I touched bottom, as alcoholics like to say, on February 12 1983 (the date is slightly fuzzy). I had just taken up a position as professor of literature at the California Institute of Technology. Caltech, as it is popularly known, is a small, excessively well-endowed science institution in Pasadena. Pasadena itself is a small, genteel western town, seven minutes away, by freeway, from downtown Los Angeles. LA is neither small nor genteel.

The Caltech job was, in career terms, one of those lucky breaks of which you can normally expect two or three in a professional lifetime. Playing such opportunities right is the big challenge of the academic career. It's not easy. You generally have two options: you can move, or you can use the "offer" as leverage to feather your present nest. Or you can play games - moving from counter-offer to counter-offer or taking yourself, as a "property", to a third potential employer.

The right call is rarely easy. In the early 1980s there were, however, circumstantial factors pushing me away from my home country; what in chess is called a forced move. The decade had ushered in a dark age for seats of British learning - the darkest since the dissolution of the monasteries, as we muttered in our gloomy common rooms. Keith Joseph's punitive regime of "cut and freeze" had just taken hold. The Tories had hated the university sector ever since turbulent students (reds, all of them) pelted their party's MPs with eggs and obscenities at campuses in the 1960s. Oxford's refusal of an honorary degree for Mrs Thatcher in 1985 and 1987 sealed their enmity.

This was payback time. In the name of "efficiency" (as if this abstract commodity was what universities produced, not research and education) the Department of Education and Science, as it was then called, embarked on a purge of Stalinist ferocity. A whole generation of middlingly senior academics was sent into what was euphemistically called "early retirement" in the name of "systems re-engineering" in the higher-education sector. Colleagues were decanted by the dozen into their premature sunset years. You could hardly teach for the sound of falling timber - "dead wood", as the authorities liked to call it - as they lustily hacked away at the tree of British higher learning.

I was 45 - mid-life-crisis years. I was a decade too young for the chop. My wood was still sappy enough. But neither was I young or flexible enough to ride the changes with the sense of infinite growing time ahead. I did not, as George Eliot puts it, have my "35 years ahead of me".

Caltech's offer to me in the first instance was a one-year "visiting" appointment. It would enable us to look each other over. If we liked what we saw, it was on. One could see it as a kind of trial marriage.

My other marriage was meanwhile going to hell. My drinking had been dangerously excessive for some years. It was now spinning out of control - though usually in the form of out-of-hours, weekend or vacation binges (what, for normal married men, would be "time with the family"). At my loved ones' bruised insistence (blackmail!) I had been seen at the Maudsley hospital, armed with a letter of introduction from a senior physician friend (I was no common-or-garden drunk, for God's sake). The letter cut no ice.

After a brief consultation with the registrar (a famous name in British alcohol studies, who was then touting a "controlled drinking" field experiment), I was referred to one of his juniors. He turned out to be the nicest psychiatrist I have ever met. But his prescription was drastic. I must give up drinking altogether, he ordained.

A fortnightly one-on-one meeting (which meant hours in the ghoulish waiting room for 40 minutes' counselling) would keep me to this regime. The theory was that, if I could stay off the booze for 18 months, the "prognosis" was good for permanent recovery. This was what the unit's research was currently telling them. Perhaps they were right. I never made it to the finishing line.

I manfully went on a year's white-knuckle "dry drunk", as AA jargon puts it. This was 1980. It didn't last. The nice psychiatrist moved on (the good ones always do; like academics, they get "offers"). He was replaced by a doctor who, however knowledgeable, seemed much more neurotic than I was. And he manifestly didn't like me. I felt like a specimen. A cockroach-and-entomologist relationship, as it seemed to me. Gregor Samsa and his shrink.

My dry spell did not last. It corroded gradually, like an old dam giving way under the pressure of that vast lake of booze on the other side. I would manage six weeks (a painfully long period for an abstaining alcoholic) before jumping out of the groove - usually for an explosively brief bout, but long enough to smash things up. Remorse would get me back on the wagon - but for a shorter period than the last. By January 1983, when I went off to California, I was on the terrible merry-go-round of what AA calls "periodics". I would be sober for weeks, sodden-drunk for days, bitterly remorseful for hours, and sober again.

