been doing that for a very long time and it just felt less frightening. And when it comes to the adventure part, I didn’t really want to have a cushy, ex-pat type existence. One, because I was broke and I couldn’t, but two, it felt reprehensible to me. I didn’t want to take advantage – I wanted to integrate and contribute.”

He now has a somewhat revised take.

“At this point, I think bearing witness is another way of being a passive bystander,” says Tim. “I was really young and I can exaggerate the extent to which that was a contribution, but at the time, I did just want to get stuck in and help out, if I could.”

EXPLODED VIEW

Reading about the Mexican drug cartels, they are notable for their brutality, with routine acts of violence.

“It was very scary,” Tim acknowledges. “I suppose it just changed the way I look at people forever. Not in a good way, though – it makes you realise how vulnerable we are, and how fragile the human body is. Also – and I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a Buddhist scripture – it makes you realise how complex the body is.

“How much of a miracle it is that you take a breath, and it goes out, and a minute later another one goes in again. That’s wild. And then you see how inhuman most of the substance of the body is. Bones are like minerals, and there are metals and iron. I guess I just had this exploded view of the human afterwards, which made me feel the experience of existence in a very overwhelming way.

“But also, when you come back from that feeling, you try to at least be a bit gentler to everyone, because you see how easily damaged we all are.”

The Black Pool: A Memoir Of Forgetting is out now.