My Life, Told Through Drinks

While your parents watch 60 Minutes, you sit on the floor and page through Time magazine, stubbing your finger on any page with a bourbon ad: Daddy drink! Your parents find it funny but hide the magazines when your no-dancing, no-drinking Southern Baptist grandparents babysit. Your grandfather still snoops, and one day he confronts your parents by flinging open a kitchen cabinet. What do you call this? he demands. I call it cereal, your father says, because in his indignation, your grandfather opened the door next to the one with the liquor.

The Teen Years
Hi-C, 1974–1985
You maintain sobriety through 11 years of book reports, choir practices, family fights, and humid Floridian Christmases.

Bartles & Jaymes, 1985
The boy looks like a surf bum version of Paul Westerberg from the Replacements. It is much easier to talk to him when you’re slightly numb from the waist down, an off-label effect of strawberry wine coolers. Rolling around with him on the sand at midnight, you realize you’re actually pretty good at this: the drinking, the rolling, the ocean peeing.

Long Island iced tea, 1986
Your prep school ID is your ticket into the gay bar where you can dance in your skimpy dresses without feeling hunted. The bartender says, Try a Long Island iced tea, honey. It has everything in it but doesn’t taste like any of it. The place is a carnival of coke and amyl nitrite and synth pop. Erasure is playing tonight, but you spend the whole concert kissing your friend Michael on the balcony. The music’s boring and kissing isn’t, you tell him. True and true, he says. Later he’ll push you into the pool with your clothes on.

Arak, 1987
The liquor cabinet is stuffed with untouched bottles of arak and raki, anise-flavored Christmas gifts from your dad’s Middle Eastern grad students. Untouched until you realize they are there. Then you sneak arak to parties in jam jars, holding your nose to disguise the taste and nearly gagging anyway. You see nothing strange about going to such lengths to consume something that repulses you. And neither does anyone else.

Screwdriver, 1988
There’s a Ministry show at the Lake Worth Junior High auditorium; the promoter convinced the school they’re a Christian band. You get a ride with Gary, a 30-year-old bookstore clerk who feeds you screwdrivers all night thinking he’ll have sex with you later. But it’s your lucky night. At 2 a.m., he sees the line between skeevy and criminal and stays on the right side of it. It’s a line you’ll learn well this last summer at home: where it lives, where it blurs, and who decides.

The Co-ed Years
Keg Beer, 1988
First night of college. A boy named Raven said you should come to this party. Now you stand at the closed door, unsure what to do — knock, just walk in, turn and run? A white guy with brown dreadlocks opens the door. Hi, he says. Do you drink? His name is John, and at his smile a tuning fork thrums inside you, drowning out any other words you might have wanted to say to him for the rest of the night. So you drink your beer and watch him.

You order a rye Manhattan, because you are maybe starting to grasp at straws to pretend your drinking is about ingredients and flavors.
Jug wine, 1988
A student band is playing Replacements covers at a bar near campus. You are half watching them and half watching John shoot pool. You’ve learned things about him from mutual friends. He’s a painter. He used to be a born-again Christian and spoke in tongues. He got stabbed last year with his own knife and almost died. He’s writing his thesis on surrealism and phenomenology. While this last is confusing to you, the rest makes sense. He also has a girlfriend, and even if he didn’t, he’s clearly out of your league. It’s okay. You can’t speak around him anyway. So you watch him.

Popov Vodka with Hi-C, 1988
There’s a big difference between sex with guys your own age and sex with the campus-wandering, megaphone-wielding 26 year ­old in your poetry class who is rumored to be AWOL from the Army. Fucking someone who is aware of the existence of the clitoris is a wonderful thing. So is vodka with Hi-C, which quickly and cleanly quiets the part of you that is also kind of terrified to be with someone who has heard of the clitoris.

Eight-dollar Chianti, 1989
Things did not work out with the older, crazy, rumored-to-be-AWOL poet. You have chosen a new boy your own age to fall in love with, a boy with short hair and a running car and parents. He feeds you pasta and Chianti in his downtown apartment and then fucks you in a standardized, flow-chart kind of way, where all the ifs lead to the same disappointing then. You make him mixtapes he hates. What is this? he says one day. The Replacements, you tell him. They sound scraggly, he says.

