Alcohol
by Scott Teel

When people find out that I don’t drink, their reactions are almost all identical. I’ll walk into a party and someone will say, “How ya doin’? Getcha a beer?”

“No thanks, but a glass of water would be nice.”

“But this is good stuff.”

“Well, I don’t drink, is all. Water will be great.”

Now the routine kicks in, as predictable as the stages a dying person goes through. First comes a furrowed brow, disbelief. Next is the Reason phase; they want to know why I don’t drink. They’re not being rude, it’s just that they can’t fathom why anyone would want to live without drinking, unless they have a good reason, and they’d like to hear it.

“I just don’t. No real reason.”

I’m not a prude, but now I’m on the outside. He doesn’t drink and has no reason…he must be a total dud who hates any kind of social fun. He’s probably never even played Hungry Hungry Hippos.

Next we’ve come to the “You Don’t Know What You’re Missing” phase. I’ve never been drunk. This amazes them. Now they want me to join them and some of them will go to fantastic lengths to try to get me to. They’ve realized their purpose on this planet, and that is to get me drunk. World hunger? It’s a problem, but Scott has to get drunk. AIDS? War? Homeless people? They’re someone else’s problem now because Scott has to get drunk. It’s a good thing I never met Mother Theresa during her life, because she’d have abandoned the poor of Calcutta immediately to take up the cause of getting Scott drunk.

“Try it. You might like it.”

“Nah.”

“I’ll get you something besides beer, something that doesn’t taste like skink urine.”

“No, thanks.”

“C’mon, I’ll drink with you.”

“No thanks.”

“You have to try it.”

This goes on and on sometimes, even reaching offers of money. I can’t imagine why they want me to get drunk so badly, except so they can see me drunk.

And don’t take my refusing to drink as me being all hoity-toity and above people. I have nothing against people drinking. It’s fine with me. Unless someone’s being violent or nasty or driving (I think drunk drivers who kill people in accidents should be charged with murder), a person getting drunk is okay with me.

“Okay, just drink one then.”

When someone gets to being a pest about it, I tell them I’m a recovering alcoholic. That always gets a good reaction. It’s like they’ve been bitten by a snake, eyes wide, ashen-faced, a look of self-loathing. They’ll apologize to me forever, sometimes longer than the attempt to get me drunk. I just tried to get someone to ruin his life…I am a filthy vermin. A diseased bacterium on a slug’s infected rectum. Then they have to drink more to get themselves out of the funk.

It’s not always like this, sometimes people just say, “Oh, that’s cool” and let it go at that. But those aren’t the norm.

I’ve seen drunk people and I just don’t want to be one. Maybe I’m afraid to lose control of my senses. I have to say, my life and this world are surreal enough without the addition of a senses-altering depressant. And I’m already near incoherent as it is, why make it worse? How much further down the chart can you go than babbling idiot? I’d have to return to primate status, mentally, pushing buttons on a keypad to make rudimentary sentences, like chimps do. “Scott…like…friend…Scott…vomit…now …ruin…friend…dress …apple.”

And I’ve seen alcoholics, too. The worst one was a woman I worked with a few years back. She was in accounting, in her forties, her face red and tightly wrinkled from years of cigarettes and booze. We’re talking professional drinking with her, it was a second job. She kept hard liquor in her desk at work. Her tolerance level must have been astronomical, I don’t know how much she had to drink to get drunk, but it was a lot. Her liver wrote a note one day and committed suicide. She spiked her oatmeal in the morning. She’d put ice in her vodka to water it down so she could drink more of it before passing out.

But she really put on a display at the office Christmas party. She got more bombed than Hiroshima, staggering around, eyes half closed, dancing, grabbing the tie of any man who walked by her and spinning him around in circles until he could grab a dinner knife and cut the tie off to escape her.

My friends drink responsibly. They get drunk and let me drink soda. But new acquaintances almost inevitably try to get me to drink. It’s practically something woven into human DNA to want to.

If I were to drink, I could hang out in bars and maybe drunk girls would come home with me and I’d be more popular and less self-critical. I could sing karaoke and have a great time that I won’t remember.

Nah.

© 2005 Scott Teel