Nobody Drinks the Way They Used To

We all know who the famous American literary alcoholics were. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Pound, the members of the Algonquin Round Table, just to name a few. Many an English major has been forced to consider the influence the bottle had on these writers. The big question often seems to be: did it help or hurt them when it wasn’t the cause of death? My big question, however, is: how did anyone ever manage to distinguish the alcoholics from everyone else?

When I was in college, my grandmother wistfully used to say, “Nobody drinks the way they used to.” I had no real idea what she meant, as I watched her lining up many bottles of wine and cans of beer (while making sure she had one or two bottles of bourbon and gin on hand “just in case”) for a dinner party of six. After all, all my friends and I seemed to be drinking up a storm with our keg parties and mysterious “punches” sloshing around in seemingly-bottomless garbage pails. Seemed to me were “drinking the way they used to.”

But these days, I’m beginning to understand from whence my grandmother’s sentiments came. I read and hear about the “old days” of publishing and law, when three-martini lunches were standard. I’ve been known to drink my fair share of one-martini lunches in my day, but if I were to drink 3? Well, you might as well just consider me to be a part-time employee with as much work as I’d be able to get done passed out in my office. But what really kills me is that, then, those people would apparently go home to their “cocktail hours.”

I was reading Peg Bracken a few years back (by the way, if you’ve never read her do. She’s a must read for anyone who’s ever once had the thought, “I wish I didn’t have this family and house to care for”), and in one of her books (it may have been I Try to Behave Myself, but I’m not sure), she echoed my grandmother on the subject of everyone’s drinking habits (back in what I would have thought were the “’old days’ of publishing and law”). She then proceeded to provide advice on what cocktails to prepare for a cocktail party and how to serve them that had me thinking, “Well, not if you don’t want to wake up the next morning to find innert bodies lying all over the house right where they fell around 7:00 p.m. last night.”

Most recently I’ve been reading things like M.F.K. Fisher. You wouldn’t believe how much alcohol that woman was able to imbibe, and I haven’t a clue how she managed to remember every single thing she ever ate from age two on when she must have been killing brain cells at the speed of light. Maybe all that booze focused on killing the cells that make a woman feel guilty for lying when she announces that she and her husband didn’t drink that much. Let’s just say, one day and one night with these “light drinkers,” and I’d be dead from alcohol poisoning.

I’ve also been reading The Lady and the Panda. Now that I'm aware of what and how those explorers drank, I’m beginning to understand why quite a few expeditions in China might have ended with falls from mountainsides. Especially when you add the fact that, apparently, opium was also often being smoked by the Chinese men hired to do all the heavy lifting and carrying.

Although I despise the New Puritans whose thought bubbles forget they’re supposed to be hidden and come churning right up to the surface, reading, “She’s having a third glass of wine?” when I’m out enjoying myself immensely at a dinner party, I’m quite relieved we no longer live in a society in which so many adults are basically drunk every day from noon until they go to bed at night. First of all, we have enough insane drivers on the road as it is. Secondly, I stay out of bars unless I’m with Bob these days, because I spent enough time in my twenties warding off the attentions of drunken men who wouldn’t have given me the time of day if we'd been in a business meeting together at 10:00 a.m. Imagine if those drunken men started showing up at 2:30 p.m. business meetings. And thirdly, I know I’ve got about as much willpower against peer pressure as, oh, your average twelve-year-old, and I value my liver. Quite highly, actually.

So, I’ll leave that sort of drinking up to the Dorothy Parkers of the world. And I’ll steal my grandmother’s phrase, re-shaping it a little to make it my own. Read this in a very wistful tone: nobody reads the way they used to.