I’ll Drink to That

EXTERIOR: Trader Joe’s, approximately 6 pm

INTERIOR: James, a professional in his late 30’s, standing in the wine aisle. His eyes study the labels of red wines falling in the $8.00 to $15.00 range, a look of thoughtful indecision on his face. James lets out a long sigh and runs a hand through his hair.

VOICE OVER:

If I just buy one bottle of wine, that is a very reasonable amount to consume for a weekend. I have to have wine to go with the pasta Basil’s making. The wine tastes so good with the pasta. And I will just have a glass or two with dinner. It is so hot today: I could get a bottle of white too. But then I will drink both bottles by myself this weekend, and that is entirely too much wine. Maybe I just shouldn’t get any wine if I can’t not drink two bottles. No-one bottle is totally reasonable. I can’t believe how long I have been standing here. Just make a decision Siegel!

James remains frozen in front of the wine racks, unable to move.

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My father loved to cook steaks out on the grill when I was growing up. He would go to Price Club and pick up packs and packs of them. When my family (and whomever else showed up for dinner at our house that night) sat down to eat, everyone got their own steak. Whomever you were, a co-worker of my father’s or a ten year old kid from down the street, you got your own t-bone steak. I was almost in college when I went to a friend’s house for dinner and was served a piece of a steak: 6 oz of steak vs. approximately the 24 oz I was used to at home. I suddenly realized that this was how most folks probably approached steak portion-sizing.

I experienced the same with my parent’s drinking: they always had drinks with dinner. It would not be uncommon for them to finish at least one bottle of wine and then start another in the course of a meal. This would be in addition to the Tanqueray and tonics or Pacifico beers they would consume while they were preparing dinner. And if it was a weekend or a vacation, beers or margaritas would be served with lunch. It took me years to realize that some people’s parents only had a single glass of wine on very special occasions. Or some parents just didn’t drink at all.

If my mother and I had gotten along as my father and I did, I may have never given much thought to how much my parents drank. But because my mother and I fought constantly from the time I was ten years old, I assumed her drinking was the main reason for our dysfunction. And because my father and I hardly ever fought and were very close, I didn’t care about how much he drank.

One day, Dad came home from Price Club with a giant pack of Martinelli’s apple juice, the kind that came in single serving size apple-shaped glass bottles. I was in high school and Max was in junior high: there was not a resident in our house that was a big juice drinker.

“Dad: what’s all the apple juice for?”

“I am going to try and drink less. Maybe quit drinking.”

I glanced between him and the case of apple juice. Sensing my confusion, Dad continued.

“I drink a lot because I am drinking with your mother. I can’t get her to quit drinking. So maybe if I drink these with her instead of beer or wine, I can drink less.”

I can’t remember how many evenings this plan succeeded, if it even succeeded once. I remember the bottles of apple juice sitting in our pantry for months, dust settling on their curved bottle tops.

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There are few things I take more pleasure in making with my hands than a margarita. My father had imparted the family recipe to me when I called him on a Saturday in the summer of 2003. I remember standing in our kitchen in Pasadena. I was armed with a bag of limes, triple sec, a bottle of Jose Cuervo, some margarita mix, and a blender. My friends Brandy and Pepper were there, along with Brandy’s boyfriend Grady. We had tried a few rounds in the blender with the margarita mix and it wasn’t at all like I remembered tasting at home.

“Dad, Dad–it’s a margarita emergency. We’re having a party and the margaritas I am making aren’t turning out like yours at all.”

He asked what I was using and when I got to the part about dumping margarita mix into the blender, he stopped me.

“Margarita mix? No. That stuff is garbage.”

He then sat on the phone while I followed his recipe: run a lime wedge around the edge of the glass and salt the rim. Squeeze approximately a lime and a half into the glass. Add ice. 1/2 shot triple sec, 1 to 1.5 shots tequila. Stir. To this day, I still consider it the perfect margarita. The ritual of making it combined with the taste is, I say with no exaggeration, a spiritual experience for me. Some people conjure up a beloved parent or grandparent with a cake or pie recipe. For me, when the granules of salt grind against the rim of the glass, I imagine it like ringing a Buddhist ringing a bell: I am addressing my father’s ghost somewhere in the realm beyond.

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When I was 23, a friend and I once held a mini-intervention for a mutual friend of ours over dinner at a Mexican restaurant. More specifically, after ordering a round of margaritas. The issue, we discussed, was not that our friend was drinking. We were in our twenties, we reasoned, and were bound to be drinking. The issue was he was drinking a bit too much, to where blackouts and regrettable behavior were becoming more common. We wanted our friend to know we were concerned. I do not remember how successful this unorthodox intervention was. My friend still drinks, but whenever I see him, appears to have it under control. As much as I do, anyway.

When I was in high school, one morning after a particularly nasty brawl with my mother, I confronted her about her drinking. I insisted she would be ashamed to say the same things to me sober that she said when she was drunk. I insisted she must only be able to say those things because she cannot remember them the next day.

She looked at me, unblinking, and said, “I  guarantee would say all of the same things to you, even if I were sober.”

This is the core of my internal struggle with my consumption of wine, beer, and alcohol: where do you draw the line for something you enjoy to keep yourself from spiraling into someone with a drinking problem? How much does any of it matter? The people I have known with alcohol abuse issues have negatively impacted my life enough: it doesn’t seem fair to give up something I like because I am scared of becoming them. But at the same time, I would do anything to avoid becoming a person like that.

I suspect there are a lot of other folks I know who have these same debates with themselves. But we hardly talk about it. I have been wary to even begin writing about it, because if I am thinking about these things enough to write a whole blog post about it, does that mean I have a problem?

To ironically cop a phrase from a twelve step program, my solution has been to take the decision of whether or not to have a drink “one day at a time”. How do I feel? Why am I having a drink? Do I really want a drink because I enjoy it or am I doing it to self-medicate? If I have already had one drink, should I wait a while to get an idea of how I really feel? This balance is walking a tight rope, perpetually self-correcting to keep myself from falling off. And so far I have managed to remain mostly upright.