my relationship with alcohol
The wrong kind of solitude is vinegar The right kind of solitude is oil
- Jane Hirshfield
Who first introduced me to alcohol? There is a man, there is always a man. Or boy.
I was twenty years old, I was a soldier in the army of [redacted] country. My fellow twenty-year-old soldiers – mischievous young boys that we were, itching for danger and some female attention – suggested we go to a certain place to buy some drinks.
There were no girls that night. Or, if there were, they were talking with other men in the venue, not with this gaggle of young boys that clearly were trying too hard to look cool.
From these boys – who have been trained to load a rifle, and to fire at a target with a certain degree of accuracy and consistency – I encountered the unsophisticated drink known as Martell cognac, mixed-with-Pokka-green-tea.
I was twenty-three years old, I was alone in a Northern country, far from my Southern bubble of comfort and familiarity.
I was assigned a room with a grinning, well-dressed Japanese young man... or boy.
On the first night I met him, he said, “I'm one of the few Japanese people who can speak English well.” In hindsight, that may or may not have been a factually accurate statement, but it worked; I was charmed.
Cordialities over, he asked the important question:
“do you like drinking? My friends and I, we like to go to Bobs.”
“Bobs?”
“Yes, it's short for Bobwundae.” [editor's note: Bobwundaye is a phrase in dialect; it means “no problem.”]
I was a little scared to appear not-cool in front of this new male figure, and I wanted to fit in with my new room-mate, so I said, “yes, I drink sometimes.”
Some weeks later, we went to a nearby bar. Actually, it was quite gringy. It wasn't a bar, it was a watering hole. Or a “dive bar”.
My then-roommate ordered a drink that came in fancy glassware – coupe glass or martini glass, I cannot remember.
I tried so hard to find a topic that would be “cool enough”. Mid-way through this chat – that had me nervous all the time – he stood up and lost his balance; his feet seemed not to obey him. He staggered and struggled to walk in a straight line.
“Are you okay?”
“Uh... the drink is a bit strong,” he managed to verbalise.
I was twenty-seven years old, I looked up Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) on the Internet, to find a gathering near me.
The group numbered about twelve in size, mostly men, with a few women. I shall not reveal their age nor ethnicity nor profession.
I learnt about a Twelve-step Programme, and I received a book. The book.
It was The Book, but it was certainly not the Holy Bible.
The Book had the words, “there is electricity in the air, when people like us gather together.”
But at the AA gathering I attended, there was no electricity, only a sense of quiet desperation.
To end the gathering, we stood in a circle and held hands. [redacted]'s palm, which I was holding, was sweaty.
“If you do the work, the change will work,” we chanted. Or something like that, I cannot remember.
I was twenty-eight years old. I stumbled upon a fancy-looking room in a Centre For Performing Arts.
With no small trepidation I stepped in.
A middle-aged man, well-dressed in vest, button-down shirt, and trimmed moustache, looked over his spectacles, and said, “Hi.”
I would visit him – and his wife – regularly, over the next seven years. (It was a husband-and-wife shop).
But circumstances conspired in such a way that he decided to close down his shop permanently. On the final few days of his shop's operations – I was thirty-four years old by then – he said:
“I'm surrounded by these bottles. But I don't need them. I'm not dependent on them, for my happiness.”
- fin -