Granta - The Magazine of New Writing 74, Summer 2001 [antikvár]

Confessions of a Middle-Aged Ecstasy Eater o the reader. I hereby present you with a record, of sorts, of a remarkable period in my life. According to my application of it, I trust, as I likewise hope, that it may prove not merely interesting, but, to a considerable degree, useful and instructive. It is in that hope that I have troubled myself to draw it up, even as I feel compelled in advance to apologize for breaching that delicate and honourable reserve which, until quite recently—when certain publishers became aware that there was for the marketing of such breaching an apparently limitless audience, that is, one ripe to be r(e)aped—has restrained me from the public exposure of my own errors and infirmities. Which makes me no less reluctant to do so, for while there are many whom it would please loudly to dispute it—they do not know me well enough, or know all too well but that certain part of me— I am, at heart, an abashed man. Indeed so alive am I to the professional reproach and public humiliation that such exposure necessarily would arouse that I have for months resisted the prodding of certain parties to permit any part of my narrative to come before the public. And it is not without enormous anxiety, nor an absence of insomniac nights, that I have, at last, reached the decision to do so however constrained I am to remain anonymous in the doing. This is not, understand, owing to my self-accusation constituting a confession of guilt, any more than it does an expression of hubris. I feel no guilt, none at all. I know this to be true for I am as susceptible to guilt (and shame and self-loathing) as to self-aggrandizement, and in this instance I feel of either, as I do of both, neither tweak nor discernible twinge. As pertains to what follows, such feelings are utterly beside the point. That said, I am not, thank God, Thomas de Quincey (or Coleridge, Baudelaire, Cocteau, Huxley, Paul Bowles, Carlos Castenada, William Burroughs, Ken Kesey or Hunter S. Thompson, to name but the more usual of the usual suspects), and the irreparable harm that revealing my identity inevitably would inflict, not only upon my professional reputation but upon those whom I love and care deeply for, simply is not commensurate with the benefits liable to redound to me in so doing. Perhaps some day, one day when we all of us are more—what?—grown up? Grown up enough, at least, to be less hysterical and apocalyptic about the subject at hand. But