I celebrated quitting the Hamilton Journal-News in winter 1999 by car surfing in the parking lot of the Hamiltonian Hotel.
Belly down and spread-eagle, I gripped the window wells of Trish's yellow convertible as she sped -- back and forth and back and forth -- through the fire lane. I was thrown from the left to the right side of her hood, and my legs swung like wish-boned pendulums.
I whooped and screamed. I hoped my mother wouldn't have to ID my body.
The next day broke through as I puked all over my bedroom and toilet. I think Kevin brought me home.
It took me nearly a week to fully recuperate, and that's all I can recall from that night.
While at the Journal-News, I amassed a collection of similarly pickled half-memories that few people this side of my life know anything about. Like most stereotypically anguished journalists, we were always celebrating -- finding reasons to drink.
There was the time we commandeered the top floor of the Academy, a downtown watering hole/restaurant. Amused by the diners below, I crawled out onto a fragile roof, talking to co-workers at my back as I inched closer to the ledge. Later that same night I unzipped a co-worker's pants, bemused by the thought of his penis.
Of course, I've no memory of any of this. I only recount it from the memories of the people present who've recounted it to me.
A sweat-smeared, failed memory is only part of life as an elective drunk.
Elective drunks are excessive drinkers not predisposed to drunkenness by family history, genetics or racial stereotypes. We don't have to drink. We don't live in abject poverty.
We straddle the identities of the weekend-only and happy-hour drinkers and the closeted John Cheever types who drink to drown secrets. We sometimes drink because of peer pressure, from some weird romanticism of The Drunk.
One of my biggest influences to drink was the psycho-genius of the poet/novelist Charles Bukowski, an internationally known drunk who not only chronicled his drunkenness but celebrated and flaunted it.
Barfly -- the book and the movie -- made me want a drink. So did Leaving Las Vegas, Mike Figgis' unflinching tale of a man's descent to an intentional, alcohol-propelled suicide, played brilliantly by Nicholas Cage.
I take care whenever I watch it. It's a scratch 'n sniff flick. It can send me over the edge and right into a drink as a cruel form of literary mimicry.
I was one of those artists who assumed alcohol would fulfill my ideal of what an artist looks (and smells) like. For me, drinking smeared the lines of an identity already in crisis.
Unlike some elective drunks, I never needed alcohol to be funny, sociable or at ease. I've always been loud and funny. Alcohol added only sweat.
Despite status as life of the party when we're drunk, elective drunks are nonetheless stupid asses because we, like all self-respecting drunks, ignore our limitations and stagger over the threshold of self-respecting behavior.
We drive drunk. We say stupid, regrettable shit. We stay too long in bad places. We pass out. When we wake, it's in a tangle of broken, bleary-eyed excesses.
Elective drunks drink to excess usually as part of a larger emotional response to life stresses -- job, love, family, boredom and the absence or surplus of any or all.
Like me, elective drunks ignore the pitfalls to their health. We get falling-down drunk knowing full well we'll lose a week of life to puking, shitting, sweating and sleeping.
I have diabetes. Drinking to excess is now a matter of life and death and of the quality of life and possibly dying.
I so wish I could place my entire prior elective drunk status and debacles on the Journal-News. It'd make writing this so much easier.
But I was an elective drunk early on, as early as my freshly minted driver's license. Make that 1981.
In high school, I was never labeled as one thing or as belonging to one clique. I traversed. It's not a gift. It's a defense mechanism.
Before I started legally driving, I tasted alcohol on the sly. Its effect was immediate.
I've never liked the taste of alcohol. I drank to get at that warm-headed, soft-limbed effect that makes you pontificate and stumble, that makes you laugh too loud. I've always -- from that first illegal sip to last weekend's heavy-handed self-poured white Russian -- drunk to get drunk.
I'm clueless, though. I do not know where the penchant emanates. There was never any hard liquor around our house. The most I ever saw my dad drink was shorty Wiedemanns in our cavernous South Fourth Street basement.
Shirtless, he'd swig shorties, shave my brothers' heads and piece together the tracks to his electric race car sets. He could put 'em down, but I never saw him drunk. My mother never touched any alcohol.
During their swank ghetto fabulous house parties, I heard ice clinking whiskey glasses, but I never really saw the whiskey itself.
After the divorce, reconciliation, remarriage and re-divorce, my father remarried and it was in his house with his stepchildren that I stepped up my adolescent drinking. In 1980s suburbia, teenagers bought alcohol from grocery stores without nervousness or fear. It never entered my mind that I'd get caught, because I never did.
A few times Larry, my oldest stepbrother, copped coolers for me. Otherwise, I was captain of my own wrecked shit.
One Friday night, stranded without a social life, I choked down an entire bottle of something -- gin? vodka? -- sitting alone Indian-style in front of the TV. Dallas went better with a stiff drink. My last memory: falling softly backward onto my father's new off-white carpeting.
The puke was warm lava down the side of my face. My oldest brother, Randy, managed me to bed, cleaned the mess, kept my secret and never held it as leverage for future favors.
Once I started driving, I curtailed the stupid drinking episodes, shaken by the drunk-driving accidents and fatalities of my Greenhills High classmates.
After high school I stopped drinking. For a time. I moved to Denver for a while and returned to Cincinnati so I could drop out of college one last time.
A brief yet relentless string of shit jobs -- microfilming medical records, selling men's sportswear at Lazarus, bussing tables at Zino's -- propelled me back toward the inside of a bottle. Liquor romanced me.
The company I kept then were all functioning drunks -- from the late-night losers at the warehouse who raced to bodegas on break to get bottles, to my Lazarus sales manager who bought me drinks on our "dinner break" at the Milner Hotel and the Bay Horse Inn, to the cooks at Zino's who passed the bottle to the backseat on Clifton side streets.
I stumbled through those days, careened the wrong way down one-way streets and drove left-of-center into the next morning. I knew God watched.
I still don't know why I got through and never got a well-deserved DUI, spent the night in jail or missed killing or maiming myself or someone else.
Grace didn't stop me from falling on and off the wagon. During the throes of a breakdown-inducing breakup in 1999 or 2000, I kept in hand a huge, earth-shaped Starbucks ceramic mug filled with mostly Captain Morgan Spiced Rum and a splash of Orangina for color, my spring/summer drink of choice.
In cold months, it was white Russians. I'd graduated to Sophisticated Drunk.
I got heavily into therapy. Coupled with prescription drugs, talk therapy escorted me through all my bad behavior, and drinking became boring.
There are people who know me by whether or not I'm drinking, and they say so: "You drinking tonight or are you stopping?" Or, "You don't really drink, do you?"
I go through phases. I'll admit to once mixing prescription drugs with alcohol and to closing down The Greenwich in a bluster of bar-slapping revelry.
Mostly my diabetes drives. Now I loathe being around drunks -- but not because of any superiority issues. It's just not fun for me.
Not like drinking was. ©
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