Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Heap would have told you, then, that he wasn't a drunk, he was a heavy social drinker whose drinking got out of hand, occasionally, but which he was generally in control of, and could regulate, or manage. Heap managed his alcohol jones, and thus was not an alcoholic. An alcoholic was someone who couldn't manage it. If Heap ever got to where he couldn't control his drinking, he would quit.

Heap didn't know, then, that (1) if you keep drinking you will reach that point, and (2) you won't recognize it, because you are in denial. John Barleycorn is doing your thinking for you. And he is cunning, baffling, and powerful.

Heap could identify with the things the men said, their outlook on life, their dark humor, their amusement at, and scorn of, earth people, as amateurs who played at drinking, who were poseurs, phonies, when you drank to the bottom of the bowl you joined a group of men--and women--who drank to the bottom of the bowl. You were of the elect. You had reverse pride. You were snobbish about your affliction. Anyone who didn't have it was somehow incomplete.

Men drank. Writers drank.

Writers associated with other people who drank. They shared the attitudes. They were initiates in a fellowship of the dysfunctional, a fraternity of the afflicted. Denial is a group-think product.

It's you and one other person, your reader, against the world. But your reader is imaginary, and a product of your own sick imagination. You have thought the reader up. In your own image. You are talking to yourself.

In the dark, to keep from being scared.

Heap wasn't like these men because they were at the end of the road, failures, in a downward spiral, a drift towards perdition. Heap had a bright future before him. He was going to be a college professor, then a writer.

He had graduated from college magna cum laude.

He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He was named an Outstanding Senior.

He had won an NDEA fellowship to Tulane. He was in an accelerated PhD program.

The world was his oyster. He believed the myth. He believed in bullshit.

As Claude Lévi-Strauss said, at the end of Elementary Structures of Kinship,

At either end of the earth and at both extremes of time, the Sumerian myth of the golden age and the Andaman myth of the future life correspond, the former placing the end of primitive happiness at a time when the confusion of languages made words into common property, the latter describing the bliss of the hereafter as a heaven where women will no longer be exchanged, i.e., removing to an equally unattainable past or future the joys, eternally denied to social man, of a world in which one might keep to oneself.

Malcolm Lowry kept to himself, in the cantina, looking at the light, come through the window. He marveled at it, like an oil slick on a mud puddle.