"Hi, I'm an alcoholic comic and I'm freelance." laughs. Pere Aznar does not raise his hand to introduce himself to Alcoholics Anonymous, but first he stood in front of Andreu Buenafuente to confess that he had not drunk for 67 days and now he publishes a book (Beber, by Penguin Random House) admitting to all of Spain that after a year he returned to fall. Today we attest that he no longer drinks beer but coffee: "You laugh and it feels bad to laugh." We laugh, of course.
Let's go with the serious presentation. Pere Aznar is a Valencian comedian and screenwriter who began to drink compulsively at the age of 13 because he couldn't think of a better idea to hang out with his friends. Pere Aznar is an alcoholic who during the confinement due to the pandemic was unfaithful to his then wife: "I brought my lover into the house and I fucked him intensely every day in front of my family" (the lover was the whiskey). Pere Aznar is the father who takes advantage of a sunny Sunday to get drunk on the terrace of a bar with his daughter in front of him. Pere Aznar is the friend who shows up drunk at the funeral home and with drugs in his pocket from the last spree. And that he tells his dead friend: "I think you saved my life and she's a bitch that you had to leave for that." That day he looked in the bathroom mirror (the funeral home, yes) and decided to stop drinking.
And if you're wondering, they've seen Pere Aznar drunk on TV, even if they didn't realize it. He is what he himself defines as a "functional alcoholic", to whom drinking "does not prevent him from continuing with his life and fulfilling his responsibilities". Because, as he points out, the important thing is not the number of glasses: "The problem is not the glasses you drink but the reason that leads you to drink them, the engine that drives you to feel that the glass in front of you is the one that It gives you what you don't have right now, that way of facing life that without that glass in front of you seems endless".
He writes that "the equation is as simple as fucked up and hard to explain: drinking and being a piece of shit accordingly leads you to keep drinking so you don't feel guilty about drinking and being a piece of shit accordingly." And that's what his story is about, "a kid with a run-down childhood, with great insecurities who falls into an addiction to hold on to something." That he grows up drinking and covering up the bad relationship with his father with alcohol, the emptiness of not having a fixed group of friends, the abyss of paternity...
"Alcoholism has a lot to do with loneliness, like almost all addictions. Nobody would spend seven hours in a cafeteria based on coffee, but drinking alone and being the happiest guy in the world. You don't need anyone or nothing because alcohol keeps a lot of company", reflects Aznar. And he remembers what a therapist told him one day: "Drugs are very bad because they are very good. If they were shit, no one would get hooked, but they are effective and they give you what you want instantly."
That is why he assumes that he needed to go to therapy when he had not drunk for a while and began to see the world without the curtain of alcohol. "When you don't drink, it's no longer a novelty in your life, but it is, quite simply, the rest of your decaffeinated, de-alcoholized and restless fucking life. That's when things get uphill," he says in the book.
It has also been scared, because there is an inevitable question. For someone who has entered adolescence with alcohol present, for whom the first kiss came while drunk and for those who began their professional career as a comedian without being sober, would it have been possible to make people laugh without alcohol involved? "I've asked myself that question, and without alcohol I probably wouldn't have been a comedian. As a child I always had an urge to attract attention, something that is part of the comedian's ego, but maybe I never would have dared. I don't know if It would have been funny, but I know that not drinking has made my head work better and now I would not consider that I am worse funny for not drinking. Quite the opposite, but I was afraid to stop drinking and not be funny".
In fact, if something is clear about this "cessation process" (detoxification is associated with stigma, he says) it is that the most difficult thing has been "to find a place in the world again." "Since I was 13 years old I had built my entire personality around alcohol and, when at 39 you decide to change a habit so crazy that it makes you talkative and extroverted and you spend a year without drinking, suddenly you realize that maybe You're a sullen guy who likes to walk around and be alone." The comedian who was considered funny and maybe not so much.
The next challenge was the book. "I've been heartbroken and have cried a lot in front of the keyboard. Managing that balance between comedy and modesty was very difficult for me. Once I started with the first 60 pages and found the tone, the rest have been vomited pages, although it sounds paradoxical. Lots of vomit at long hours, with zero routine. It's been hard, but I've found a balance between telling a hard truth and laughing at it."
Was there another option that was not to relate a similar drama from the self-parody? "I didn't want it to be a funny book and it isn't. Neither life nor my life is a constant joke, although it is true that my brain will always seek comic relief, otherwise living would be unbearable." The thing about never taking off her humorist outfit was already being blamed by her psychologist... "All the time, poor thing."
How else to manage the image of a girl drinking a colacao next to her father having a whiskey (one after the other, actually). "If you look around you, how many people drink with their children. All of them. In my case, due to vital circumstances, I spent weekends with my little daughter hand in hand and, since I was able to drink continuously and that I didn't noticed, I had magical times with her while I was getting drunk". As she confesses in the book, the girl ended up becoming her "partenaire in a thousand parties".
And what parties Like the one that she was having in full confinement and that she did not hesitate to interrupt when the girl had an anxiety attack in the middle of the night. Her drunken father was the one who did not hesitate to take her to the street ignoring her curfew. "It is one of those moments in the book that has made me think the most, because if I had not been drinking all day I would not have done it. And it was wonderful. It was nice to have realized, to have stopped, to have told it... I hope that to time, and that it hasn't caused a trauma to the girl, because if not I'm already saving for the psychologist".
Jokes aside, he warns that his is not a manual to stop drinking or a moral to demonize alcohol. It's just a lesson in honesty from someone who learned on the way back from hell that he wasn't as bad a person as he thought. Although he hasn't gotten rid of the habit of carrying used ear buds in his pocket. "Fucking fucking addict." laughs.
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