Friday, August 30, 2013

Songs that She Sang in the Shower

Jason Isbell

And in the car
Headed home
She asked if I had considered the prospect of living alone

With a stake 
Held to my eye
I had to summon the confidence needed to hear her goodbye
And another brief chapter without any answers blew by

And the songs that she sang in the shower
Are stuck in my head
Like Bring Out The Dead
Breakfast In Bed

And experience robs me of hope
That she’ll make it back home
So I’m stuck on my own
I’m stuck on my own

In a room
By myself
Looks like I’m here with a guy that I judge worse than anyone else

So I pace
And I pray
And I repeat the mantra’s that might keep me clean for the day

And the songs that she sang in the shower all ring in my ear
Like Wish You Were Here
How I wish you were here.

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

On the Summer of '13 Slipping Away

I've been keeping myself busy with my books and with my tapes
Every day's been much better since I've slowed my drinking pace
There's no swimming in the bottle it's just some place we all drown
I lost myself in sorrow, lost my confidence in doubt

- Gin Blossoms


It's that time of year again. The dog days of summer have set in. The back to school supplies are in at the grocery store and the college football previews are making their rounds before autumnal tailgates. There's a rustling of autumn winds, carrying with it a whispering breath of departed revelry.

I think back now on the summer almost past. I graduated law school. I embarked upon the first real relationship since the one that devastated me two summers ago. I put the past behind me. I read some good books, but no great ones (possibly the Hemingway biography and Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel). I visited the schoolhouse in Canada and felt the cool waters of Lake Huron and the sandy beaches of Grand Bend, Ontario. I saw Back to the Future, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and The Goonies at the old Penn theater in downtown Plymouth. I went to the Toledo Zoo and Cedar Point in Ohio.  I was sober for virtually the entire summer, which is a long way away from where I was just a couple months prior. It was a good summer, but not a great one; not the '97 summer of innocence when the Wings won that first Cup, not the Indian summer in the Petoskey woods of '10, but also not the misery of last summer when memories past and whiskey hangovers haunted me.

I can't help but be nostalgic for the end of something. It's not just the end of summer for me. It's the end of something more. As a nine-to-five job awaits me in the Fall, it's the end of the hectic yet free lifestyle of a student. So I want to savor every moment of it. Make the best of it. The to-do list for the last couple weeks of summer:


  • Tigers game. Hard to believe this one hasn't happened yet this summer, but two games are on the menu for the next week: Wed v. Minnesota and Tues. v. Oakland. Watching Miguel Cabrera alone has been a reason to remember this summer.
  • Listen to a Tigers game on the radio in the backyard under the moonlight and with a bonfire. 
  • Hike to Newburgh Lake. I used to go here on Monday's last summer when I was hungover, oftentimes avoiding work. It feels like something I need to do, go back and retrieve those memories long gone.
  • Walk around Ann Arbor to all the places I lived during college. While depressed, I used to do this what felt like every Sunday while I lived in the apartment that I want to forget forever; it was by far the darkest period of my life. This is something else from my past, though, that I want to go back and retrieve, maybe change the way I remember those walks.
  • Wish my baby sister off to college, at Michigan State no less.
  • Get to Beaver Creek, the restaraunt my buddies and I have gone to over the summer, one last time. Though those dinners don't often seem like much, it's stuff like that you look back on and remember as the good times later on.
  • Michigan football: Michigan Stadium August, 31st.
  • Plymouth HS football v. Churchill, September, 13th. Friday Night Lights watching my cousin play to close out the summer.



Friday, August 9, 2013

Goose Loonies (Visions of Yzerman)

[Edit: updated as I've been editing the book]

SAWCHUK



1





March 24, 1988 – Joe Louis Arena, Detroit, Michigan.
Hartford Whalers 3, Detroit Red Wings 2.




My old man used to say that it was the only game he failed to watch during the 1987-88 Red Wings season. “It was the best game of the season, though,” he used to tell me on game nights after a few Labatt’s, “because it was the night you were born”. It was always through sports that he told me he loved me.

Ostensibly it was an unremarkable regular season loss, the box score and newspaper collections in the National Hockey League archives indicating that Hartford defeated the Red Wings 3-2 at Joe Louis Arena that night; it was a late season throwaway game, Detroit having already clinched the Norris Division. Soviet defector Petr Klima scored a goal for the Wings, bad boy Bob Probert notched an assist, the ever-scrappy Joey Kocur amassed a whopping twelve penalty minutes with his fists alone -- ten for fighting, and two for slashing -- and John Chabot, resembling a cast member of Dazed and Confused, tallied two assists in the loss.

