Why George Michael’s battle with drugs won’t be repeated – GQ.com

George Michael was too young to die and too old to be caning it.

Fifty-three is not old for a self-made millionaire looking forward to enjoying the final third of his life. But it is positively ancient when you have spent the last few years in and out of expensive clinics and getting busted. There is a time and place for party drugs and sex in public places. It is not a man's middle years.

After the booze-soaked, chemically crazed tumult of youth and young manhood, your thirties, forties and beyond are a time for yoga and fruit smoothies and stretching exercises - not rehab and bad drugs and increasingly desperate attempts to stay clean.

When he did four weeks' jail time for driving under the influence of drugs, George Michael was already 47 years old. I have known a few wild men in my time. But I never knew anyone who caned it all the way to the male menopause.

Oh, George! When I first met him, he was 21 years old and Wham! were in their pomp - stuffing shuttlecocks down their tennis shorts, mobs of teenage girls chasing George and Andrew Ridgeley down every street and a chauffeured limo waiting until the night's fun was over. But the fun was, like the 21-year-old George himself, as clean cut as could be.

Young George was shrewd, mature and totally unlike the debauched degenerates that I had been knocking around with for the previous ten years. The night we met, George and I went to Rudland & Stubbs in Smithfield and drank our bodyweight in sauvignon blanc. And I thought that was about as wild as it would ever get with this likeable young man. I was dead wrong.

Even nine years after that first meeting, at his 30th birthday party on his father's stud farm - the horses running free in the rolling fields, torch lights lining the long sweeping driveway - there was no indication that George Michael was going to go down in flames as the last of the great hedonists. Even on the night he turned 30, all that was still ahead of him. He looked too much the master of his destiny to ever veer wildly off the rails. He surely managed his career far too well to destroy it with gluttony for good times. But five years later we were sitting by the fire in his big open-plan house in Oak Hill Park, Hampstead - Hippy the Labrador chewing the white pile carpet between us - when George casually slipped into the conversation that he was smoking around 25 spliffs a day.

In those years he was still reeling from a double bereavement. Anselmo Feleppa, the Brazilian lover who finally convinced George that he was gay and not hovering somewhere on the bisexual spectrum, had died of an Aids-related brain haemorrhage in 1993. His mother Lesley, the only member of his family I ever met in the many hours I spent in his Oak Hill Park home, had died in 1997 at the age of 60. But life is full of loss. It doesn't make most of us want to ruin ourselves.

And suddenly, it seemed like the drugs were not for recreation but relief, respite and oblivion. And he was already far too old to be living that way.

This is not to suggest that fleeting fun is for the young. There will always be a time and place for transient bliss in a man's life, whatever his age. Witness Sir Rod Stewart, 72, flamboyantly making the draw for the fifth round of the Scottish Cup after possibly imbibing a drink or two. And consider the late Leonard Cohen, who always said that if he lived to be 80, he was going to start smoking again.

"It is the right age to recommence," Cohen solemnly told the New York Times. And that's exactly what Cohen did - it is no coincidence that on the cover of Cohen's last album, You Want It Darker, released just before his death at the age of 82, he has ostentatiously got a fag on the go. Leonard Cohen, the smoker, and Rod Stewart, the drinker, glow with joy. But then they obey the first rule of hedonism - enjoy it.

How much true undiluted pleasure, I wonder, did George Michael feel from his wild years? Rumours abound about what chemicals he was on. What is irrefutable is that they ruined him. I spent a lot of time around George in his twenties and thirties. We met each other's families. When I went out with my girlfriend Yuriko on the night before we got married, the only person who came with us to the little Japanese restaurant in Islington was George Michael. In the end I was really just the favourite journalist of a big star. But I considered him my friend. But by the time he was in his forties and fifties, we had stopped talking to each other. And I had stopped recognising him. It wasn't just the weight he piled on. He looked miserable.

Why do most of us bail out of hedonism? Because we worry about the consequences. You have to be either 18 or 80 to smoke cigarettes and not worry about lung cancer. Anywhere in between and you know it is a real possibility. After youth's first flush, other things take priority over having a good time. A serious job, a permanent woman and fatherhood. You don't stay up all night when you have to play with your child at dawn.