So the wheel turned. This is a peculiarly destructive phase of drinking, physically, and socially. Having lapsed, one drinks to madly toxic levels - making up for lost time, suffused with guilt and apprehensive of the dry, remorseful weeks to come before the next glorious release. The gross drunkenness shatters the trust others put in you. Usually after the third or fourth such lapse they give up on you. I was well past that threshold. The carousel was speeding up, like the climax of Strangers on a Train.

Professionally, I would still be classified as a "high functioning" alcoholic. I could do my job. There were occasional disasters: drunkenly slurred lectures (à la Lucky Jim), student complaints about late return of essays (à la Butley), missed meetings, insulted colleagues, dinner-party disasters (some of which can still make me groan out loud today). But I could just about cope at work. I was experienced enough, after 20 years, to fly on automatic pilot, winging it, as they say. It helped greatly that in academic life you largely devise your own schedule. Cannily (as I thought - alcoholics love to think of themselves as smart operators), I ensured that the bulk of my lectures, tutorials and seminars were in the hungover but clear-headed morning - before the dangerous fog of the lunch session descended on the world. If I had something important to write (a piece for the London Review of Books, say), I could stay sober.

My head of department at University College London, Karl Miller (he was also, fortuitously, editor of the LRB), came from journalism (and, further back, from Scotland). He knew all about drunks and was infinitely patient. Domestically, it was something else. One of the problems about problem drinking is that you tend to be at your drunkest and least civilised at night - when, that is, you go home. If your family is still around, "scenes" are inevitable. Few women nowadays wield the cartoonist's rolling-pin, or throw crockery at their drunken spouse's head. But their long-brewed disapproval scalds the alcoholic (who will already be feeling remorse, probably) like molten lead. By the time you get back, the little woman has her script rehearsed to perfection.

What defence do you have? None. Guilt makes the drunk quarrelsome and few alcoholics - when drunk and quarrelsome - are not violent, verbally and physically. Anger is, late in the game, exacerbated by sexual paranoia (the alcoholic's impotence translates into jealousy of Othello-like intensity). And, of course, there is the sheer nastiness of the Edward Hyde everyone has inside them. Edward thrives on booze.

Keeping the Sutherland show on the road was not easy. My wife every so often walked out with our young son. She was, after 15 years with me, something of a co-alcoholic, an "enabler" (as the AA lexicon puts it). But she had her pride. She had, I knew, seen a solicitor.

It was a mess. Alcohol didn't make things simpler, but it blurred them temporarily into invisibility. Leaving the country for a new start in southern California was a heaven-sent "geographical" cure. More so, since the Caltech offer was so munificent and, thanks to the tax amnesty, all net income. I could be ostentatiously generous - something that drunks love to be (it allays their sense of guilt at drinking up the housekeeping money for all those years). I could, assuming I could find time and energy to live them, afford several lives.

Caltech was easy street. Teaching was minimal (six hours a week, 20 weeks a year, small classes); the students were clever, well mannered and intellectually docile (all they really wanted was to preserve their perfect 4.0 GPA - grade-point average). And there were no administrative chores. Who knew, I might even get round to doing some research at the nearby Huntington Library. ("If I died and went to heaven," a colleague once told me, "it would be like having an eternity fellowship at the Huntington.") If all else failed, there was always Disneyland.

I left the UK in high spirits and arrived in the US for New Year. My wife, working with a prestigious London publisher, was not inclined to accompany me. The bonds holding us together were frayed to breaking point. If it was a trial marriage with Caltech, it was a trial divorce with her. There was an unspoken agreement that if I cleaned up, things might mend. But, for the moment, I was free as air.