What that box score couldn’t suggest was that, underneath the surface, the gears of fate were turning deep within the Motor City hockey machine. Objectively, as opposed to my father’s biased perspective, the best game of the season would have been the night the Wings clinched that Norris Division title, as it was Detroit’s first division title in twenty-three years. Along with the squeaky-clean Steve Yzerman, who had been named by new head coach Jacques Demers in 1986 training camp the youngest captain in Red Wings history, Petr Klima and Bob Probert -- both 1983 draft picks -- were pivotal cogs in the hockey revolution that brought Detroit out of the depths of “Dead Wings” era dormancy and into serious contention in the late eighties. In the process, however, the pair had also developed a reputation for themselves as hard-drinking troublemakers. Three years removed from Soviet Russia -- sporting a diamond earring and blond streaks in his hair to the chagrin of Demers -- Klima notched a career high 37 goals during the Norris Division-winning ‘87-88 campaign. Probert, fresh out of his third addiction treatment facility the previous offseason and now on antabuse, a prescription medication that induced vomiting in reaction to alcohol, made the All Star team en route to posting his own career highs that season with 29 goals and 33 assists. Jacques Demers, himself the son of an alcoholic, recognized the warning signs exhibited by both Klima and Probert early on. “When you start winning with a bunch of kids,” Demers recalled of coaching the wild young Wings of the eighties, “you start playing father and you start playing doctor. They were just troubled kids. We knew we were always in a [ticking] time bomb with a couple of those guys.”

A few weeks later, just after I had left the hospital – an incision stitched halfway across my belly, I was a hospital baby in my first couple months in this world – rumors of a scandal scorched the hockey world. On May 12, the morning after the Red Wings had been eliminated from the Western Conference Finals by the Edmonton Oilers for the second consecutive year, the sports world read the details of what would come to be known infamously in Detroit as the Goose Loonies incident in the sports pages of the morning papers, the press hot with the details of a late night drinking incident involving six Red Wings players. A young Mitch Albom, whose sports column I would grow up reading in the Detroit Free Press, detailed the night in a Free Press column titled “Wings Lost Much More than a Game”. Under normal circumstances, perhaps – it being the late eighties – it wouldn’t have merited news, but the six perpetrators happened to pull the stunt on the eve of the biggest Red Wings game of the season and perhaps even their biggest game of the nineteen eighties to date – an elimination game in the conference finals against the juggernaut Edmonton Oilers. It was more who than what, perhaps, too.

Two of the ringleaders turned out to be none other than Petr Klima and Bob Probert – the was recovering alcoholic; Probert later admitted he’d been swapping ibuprofen for his antabuse pills under his coaches’ noses. Other guilty parties included John Chabot, Joe Kocur, Darren Eliot, and Darren Veitch. The rumors were that Probert and Klima had organized an all-night drinking party at a downtown Edmonton establishment called “Goose Loonies.” The Red Wings fan base, starving for a winning team, took the Goose Loonies incident personally, feeling a few bad apples had jeopardized the franchise’s best shot at a Stanley Cup in years. It was a big story in the newspapers in Stanley Cup-deprived Detroit that summer, and Goose Loonies became a household name in my neighborhood in the following days, weeks, and months. Even now, twenty-seven years later, I still come across references to the infamous Goose Loonies incident in the sports section of the Detroit newspapers, usually around its anniversary.

The oft-troubled Probert must have lost control at some point earlier that season. No stranger to trouble with the law, Detroit’s notorious tough guy had famously cleaned up his act the previous offseason, and it seemed he had managed to pin down his demons for most of that 1987-88 regular season – that season featured Probert’s lone all star game appearance – but even one drink can be the unraveling of a recovering alcoholic. Red Wings assistant coach Colin Campbell incredulously found the hotel rooms of Klima and Probert empty at curfew check, put on his jacket, and went looking for the missing players in the city lights of downtown Edmonton. Enlisted to aid in the search was front office assistant Neil Smith, who recalled: “Probert had alcohol issues and Klima had a track record of running wild. So Colin and I went out to try and find them.”

