{"id":65758,"date":"2014-01-28T12:30:03","date_gmt":"2014-01-28T17:30:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=65758"},"modified":"2014-02-03T08:21:38","modified_gmt":"2014-02-03T13:21:38","slug":"free-of-ones-melancholy-self","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/01\/28\/free-of-ones-melancholy-self\/","title":{"rendered":"Free of One\u2019s Melancholy Self"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"quaaludes_tape_cover_02\"<\/a>

The Quaaludes featuring the DT\u2019s album cover, 2011.<\/p><\/div>\n

When Jordan Belfort\u2014played by Leonardo DiCaprio in a truly masterful moment of full-body acting\u2014wrenches himself from the steps of a country club into a white Lamborghini that he drives to his mansion, moviegoers, having already watched some two hours of Martin Scorsese\u2019s The Wolf of Wall Street<\/i>, are meant to be horrified. His addiction to quaaludes (and money, and cocaine, and sex, and giving motivational speeches) has rendered him not just a metaphorical monster but a literal one. He lunges at his pregnant wife and his best friend, played by Jonah Hill, and equally high; he smashes everything in his path, both with his body and with the aforementioned Ferrari. He gurgles and drools and mangles even monosyllabic words. He\u2019s Frankenstein in a polo shirt.<\/p>\n

But what of the movie\u2019s glossier scenes? The one where Belfort and his paramour engage in oral sex while speeding down a highway? Where he and his friends and colleagues are on boats and planes and at pool parties totally free of the inhibitions that keep most of us adhering to the laws of common decency? What about the parts that look fun?<\/i><\/i><\/p>\n

Everyone I spoke to post-Wolf<\/i> (at least, everyone who liked it) rapturously praised Terence Winter\u2019s absurd dialogue, DiCaprio\u2019s magnetism, Scorsese\u2019s eye for beautiful grotesquerie. Most of them also included a half-whispered, wide-eyed aside: What exactly are <\/i>quaaludes, and where can we get some? <\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Often prescribed to nervous housewives, a quaalude was something between a sleeping pill and a sedative. First synthesized in the late fifties, by 1965 \u2019ludes were being manufactured by William H. Rorer Inc., a Pennsylvania pharmaceutical company. The name \u201cquaalude\u201d is both a play on \u201cMaalox,\u201d another product manufactured by William H. Rorer Inc., and a synthesis of the phrase \u201cquiet interlude\u201d\u2014a concept so simple and often so out of reach. Just whisper \u201cquiet interlude\u201d to yourself a few times. Seductive, no? It\u2019s the pill in the \u201ctake a pill and lie down\u201d directive thousands of Don Drapers gave their Bettys.<\/p>\n

Of course, housewives have children who grow into curious teenagers, and medicine-cabinet explorations led the children of boomers to discover a new use for the drug. Most sedatives are designed to take you away within fifteen minutes, but\u2014as Belfort explains in a lengthy paean to \u2019ludes\u2014fighting the high leads one into a state almost universally described as euphoria. \u201cIt was hard to imagine how anything could feel better than this. Any problems you had were immediately forgotten or irrelevant,\u201d said one person who came of age when \u2019ludes were still floating around. \u201cNothing felt like being on quaaludes except being on quaaludes.\u201d<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

William James thought the world was made up of two halves: the healthy-minded, or those who could \u201cavert one\u2019s attention from evil, and live simply in the light of good \u2026 quite free of one\u2019s melancholy self,\u201d and the sick-souled, or morbid-minded, \u201cgrubbing in rat-holes instead of living in the light; with their manufacture of fears, and preoccupation with every unwholesome kind of misery, there is something almost obscene about these children of wrath.\u201d In the end, to be of morbid mind is, according to James, the better option\u2014the harsh realities the healthy-minded cheerily repel \u201cmay after all be the best key to life\u2019s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.\u201d Still, it\u2019s not easy, being a sick soul. James is one of the first persons to pop up in a search of \u201cneurasthenia,\u201d the catch-all term for those who suffered from nervousness, exhaustion, and overthinking in the nineteenth century.<\/p>\n

