Drunkard isn’t mawkish. It isn’t false. It doesn’t try to charm its readers into forgiving the author’s flaws. Neil Steinberg expects us to like him no more than he likes himself, and based on the evidence of this book, that relationship blows hot and cold. Drunkard reminds me of something I once told an adolescent daughter: that growing up is learning how to pretend to be normal. Entering middle age, Steinberg’s still pretending, and he can be luminous and touching when he considers his techniques. He tells us of a piece of advice he has for one of his two young sons: “When a friend of Kent’s is coming over, Kent will often sit by the window, looking out and waiting. I try to tell him not to do that—people sense that eagerness in you and draw away.”
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Steinberg has been a Sun-Times columnist since 1996. I met him in 1992 while writing a column on his first book, which nominally dealt with cow tipping and other college pranks—though I offered in Hot Type that “in his own way he’s meditating on the century.” I stopped thinking we were friends seven years later, when out of the blue—or so it seemed to me—he responded to a column I’d just written on Brenda You, a former Tribune writer who’d gone on to work for Jerry Springer and pose for Playboy. (She’s since committed suicide.) In a letter to the editor that began, “Of all the miscalculated Michael Miner pieces I have read over the years . . . ,” he went on to opine that I “was just bedazzled by her gaunt porn star looks.” He might date the breach differently, perhaps from 1995, when I begged off on editing Bobwatch, the column about Bob Greene that he’d begun writing for the Reader under the name Ed Gold. That wasn’t a judgment on Bobwatch; it simply felt wrong for me to abet a subterfuge that a media columnist would normally be expected to reveal.
Steinberg’s predicament could support a novel, and in some respects Drunkard is written like one. It faithfully reports how the weather was and, as Hemingway also advised, it’s artfully reticent. Steinberg tells us just enough about being a drunk to assure us he is one, but he doesn’t wallow in his alcoholism. His writing is brisk and sober.
Edie isn’t the only significant woman in his story. Perhaps because of my weakness for gaunt porn-star types, I was drawn to one other, a petite young coke addict named “Leslie” who begins rehab the same day as Steinberg. “My higher power is myself,” she tells the group. The remark is catnip to Steinberg, who finds her “intense” and “genuine” and always seems to notice what she’s wearing. The day she’s in salmon pedal pushers and a green tank top she reveals herself to the group as a Jewish princess “twirling at Grateful Dead concerts” when she was 11, progressing to Ritalin, pot, and oral sex at 13, and eventually moving on to opium and Thailand. Later, after she became a chef in LA, “I lost my sense of self,” she says. “Before I knew it, cocaine was my best friend. . . . Cocaine took me to my knees.” Steinberg gets it when she says she’s “licked every bathroom in Los Angeles” for cocaine residue, though still ahead of him is the time he hits the vanilla bottle at home for the alcohol it contains.
How do people cope who can’t tell themselves, “One day I’ll write about this”? I don’t know, and Steinberg might wonder too. Surely he knows that year of sobriety was something his book needed as dearly as he did.
Neil SteinbergDutton, $24.95