Meanwhile Probert and gang were still sucking down Molson’s in the whiskey hours of the Alberta night, undoubtedly under the hazy spell of Canadian beer and Canadian women. What a buzzkill it must have been for the six of them, when, to their great infamy, assistant coach Colin Campbell showed up at Goose Loonies, a sardonic grin on his face as he imagined what head coach Jacques DeMers would have to say about his discovery. Six Red Wings caught red-handed.

“I waited outside and Colin went in and found not only Klima and Probert but four or five others,” Smith remembered of the fateful night. Detroit’s third goalie, Darren Eliot, who eventually became a Red Wings commentator for Fox Sports Detroit in the aughts, recalled: “Neil Smith and Colin Campbell were looking for Probert. In a hockey town like Edmonton, the word was out that Probert was on the streets and going crazy.”

A surely hungover Probert dressed in the following evening’s Game 5 against Edmonton anyways; the Wings couldn’t afford to sit him. He accumulated a tell-tale minus three rating in a lopsided 8-4 loss to that loaded Edmonton team. Wayne Gretzky, Canada’s soon to be departed Great One, scored a goal and added two assists for the hometown Oilers. Had it been a victory for Detroit, the details of the previous night might have fallen away into the great chasm of forgettable sports stories. But it was a loss, and a season-ending one at that. As such, the Goose Loonies incident would haunt the Red Wings for some time.

A la Shoeless Joe Jackson and Chicago’s “Black Sox,” the six perpetrators – Probert, Klima, Kocur, Eliot, Darren Veitch, and John Chabot – became forevermore associated with the scandal, the words “Goose Loonies” stitched permanently onto their jerseys like damning scarlet letters. The proverbial last straw broken, Red Wings then-coach Jacques DeMers stood shamefacedly at a podium in front of news cameras back at Joe Louis Arena and issued a heartfelt public apology to Detroit fans, calling the incident his “biggest disappointment since coming to Detroit.” Fighting back tears, DeMers apologized profusely, looking like a broken man. Captain Steve Yzerman later called it a “black cloud on the season”.

DeMers’ public apology, while dramatic, belied more volatile currents running through Detroit’s front offices. Behind closed curtains, Detroit’s management team discussed rehab facilities and treatment options for Probert while debating the termination of some of the other perpetrators’ contracts. The fault lines beneath Hockeytown were shifting. The turn of the decade fast-approaching, Detroit’s brain trust wanted to put an end to the “Dead Wings” era, for good.




Twenty-four years later, while vacationing in Ontario with some of the guys I grew up with, I read Probert’s tongue-in-cheek version of the Goose Loonies incident in his autobiography, Tough Guy: My Life on the Edge, over some breakfast beers. It was springtime, and we were visiting my lifelong friend Jim Racine’s schoolhouse cottage on Lake Huron for Game 4 of the OHL Championship in London, Ontario. The corn stalks planted in rows behind the schoolhouse had barely peaked out of the dormant earth, the North country air still crisp as morning dawned.

Hungover and jittery – unable to sleep – I retrieved my copy of Tough Guy from my duffel bag and tried not to wake my buddies as I snuck a handful of beer bottles out of the refrigerator. Although I drank in the morning all the time with my college buddies back in Ann Arbor, these were the guys I grew up with, and they were much less further gone than I was at the time. As the eldest of our friend group, a role model to those guys, I didn’t want them to catch me drinking so early in the morning.

The wood floorboards creeky in the morning chill, I slipped out of the front door, crept around back through the cool shadows of birch trees, found a chair on the deck, facing the cornstalk horizon, then uncapped my first beer bottle. Soggy playing cards, beer bottle caps, and various cans and bottles littered the glass table, relics of a debaucherous night. We had gone pretty hard the previous night – cracked our first beers in the car before we even pulled in – and, in the pale light of sunrise, I felt nostalgic for childhood summers at the school house for the first time since our arrival.

From 1898 through 1969 the property served as a school and boarding house in Hay Township, Ontario. The Racine’s grandfather, who died before I was born, bought it shortly after it closed publicly. He and Mrs. Ewasek, his wife and a Dearborn school teacher herself, used it as a summer house for decades, and my family joined Mrs. Ewasek and the Racines there two or three times per summer for most of my childhood. From the Bluewater Highway, where red pines bent from waves and wind lined the eastern shores of Lake Huron, it was a short drive north past the beach town of Grand Bend in a bucolic town called Saint Joseph Township, on Black Bush Line. Factoring customs at the Blue Water Bridge in Port Huron, it was about a four hour drive from Livonia -- Westland.