Maybe William James needed a quiet interlude. Maybe something like a quaalude, something that makes you feel like yourself without any of the stress of actually being yourself, can be, for a healthy mind looking to spice up a Saturday night, something that enhances dancing and drinking and sex and honesty. But for someone like Jordan Belfort\u2014whose desires beget more desires until he isn\u2019t sure whether they\u2019re real or if he\u2019s wanting just to want\u2014quaaludes were probably more an occupational necessity than a recreational getaway.\u00a0<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

\"Quaalude\"<\/a>To stay home feeling ecstatic was one thing, but imagine being out! Music! Lights! Sweaty, writhing bodies! Of course <\/i>quaaludes were at the center of the seventies disco movement. Manhattan was littered with \u201cjuice bars,\u201d nightclubs where no alcohol was sold but quaaludes could be had for a song. (Speaking of songs, here\u2019s an incomplete list of musicians who wrote songs referencing \u2019ludes: David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Cheap Trick, and the Tubes, whose lead singer\u2019s stage character was called Quay Lewd.)<\/p>\n

As with all fashionable drugs, quaaludes make countless appearances in the diaries of Andy Warhol, who, for the sake of verisimilitude and sheer meanness, took great pleasure in documenting the quantities ingested by those on the dance floor at Studio 54:<\/p>\n

\n

January 3, 1978: \u201cLiza said to Halston, \u2018Give me every drug you\u2019ve got.\u2019 So he gave her a bottle of coke, a few sticks of marijuana, a Valium and four Quaaludes.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Liza and Halston, of course, need no further introduction. They are the shiniest stars in a room too shiny for most of us to even imagine. They are at the peaks of their respective professions. Studio 54 is the most important place in the most important city in the most important time the world has ever known and they are its royals. But they can\u2019t dance without quaaludes.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

What happened in New York City nightclubs was just a more moneyed version of what was happening in suburban living rooms, and the lust for \u2019ludes was no exception. By the early eighties, though, the supply was running low\u2014in 1978, Rorer sold Quaaludes to the Lemmon Company, who continued to market them as a sleeping aid even as the DEA was cracking down on street sales and quack doctors who would, for the paltry sum of fifty bucks, write anyone who walked in off the street a prescription for \u201c714s,\u201d so termed for the number Lemmon stamped on each pill. For those too young or too far away from New York, I\u2019m told, \u201cThey were always very hard to get\u2014I assumed most of them came from people who robbed pharmacies or raided parents\u2019 medicine cabinets, or they were stolen from medicine cabinets in burglaries. I remember paying a very pricey eight dollars each for them. I knew a guy who used to steal them from his mom, who was dying of cancer.\u201d<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

There are uglier moments. One person I talked to sheepishly admitted that quaaludes were something you gave girls to \u201cloosen them up\u201d\u2014to get them to say yes to anything. Roman Polanski gave a quaalude to his thirteen-year-old rape victim that night in a Hollywood jacuzzi. On first reading this story, in a nail-salon copy of Vanity Fair<\/i> ten years ago, I assumed all the drugs available to rich LA filmmakers in the early seventies were pretty much to the same.<\/p>\n

Now I know that\u2019s not the case.<\/p>\n

In Bunny Tales: Behind Closed Doors at the Playboy Mansion<\/i>, Izabella St. James, Hugh Hefner\u2019s former live-in girlfriend, says that every night out was prefaced with an offer of \u2019ludes from Hugh. The later descriptions of post-nightclub sex parties\u2014I\u2019ll spare you the gory details, but there are some depressing references to unintended uses of baby oil\u2014make much more sense knowing the participants would\u2019ve been feeling the euphoria and increased sexual desire the drug can create.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

