Rebecca Johnson

My first drink was a disaster. Our family had gone to a wedding at a country club in the Southern city where we lived. Thanks to my grandparents, I knew my way around country clubs, but this one was more gaudily opulent than any I’d ever seen. The faucets on the sinks were gilded swans. When you turned the head, water came spurting out. I would have liked to stay and gawp but a lady in a uniform was waiting to hand me a starched linen washcloth.

My sister and I wandered the reception in our high-heeled huaraches and the haute hippie dresses my mother had brought back from France a few weeks earlier. They must have made us look older than we were (13 and 14) because a waiter carrying a tray filled with champagne stopped in front of us. We looked at each other in shock, not entirely clear what was in the glasses. Ginger ale? Not in those dainty coupes. We each took one and wandered as far away from our mother as we could.

The sweet bubbliness of champagne was a wolf in a feather boa. A minutes earlier we’d been cowed by the splendor of the setting, now we were relaxed and amused. We burst into giggles at the giddy warmth of the alcohol. Once we finished those glasses, we went looking for the waiter again and again, just like the first primates who made the felicitous discovery that rotting apples could make you feel strangely pleasant.

When my mother came to fetch us at the end of the evening, she was horrified to find us staggeringly drunk. When we got home, she stomped off into the apartment complex we had recently moved into following our parent’s divorce. My chastened sister followed her but I, in my inebriated wisdom, decided I just needed a little fresh air to clear my head. If I came back acting normally, surely my mother wouldn’t be so angry. When my mother realized I wasn’t home, she searched the parking lot, then called the police in a panic. The next thing I remember, I was lying on a merry-go-round in a nearby park, the bright light of a cop’s flashlight shining in my face.

I spent the next morning lying on the bathroom floor, intermittently vomiting into the toilet and listening to the news. It was the day Elvis Presley died.

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Looking back, I can see a few lifelong patterns revealed by that night. I like booze. All these years later, I still do. I like the way it transforms me, a congenitally reserved person, into a gregarious extrovert. I have heard that moment when alcohol makes everything tilt on the axis towards pleasure described as “the click.” In my family we have a joke about the click. As soon as it kicks in, we toast each other and say in a dopey voice, “I love my family!” I remember joking to a friend when I was in my twenties that I sure hope I never become an alcoholic because I like it way too much to give it up.

For long periods of my life, I wasn’t a “problem drinker.” I’ve never drunk during the day and during my childbearing years, I drank nothing at all. Can you imagine the guilt you’d feel if your child had fetal alcohol syndrome? But then came the long slog of parenthood. Gone were the parties of my youth, the hanging out in bars with friends. Now every night was stay at home night. I had a lot of time on my hands and, frankly, it was kind of boring. Four year olds are not the best conversationalists and you reach a point with your spouse when you really do know all the stories. So, I began to drink wine while I made dinner and then I drank it with dinner and then, when my husband and I settled onto the couch to watch tv, I drank some more.

The problem is, alcohol begets alcohol. I can’t exercise buzzed. Despite Ernest Hemingway’s famous advice, “Write drunk, edit sober,” I can’t write buzzed. I am funnier to myself but I am not funnier to other people, not unless they’re also buzzed. I was once at a party talking to the actor Eric Stoltz (probably best known as Cher’s son in Mask). I remember thinking, wow, this (kind of) famous actor seems really interested in what I am saying, I think he might even be flirting with me! Then I took a few sips of wine and I could literally see his interest in me fade, like a curtain being slowly drawn across a window. When you’re sober, drunk people are a drag.

I was walking down the street in Brooklyn one day when I overheard a nanny describing her employer to a friend on the phone. “The minute six o’clock comes, that wine bottle comes right out.” I felt a throb of sympathy for the mother being spied on and judged, as well as relief that I was not her. What kind of a degenerate drinks in front of the nanny?

At the doctor’s office, when I faced the questionnaire that asks how many drinks a day? I’d put “one glass of wine” but the truth was closer to two and sometimes three. I began to worry about my relationship to booze. I took online inventories. They told me I was alcohol-dependent. I filed the information away under good to know, now shut the fuck up. I read about naltrexone, a drug you could take that would make you stop wanting to drink. That sounded like the magic beans to me. I asked my doctor about it and she looked aghast. “That’s for alcoholics!” she said.

My husband, who grew up in England and watched as his mentor at Oxford literally drank himself to death by starting on whiskey every day at 11 a.m., didn’t think I had a problem at all.

I went to an AA meeting and kept my face passively sympathetic as one guy talked about getting up at 5 in the morning to start drinking, but on the inside I was thinking, holy shit. I’d never seen that kind of self-destruction up close. I was a piker compared to that crowd.

What disappointed me the most about AA is that nobody talked about why they drank, they just talked about how they drank. I drink because it allows me, for however brief a time, to stop worrying about the world, something I spend an inordinate amount of time doing for no logical reason. I do realize that me feeling bad over the Armenian genocide does not make a whit of difference to anyone suffering but if I just ignored all those problems, I’d be an asshole. The most efficient way to quiet my useless conscience is to have a drink at the end of the day. Chillingly, the Nazis understood this all too well. According to Viktor Frankl, the guards at Auschwitz who escorted prisoners to their death were allowed to drink unlimited amounts of Schnapps.

Here’s what Christopher Hitchens, who truly did drink himself into an early grave and never seemed to regret it, says about the anodyne effects of booze. “What the soothing people at Alcoholics Anonymous don’t or won’t understand is that suicide or self-destruction would probably have come much earlier to some people if they could not have had a drink. We are born into a losing struggle, and nobody can hope to come out a winner, and much of the intervening time is crushingly tedious in any case. Those who see this keenly, or who register the blues intently, are not to be simplistically written off as “dysfunctional” cynics or lushes.”

A cocktail party without a cocktail is, well, I shudder to think. I envy people who find happiness in the way the sun reflects off a daffodil. I like a good appreciation of nature moment as much as the next person, but it does not sustain. Sooner or later, the sun disappears behind a cloud.

In the end, all drinkers must come to a reckoning. As George Vaillant, the author of The Natural History of Alcoholism, writes, “Alcoholism is a progressive disease.” If you do nothing, it will progress. And so it did for me. I thought booze and I had an understanding, à la Winston Churchill, who insisted, “I have taken more from alcohol than alcohol has taken from me.” I thought I was the driver and wine, the passenger, was a benign lady with rosy cheeks who only wanted the best for me. Over time, she had pushed me out of the front seat and wrested control of the car. Now she was taking me places I really did not want to go. It was time to break up.

This is not one of those I saw the light and gave up booze forever stories. Hardly. I still love the stuff. But now, I no longer keep a case of wine in the house. Instead of wine, I’ll have a martini and then I’ll stop. Or I’ll have just one beer. If I slip up and drink too much one night, I won’t drink for the next three days. Or I’ll quit for a whole week. Or I’ll start buying non-alcoholic beer. Once, I even bought non-alcoholic wine — an oxymoron if ever there was one. Nowdays, when I feel “the click,” I don’t think ahhh, I think, Careful. Danger ahead.