People drink alcohol socially and because they enjoy the taste. However, more often, they drink to experience the effects it produces, effects that can cover up underlying personal problems.
Some people don’t want to start drinking, but can’t say no, and others are unable to stop once they start. Thinking about these situations, I want to share . . .
My Drinking Problem
Like most kids growing up in the fifties, I wondered what alcohol tasted like. As a Jewish youngster, I wished that a glass of wine would be placed next to my plate at our Passover holiday meal in April. But seated at the children’s table in my family home, with my sister and cousins, this was not the case. My beverage was grape juice, served in a wine glass.
Eyeing the glass, I looked at my father and shook my head in disappointment. He grinned and said, “Looks like wine and tastes a bit like it, too.”
“But it isn’t,” I groaned.
“Your time will come,” he replied.
When I became a teenager, my parents broke the rules a bit. The drinking age in New York was eighteen. However, in unison, they stated, “If you need to drink, do it in front of us—no other place.”
“Well, that works for me,” I said, delighted at the thought I could have my first real alcoholic beverage in the near future.
The next year, in March 1958, my uncle and aunt opened their third children’s store in Queens, New York. I was not quite fourteen years old at the time. At the grand opening, on a Saturday evening, I entered the main room of the store and stared at the checkout counter, adorned with glasses full of champagne.
My uncle stood before the group gathered and stated enthusiastically, “Please take a glass so we can toast our newest, most beautiful children’s boutique.”
Somewhat uncomfortable about grabbing the glass, I looked for my father. Our eyes met and I pointed to the champagne. He nodded his head in affirmation and held up one finger. I snatched a glass off the counter— now my prized possession.
My uncle spoke, “My friends and family, I am honored to share this wonderful experience with you. Please lift your glass in celebration of the great things to come in this magnificent store. Now drink, eat, and have fun!”
Well, I did as he said. I poured the long-awaited drink into my mouth. “Ick,“ I muttered. It tasted like vinegar. It was so disgusting; I spit it back into the glass.
After that evening’s experience, I shied away from alcohol. Even when offered a drink in front of my parents, I politely said, “No thank you.”
Years passed and I managed to avoid drinking. Then the summer after my freshman year at the University of Rochester, in upstate New York, I worked as a counselor at an overnight camp in the Catskill Mountains, an amazing job that I put my heart into.
The first couple of weeks went so well that the camp owner announced, “To reward you, our fantastic counselors, for what you’ve accomplished and for how happy you’ve made the kids, we’re going to have a party this weekend—a ‘beer bust.’”
On Saturday evening, the beer flowed from the tap in a large keg that sat in the corner of the camp dining room. I was handed a warm glass and told to drink up. Not knowing any better, I chugged the beer. The warm brew entered my mouth and throat. The taste was miserable and I thought I was going to choke to death. As quickly as it went in, I let it out, spraying it over those around me and myself. I thought, Never again would I want a drink.
As my young adult life began to unfold, I learned not drinking might be worse than drinking.
I moved to California in 1964, because my parents had relocated there. I enrolled at UCLA and joined the same fraternity I’d been a member of at the University of Rochester. I turned twenty-one the next year and now I could legally drink in California, but I had no desire to do so.
At a frat party that year, beer and other booze flowed through the main room of the fraternity house. “Come on, take a drink,” a fraternity brother urged.
“No thanks. I don’t like alcohol. It tastes awful.”
He looked at me with a weird expression on his face and said, “You do know you have to develop a taste for it.”
“Why should I try to develop a taste for something I don’t care for?” I asked.
“Because everybody I know does,” he responded.
I still didn’t do it. I held firm to my position that drinking wasn’t my thing.
About three months later, driving home from a date at 3:00 a.m. on a Friday during Christmas break, I was totally wiped out. I drove the freeway from the San Fernando Valley to Los Angeles at the speed limit, 65 mph, but my fatigue caused me to slow down, then speed up, and then slow down again, however, never swerving out of my lane.
As I tried to remain awake, I glanced in the rearview mirror. What I saw blew me away. Not one, but two sets of flashing lights.
I pulled my car over to the side of the road, rolled down the window, and shut off the engine. Two highway patrol officers approached from their cars, lights still flashing behind me. The taller of the two said, “Please hold your hands up so I can see them. Now show me your drivers license, proof of insurance, and vehicle registration.” He watched closely as I reached into the glove compartment and got them out. I handed them to him. He looked them over and then asked, “Have you been drinking?”
This is when my whole world fell apart and I learned how not to answer this question. I replied, “No officer, I don’t drink.”
Without responding, he opened my door, and said, “Please get out of the car.”
For some reason I never understood, the shorter officer pulled out his gun and pointed it at me. I felt like I was going to puke. The taller one directed me to walk a straight line, stand on my right leg and then my left, touch the tip of my nose with one hand and then the other, follow his finger with my eyes, and pronounce five words. After I did as he instructed, he asked me to exhale so he could smell my breath. It was humiliating.
Rattled, I didn’t know what was coming next. Then he stared me straight in the eye and said, “You’re free to go, but you need to get off the freeway and use the side roads.”
“But officer, I have no idea how to get home from here if I leave the freeway.” To my surprise, he took a sheet of paper and a pen from his pocket, asked me the name of my street, and wrote down the directions. I gasped, “Thank you,” got back in my car and headed home. If this experience taught me one thing, it was if someone asks me again if I’d been drinking, I’d simply say, “No.”
The fear of telling people I don’t drink became an obstacle I had trouble overcoming. So at a party, I’d approach the bar and request a screwdriver—with a little vodka and a lot of orange juice. Since screwdrivers are served in a regular drinking glass, if no other guests were present where the drinks were being served, I’d ask the bartender to fill my glass with just orange juice.
My drinking problem lasted until I was forty-five. It was only then I became comfortable saying. “I don’t drink,” when asked if I’d like one.
My “non-drinking life” is not perfect, however. Today, when I tell people I don’t drink, some say, “I hope you don’t mind my asking you a question.”
I reply, “No. Go ahead.”
And then they ask, “How long have you been sober?”
As we ring in another New Year, and I’m told to raise my champagne glass in a toast to a wonderful future ahead, I will do so with pride. However, my glass will be neither half full nor half empty—just empty.
Copyright © 2022 Alan Lowe. All rights reserved.
