Spirited Away
Bex Brian
The Brian clan spirited away, circa 1970, Palm Beach, Florida. Bex’s father, Tony, far left.
I can’t write about drinking. It’s a trap. The minute I say I love drinking, someone will immediately think, ‘She has a problem.’
When I was a baby my father used to put a drop of Irish whiskey in my bottle to ensure I slept through the night. I can hear the hue and cry. “Oh my god, you should have been snatched up by child services!”
I don’t think there were child services back in Canada in the sixties, I mean there must have been—there was a boy’s home near me, a heartbreakingly Dickensian pile called Weredale. Someone must have placed those kids there (terribly convenient for me to have the bad boys just down the road--dated more than a few of them). But child services certainly wasn’t going to be banging down the door of our house.
Still, most would assume that something happened in my past, or with my family, to fuck me up and turn me into a lush. You just don’t drink for the hell of it. I suppose “I’m of Irish descent” doesn’t quite cover it. Too much of a stereotype?
It was in the air, in my blood, in the house. Everyone I knew drank. Yes, there were a few alcohol-fuelled rages between my parents that rattled us kids. But mostly, it was all soft focus. My father, head in hand, dreamily telling us girls we were such beauties. The look of parental boredom normally plastered across my mother’s face miraculously gone.
When my parents divorced, I was fourteen, and it seemed only natural that I should step in and have a drink with my mother when she came home from work. A little Vin Ordinaire. After all, this was Quebec, although it wasn’t as free and easy as it was in France. The sale of booze was controlled by the Province and, in those days, sold only in dank little storefronts manned by dour men behind counters who ran and got what you wanted from the back. No browsing through vintages. Mother bought jugs of Vin Ordinaire and vats of vodka.
The ritual of the after work drink is still honoured in my house. My thirty-odd year marriage is in no small way bolstered, shored up, and immeasurably helped by the fact that we are both drinkers. To that, some might say, “Then the union is built on a faulty bedrock.”
Maybe so, but I live for the moment each evening we sit down across from one another. My husband with a whiskey and a beer— he has been imbibing the same one-two punch since the day I met him-- and, me with my little creme pitcher filled with vodka at the ready to fill my shot glass. Conversation is a bit halting at first. He has had his day and is still under its thrall. I have had mine. Slowly though, we begin to unfurl, our insular brains now noting the person opposite, wondering who they talked to, what they wrote, what they read or saw. These moments are even nicer now that Trump’s gone. No more red face rages.
A couple of years ago, I felt compelled to write about my love of drinking in an occasional column about food I did for the website Salon.com. It got me fired.
It seems the fact that I girded myself with a beer before my husband taught me how to drive, on a stick shift no less, set off all sorts of alarm bells. MADD complained. Lawyers were called in. She drank! She drove!
Christ, what would have happened if I said that for many years we basically had a cocktail bar in the glove compartment? I can’t admit that, so I won’t.
My husband and I never went out to eat (damn, I miss restaurants), without our flasks. My quick fluid motion to top up my glass is so much more graceful than my husband’s, who nervously looks off to the middle distance as he tips his flask (not that marriage is a cease-less competition). I tease him that he would make a terrible spy.
A vow. When the world opens up again and restaurants struggle to get back on solid footing, I will pay for all my drinks. It was a good run, but now it’s time to give back.
You can drink and not have it ruin your life. I have never blacked out, never woken up beside someone or something with no clue as to how I got there.
Did I make a fool of myself?
Many times. You name it. Dancing with no knickers. Falling off bar stools. Demanding eternal friendship from poor souls I had only just met at parties. The morning shame was sharp but short-lived.
What about the hangovers?
Now here’s where you might have me. I choose to see them as the price of admission. True, now in my sixth decade, they are a bit more brutal, so I avoid them. Wisdom is knowing your measure. I know exactly how much I need to drink to get buzzed, to perfectly demarcate day from night.
When I am alone, I imbibe. Of course I do, a natural solitary, I am by far my favourite drinking companion.
And finally, the last scold. Empty calories! Bad for your skin! Your Hair! Your figure!
To me, it’s all worth it.
What I really want is for people to stop coming after me. For years I have been hectored about my drinking. Once, a waitress who had spotted my quick flask action, followed me out of the restaurant and chased me down to the river’s edge, all while giving me the lowdown of my lostness, my delusion, my blindness to my sickness. I seriously contemplated jumping into the swirling depths of the East River to escape her. Luckily, I spotted a sanctuary down the road—a bar. Quick as I could, a nipped around her and sought my refuge.
Bex Brian
Bex, who lives mostly in Brooklyn with her husband and their dog, is the author of the novel Promiscuous Unbound and the forthcoming Radius.
