Visions of Yzerman

"It's an adolescent representation, and when a person delves into his subconscious all the symbols from adolescence return. . .

Medical science knows next to nothing about it. It's disappointing to read the books that mention delirium tremens; they explain patients' physical disorders but turn their backs on interpreting the images. To this point, it has been a disorder for psychiatrists. I learned that a man died during an attack because of muscle contractions. You see? We don't know what he was seeing or hearing. Nevertheless, no medication can stop that flow of images or voices, and sometimes even odors, that place the patient squarely into hell. Well, there is one, as you probably know, but a drink condemns the patient to more delirium. It's a vicious circle in which the illness is the remedy. . .

The images of delirium are like a pump that purges guilt. The experience is so profound that afterwards the alcoholic understands things he didn't understand before and can therefore change his life. Maybe it isn't too different from what happens, in another way, to those who try LSD. The vision transforms, seemingly with no remedy. Things that make up part of daily life -- love, hate, sex, fear -- are experienced during delirium tremens and go beyond their usual limits."

"With his hypersensitivity, I could imagine the deep depressions he must have had when he was drinking."

Ignacio Solares

Delirium Tremens

The rain acted as a catalyst in the stew of the Rouge, making the river steam like a potion; it emanated a foul, trash-like smell throughout the woods that smelled distinctly of childhood. The potholes on the dirt road puddled with mud. I found my truck in the spot underneath a hanging branch where I left it, climbed in, and hunkered down in the storm with the radio on, taking a swig of my blue liqueur.

An hour later, when the rain let up, I found myself wandering the trails near my cousin Frank’s old house -- namely the trails to and from the old sandlot baseball diamond where we'd spent every waking hour as teens. I explored mini-trails I’d never known before. The bottom ends of my jeans were browned from mud, adding to an already disheveled general appearance, and for that reason I prayed I didn’t run into a jogger, or worse, another crazy hermit. I went to the stone bridge over the Rouge River behind Frank’s old house. The Rouge there had flooded from the rains, pooling up to form a bubbling brown pond on one end of the bridge. It was the spot where we’d played truth or dare with Dawn and Jenny, public school girls from Frankie’s neighborhood, and I was lost in drunken nostalgia when something moved out of the corner of my eye. It was a coyote sitting in mud in the swampy underbrush -- I was sure of it. It stared back at me with yellow glowing eyes, a look of empathetic pity in its gaze, and, although it showed no signs of aggression, I scampered back towards my car in terror. When I got to my truck, it occurred to me that the coyote might well have been a hallucination, a symptom of my worsening withdrawal, but I felt certain it had been real. Either way, the encounter spurred me into action; I needed fresh beer to keep the withdrawals at bay.

Ch. 29

Liam Brady

"Just seven months after losing Liam to Inter Milan I lost my girlfriend to another man, slap-bang in the middle of the first dismal post-Brady season. And though I knew which loss hurt the most -- Liam's transfer induced regret and sadness, but not, thankfully, the insomnia and nausea and impossible, inconsolable bitterness of a twenty-three-year-old broken heart -- I think that in some strange way she and Liam got muddled up in my mind. The two of them, Brady and the Lost Girl, haunted me for a long time, five or six years, maybe, so in a way it was predictable that one ghost should melt into the other. After Brady had gone Arsenal tried out a string of midfield players, some of them competent, some not, all of them doomed by the fact that they weren't the person they were trying to replace: between 1980 and 1986 Talbot, Rix, Hollins, Price, Gatting, Peter Nicholas, Robson, Petrovic, Charlie Nicholas, Davis, Williams and even centre-forward Paul Mariner all played in central midfield.

And I had a string of relationships over the next four or five years, some serious, some not. . . the parallels were endless. Brady's often-rumoured return began to take on a shamanistic quality. I knew, of course, that the bouts of vicious, exhausting depression that afflicted me in the early-to-mid eighties were not caused either by Brady or the Lost Girl. They were to do with something else, something much more difficult to comprehend, and something that must have been in me for much longer than either of these two blameless people. But during these terrifying downs, I would think back to times when I had last felt happy, fulfilled, energetic, optimistic; and she and Brady were a part of those times. They weren't entirely responsible for them, but there were very much there during them, and that was enough to turn these two love affairs into the twin supporting pillars of a different, enchanted age."

Nick Hornby

Fever Pitch

Highbury

"There is a short story by the American writer Andre Dubus entitled 'The Winter Father', about a man whose divorce has separated him from his two children. In the winter his relationship with them is tetchy and strained: they move from afternoon jazz club to cinema to restaurant, and stare at each other. But in the summer, when they can go to the beach, they get on fine. 'The long beach and the sea were their lawn; the blanket their home; the ice chest and thermos their kitchen. They lived as a family again.' Sitcoms and films have long recognised this terrible tyranny of place, and depict men traipsing round parks with fractious kids and a frisbee. But 'The Winter Father' means a lot to me because it goes further than that: it manages to isolate what is valuable in the relationship between parents and children, and explains simply and precisely why the zoo trips are doomed.

In this country, as far as I know, Bridlington and Minehead are unable to provide the same kind of liberation as the New England beaches in Dubus's story; but my father and I were about to come up with the perfect English equivalent. Saturday afternoons in north London gave us a context in which we could be together. We could talk when we wanted, the football gave us something to talk about (and anyway the silences weren't oppressive), and the days had a structure, a routine. The Arsenal pitch was to be our lawn (and, being an English lawn, we would usually peer at it mournfully through driving rain); the Gunners' Fish Bar on Blackstock Road our kitchen; and the West Stand our home. It was a wonderful set-up, and changed our lives just when they needed changing most, but it was also exclusive: Dad and my sister never really found anywhere to live it all."

Nick Hornby

Fever Pitch