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april fools | eleven post meridiem
Modern boys drink Vesper(tine)s
I miss having drinking buddies. I also miss getting "hangovers" that could be cured by half an aspirin and being able to blow off class and not having to go to work at 7:30 am. I miss moonlit walks on the beach and having a well-muscled sloth to rub my toes each morning. I miss My Two Dads.
By "drinking buddies" I mean DRINKING buddies; i.e., people I had NOTHING in common with aside from a mix of blood 'n' whiskey in the veins, except for maybe liking girls and having a similar number of appendages, though both of these common denominators have been scratched at times. I miss having that destructive yet otherwise mostly-unavailable opportunity to pry into a totally foreign worldview, even though we might have grown up in the same town.
While in college I spent a few months working for a landscaping company. I was the only one besides the boss-foreman-guy who could legally drive the trucks since everyone else was on work release from prison. After we'd finished for the day we'd have to drive the criminals back to their halfway house and watch to make sure they checked in. Most of these guys were about my age, and when one of them got parole, we went for a beer after work.
He was a big guy, at least six and a half feet, with a square jaw and greasy grunge rocker hair. He'd been a football player in high school, but was one of the laziest fuckers I'd ever seen. He was pleasant though without a sense of humor and I'd always been too intimidated to ask him what he'd done. After we'd had a few, and he'd started to smile more, and I'd established my manly cred by talking baseball, I asked him.
"Auto theft," he said, without hesitation.
"What'd you take?"
"Big Red Car Go Vroom [I don't know anything about cars and can't remember what he actually said]. I didn't take it though. This woman let me borrow it. She said I could borrow it and bring it back in the afternoon but I was a little late and she just flipped out."
"Wow, how late?"
"Not hardly late at all, she just wigged. She was nuts."
"They could convict you for that though? Didn't you explain what happened?"
"Yeah, but there was some other stuff too. She had some guns in the trunk, and I guess forgot she'd put 'em there, and I had no idea, and when the cop pulled me over, I couldn't explain it, 'cause I didn't even know what they were or why they were there."
"What were they, like hunting rifles or something?"
"No, automatics. There was a [he named one or two scary-sounding people-killing models], and a 9mm. Oh yeah, that one was in the glove compartment."
"You didn't know it was there?"
"No way, I had no idea."
I've yet to go out with any of my current coworkers, and since I've been avoiding most of the people I know in this town anyway, this means I almost never drink now. But when I do I think I've graduated to being a good drunk. I can drink nearly all of my friends under the table and still hold it down, and I don't black out. I'm a tipsy social drinker. I started late; my first drink was at 17, my first drunk at 18 (Protestant upbringing + grandparental alcoholism = sXe high schooler). When I go out now I never order mixers; I like martinis (Sapphire, twist, stirred is preferred [fuck off B*nd] but I'm not such a prick that I'd actually say this) and whiskey or scotch on the rocks. The first time I drank (i.e., not taken shots of) straight liquor was at a party in college; there was a crowd of people I didn't know very well blocking the fridge, so I just sat and sipped my Beam. It was a formal cocktail party, whose theme wound up being kind of pointless since everyone stripped after an hour or so. There's a hilarious picture of me dancing - which I might even post, if I can find it - wearing only a tie and vest, with a foregrounded elbow perfectly placed to cover my (mighty and territory-claiming, I assure you) knotty bits. It turned out a bad night however: a couple we were close to invited The Maenad and I in for some group sex, but I ended up yelling about how she'd rather have a penis with darker pigmentation than mine (this was completely out of the blue and is honestly one of the stupider things I've done) before mercifully passing out.
I've made other bad decisions under the influence. Chatting with MyBuddy today about her (frankly abominable) musical tastes, I was reminded of some of the poorer choices D.A.R.E. warned me not to make. Like going to Oasis concerts. And - g*d it pains me to type this - Lenny Kravitz (both shows free + last minute decisions, ok?). I saw Live in 1995 though that time I was punchdrunk only on love (for PJ Harvey, who opened). I've seen the Dave Matthews Band (also for free) at least once. Maybe twice. This is a point of some controversy. Last year I was (what else?) drinking with an old friend I've yet to give a pseudonym to - let's call him Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik - and he was trying to describe a feeling of total ease and contentment he'd felt recently:
"It was like the time we saw that girl at Dave Matthews. You know, the one with tits on her back instead of her front? So we could stare and not get caught? Or at least until she flashed us and and we saw that she had eyes in place of nipples."
I was incredulous. "Are you on crack? That was Sir Mix-A-Lot, not DMB. I only saw them once, and that time I was most definitely on crack. You'd have to force feed me K and cyanide Fruity Pebbles before I'd go to another one of their shows."
"Dude that was DMB and you were totally there. Afterwards we all went to live in a kingdom under the sea? Remember? But first a tentacled arm handed me a telephone, saying it was a call from the President. So I said to the President..."
[Insert oft-told lame karoake prowess stories here as segueway]
Drinking, even when we don't intend it to be, is ritualistic. So let us praise the Japanese - the most embarassed people on earth - for giving us karaoke, the great ritualizer of stupidity. I wanted to share another anecdote or two about DBs I've known, but I now realize they're all pretty typical and stupid so that, since this is a just world, stupidity should get the last word. I've watched DBs rip public telephones off walls when their exes wouldn't take their calls; I've watched them start fights and break pool cues; I've watched them drool on their server's belly ring then drive home when they obviously shouldn't. Even I - I! - have acted stupidly on occasion. I've been thrown out of a club just once. 19.5Appendages and I started throwing each other around on the dance floor (why neither of us knows); the next thing I remember is being carried out the door by a bionically strong man with a nametag. I spent half an evening (according to witness testimony) making out with some random girl in a dark corner, and didn't remember it until I found the scrap of paper with her number on it the following afternoon. Once dear friends had to forcibly prevent me from making a pass at my married boss.
There are other stories but even now, sober, it's erm more sobering to think that just the other side lies AA and its codependent community. Not to sound overly dramatic, but when the extended family wants to buy Frank McCourt a round so he'll just loosen up a little, this sort of thing weighs on you. But as Frank or any drinker could tell you, there's a selective, transient, tender communion in the sharing of a few glasses. It's that that I miss. That communion. That connection.