More than 11 years after getting sober, memories of my more disgraceful drunken nights can still make me blush with shame. Waking up in a police cell with no idea how I came to be there was a low point and so was being discovered unconscious in the pouring rain under the shrubs in a neighbour’s garden.
In the mercifully rare moments when I find myself dreaming of a drink, it is the thought of such dark times that helps keep me on the straight and narrow. But of one long drunken night I have only the fondest if admittedly befuddled memories.
It happened in 1996 on a press junket. Disney was opening its new animated film of The Hunchback of Notre Dame not in Paris, but in New Orleans, with its famous French Quarter. The screening was in the Superdome stadium, which later became such a hellish place of refuge for many during Hurricane Katrina, and after going back to the hotel to file our reviews, a colleague and I hit the town.
Bourbon Street seemed like a wonderful late-night carnival and there was an extraordinary tall, blood-red cocktail called a Hurricane on sale, deliciously cold in the hot and steamy night that got you high as a kite. Apparently, the ingredients are rum, more rum, a little extra rum plus grenadine, passion fruit and orange juice. Boy, does the Hurricane live up to its name. It sent me surfing through the streets on a tidal wave of euphoria.
The French Quarter was full of strip joints, hustlers and shady drug dealers, with every bar blaring out great music. In the early hours of the morning, after gazing in awe at the Mississippi for the first time and thinking of Huckleberry Finn’s epic journey on the raft with the runaway slave Jim, we entered yet another bar and there was a marvellous old bluesman playing brilliant electric guitar.
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