A particularly Murnau-esque image from Scorsese's film.

A lot of people don’t like Shutter Island. I get that. It’s excessive, lurid, and even those who’d argue the excess is part of the point will perhaps admit it does duty above and beyond in that respect. Mystery mavens will tell you the film’s plot is laughably obvious. It’s arguable that the film conjures up tropes of the atrocities of 20th century history far too glibly.

I praised the movie when it was released in February of 2010, but these days when it comes up on social media I don’t offer too full-throated a defense of the movie, if any at all. And if the movie comes up in conversation with friendly acquaintances, and one of them proclaims “Well that sucked,” or something along those lines, I just zip my mouth tight and shrug.

Almost all my adult life I had been a hard drinker. When my family moved from Dumont to Lake Hopatcong in the mid-‘70s, when I was between my sophomore and junior years in high school, I was terribly irritated to be consigned to the sticks, but I wound up doing well there. I was a social pariah in Dumont, something to do with my brash personality, but at Jefferson Township High School I found friends, quite a few of them, and many of them are friends to this day. There were social hierarchies there but they didn’t seem to be taken quite as seriously in the more cosmopolitan realms of Bergen County. The jocks and the self-described “band f*gs” kind of got along, and they drank together at a bar called Rudy’s that sat at the top of one of the mountains separating Hopatcong from Milton. It was there that I did not learn how to drink. I remember trying to do a “flaming shot” of Green Chartreuse and spilling it, pretty little flames dancing on the linoleum. The proprietors were pretty tolerant of that sort of thing. Of course they were serving sixteen-year-olds without even making a show of carding them.

In any event. Once I began writing for a living almost a decade later, I had your standard issue perspective on the position of alcohol in the life of a scribe. One friend would refer to what he considered my “interesting relationship” to spirits, which he did not take as alcoholism.

Whether I had been an actual alcoholic during the better part of the relationship is, at least from this perspective, neither here nor there. But the relationship took a decisive turn when I lost my office job (at the website spun off from Premiere magazine, a job I should not have accepted in the first place, but that is, again, neither here nor there) and was obliged, for the first time since the mid-1990s, to work as a freelancer.

This was in 2008. My ticket to Cannes was already bought, and I started the blog you are reading now. I got a lot of sympathy and not a lot of work. For the third time, neither here nor there in the larger scheme of things. I drank like more of a fish than I ever had, I got fatter than I’d ever been, I was invited to play a fat monster in a Steven Soderbergh movie.

Some time in 2009 it occurred to me that because I felt I had to have a lot of alcohol every single day, I might have a problem. This was pretty plain to my wife Claire as well. My routine was something like this: I’d get out of bed a little before noon. (My wife, on her way to her office job, would cheerily repeat a little mantra she’d formulated, reminding me to perform a few actions, including showering and putting on fresh clothing.) I’d do a little work. I’d wonder if I should go to Hanley’s for lunch. And whether, when there, I’d just have one drink. There was a pretty lively afternoon crew at Hanley’s, including a carpenter who had inexplicably cut off a part of his finger recently. The bartender was a goddess with the buy back. Some time after five, I’d ooze on back to my house, and try to arrange myself as if I had not spent the afternoon getting utterly hammered. It was kind of tedious for me, and really sad for my wife. I had long past burned my way through my Premiere severance and was in the process of obliterating our shared savings.

I tried some of them there "meetings." (I like how Paul Williams describes his sober path in the book Trust and Gratitude: “The path I took to get here is the oldest and best hope for any alcoholic of addict who seeks help.” He does not refer to it by name and I’m going to follow his example.) They did not work for me. I literally walked out of one muttering to myself that I was entirely entitled to my resentments. Claire asked me to go speak to a counselor at the New York office of Hazelden. We had an amiable chat. I told him that I did not care much for the chair of one of these meetings; I suspected that he ran the numbers game in our neighborhood (he didn’t). “So you’re concerned that he doesn’t walk the walk,” the Hazelden counselor asked with what I did not recognize at the time as exquisite sarcasm. “Exactly,” I said.

That was in the summer. I drank through the fall and the winter. I white-knuckled a week at my in-laws’ place. There was a bottle of Maker’s Mark in a cabinet under their microwave and I contrived to drain just a little of it for myself one day while everyone was out shopping or something. (The bottle is still there, and it’s at the same level I left it.) When we came home after New Year’s, I had given up all pretense. Every day when I woke up I immediately contrived to get my first drink. My most cherished time was Happy Hour at Blue Ruin, a still-extant dive (and I mean that in the nicest way) on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan. Two-for-one from four to eight. That’s a lot of Wild Turkey 100 Proof with a Stella pint for relatively little money. I’d sit in the bad lighting with a bunch of poor creepy guys like myself and play Stooges songs on the jukebox. And drink.

