I have been drunk for a long time.
There are the notable binges. At a staff Christmas party, I put my boss in a headlock; in the photo, I am toothy, he is purple-faced. Later, I did shots of šljivovica with my boss's boss until I went blind. My girlfriend made me leave. I was very angry. I remember screaming at her in the parking lot. In the car, I said unforgivable things. And then I threw up on my lap. When we got home, I put my fist through a side light and smeared the walls with blood on my way up the stairs. She did not leave me.
I have slept off drunks and hangovers under bushes, on beaches, behind sheds, on picnic tables and benches, in bus stations and train stations, in restaurants and bars, at work; in Barrie, Windsor, Victoria, Toronto, Taichung, Taipei, Hualien, Hong Kong, Naha, Paris. I have drunk half a bottle of white wine in a park before a job interview. I have gone to the whores in the company of Chinese cops and Chinese criminals, and never managed to engineer an erection. I have told strangers my secrets; I have been punched out; I have earned my despite.
I tagged along with a pack of teachers from another school, a large school with many foreign employees, on a 7-11 crawl. There were something like a dozen convenience stores on the route from their school to our destination. We started at six. I had eaten nothing at all that day. It was hot, raining. I bought an umbrella. I bought an apple after three beers, feeling prudent. We loitered in front of the OKs and Family Marts and 7-11s, drinking beers, smoking cigarettes, telling bad stories and worse jokes, heading into the bright cold store for another can.
We came into the bottom of a road near a university, 學府路, I think, and paused at a very low-rent variety store. I think these places were called Sunrise. There weren't many, all in dirty parts of town. Next to the thousand 7-11s, they were cramped, dingy, and dim. In front of this one, there were a couple of tables with built-in seats like you find in mall food courts. The seats were occupied by three labourers with hard dirty hands, sleeveless shirts with holes in them, red teeth, skin burned russet. They had a case of Beck's in cans. I struck up a broken (crippled) conversation with them. It wasn't a conversation. It was a handful of simple sentences thrice-repeated, strung together with big smiles and emphatic gestures and 乾杯! 乾杯! I was a big hit. They went in and bought another suitcase of beer and wouldn't let me pay. They showed me pictures of their kids. We yelled 乾杯 and downed cupfulls of 120-proof 高梁酒, we chewed betel nut. The crowd of teachers had thinned, heading up the road. The last of them tried to get me to go with them; I said I'd catch them up. The second case was empty and we were finishing the 高梁 when Bridget came back for me.
Somewhere on the way past the two or three corner stores I had missed, I lost my umbrella and my water bottle. The crowd had dwindled a little. I remember debating the merits of the food in the store with a tall Canadian. He took a tetrahedron of rice from the refrigerated display. I couldn't decide, so I bought another umbrella. A few minutes later I gave it to a girl who didn't have one. This was the last stop. Everyone was going up to the apartment of a new couple, a few weeks fresh, good-looking and probably still in love or something like it. I decided to buy food from a street vendor. Someone came back for me. I ate two skewers of chicken hearts on the way to the building.
The apartment was bright, clean, sparsely furnished. I collapsed in a chair, and very shortly realized that I would not recover. I got out of the chair. There was someone in the bathroom. I went out the door. Unable to face the elevator, I went down the stairs. I fell. I clung to the stairs and vomited. Beer foam, chocolate-coloured paste, green bile, black bile. I slept shivering on the front steps of a Chinese Mennonite church and shuffled home like an accident under the early white sun.
In Paris, when I had given up hope of finding work, I got down to drinking away my money. I never made it into the Louvre. I walked around the narrow roads. I bought demis of the cheapest beer and ham sandwiches in the dingiest cafés. In cluttered little groceries I bought bottles of wine and poured them into my water bottle. I walked miles through the confused outer arrondisements. My blisters burst. I limped like a child. I got lost in the suburbs, where I was accosted by Arab kids demanding cigarettes and money. Once when I marshalled my startled, puffy-mouthed, bloodshot French into a refusal, a boy no older than twelve barked an angry laugh at me and punched my face. I was scared. I stared at him and I went on walking. His friends watched me from across the street. He yelled after me that he would kill me. I turned the first corner, and the next, and the next. It didn't matter; I was already lost. I pulled on the bottle like it would save me. I took refuge in a café where the old men hated me. Unable to find my hotel, or even my arrondisement, I bought more wine and walked until the price of a beer began to go up. I drowsed in a park, but still did not feel safe. I headed uphill; when the streets twisted, I turned uphill, knowing that if the Champs Elysées are Paris's tourist equator then the big hills are its tourist poles. On Montparnasse, I took my wine-red mouth into a movie theatre and fell asleep watching Spencer Tracy.
And what do you think I did the next day?
I have missed scores of days of work, ignoring the phone. I have gone to work fragile, filling my belly with water and vomiting efficiently between classes. I have spent countless hours and hundreds of dollars on phone calls in the middle of the night to people who were once friends, calling them at work, rhapsodizing incoherently, saying the unspeakable, ending in ridiculous gales of tears. Mortified, going to work late the next morning, and hourly, daily, I would repeat the shamed, shrugging, rueful reminder, ‘There's always suicide.’ Swearing tonight, just for one night, I won't drink, I'll go to bed early and put it back together. And stopping off to buy twelve beers on the way home.
Buying a bottle of wine to go with dinner, making it three for variety, contingency; getting home with my provender, uncorking, laying out the fish and greens or steak and eggplant; putting on music; breaking the glass; drinking from the bottle; burning the sauce; undercooking the meat; watching black-and-white movies alone and blearily; ungumming my eyes to two empty bottles and a heel.
I remember heading home and tallying the beers waiting in my fridge, and worrying four would not be enough for a weeknight. The worry over four shaded into worry over six. Eight, ten; should I stop at the store? No, it's only a Tuesday. But better to be safe. I'll just pick up a quart of corner-store Johnnie Walker. My life is garbage. How would I do it? I'd go up to the top floor with a hammer and a tea towel, I'd break the stairwell window quietly.
Everyone has a drinking problem the day after they have too much to drink. The alcoholic hears the lesson every morning and washes it away every night. His spongy wits make him feel clever, sensitive, urbane. On Sunday morning, he pulls old jeans over his naked ass and stands barefoot and shirtless on his balcony drinking Scotch and coffee, feeling young and raw, free, careless; he passes out in the afternoon and wakes up after dark. He is always pouring another, eyeing his family to see if they are keeping count. He conducts all social intercourse over a glass. When he is detained, he is irritable, thinking only of going home to his filthy kitchen and his full ice-cube trays. The warm throb of his guts and the warm soft laziness of his eyes are the comforts of home. In company, he begins chilly and does not warm up until four drinks in; he is momentarily charming, and then he boils over and is angry or maudlin or tiresome or incomprehensible. The alcoholic thinks he has fooled you. He thinks you don't know.
I quit for almost three months, once, in the last year in Taiwan. I remember it being very boring. There was nothing to do. There were so many places I could not go for dinner. I was annoyed at being denied the common and unexceptionable indulgence of a single drink and to bed—a luxury to which I could never limit myself anyway. I don't remember accomplishing anything more than before, except that I read more books. I don't remember how that period ended; but I think I was secretly relieved that the bottle had waited for me.
All this to say, to no one or thereabouts, I have stopped drinking. There is a too late. It has not yet come.