If you Google \u201cwhat drug is most like quaaludes,\u201d the answer that most often pops up is Ambien, a prescription sleep-aid made famous for its other effects by golf superstar\/sex addict Tiger Woods. Much as \"Quaalude<\/a>with quaaludes, fighting the sleep-inducing effects of Ambien can send one into a state of decreased inhibition, heightened libido, and lucid hypnosis. It\u2019s when I read this that I realize what I was grasping for during Belfort\u2019s explanation of the quaalude high\u2014\u201cI\u2019ve been here before.\u201d I have a (very sparingly used) prescription for Ambien\u2014insomnia is, I think, a plague suffered by all morbid minds\u2014and I always take it meaning to go directly to sleep, to drift away into the good night, but once in a while something distracts me and I\u2019ve passed the fifteen-minute window into a curious netherworld where I am wholly myself: perhaps too much<\/i> myself. A cursory search through my e-mail turns up notes sent to old boyfriends; to people to whom I no longer speak; to people to whom I do<\/i> speak, just not particularly frankly. My sentences in these notes are coherent, sometimes even lyrical, and the words are funny, direct, revealing. In the morning I have hazy memories of these exchanges and feel not the embarrassment one feels after a night of too many drinks and too many sloppy \u201cIt was the booze, I swear!\u201d moments, but the embarrassment of having revealed thoughts and feelings I\u2019d otherwise expect the civilized part of my brain to keep locked up. I might not\u2019ve danced, like Liza did, or spent ungodly sums of money on a domineering prostitute named Venice, like Jordan Belfort did, but my own morbid mind does, in its way, understand the appeal.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Despite one person\u2019s assertion that he could have quaaludes in my hand by the end of the day (hypothetically, of course\u2014he refused, and I\u2019d probably be too scared anyway), finding pharmaceutical-grade quaaludes in 2014 is virtually impossible. Lemmon, citing bad publicity, ceased manufacturing the drug in 1983, and by 1984 Ronald Reagan had signed into law a ban on the production and sale of prescription quaaludes.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean people didn\u2019t still get<\/i> them\u2014plenty were left over from the three decades in which they\u2019d been legal, and really, wasn\u2019t it easier to just call a guy than bother with a doctor?<\/p>\n

Amateur chemists, too, tried (and still try, mostly in South Africa, where street-manufactured quaaludes account for a startling percentage of the drug trade) to replicate the original, often using Valium and other milder sedatives to capture a fleeting bit of the quaalude high. More than anything, though, \u2019ludes simply fell out of fashion, becoming a historical oddity. People who are now responsible parents took them in the seventies. Hugh Hefner still does, maybe.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know a single person under thirty who has seen one.<\/p>\n

\"quaalude2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Wolf of Wall Street<\/i> is as much about addiction as anything else. In a scene near the film\u2019s end, Jonah Hill\u2019s character, Belfort\u2019s best friend and partner in crime, visits his ankle-monitor-wearing comrade at the Long Island mansion Belfort will have to mortgage in order to pay his mounting legal fees.<\/p>\n

Addiction narratives in which the protagonist survives often see the hero praise the light, expressing a newfound joy in living clean\u2014in living healthy-minded. Hill\u2019s character, joining the now-quaalude-free Belfort by the pool to sip nonalcoholic beer, asks what it feels like to be sober. His face is genuinely curious\u2014if I had to decide, I\u2019d call Hill\u2019s Donny Azoff a sick soul, and it\u2019s easy to imagine him wondering if it\u2019s possible to get to the quiet interlude without chemical assistance.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a pause.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt fucking sucks, man,\u201d says Belfort. \u201cIt really fucking sucks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Angela Serratore is the deputy web editor at <\/em>Lapham\u2019s Quarterly.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Jordan Belfort\u2014played by Leonardo DiCaprio in a truly masterful moment of full-body acting\u2014wrenches himself from the steps of a country club into a white Lamborghini that he drives to his mansion, moviegoers, having already watched some two hours of Martin Scorsese\u2019s The Wolf of Wall Street, are meant to be horrified. His addiction to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":598,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12695],"tags":[12697,12696,497,12698,12699,12483,374],"class_list":["post-65758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-drugs","tag-jonah-hill","tag-jordan-belfort","tag-leonardo-dicaprio","tag-quaaludes","tag-the-seventies","tag-the-wolf-of-wall-street","tag-william-james"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA History of the Quaalude, Jordan Belfort\u2019s Drug of Choice<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"January 28, 2014 \u2013 When Jordan Belfort\u2014played by Leonardo DiCaprio in a truly masterful moment of full-body acting\u2014wrenches himself from the steps of a country club into a\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link 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