Nick Bates and alcohol
This was something I couldn’t quite see at the time because it was particularly mild for the most part. I spent around half-or-more of close to four months out in Pukekawa with Nick and, on reflection, there was not a single day of his total sobriety across that whole time. Weekdays were a pattern of a beer or two in the stables then into wine each night, and weekends were heavier with drinking commencing from the time the horses were unloaded well before noon.
This post is a little bit piecemeal today as I weave a few different ideas together: Nick’s pattern of drinking, some of the effects this had on our communication, how I supported his drinking and some other thoughts.
Port was a mainstay of the ritual of the hunt - it was often served on platters of plastic shot glasses. People would offer you a port as you strolled around their horse floats. On days that Nick and Shayne were attending a hunt together there would be beer and port and perhaps other spirits too. One of them would offer to be the driver (I didn’t feel confident driving their horse float and precious cargo), but it was Shayne more often than Nick that did the drive home, while Nick did the drive out to the various farms. Once, noting Nick’s inebriated state in the back seat, Shayne turned to me and said, “Well at least you know he’s a cheerful drunk”. And that assessment was enough for those months - or at least it could have been.
While on a hunt, many riders also carry hipflasks with them, or their saddles have specific slots for a conical flask to be inserted. They have pitstops like this to chat and sometimes drink more - or share their flasks with a friend if someone had brought a peculiar liquor with them that day. I once heard a story that police used to stake these events out in decades gone by - nabbing the hunt attendees as they left the property.
Yet the beauty of these properties, the jovial nature of hunt and time spent with Nick seemed to more than balance out the banality of alcohol-fueled banter and conversation in one-or-other horse float or woolshed.
The night that I was raped, Nick shared a story with Shayne, the woman who was present (she was on the Pakuranga hunt’s committee and a resident of Pukekawa area) and myself that he had brought cocaine to one of the hunts he had been on (it’s an odd but relevant side-note that Shayne was not at this hunt). It was a short account of sharing the cocaine under a tree with one or two others, where a third party happened upon them giggling away and he shared it with them too. Other than that, I never witnessed any other drugs at hunts.
Now for a digression:
From wiki: It’s a “theory … in which many of alcohol's social and stress-reducing effects, which may underlie its addictive capacity, are explained as a consequence of alcohol's narrowing of perceptual and cognitive functioning”
Or, it describes a common effect of alcohol being that, as a person becomes intoxicated, they limit their awareness to things they already expect to be present. In the psychology of sexual assault involving alcohol it is argued: if you believe alcohol makes you more sexual, one might then interpret non-sexual social cues (friendliness) as a sexual cue where no sexual signal exists - and this misinterpretation of reality can lead to instances of sexual assault.
Another way to describe it is that it is hard to get the person to update their perspectives based on new information. We’ve all had that drunk friend on a rant that seems immune to any feedback, they become fixated on politics, conspiracy theory, romantic feelings, desire for food, or hostility in some form. All in all, it’s fair to say that alcohol limit’s one’s view. Even the concept of beer-goggles assumes that the intoxicated person isn’t updating their view of the attractiveness of another - but are locked in the insular experience of their own sexual desires.
Image taken from The Guardian
So how is that relevant?
When alcohol is present in daily life, I guess it means that Nick wasn’t always seeing me as I was. The possibility of deeply engaging is lessened. As the effects of alcohol slowly kick in, perhaps the way our relationship actually was was passed over for a prior idea, an ideal, a step further away from reality. And? Well, it means that Nick forgot things more readily than I would. He missed the details and so when it came to tally up his satisfaction, he found it lacking.
Once Nick had declared “I want to live until I’m one hundred”. I thought that was great, I know how to nurture and support a project of health and longevity. A few days later I found that one of the magazines Nick had in the kitchen island included a section of 50 to 100 top things that promote health and long life. I started reading through the various items to see what resonated with him. Nothing resonated with him. It was like he’d forgotten this claim and none of the prospects of doing or abstaining from X, Y or Z landed. I was disappointed at the time, I thought I was trying to find a common value. That was a lost opportunity.
Another time, I think we were returning from a hunt. He proclaimed that we must get an air-fryer. So a few days later I try to begin a conversation with, “I’ve been looking at a few air-fryers online. . .”, his reply indicated he had no idea why I was talking to him about this at all - no connection, no memory of the thing he’d asked for; another lost opportunity to realise he was cared for. Another small cost of daily drinking.
Dan the sober driver
I mentioned before that we never had a single date that was about us or our romantic connection, but I was invited as a plus-one to various things. I was brought along to meet a couple that Nick knew, we had a restaurant lunch followed by a stop at their house so Nick could bounce some home-remodelling ideas with them. This was a lovely day and I wish I was still in touch with them. I was the sober driver on this occasion.
The Barfoot and Thompson awards night 2021 - now this was a real spectacle. Two gentlemen at the other end of the table downed beers so fast they had to be delivered in pairs. One of them won a ‘rising star’ award and he humped the award on stage in front of hundreds of people and all the company directors. Nick said he’d contemplated getting a hotel room for us, but no - he wanted me to be the sober driver and take him from the Aotea centre to Pukekawa in the early hours. After the awards night Nick hosted a contingent of colleagues at some underground bar in a hotel at the waterfront. He laughed off the almost $600 bar tab they’d run up in under two hours.
Sometimes I think that one of his goals in asking me to begin a relationship with him was just so he wouldn’t have to sit at this table as a single man - that I was just a shield against the shame of being alone. His ex-partner also worked for the same company but wasn’t there that night.
Nick and Shayne had a long-standing event on their calendars - a landowner’s dinner where the hunt association thanks the people who hosted them throughout the season. They didn’t want to uber, and they wanted to drink. They didn’t ask me to also attend but asked me to drive for them. I went and had dinner alone in Pukekohe, I picked up their booze order for the hunt the next day (one I wasn’t attending), and then I curled up and slept in the car until they eventually woke me up as their dinner had ended. They both praised me for this service: I remember that because positive feedback and thanks was a rarity - and, in my mind at least, I had other praiseworthy attributes than merely being a chauffeur.
I supported the ever-present effect of alcohol and intoxication in Nick’s life and I wish I hadn’t. Alcohol played a large role in the evening’s lead up to the rape that was to come. I wish I had resisted it from the beginning - how much of all our quality time together was tinged with its effects? Easily over 80%. Far too much.