I got a small apartment near campus, ingratiated myself by day - and promptly disgraced myself at night by getting drunk and boorish at various welcoming functions. It wasn't misjudgment: more like taking deliberate aim and shooting yourself in the foot.

It is a peculiarity of alcoholics that, when things go well, they sabotage themselves. This death wish is often pondered at AA meetings. My personal view is that drunks do not want the responsibility of a successful life. It involves too many decisions and too much stress. "Keep it simple" is truly the drunk's motto. Nothing simpler than disaster. Smash the crockery and you never have to wash it up.

Another favourite explanation is that by misbehaving, drunks are confirming to themselves that, however extreme their misbehaviour, someone will always be there to look after them. They want to regress to that childhood condition where they can soil their nappy and still be loved ("Who's a bad boy, then?"). Who knows? But I realised quite early on that in America there were no safety nets.

In the UK, however obnoxious I was, I had some credit with those whose patience I regularly tested to destruction and beyond. I was tolerated, even at my worst. I might be a drunken son of a bitch, but I was their son of a bitch. People felt responsible for me; some even owed me for favours done while sober. There was always a wagon to climb back on. In America, there was nothing: just disgrace, freefall and a one-way ticket to Skid Row, the closed ward, or the mortuary. The absence of a net underneath me added a cutting edge of riskiness to my drinking, nudging me over the brink on which I had been teetering for years. I felt, excitingly, that I was dicing with ruin (and, beyond that, the noseless one). I felt "bad"; homo MalcolmLowriensis, living under my personal volcano. Looking back, I see it as the delusion of grandeur which is common with the terminal alcoholic - nothing existential, just another telltale symptom.

There were pressing difficulties of a humbler nature. Oddly, finding somewhere to drink convivially was one of them. Pasadena is a ribbon, stretched out on the five-mile length of Colorado Boulevard (the same route that the Rose Parade takes every New Year's Day; I watched this grotesque festival in 1983, in blinding sunshine, with a thumping head and a parched throat). The whole of LA County is constructed for the automobile (and before that, the horse; and before that, the lizard).

One of the problems for a pedestrian drinker like myself was that there were no bars within walking distance. I had, as yet, no car. A new colleague had sold me an English Raleigh, a young fogey's bicycle, complete with handlebar basket. If I wanted to drink, I would have to pedal for it. Or, as a last resort, drink in my apartment. I longed for London's ubiquitous pubs.

The only drinking I could find within cycling distance (at least, cycling-back distance) was, as it turned out, Pasadena's sole gay bar. It had the unlovely name Nardi's (half naff, half sordid, as I merrily thought). It was not what I would have chosen, but that was how the chips fell. On the any-port-in-a-storm principle, I adopted Nardi's as my local. Drinking went on till 2am, the legal closing time in California. Thereafter, a hardcore of survivors would adjourn to someone's apartment.

I had never explored gay sex. But it was the only thing on offer at Nardi's. And, in a way, it seemed to fit in with my current Baudelairean sense of self. A new, dangerous road to explore. In fact, it turned out to be baffling rather than adventurous. After one heavy night I awoke from blackout to find myself slumbering alongside an African-American whose name, I dimly remembered, was Richard. We were both partly undressed. My hand brushed against his penis (accidentally, as I trust), and felt nothing there (I'm fairly sure this was not an hallucination). His Johnson had been cut off, amputated. Perhaps it was a preliminary to a sex-change operation.

It was just as well things went no further. Aids was reaching epidemic levels in southern California, although, in 1983, no one was entirely clear as to what the new disease was. I would almost certainly have contracted the virus had I carried on as I was then doing for a a night or two more.

It was the morning of February 11 1983. I had a monster hangover. The phone rang: it was Richard's parole officer phoning up to make sure he was home and not violating his curfew. (What, I vaguely wondered, had he been in for? Penis chopping?) I made my ultra-English excuses and left. I emerged into blinding early-morning sunlight among the palms and skuzzy bungalows of western Altadena - Rodney King territory, as it became known eight years later. If Officer Koon had been going at me all night with his mighty Kevlar truncheon I could not have felt more bruised.

