Tuesday, June 04, 2019

Beer of the Week special: Guest post by author Evan Bollinger


For The Love of the Drunk


I remember my first drink.

It was a shot and it was beer. Bitter, luke warm like tap water left in a dirty glass in a disheveled kitchen in a subterranean dorm room with beige walls and three too few lamps. My heart was practically in my brain when I took that first gulp.

But nobody cared. Nobody knew. My alcohol maidenhead was gone down the gullet...

Part of me wondered if it was obvious, the half-fear on my face. But alas, there was no time to watch. 60 seconds passed and another. And then another. A minute by minute swish-swash mouthwash of that kingly beverage. A “power hour” they called it.

Though I didn’t see the power. Not in me. And by shot #47 or so, there was no such thing as hour or minute. Time no longer ticking but melting… slipping away like Salvador Dali’s.

At some point, some people actually looked different. Or maybe I was different. Or maybe we were all different. I couldn’t help but noticing that the voice in my head was now coming through my mouth and speaking on my behalf, without a whiff of permission.

Oddly enough, I didn’t care.

Because I was laughing. The beer was gone but we were doing something else. Again, a shot glass. No, not a shot glass. A bottle. Straight from the bottle. But this, darker, harsher, like sucking fire from the sewers.

And then we were going, to dinner, to a building that suddenly sounded infinitely more exciting than words could express. Yay we were going. Most of us. One — two? -- of us were in the bathroom spitting. Some of us were being forced by the flat-faced seniors to “keep going bitch, you didn’t fill those to the top.”

In my head I tried to do the calculations. 60 minutes in an hour, so 60 shots. A shot glass was 1.5 oz so that was 1.5 x 60, so… so… 90 oz. Okay, so a normal beer was 10 oz — no, 12 oz. Was it 12 oz? It was 12 oz. But wait, were these cans 12 oz? Okay, okay so that was 12 ounces and… what was the beer?

Normal alcohol? The normal alcohol content for a beer was… So this was 12 oz of ‘normal’ beer alcohol content with shot glasses, one of every hour for 60 minutes, so that was …

Wait, were those ‘normal’ shot glasses?

“Dude.”

We had reached the cafeteria and it was taco night. How did I know it was taco night? Aside from the line of bros who loved taco night? Easy. The undifferentiated mass of dung that clung to your plate and made your bowels quake like the San Andreas Fault.

Except tonight, it was beautiful. And apparently, so too was everybody else. Women looked a lot better. And apparently they thought so too. Why else would they clone themselves?

As the double apparitions moved around me, I squinted with one eye closed to find my fork in the dump of mass-produced paste, an ooze of dining hall fodder on my lopsided tray.

Just for shits and kicks, I opened my closed eye and closed the other.

As the years passed, I would open and close many more. Sometimes you’d open in a strange place. Most times, good. Sometimes bad. Occasionally, awful. Some, like me, would come to invite the spirits whenever possible. Pouring through the pores, heavy on the breath and tongue, glossed and glazed in the crooked eyes.

Words of seeming genius intertwined with mindless garbling. Friends and foes made and forgotten. Good drinks turned bad, and bad turned worse. Good memories too, easy days, simple sips and heavy rips.

Because when you threw out the trash, you chose the trash. You distinguished the trash from the non-trash. For every blood-soaked sunset with a summer ale, for every perfectly hazy memory of intoxication, youthful and old, there are days less glowing. Times less desired. Memories that hurt the brain and heart, leaving indelible marks in nooks and crannies we rarely expose.

It’s simple and obvious, but no less true. You don’t know the bad without the good. You can’t know love without hate. Two sides of the same coin. Just centimeters away, so close yet so far — facing out on two different worlds. Always, forever, one turned away from the other. And yet always, forever, made of the same thing. Created in the same way, from a singular source.

The love-hate-rinse-and-repeat of the lovely drink. The love for the drunk.

Sometimes I loathed what it did to me, or I did to it, or what I imagined we did to each other. And whenever I truly tried to break it down, I riled it up. Rearing the head of that burning lust.

Over time, I’ve learned to change. Slightly, I’m not perfect. But mixed with writing, mixed with anything, in moderation, things always seem better. I think. Writers drink, someone once told me. As if it were an immutable fact of the Universe. Not only do they drink, but they absorb. They suck it dry till their synapses are sufficiently soaked, their thoughts and feelings buoyed by that lapping bath of booze.

Soaked and swimming in thought. Writers, one once told me, are alcoholics.

Well that’s fine, I thought. Because I’m not a writer and never was. What I do, when my fingers flick and my words issue with the warm gentle flow of a healthy heart at rest — that’s not writing. I’m not writing. I’m bleeding. A strong, ceaseless pump, tendering in that moment what matters most.

I write as I run. Streaming, daring it to stop.

I’m not a writer, I think sometimes. I just know how to bleed.



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