Heaven Helps the One Who Leaves

This is Flirted With You All My Life, Niko Stratis’ column of personal essays about the intersection of sobriety, popular culture, recovery and music.

Someone stole my bit. They didn’t know it, we’ve never met nor spoken or even so much as glanced at each other to the best of my knowledge. But there they were all the same, taking what was mine and making it their own—singing “Werewolves Of London” at karaoke night in the basement of a legion hall on a Saturday evening. Somewhere in the distance, a dart meets its end on a board, the superfluous rhythm of brown bottles of Labatt 50 clinking in revelry the only other sounds in the room, all muffled by a best-guess attempt at a cherished Warren Zevon track.

When I say this is my bit, what I mean is that I used to be that person, holding a microphone that hundreds of people had held and singing into without it being cleaned even once, belting Warren Zevon’s best-known song that I am also aware he had grown to hate. It’s part of the human condition that, when you become known for a single achievement, you may grow to despise every shade of its memory. Cobain hated “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Wally Conron regrets creating the Labradoodle. Warren Zevon wanted to be more than a single hit.

Zevon disliked the attention that Werewolves got in contrast to his other more compelling work, and grew to hate his one big moment in the center of a swiftly moving spotlight. When he did revisit it live—perhaps out of some sick commitment to the needs and desires of an audience that cares little for those of the artist—he would change the words to the song to his own amusement. I’d like to meet his tailor becomes He’s looking for James Taylor.

“Werewolves Of London” was my go-to karaoke track. Someone once told me I have perfect pitch after hearing me sing it—my voice and bravado fueled by cheap whiskey in a bar in the basement of a hotel with a Bo Jackson poster on the wall overlooking a pool table that was more decoration than function. I knew the words by heart before too long and it became more of a performance piece than simple pastime. Something to do with the energy brown liquor had indebted to my anxieties. I don’t do any of it anymore, the fueled by whiskey part or the perfect pitch renditions of “Werewolves Of London” part.

It’s not Warren Zevon’s best song. I’m not even here to tell you what the best Warren Zevon song is. At best, this is subjective and, for a long time, I would have honestly said “Werewolves” myself anyway. Some days, I will be willing to tell you—with all the confidence my little heart produces—that “Nighttime In The Switching Yard” is the one but, like all confident statements, it’s probably a lie puffing its chest out to ward off any challengers.

The thing with Zevon is his desire to write lovingly about the imperfect beauty of the failing world that existed in the blast radius of his life. Zevon did not live easy or leave a perfect legacy behind, his is a story riddled with the hard realities of addiction and the fallout of self destruction. He pushed people—even his most ardent supporters and collaborators—away; he was physically and emotionally abusive. The tense with him is, of course, past. Zevon died many years ago. He once told his longtime friend and endless champion David Letterman that he hadn’t been to the doctor in decades, and the minute he went he was told that he was going to die. Life’ll Kill Ya. Enjoy every sandwich was his advice for living with death imminent on the horizon.

I was describing my alcoholism to a friend who had last seen me as a functional alcoholic who’d long perfected keeping secrets hidden in all of the places no one ever thought to look. In the years after we had ceased our closeness to one another, I had shifted whimsical binge-drinking to chasing blackouts with a bottle of scotch and a half-case of beer on casual Saturday nights. I didn’t remember any of the nights lost to the dark, but there was always a photo or two featuring me, face red like a neon sign on a midnight highway, that informed me of shames that will haunt me—shames that I will never fully remember.

I was blacking out when I drank more than I wasn’t and, in the murky darkness of the night and the hard light of the morning after, I thought a lot about taking my own life. The thoughts you can never walk back and you are forced to contend with, the reality of your brain so thoroughly having turned on you. It’s hard to live with the memories of these single moments we worry will define us forever. If we really want to be honest with each other, I think that “Desperados Under The Eaves” is, if not the best Zevon song, at least the perfect vantage point from which to survey the breadth of his work. It just happens to be a deeply personal reflection of the ennui in the midst of a life of destructive alcoholism.

A song told in the backdrop of run-down hotel bars in Los Angeles, “Desperados Under The Eaves” is a lament that weaves between bitterness, sorrow and resignation; unsteady footsteps searching for their mooring on a sinking ship. It is the remorse of the morning after, where coffee is a survival tactic more than a beverage of deep appreciation. I have sat in this moment, staring into the expanse of the bottom of a white porcelain mug and wondering what fresh Hell I have brought to my own front door.

“Desperados Under The Eaves” pulls its most tender strings from an unexpected heart: When Zevon makes mention, in his best leaning-on-the-counter-of-a-diner voice, of listening to the backline hum of an air conditioner; where his voice finds the humming rhythm of the artificially cooled air a chorus rises from its resting place, string sections crashing against the wall of quiet desperation, building with a righteous fury; the blessings tucked away in the mundane parts of bland backgrounds; the flicker in time when the room isn’t spinning and the despair has not quite caught up to you and you think, for just a minute, that this is all, somehow, worth it.