Maintained in its original layout and decor, with the outdated schoolmaster rules still nailed to the walls, the interior of the schoolhouse resembled an historical site. On the main floor, the front end featured a dining room table and chairs, a china and liquor cabinet, a kitchen and a modern bathroom addition, while, in the back, chalkboards still lined the back wall and a wood stove heated the interior in colder weather. There was a separate mudroom entrance at the front where the rope to the school bell dangled temptingly; we rang it as frequently as we had as children, its magnificent gong-like chimes echoing into the Ontario days and nights – we must have annoyed the neighboring farm houses to no end.

A metal spiral staircase with wood steps led upstairs to an overhead wood-floor balcony lined with bookshelves that held old classics and elementary school readers. An open doorway from the balcony led to the sleeping quarters, which included  a schoolmaster’s bedroom and a separate, open sleeping room with three beds, some end tables, and an old billiards table that squeaked with the floorboards. A wood ladder in the main boarding room led up to a small loft area that looked out of the crow’s nest window above the school bell tower, where I preferred to sleep when it was not inhabited by bats or bees.

Despite many family vacations with the Rivards and the Racines, who were more like aunts, uncles, and cousins in practice and in spirit than close family friends – trips to Hilton Head, Disney World, and Virginia Beach, where Mr. Rivard was stationed at a naval base – the school house remained my favorite vacation spot throughout my adolescent years and into the young adult ones. A relic of a forgotten time, its sepia photographs and science artifacts told stories of long-lost Canadian yesteryears, while outside, the cornstalks swayed breezily and the adjacent creek meandered lazily, as if at a slower pace of life. A trip to the school house offered more than a mere escape in destination; it was an escape to the past.

Two summers prior, Bob Probert had suffered a massive sudden heart attack on his boat on Lake St. Clair while boating with his children and in-laws. He was pronounced dead later that afternoon at Windsor Regional Hospital. Unreleased toxicology reports indicated that Probert was using large quantities of OxyContin daily, and in that sense, the loss of one of hockey’s greatest tough guys devastated the hockey world, if it didn’t surprise them. Probert died just a couple chapters shy of finishing his autobiography, and Helene St. James, a local hockey columnist who co-wrote the book, ironically had to ghost write the final pages of the book. Only two years had passed since his death, and the wound of his passing was reopened as I voraciously consumed his roller coaster of a life story.

As I discovered in the pages of that book and in subsequent research, the Goose Loonies incident was only the beginning of the downward spiral for Probert and others present at Goose Loonies that fateful night. In Tough Guy, Probert downplays his own role in the affair, then channels Jeff Spicoli in recalling the summer that followed: “after the Goose Loonies incident, the team was telling me I had to go into rehab again. I told them, ‘No way. I just got a boat and a new car and I’ve been in rehab three summers in a row!’” Just as nonchalantly he then describes how he and buddy Petr Klima began using cocaine that offseason. “In September 1988, Petr Klima and I got suspended. I’d been sent down to Adirondack and fined $200 a couple days before because we had missed a team bus and a flight from Chicago to Detroit for a game. Petr and I were at my house the night before, and we were supposed to report the next day by 11 A.M. We stayed up late, so we called up and postponed our flight. It was time to leave for the second one, but we postponed it again. We headed out to catch the [third one], but got held up at the titty bar near the airport. We finally got on the last plane, but didn’t get in until about 12:30 A.M., so the team left us a message on our phones, saying, ‘Don’t bother staying. You’re suspended.’” According to the team’s account, both Klima and Probert skipped practice before missing their flight to Glen Falls, New York, where they were supposed to report to the Adirondack Red Wings. At any rate, Probert soon landed back in rehab. Amidst pressure from the Red Wings, he entered treatment for the fourth time in October 1988.

The Goose Loonies incident must have seemed like small potatoes to him indeed when he was arrested a few months later, in March 1989, for attempting to smuggle more than fourteen grams of coke across the Windsor-Detroit border. Probert faced serious felony charges. To his credit, he served his time in federal prison and would find his way back onto the ice for Detroit -- later finding a successful career with the Chicago Black Hawks -- but his personal demons would forever be linked to his name, fairly or unfairly. It was hard not to speculate that his early demise was somehow loosely connected to that fateful night at Goose Loonies in 1988.

