 |
| Drinking in Dmanisi, Caucasus Georgia |
Who is Dave Robicheaux?
He's the protagonist in 20 books written by James Lee Burke, a New Iberia, Louisiana, writer.
Dave is a homicide detective in New Iberia, Louisiana. Cajun. Recovering alcoholic. Viet Nam war veteran. A man who marries. A father.
You can read more about Dave here. And what he thinks about north Louisianans here.
 |
| Bar glasses, St. Louis, Missouri |
Dave and alcohol
I said Dave was an alcoholic, right? In the series, he's been abstinent and he's been in relapse. He's a member of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Here's how Dave's brain processes alcohol:
From Neon Rain (1987):
The sudden raw taste of alcohol after four years of abstinence was like a black peal of thunder in my system. My stomach was empty and it licked through me like canned heat, settled heavily into my testicles and phallus, roared darkly into my brain, filled my heart with the rancid, primordial juices of a Viking reveling in his own mortal wound.
From A Stained White Radiance (1992):
The bottles of bourbon, vodka, rum, gin, rye, and brandy rang with light along the mirror. The oak-handled beer spigots and frosted mugs in the coolers could have been a poem.....
 |
| Descanso, New Mexico |
From Jolie Blon's Bounce (2002):
[At an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting] .. I told them all of it. How I had stolen and eaten my wife's diet pills for the amphetamine in them, then had kicked it up into high gear with white speed I had taken from an evidence locker. How I had bludgeoned Jimmy Dean Styles's face with my fists, breaking his nose and lips, knocking his bridge down his throat, grabbing his head and smashing it repeatedly on the bar, my hands slick with his blood and the sweat out of his hair, while an insatiable white worm ate a hole in the soft tissue of my brain and I ground my teeth together with a need that no amount of sex or violence or dope would relieve me of, that nothing other than whiskey and whiskey and whiskey would ever satisfy.
 |
| Beer bottles, Shiprock, New Mexico |
Dave's description reminds me of how Mary Karr, in her memoir, Lit, explained how she fell for the drug:
The bottle gleamed in the air between us. I took the whiskey, planning a courtesy sip. But the aroma stopped me just as my tongue touched the glass mouth. The warm silk flowered in my mouth and down my gullet, after which a little blue flame of pleasure roared back up my spine. A poof of sequins went sparkling through my middle.
 |
| Wine, Alamogordo, New Mexico |
