PREV: Part 3 - My Last Drink

My exit from drinking went off about as elegantly as it began. But this is life, no. Figuring things out on our own by trial and error tends to be clumsy by nature. Why would we ever expect otherwise? The first hurdle was the guy, usually the loudest in the room, who finds it unacceptable for anyone not to be drinking if they were. They wouldn’t have it and would grab you up and not let you go until you had a beer in your hand.

It took me a little bit, but in time, I learned to just accept and hold the beer. That bought you some leeway. But then, if you weren’t raising it enough, that might get the notice of someone, again, usually the loudest guy, and that would also not do. So then I learned to get the beer and, at some point, excuse myself to the bathroom or an empty kitchen where I could pour out the beer and replace it with water.

I ran into some situations where I could not lean on my sleight of hand and decided to just stand my ground, saying I didn’t want any and not take any. As an adult in this day and time, you’d think this strategy would be perfectly solid. But to a twenty-year-old in the late eighties, running with the crew I ran with, it was like trying to pass Canadian quarters at the arcade.

Then I stumbled upon the only thing I found to work on every person in every setting with one hundred percent effectiveness. Think of it as a solution to a riddle. What is the only thing you could tell a loud, drunk guy to get him to stop badgering you about a drink? The answer is to tell them that you are a recovering alcoholic. Curiously, not only will this quiet down the drunkard, it will give them a level of respect for you in that, look, this is something I was soooooo good at, even as a twenty-year-old, that I had to stop doing it. It’s like the drinking version of being registered as a deadly weapon. Then, still curiously, that same loud clod will not only stop harassing you, they will become your protector, threatening anyone who comes near you with a drink.

While technically I am not an alcoholic, because I never really developed an appreciation for that genre of refreshment, I gotta think I fall on some ven-adjacent circle that gives me partial rights to the club.

NEXT: Part 5 - Life-Saving Luck