Petr Klima also struggled with alcohol after the Goose Loonies incident -- even in the absence of his sidekick. While Probert was at the Betty Ford Center in October of 1988, Royal Oak police arrested Klima for drunk driving after he backed his car into a parked vehicle outside of The Jukebox, a Royal Oak bar, a violation of his probation terms for a previous drunk driving violation. In late May of the following spring -- not to be outdone by Probert’s March cocaine bust -- Klima was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol again -- for the third time in two years, this time in Bloomfield Hills, and this time for the last time with Detroit; the Wings dealt him to Edmonton in a six-player deal later that summer. Between Edmonton, the minors, and several other NHL franchises, Klima would bounce around from team to team throughout the remainder of his career, even winning a Stanley Cup in 1993 with the Oilers – perhaps fitting that he won there – but he never quite lived up to the hype he generated during his first three seasons in the league with Detroit.

Steve Chiasson, a longtime Red Wings defenseman, never got caught at Goose Loonies, but later admitted to having been present there. Chiasson struggled mightily with alcohol abuse, too. In August of 1989, a little over a year after the Goose Loonies incident, Oakland County deputies busted Chiasson for driving under the influence of alcohol in Waterford Township; his blood alcohol content was .13. He played in Detroit through the 1994 season, then played with Calgary, Hartford, and Carolina. Following elimination at the hands of the Boston Bruins in the 1999 Stanley Cup Playoffs, Chiasson joined several Hurricanes teammates for an impromptu end-of-season bash. He died later that night after rolling his pickup truck in suburban North Carolina, a single-car drunk driving wreck.

Laying the book on the glass, leaf-printed deck table -- folded text down -- I grabbed my beer and gazed out at the cornfield stretched out below the schoolhouse deck, feeling the strange buzz of a liquid breakfast. Rolled out across the shell-pink horizon was Canadian farmland as far as the eye could see, the fields glowing golden under the early morning sun, hawks circling the fields from high above, blackbirds watching from the telephone wires. Probert and Klima’s struggles with cocaine and booze captivated me. I was reading a lot of books about the dark side of alcohol at the time, memoirs of battles with the bottle, probably on some subconscious level knowing that my own toe to toe battle with the bottle was looming right around the bend.

But all that was still in the stars.

Sunday, August 4, 2013

The Dark Side of Hemingway's Drinking



There is a fine line between hard-drinking and alcoholic. I should know. I spent the better part of the last decade flirting with that line, at times swaying into both camps. When it comes to pop culture, the hard-drinking writer is something of a folk hero, often a legendary figure of mythical proportions (see: Hunter S. Thompson, Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Bukowski, Hemingway). The hard-drinker is to be admired. Step over that fine line into the alcoholic territory, though, and you've suddenly found yourself in taboo waters.

The popular conception of Hemingway is that he was a hard-drinking, hard-living portrait of masculinity, surely a drinker to be admired. A quick google search will reveal a plethora of sites encouraging you to "Drink like Hemingway". Kenny Chesney even recently released an album entitled "Hemingway's Whiskey," glorifying the writer's life-long infatuation with the bottle.

In pop culture, it's not hard to see why the hard-drinking days of such writers are glorified. Scott Fitzgerald's most famous book? The Great Gatsby. Jack Kerouac? On the Road. Jack London? The Call of the Wild. The literary realm remembers the glory days of such writers, not the darker counterparts to the heroic drinking days. In the midst of the recent release of Gatsby the movie, most of American society would probably picture Fitzgerald a colorful, hard-partying figure of the roaring twenties. Lost in popular culture, however, is the fact that Scott Fitzgerald had such a problem with morning drinking - drinking away alcohol withdrawals from the night before - that Hemingway(!) of all people often cringed at his friend's embarassing public antics, to the point where Fitzgerald had to be avoided during some of the worst drinking spells. Few people know that Kerouac wrote perhaps the quintessential novel on delirium tremens - the final, dark stages of alcoholism - in Big Sur, or that Kerouac spent his finals years walking around his hometown in New England, bloated by alcohol, in a stupor that earned him town-wide pity. Fewer would probably know that Jack London wrote an account of his own alcoholism in John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs. As for Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson, these folk heroes are lauded as the testament to towing the line between hard-drinking and alcoholism successfully, perhaps the most laudable drinkers in literary pop culture. What we don't see is the final years of Thompson and Hemingway's drinking, when the ravages of liquor began to gnaw away at their brains and their livers, leading both ominously down a path of fate involving a shotgun and their own hands.