For most of us, life imposes its own restrictions. The hard-core hedonists are often the ones who take most readily to the Perrier and pilates of later life. Because they have watched their friends die. Because they have done unknown damage to themselves. And they know it. So they move from the dark to the light, from the madness to something approaching peace. George Michael, almost uniquely, travelled in exactly the opposite direction. Whatever George was on, he did too much of, much too late. Whatever your poison, you should start young and - when the hangovers take days to shake off, rather than hours - learn to pace yourself. You don't do what George did. Because that will give you a morning after that lasts for eternity.

On the wall of the Snappy Snaps on Hampstead's high street, five minutes' walk from George's old home in Oak Hill Park, there was some graffiti next to the dent where he crashed his car at 3.30 on a Sunday morning. "Wham" the graffiti quipped, and everyone enjoyed the joke. But it was probably a lot less fun to be the drug-addled middle-aged man who had passed out behind the wheel of his car when he was trying to find his way home.

I never saw anyone get hedonism so badly wrong as George. All the drugs, all the sex in public places, all the reckless driving - and he was not having fun. He was dying.

It is different for the authentically young, for the generation born in the 21st century. A major NHS survey of 6,500 schoolchildren reveals that the number of young people smoking, drinking and taking drugs has dramatically fallen over the last ten years.

The authentically young have watched their grandparents die of lung cancer because they smoked cigarettes. They can see that a drink or two is fun but that drunks are unequivocally pathetic. They know their parents took drugs - mum starting everything with an E in Ibiza, dad chopping out the white lines during the Britpop wars - so drugs seem old hat. They have watched their elders take hedonism to the end of the line. And they want very little to do with it.

For the second half of the last century, young folk drank up, lit up and cranked up the volume. But the clean teens of the 21st century make that old-school hedonism look out of time, as redundant as record stores. And nothing ever seems quite so old fashioned as the formerly fashionable.

Drugs are still out there. But even the use of cannabis, the most commonly used drug, is way down these days. And we are talking about the very young - which means we are talking about the shape of the future. The young of today have learned from the mistakes of all those arthritic old groovers who cavorted in The Roxy and The Haienda. And as the father of one of them, it seems to me that there has been a real cultural shift. It was once the cool kids who got off their faces. Now it is the uneducated idiots who get routinely rat faced. Unfettered hedonism is a dial-up pastime in a digital world.

The experts say the nature of childhood has changed. This coming generation set the pace for all of us, with our personal trainers and obsession with appearance. These clean teens are more vain than all those generations who passed the bong in leaky bedsit rooms. In those heady days of 20th-century hedonism, nobody fretted about how they looked in a photograph. Nobody joyously rutting in the mud of Woodstock worried about something so superficial as their appearance. Now it often feels as if nothing matters more.

Funny enough, George Michael was fanatically self-conscious about the way he looked. When we met in that house at the end of a private road in Hampstead, he would always put the kettle on and get out the biscuits. The only exception would be if he had a photo shoot coming up. Then he would not even touch a chocolate digestive. George was in control. He was disciplined. And in those years of early solo success, when he was up there commercially with even Michael Jackson, he was happy. Somewhere along the line, he lost his way. He lost the ability to know when it was time to say yes to a chocolate digestive - or your drug of choice - and when it was time to say no. Although we drifted apart, I remember him as a beautiful man with a huge heart and a generous spirit who could handle success but could not handle hedonism.

You can't make the pleasure of the moment last a lifetime. How will you celebrate your 80th birthday? Chop out a couple of lines? A threesome with friends? A fireside spliff? Or light up a cigarette knowing that life has waited too long to kill you with lung cancer? Leonard Cohen's cigarette at 80 was only fun because he had stopped smoking decades earlier.

We give up on the unapologetic hedonism of our extreme youth - the meaningless sex with a succession of strangers, the nicotine habit, the booze and powders - when we learn that life cannot be lived as if tomorrow never comes.

Because unless you fall off your perch, it always does.

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Why George Michael's battle with drugs won't be repeated - GQ.com