Make Mine a Double: Why Women Like Us Like to Drink (Or Not)

The Drink

133 susan campbell ฀ t The Drink ihave pretty much given up the idea that I will ever enjoy The Drink. That’s wine, beer, liquor, and frou-frou mixed drinks—all of it regretfully poured down the drain to swirl off in an amber flow to the party down the street, where perhaps people dwell who would enjoy it. I will never stumble into a drinking establishments and, floozy-like, throw my breasts over the bar to order a tall one. I will never sit with the snots or swells discussing the grape or the grain with any degree of grace, nor will I ever—most likely— learn to open wine in such a way that the drinker next to me won’t feel compelled to take the instrument out of my hands before I cut myself or stab through the bottle. Blame Jesus for my current sober state. I do. I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian church that forbade drinking because the quickest way to be induced to remove one’s panties unduly was to 1 Dance and 2 Drink. And once the kids in my youth group learned just how much fun was sex, we’d never warm a pew again. And then Jesus would return and find us wanting, and we would be placed with the rest of the chaff, the sinners who go to hell where our flesh would melt from our bones throughout all eternity. You could look it up. We did. It’s in there. That’s the boiled-down version of the theology that caught in 134 t s u s a n c a m p b e l l my net, and though the original message was probably more nuanced , the shadings went right by me. During one high-school football game, the rumor spread that Terry, a friend of mine, was drinking beneath the stands. I went to retrieve her and cried over her lost state. For her part, Terry was gracious enough not to tell me to mind my own business, though she would have been well within her rights to do so. I don’t believe our friendship ever quite recovered , and why would it? Not drinking cut me off from countless house parties when someone’s parents would just be pulling around the corner for a nice daylong fishing trip and my classmates , like locusts, would descend with six-packs galore. I didn’t get the phone call to show up in the chat piles (piles of radioactive gravel left over from my hometown’s old mining days) because who wants to throw a party and invite a grind—or, worse, a fundamentalist who’ll bring along her Bible to swing like Carry Nation’s hatchet? I did not grow up drinking, and while it is a talent one can acquire later—like piano playing—there’s always just a bit of a paucity of talent. You can practice and practice, but you’ll never make the travel team unless you start young. Beyond the theology, we were frightened away from the bottle by a thick vein of alcoholism that runs through my family. We knew which uncle and which grandfather had pickled themselves to death. In our fundamentalist home, drinkers were looked on with much disdain, and if I had opened up the refrigerator and found a wine bottle there, I would have hurried outside because I would have known I had wandered into the wrong house. We. Didn’t. Drink. So while sex and sin were to be had all around me (this being the 1970s), I rounded up my sober loser buddies to try to have fun anyway. Someone would grab their mother’s car, and we would go vandalize the homes of private citizens. I believe we were trying to prove to our drinking friends that we could be just as wild and crazy, even without the encouragement of alcohol. The Drink t 135 There was a hollowness to it, but I think I was having fun without alcohol. If my friends were boring, they weren’t scary, and I could relax around them even while I felt a longing to be in the cool crowd. Still, I had the added incentive of my teachers’ love to keep me on the straight and narrow. My teachers would compliment me on my clean lifestyle. That I was out drag-racing and...