And this is unfortunate. I've always sought after the darker tales of battles with the bottle. Any hack writer can put heavy-drinking tales to paper, but it takes true literary genius to account for those harrowing dark days when you come face to face with the devil himself in the midst of delirium tremens, as Kerouac did in Big Sur, or to account for a losing battle with the bottle when you can't put down the mescal despite your best intentions, as Malcolm Lowry achieved in Under the Volcano.

I'm somewhat of a self-proclaimed Hemingway afficionado. The deeper I delve into the Hemingway catalogue, the deeper my primary critique of his work gets - that he was unable to ever account for his experiences with alcoholism. This summer I read one of Hemingway's final novels in Across the River and Into the Trees, which is in essence a retrospective piece on his life as he approached the half-century mark of his life. Given the retrospective quality of the novel, it had the potential to be a masterpiece of nostalgia and regret - and Hemingway indeed thought it would earn masterpiece status in the way that The Old Man and the Sea would turn out to be years later. From booze to war to lost love (three failed marriages at this point in his life), Hemingway had a breadth of life experiences from which he could have worked. Instead, we get tidbits of war flashbacks that do not come close to achieving the war-ravaged emotions of "Big Two-Hearted River". Unfortunately, this novel aims low rather than reaching for the stars. In part, I blame this on Hemingway's unwillingness to address the role of alcohol in his life, which he continuously refused to do in any honest way throughout the course of his life.

Hemingway deserves as much blame as pop culture for his image as a hard-drinking folk hero rather than an alcoholic, though. For as much as pop culture perpetuated the myth of Hemingway the hard-drinking, hard-living icon, Hemingway himself was never capable of recognizing his drinking for what it ultimately became: a dark problem. While Hemingway had no problem calling out Fitzgerald for his drinking and recognizing that for Fitzgerald, pouring out the liquor cabinet was essential, he had quite the problem admitting his own demons. This denial, of course, is one of the underlying symptoms of addiction.

I'm currently about 500 pages deep into the 600 page tell-all Hemingway biography, written by Carlos Baker. This means I am starting to get into the dark side of Hemingway's drinking years, when the act of drinking was no longer a social outlet amongst expatriates in Paris or a military coping mechanism amongst his comrades in arms. In reality, alcohol had destroyed a lot in his life. The latter two of his first three wives both left him in part due to his reluctance to accept a sense of domesticity, opting instead to retain the late-night drinking sprees of his twenties well after he had grown old. Moreover, Hemingway suffered a number of injuries from automobile acts resulting from drinking and driving, some leaving him with concussions that further inhibited his alcohol-deteriorated brain. Further revealing is the fact that, after being wounded in the first great war, Hemingway's nurses were perturbed to find hidden bottles of cognac stashed away in his hospital room. But perhaps most revealing is that, when suffering from kidney problems and told by doctors to abstain from drinking, and finally in his late years when family and friends pleaded with him to put down the bottle, Hemingway was either unwilling or unable to follow doctors' or friends' orders.

Whether or not Hemingway suffered from alcohol dependence - the crucial turning point in any story of alcoholism - is disputed. In his later years, Hemingway is said to have drank a quart of whiskey per day. Though he set rules for himself to try and limit his drinking, he often was unable to abstain from the elixir past lunchtime. Ultimately, the alcohol began to rot Hemingway's brain - as it has been wont to do for so many illustrious writers. Self-medicating with alcohol in his final years led to a deep-seated depression, climactically resulting in that tragic day with a shotgun in Ketchum, Idaho. Though he called his own father a coward for committing suicide, Ernest was unable to escape the same fate, the terrors of alcohol and depression weighing like a black cloud over his soul.

I don't mean to critique Hemingway for his drinking. Someone in my shoes is certainly in no place to do so. Rather, I can only lament that the tragic story of the dark side of the bottle never found its way into Hemingway's writing. As is evident from Kerouac's Big Sur and Lowry's Under the Volcano, these types of tragic tales can result in some truly meaningful literature. It's a tragedy in itself that we never got to see what the master of American literature could do with similar material. All that's left is the mistaken perception in popular culture of a hard-drinking, hard-living man, an entirely incomplete portrait of the legendary Hemingway, and the wonder of what could have been.