In late January Claire left town, to tour the country in a production of Gravity Radio, a music/theater piece by Mikel Rouse, who also was the primary performer. Claire was the newscaster whose stories, which she chose from the real news every day, punctuated Mikel’s “radio” songs.

The cat being away, I played. I don’t want to get too specific, and anyway, as the Rutles once sang, “Do I have to spell it out?”

I don’t even remember just what I was doing for work at that specific moment in time, but one of my clients was the MSNBC website, which ran all sorts of original editorial at the time, and paid okay for said editorial. My editor there called me up the morning of January 27. Would I be interested, he asked, in doing the video junket for the new Scorsese movie, Shutter Island? I would be interviewing Leonardo Di Caprio and Ben Kingsley, but not the director. This despite the fact that Scorsese was someone I’d interviewed not infrequently back when Premiere magazine was still a magazine. A magazine where I ruled the roost to the extent that once, two fact checkers quit because my boss wouldn’t fire me for yelling at them all the time.

I was not keen — I try not to appear on camera if I can help it, honest — but then Dave, for that was my editor’s name, said the labor paid five hundred dollars. That was good, because at the time of our conversation I had more or less no money. I had no substances. I had little alcohol: A can of Sapporo Premium Beer — one of those fluted 22 ounce jobs. So, you know, who cared who I interviewed, or didn’t interview?

After the phone call, I drained that fluted can and went about trying to make myself presentable. And coherent. The screening was on the early evening of the 28th, which was the next day, and the junket was on the morning of the 29th.

While I was an avid Scorsese person, I had not been following the making of the film; I had other things going on. So I went in relatively clean. And I was knocked this way and that for a while — a lot of the time it seemed that Scorsese was aiming for a high-toned variant of a Hammer film. Which was fine with me, provisionally.

Almost two hours into the movie, there’s a flashback involving the film’s central character, "Teddy Daniels", played by DiCaprio. It’s from a time when he was an officer of the law, married, with two children. At this point, unbeknownst to him, his wife, who’s severely depressed, has drowned those two children and has laid them out on the back lawn. It’s been shown that throughout his marriage Teddy has ignored, or at least been ignorant of, his wife’s mental illness. In the scene prior, Teddy has hallucinated a conversation with his wife and one of his dead children. Now, in the flashback, he is returning to a beautiful house of stone. “I’m back,” he bellows, seeing no one in the house and expecting that Dolores (Michelle Williams) will hear him outside. He takes off his jacket, folds it over his arm. “We got him just outside of Oklahoma.” He takes off his hat and puts that and the jacket on a chair. “We must have stopped ten places between here and Tulsa, I could sleep for a week.” He moves over to the kitchen sink.

Now the audience already is aware of what has happened to the children, and of the state Dolores is in. If you’ve been able to achieve any kind of emotional connection to the movie by this point, it weighs heavily.

Teddy opens a cabinet, pulls a bottle of whiskey out of it, says “Dolores?” and pours a not-all-that stiff belt into a glass. He downs it and shows his teeth, temporarily satisfied. It wasn’t that big of a drink. But it was something that he put in front of everything else. He looks behind him and yells “Dolores” again.

This was my white light moment. My moment of clarity. I do not exaggerate when I profess that it hit me like a thunderbolt. In an instant. This is me. And this is what is going to happen: I am going to lose my marriage (by destroying it) and I am going to lose my mind (by destroying it) and I am going to die.

I looked at my watch and did a little math. If I did not drink between now and six-thirty the next evening, I could go to one of those meetings and proclaim that I was an alcoholic, and I could ask for help.

The next day I got to the junket site early. It was the Hotel Parker Meridian and the junketeers were offered a stupendous breakfast buffet and I sure did appreciate it. I was herded into a waiting area to do my first interview, with Di Caprio. A journalist of my acquaintance noticed me with some surprise. You don’t usually do these kinds of things, he noticed. “Have you got a one-on-one with Scorsese?”

“No,” I said glumly. “Essentially I’m Tyrone Power near the end of Nightmare Alley.”

“I don’t know that movie,” he said.

That night, at the meeting, the guy I thought ran the numbers took one look at me, ashen in my overcoat, and said “Tis the season.” That was January 29, 2010. I haven’t had a drink since then. Thanks to everyone who helped.