[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.To extend the life cycle of the tell-all drug memoir, it wasnecessary to invent new drugs or at least rediscover old ones:Benzedrine and heroin in the 1950s; LSD and mescaline in the 1960s.Inthe 1980s, the new drug was an old one. It was as if I suddenly inventedcocaine, McInerney said about the public reception of Bright Lights. Natives in South American mountain ranges had used coca leaves as astimulant since antiquity, but it wasn t until a maximum strength version was synthesized in 1855 that the rest of the world caught on.Chemists isolated the stimulating drug from the leaves and dubbed theresulting white powder cocaine. The European medical communityquickly recognized the drug s power, and it was prescribed as a safealternative to opium for conditions such as depression and pain.Unfortunately, enthusiastic doctors, such as psychologist Sigmund Freud,did not yet understand its addictive properties.Cocaine was included inall sorts of tonics, including, infamously, the original formulation ofCoca-Cola.Georgia druggist John Pemberton s first cocaine-containingconcoction, French Wine Coca, was advertised in 1885 as a delightfulremedy for all manner of diseases ranging from mental and physicalexhaustion to constipation.The ad copy expressly recommended FrenchWine Coca for people whose work required them to be sedentary for longperiods, such as clergymen, lawyers, and literary men. Pemberton removed cocaine from Coca-Cola in 1903 amid growingconcern over the drug s effects, and Congress banned cocaine in 1914.Itremained a popular drug throughout the twentieth century, though itsusage did not grow to epic proportions until the late 1970s and 1980s,when an influx of cocaine into the United States from Colombia.Cocainequickly became a status drug for those who could afford it.According to McInerney, cocaine was an elitist downtown thing inManhattan, the perfect drug for bright, shiny overachievers.It seemedharmless.It helped you stay up all night, and the next day, if you felt alittle comedown, it was a far more effective pick-me-up than a doubleespresso. Cocaine was so popular that 43 percent of all Manhattanarrestees tested positive for it in 1984.For a while, McInerney played into the press s hands, hitting up clubsand alluding to drug use in interviews. There was a point when I wascompeting against my books and my books were losing, he said. People were writing about me, and not my books. McInerney dated and married a string of heiresses and models. One of the hardest things toacquire is a persona, Norman Mailer once told McInerney, and you vegot one. The truth was, by the time Bright Lights, Big City was published,McInerney was several years removed from his drugged-out disco days inManhattan.Prior to graduate school at Syracuse, McInerney thought ofwriters as luminous madmen who drank too much and drove too fast andscattered brilliant pages along their doomed trajectories. Carver taughthim that writing was 90 percent perspiration.To write, You had tosurvive, find some quiet, and work hard every day.Carver saved me ayear of further experimentation with the idea that the road of excess leadsto the palace of wisdom.I d already done a fair amount of the destructivestuff. Unfortunately, the wheels had been set in motion.Jay McInerney was ahot commodity that publishers were eager to copy.In 1985, just one yearremoved from Bright Lights, Big City, a twenty-one-year-old writer wasalready being touted as the new Jay McInerney. That writer s name wasBret Easton Ellis (b.1964).Ellis had been working on a novel since he was sixteen, and his collegeprofessor (a writer, Joe McGinniss) immediately submitted themanuscript to his own agent after reading it.When Less Than Zero waspublished in 1985, Ellis was only twenty-one scarcely older than thedrugged-out rich kids he was writing about. It wasn t a documentary, butit seemed like one, McInerney said.Less Than Zero later became amovie starring Robert Downey Jr., who went club hopping with Ellis,further blurring the lines between fact and fiction.Ellis and McInerney became poster boys for the 1980s, part of ageneration that was growing up in the shadows of their parents rebellion.Prior to the release of Less Than Zero, Ellis was asked whether there wasany rebellion in his generation. No, he deadpanned. I m going to thisreally small liberal arts college which likes to think of itself as the last bastion of bohemia, but the two most popular places on this campus noware the computer room and the weight room. Regardless, he andMcInerney were lumped together by journalists as the toxic twins. They became fast friends, almost out of necessity.There were some critics who wondered whether Ellis would let themoney from his advances and the drugs, and the sex, and whatever elsethey imagined he was up to go to his head. He s in a good position tob e chewed up by the time he s twenty-three, an editor told the LosAngeles Times in 1986. It s hard to live up to this kind of early splash ina town that s always restless for the next hip novel. Ellis, a Los Angeles native, moved to New York after he graduatedfrom college.He had long been in love with the romanticized portrayal ofthe Big Apple in books and movies and saw it as the place a young writerhad to go to make his or her name.His second book, The Rules ofAttraction, wasn t the commercial success that his first book was, but histhird book would turn out to be his most controversial and talked-about.After the stock market crash of 1987, Newsweek declared the yuppieextinct
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]