This, as I walked down the interminable miles of Marengo Avenue, was the end of my night and the morning of clarity. Was this what it had come to? All that grind, the degrees, the books read and the books written? Holding the penile stump of someone I barely knew, in a godforsaken California ghetto in a sun-baked country where I didn't belong?

I would have one more drink: the final test. Me versus my alcoholic destiny. It would be no half-hearted affair. I bought two bottles of cheap California champagne and a large, two-quart flagon of Gallo's even cheaper chardonnay (as back-up, when the fizz ran out and one's palate had lost its discriminating edge: the alcoholic mind at work). This last stash was taken back in the basket of my Raleigh and consumed - gulped - in my apartment. I can taste the saccharin-acrid Gallo's now. I was, finally, a wino. End of the line, Ma.

Of course, my tolerance was shot. I needed a lot less than I had bought to do the trick. But, somehow, I finished it all off (never let it be said a Sutherland left an empty flagon). I blacked out early. When I came to, all the furniture had been rearranged. I never did find out which fairies had done it.

I awoke to a different world. The sun had gone in.

For ever, as it seemed. Southern California was now experiencing record-breaking rains (some damned weather record is always being broken over there). The Queen of England, no less, was visiting a west coast sodden all the way from Vancouver to Baja California. Storm systems were backed up like a Venetian blind, all the way to Japan, waiting to sweep in and dump their load on me and my monarch.

Pacific storms are different from Britain's "soote shoures". They are made up of heavy drops, widely spaced. It is, somehow, a harder rain and can deposit up to three inches a day (a third of the annual rainfall in a dry year). The downpour triggers mudslides. Less dramatically, but more dangerously, the patina of tyre-rubber and grease on the freeways, baked for months on end by the desert sun, is moistened into pure slick. Withered windscreen-wipers peel and smear. People get nervous and short-tempered. In short, the Golden State turns and looks ugly when it rains. Apocalyptically so. The great flood, they say, will be more destructive than the great earthquake, "the big one".

Alcoholics are always on the lookout for their "objective correlative" (as TS Eliot called it). My internal works were as turbulent as the end-of-the-world weather.

I emerged from my bout with the Gallo brothers in the grip of agonising withdrawal. Uneven heartbeat, panic attacks, dislocation of time (minutes became hours; days passed as eye-blinks before I could even pretend to do any work). I was sweaty and chilled at the same time. I was hearing voices, experiencing visual phenomena (jagged zigzags of light out of the corner of my eyes), afflicted by paranoid persecution fantasy in public places (Why were people looking at me that way? Did they know?); ravenous, nauseous, anorexic by turns.

It is a state of mind in which banal events take on the portentousness of symbol or prophetic sign. I walked, pelted with rain, past the local supermarket, Louis Foods, and saw genteel senior citizens, as they always did in the morning, rooting in the skips ("dumpster diving") for the perishables that Californian state law obliges retailers to discard after 24 hours. The old gents civilly made way for the old ladies among them to take first pick of yesterday's sandwiches. It was, in my suicidal frame of mind, an incredibly depressing sight. And there was a kind of de te fabula aspect to it - how long before I was there, shuffling through the garbage with the geezers?

I found myself, at midday, in my office at Caltech, shuddering like a holed fox. I had forced down some food, at that incredibly early lunchtime the Americans like, around 11.30am. Chilli con carne (something warm, a distant maternal voice told me, would be cheering). I can taste and see it now: white onion, lying like maggots, on tongue-scorching red sauce. It lay in my stomach like a pocketful of billiard balls.

It was drink or not drink time. And the next drink, I feared, would be decisive. A one-way ticket into the dark - goodbye high functioning; hello dumpster diving. I was very frightened. After a riffle through the Yellow Pages, I phoned AA.

 John Sutherland is Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at UCL. This is an edited extract from Last Drink to LA, published by Short Books on August 20, priced 4.99.