I’ve almost forgotten what it feels like to be drunk. Not what it tastes like — I remember what it tastes like. It tastes sweet. I always preferred sweet mixed drinks: schnapps and orange juice, Kahlua and half and half, and absolutely anything involving Bailey’s Irish Cream. My girlfriend — who is no longer my girlfriend, of course, you don’t get to keep any of your relationships when you get sober, except maybe one dear friend if you’re lucky — my girlfriend and I would sit around on Friday night, order pizza, and get drunk for no reason. She asked me once, after we had both had enough shots of schnapps that we couldn’t possibly do anything else like go out or even do much of anything staying in except sit around and watch TV and play video games, she asked me why we were drinking. As if it had just sort of snuck up on her, this drunkenness thing, and she was just now starting to notice it. Being drunk is like that; it just sort of sneaks up on you. I shrugged and said “Why not?” This seemed hysterically funny to us, in a drunk sort of way, and we both started laughing.
Alternatively, you can get drunk on beer, but it’s really not as much fun, unless you happen to have really good beer, and even then I never did acquire much of a taste for it. Plus it makes you pee more, and God knows, my bladder was never very hardy to begin with. Maybe that’s why I developed an affinity for mixed drinks. Less work, more bang, fewer bathroom breaks. Stumbling to the bathroom is never pleasant, either, but not for the reasons you think. It’s not the vomiting; I rarely vomited. I was a better drinker than that; I got all my vomiting out of the way in college, like a good red-blooded upper-middle-class American. No, the unpleasantness of stumbling to the bathroom drunk is looking at yourself in the mirror on the way out. Seeing your own face, flush, your own hair, matted, wondering if it will ever get any better than this and knowing that, for tonight at least, it’s too late to do anything about it. To magnify the effect, it helps if you happen to be holding a beer bottle or a drink glass in your hand at the time. Yes, that really helps.
One of the moments I enjoy most about being sober is the first step out of a restaurant. Going to a restaurant, you see, is not that much fun. Everyone around you orders a drink; that is, after all, what you do when you go out to eat, especially in large groups where not everyone knows everyone else. You order a drink, the person next to you orders a drink, and that act itself, followed by the ensuing ritual of actual drinking, all help to loosen the social barriers and start the flow of conversation. Some restaurants are better about non-drinkers than others. Most implicitly understand if you claim to be the designated driver; some even give you a free non-alcoholic drink as a sort of consolation prize. “Thanks for coming, sorry you’re a loser, here’s a cranberry juice.” That sort of thing. Other restaurants, not even that. I went to one restaurant where I asked for a virgin daiquiri and the waitress disappeared for a while and finally came back with everyone else’s drinks and said that the bar didn’t make virgin drinks. We don’t go there anymore. Fuck ‘em if they can’t cater to sobriety.
But anyway, after the meal, after the chatter, after the bill is split and the tip is calculated and everyone has run to the bathroom and gathered up their things and said goodnight, I always make it a point to notice that first step outside the restaurant. As I’m stepping outside, crossing the threshhold of the doorway, I purposely take a deep breath and let the outside air fill my lungs. I still do this, to this day. At that moment, I realize that I’ve made it, I’ve survived the evening, I’m still stone cold sober and ready to face whatever lies ahead for the rest of the night. Maybe that’s some other event, a movie or show or a walk around Greenwich Village; maybe it’s the second, more private half of a date; or maybe it’s just coming home, kicking up my feet, and writing about it on my weblog. Whatever; that moment, that first step, that deep breath, is what it feels like to be sober.
