Alcohol warms some people up and gives them a little glow; for others, it offers almost instant access to their inner troglodyte. Life is unfair this way.
Mark Judge started out as the first kind of drinker and quickly became the second. He realized while still in college, at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., that he had a problem. He got into Alcoholics Anonymous, found help and wrote a book about his experience called Wasted: Tales of a GenX Drunk (1997).
It is not even close to being a good book. This may explain why it was published not by a mainstream house but by Hazelden Publishing, an arm of the well-known addiction treatment center. Wasted received a short and dismissive notice (“naive,” “earnest,” “thin”) in The New York Times Book Review. It went out of print. It was mercifully forgotten.
Twenty-one years later, Wasted is perhaps the most in-demand out-of-print book in America. As I write, the only copy listed on Amazon can be had for $1,949.99. (The “.99” is oddly poignant.) Reader, I bought that copy. No, I didn’t. I am not unhinged. But I managed to acquire a PDF of the book and have read it through.
Wasted is back on the cultural radar because its author went to the same elite, private, all-male Catholic school, Georgetown Prep, as Brett Kavanaugh, who has been nominated to the Supreme Court by Donald J. Trump. More to the point, Judge has been said by Christine Blasey Ford, who attended a nearby private all-girls school, to have been in the room on the night in 1982 when Blasey says Kavanaugh attempted to sexually assault her during a high-school party. It’s an allegation Kavanaugh denies.
Who is telling the truth? Is Kavanaugh lying about not just this but other things, small and large? Not much hangs in the balance, except the future of the Supreme Court and very likely a decades-long change in the tenor of American life. (Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in as an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court last Saturday.—Ed.)
Judge has reportedly testified to the FBI about the night in question. That testimony will be more salient than anything that can be found in Wasted. But what does this book have to say about the milieu in which the author and Kavanaugh were raised, and about prevailing ideas of masculinity in the 1980s?
Wasted is the story of a privileged young white man, a cocky princeling among cocky princelings, who loses his virginity, loses his religion, loses his lunch and nearly loses his mind. These things happen to a cassette-powered soundtrack by AC/DC, The Clash, The Eurythmics, R.E.M. and The Replacements.
These were, by and large, my bands, too. Born in 1965, I am almost an exact contemporary of Judge and Kavanaugh. I attended a private Catholic grade school in Naples, Florida, and a public high school there. The kind of drinking described in this memoir is deeply familiar to me—the parties in interchangeable houses when parents were away, the milling in backyards, the lines of parked cars trailing for blocks.
My friends and I, like Judge and his, saw ourselves as part of a group we referred to as “Alcoholics Unanimous.” We responded to an emerging organization called Mothers Against Drunk Driving by proposing Drunks Against Mad Mothers. We were, not to put too fine a point on it, idiots.
By temperament—lucky for me, or maybe not, socially—I was not a jock or among the heavy drinkers. I hoped to be seen, to use a final, painful acronym that was popular at the time, one that is not in Judge’s book, and please kill me now, as a SNAG, or sensitive new-age guy. I failed at that, too; another reason to pull out the church keys, as we sometimes called beer openers.
We tend to judge memoirs of intoxication by how brightly the writer burns in the early parts of the story—the most memorable moments tend to occur as the moth’s wings have just begun to scorch.
This is because the sober endings, the meetings in brightly lit basements, are nearly always the same: uplifting for the author, less so for us. An exception to this rule is Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering, published this year, in which the writing gets stronger and stranger near the end.
Judge isn’t a skilled enough writer to evoke the complicated longings that alcohol can instill. At moments of intensity, he tends to lean on analogies from his favorite J.R.R. Tolkien book. (“I imagined myself as Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, carrying the evil ring through the forest”; “I was like Gollum”; “I feel like the hobbits after they were captured by the Orcs.”) A little of this, like Jägermeister, goes a long way.
It is widely assumed that Kavanaugh makes his one, now infamous, appearance on Page 59.
“Do you know Bart O’Kavanaugh?”
“Yeah. He’s around here somewhere.”
“I heard he puked in someone’s car the other night.”
“Yeah. He passed out on his way back from a party.”
Did Kavanaugh ever black out—that is, do things he was too drunk to remember? It’s impossible to say. But Judge recounts several of his own blackouts. He awoke from one at the Four Seasons hotel in Georgetown. About another, he writes, “I could have murdered somebody.”
They drank because their parents drank. They drank because, as Sylvia Plath wrote in The Bell Jar, “there is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.” They drank until their eyes were Xs, like in the comic strips, as have young people throughout history, because they often felt self-pitying and tragic.
That anyone cares about Wasted in 2018 is a reminder that America has debouched onto a strange field. And it leaves you wondering about the people who needed help and never sought it.