It was another layer in the complicated, circular relationship I was constructing between drinking and making: Booze helped you see, and then it helped you survive the sight. The appeal wasn’t just about intoxication—as a portal, or a bandage—but about the alluring relationship between creativity and addiction itself: its state of thrall, its signature extremity. The person who found himself in that state of thrall was someone who felt things more acutely than ordinary men, who shared his living quarters with darkness,