Old-Fashioned, 1990
You and your boyfriend drive across the state from the apartment you now share to his parents’ beach house. Passing a rack of swimsuit calendars in a gas station, your boyfriend tells you which supermodels look good in their bikinis and which don’t, and why. At the beach, you let him fuck you in the ocean, even though that’s basically a terrible idea. Later, cooking dinner, you play what will turn out to be the last Replacements album. Him again, your boyfriend says. If he showed up here, you’d leave with him. You half smile. And I’d never look back, you say.

Six-dollar Chianti, 1990
You move to Florence for a year to study Renaissance poetry and drink red wine, leaving your boyfriend in the States to start grad school and further develop his philosophy of supermodels. Florence is a refined, introspective city, except for the hordes of young Italian men putting their uninvited hands on girls. Basta! you learn to shout — Enough! Twenty years later, a man passing you on a side street in Paris will grab your breast and you will yell Basta! without even thinking. In Florence, you make a copy of the first Stone Roses album and mail it to your boyfriend. This is one of the worst things I have ever heard, he writes back.

Gin and tonic, 1990
You take a train to Salzburg and go on the Sound of Music tour. You are the only single person on the bus. Henrik, the young tour guide, works you into his patter: Perhaps our beautiful American friend will marry in the cathedral where Maria married the Captain! Everyone smiles at you and you wish to vanish from the earth. In Mondsee, there is a lunch break, and you and Henrik end up in the same bar, mixing your own gin and tonics out of little silver pitchers. You are delighted by the doll-sized bar kit, and Henrik is delighted by your delight. Everyone is delighted and everyone wants to die: you because your boyfriend has breezily admitted to cheating on you with various women at grad school; Henrik because his American girlfriend has become distant and hard to reach. Henrik shakes his head and pours himself another drink. Life is not like the movies, he says dolefully. Except it is a little, you think.

Gewürztraminer, 1990
You leave Salzburg for Bern, where you spend an entire weekend reading music magazines in cafés. From one, you learn that Paul Wes­terberg has quit drinking and feels great. You know you should be happy for him. Instead, you think, We’re not the same kind of person anymore, as you drink another glass of wine and are lonely, lonely, lonely.

Yugoslavian red, 1991
You come home from Italy and see John shooting pool in the townie bar again. His hair is shorn almost to the scalp now. I like this, you say, as you reach right out and buzz your hand over it. I like that you like it, he replies. And then you both freeze up and walk away in opposite directions. You spend most of your time that semester hanging out with his old roommate Richard, watching movies, drinking cheap red wine, and reading Robert Hass. Longing, we say, because desire is full/of endless distances.

Some kind of punch, 1991
You run into John at a party a few weeks later and panic at the sight of him. Still, you talk for hours, riding the wave of fear and desire and boozy fruit punch all the way into his bed, where you stay for a very long time. Nothing good can come from this, you think. You assume he won’t call, but it’s okay; you know things now you didn’t know two days ago, things about yourself, about the world, things you can keep with you for the rest of your life. But he calls the next day, identifying himself by first and last name just in case you forgot, and asks if he can make you dinner. You sit in his tiny kitchen as he chops onions for risotto with a carbon-steel knife. You are completely at sea.

Diet Coke, 1992
You and John drive Alligator Alley, the two-lane highway connecting Florida’s west and east coasts, to Miami to visit his parents. You’re driving and it’s daytime, so Diet Coke is the drink of choice. Brush fires blaze on the sides of the road, but as native Floridians, you both find this perfectly normal. John tilts his head at the car stereo. Who is this? he asks. The Replacements, you tell him. He listens for another minute and says, This is fucking amazing, and you glow like the saw grass around you.

Sangiovese, 1992
John is chopping garlic in your kitchen the night Nirvana smash their instruments on Saturday Night Live. You are standing close to him, uncorking the wine. Too close, as it happens. Love of my life? he says. You’re in my light.