I’m writing this from Isla Holbox: the land of ceviche and thatched roofs and flamingos and tiny-umbrella-adorned cocktails. Today is day 6 of 7 and I’ve just had a Miami Vice — part strawberry, part coconut, all rum. Pink, cold, sweet, it’s a welcome reprieve from the salty, incessant fever of the seaside. This is the first cocktail that I’ve had since September. I move my straw round and round the cup, the familiar gurgle and purl of an empty glass signaling a victory.
A drink is never just a drink. It’s courage and comfort and coming of age (sometimes coming to terms with age). It’s celebration and devastation. Boredom and joy. It’s friend and enemy, self-love one day and self-destruction the following. Disappointment, bliss. Bills to the sky, or a promotion. A birthday. A death. Thirst. Memory. Place.
But it’s never just a drink.
The first time I blacked out, I was a sophomore in high school. I went to a party on the Pontchartrain lakefront; my first time on the white side. It was a big deal, for me at least, to have been invited to such an affair — gaggles of teenagers traipsing the concrete levee, dressed to the nines in their finest Abercrombie and DC and Forever 21, thirsty for belonging and bad liquor. I don’t remember what I wore, or who I arrived with, or how we got there, but I do remember needing to prove that I deserved my spot on that levee. My inauguration kicked off with a bottle of booze duct-taped to each hand (one brown, one white, neither more than $7) . The challenge — surely you see where this is going — was to end the night (presumably alive, though that wasn’t specified) with both bottles empty. I was not to share. Only then would I earn back the use of my hands.
This is not my own memory, but a memory of myself, formed by the sharp shards of story shared with me; a dastardly mosaic of Jägermeister, SKYY, Jack.
I drank. Vomited. Passed out. Woke up next to the aforementioned vomit. Begged for water. Drank the water that I was given, that had apparently come from the lake. Vomited again. Woke up again, in a friend’s bed, hands free of glass. I missed the entire party. I still don’t know if I finished either bottle.
The second, third, fourth times I blacked out were scattered through my remaining teen years. Somewhere between an A-cup and a C-cup, I’d decided that it was critical that I be able to outdrink anyone, regardless of age, gender or size. Fake IDs were plentiful as potholes in New Orleans and though Andy was still years from the legal drinking age, Tammy, Patricia and Yolonda were fully grown.
Beyond the haze of pubescence, my relationship with alcohol shifted, but only slightly. There was less to prove, but anxiety lingered like henna. Anxiety about my body, anxiety about money, anxiety about my relationship, anxiety about money, anxiety about rhythm, anxiety about work and housing and family and meals and money. Life came at me faster than a Shanghai Maglev and liquor, in all its acrid glory, became my aegis of choice. There wasn’t much to laud during those years, but there was always something to miss, and Barefoot, however cloying, dulled the sting of mourning.
Things changed again, as they do. This time it was for the better.
On my first date with my (now) wife, we met at a bar and prattled on about our dreams, hopes, fears. The cocktails kept coming, as did the words that poured like wine from our lips, stained maroon and ripe for love. Before we left the bar, I chugged the last of her drink, loudly proclaiming that we, “don’t waste liquor around here.”
From there, celebrations were aplenty, and with them came the glitzy clink of toasts, cheers, ¡saluds!. As my world view expanded, so did my palette: Rum on a hot Cuban plantation, Pastis in the lissome streets of Marseille, Vino Verde on sailboat in Porto, Micheladas from a shoddy stall in Lagunilla in Mexico City, Pox in Chamula on Día de Muertos. I made a passport of my wine rack, and my ego grew drunk and plump from the Sangioveses, the Vermentinos, the Ports. This chapter of booze was glee; my tongue left sanguine with the spice and smoke and syrup of it all.
I’d been fully sucked into the pleasure vortex and suddenly found myself downing a bottle of wine a day — sometimes two — without thought. Sixteen-year-old me would’ve been proud, but late-twenty-something-year-old me was not. Wine with dinner, wine on good workdays and bad workdays, wine because I wanted it, wine because I needed it. Our grocery bill grew longer, and the question in my head grew louder:
When does a habit become a problem?
For me, it was when I could no longer button my pants, or waking up more than one weekday (in the same week) hungover. It was the acne that stippled my chin like chicken pox, the ever-present bloat in my belly, the sandbags beneath my eyes.
I wish I could say that I’d had the discipline to stop drinking on my own, but that’s not how it happened. I started medication for another, more acute ailment, and was told that I should avoid alcohol for the first 2 weeks while my body adjusted. I wish I could say that I enthusiastically took on the challenge of sobriety, but that, too, would be a lie. I was pissed. And not only that — I was ill. My body was adjusting to a new drug and detoxing from an old one in tandem. I spent 10 days dizzy with rage, with nausea, with the realization that, for all intents and purposes, somewhere between the levee and Lisbon, I had become an alcoholic.
Two weeks, originally an adjustment period, turned into two months, then two quarters, until the cravings disappeared, the way the wine used to. Mocktails, the same ones that I used to, well, mock, have become a thrill, and my chin sits high (and pock-free) knowing that my memories are my own.
Alcohol is remembrance. It’s the beer I chugged, frantic, before my first kiss. It’s the MD 20/20, an unnatural blue, heavy in my backpack during my last true Mardi Gras. It’s the plink of crystal champagne flutes on my engagement day. But it’s also the hours I’ve lost, spent hunched over toilet bowls in strange houses. The t-shirt in the dumpster, crumpled and rank with bile. The texts I’d pay thousands to unsend.
I’m not swearing off alcohol forever just yet, I don’t know that I ever will, but now, back in Holbox, the waiter comes to the table and asks, “Uno mas?”
“No gracias,” I say. And it feels good.