I used to Drink and Now I Don't

The end of my love affair with wine and beer wasn't terribly dramatic. The diagnosis wasn't pointing toward doom, it was pointing toward discomfort. The best cure? Take antacids and stop drinking coffee, wine and beer.

I tapered off. Wine wasn't much fun since my bout with throat cancer so I was only saying goodbye to beer. I ran through my stock at about one-quarter my usual rate. I have beer twice a week now, just one. I drink it with dinner and I drink it with reverence for the sheer generosity of the taste of it.

The first few days were weird. Kind of like when your dog dies or your best friend moves to California. All the usual beer times were empty-nothing to do. My friend the buzz was gone too. I felt sad in a low-key way and I stared at my water glass at dinner as if it were a cruel joke.
Then I got used to it. I made up the calories with ice cream and I contracted my diet away from the things that called for beer. In a few weeks it became the new normal and then something odd happened.

Some underground well of energy got tapped. It came out in the form of picture-making. I was seized by passions for making collages, drawings, illustrations of things that nobody had asked me to illustrate. My hard drive became cluttered, my computer slowed down. Files built up, sometimes two a day.
The same flood that brought the pictures carried off some diffidence that had characterized my relationship to my work. I started sending stuff out: pictures, poems, requests for reviews. And the universe, as my sweetheart says, seems to be answering my call.
Since I stopped drinking beer, I've had a book published, lined up two exhibits, gotten hungry and more curious about my world. Life is OK, sometimes it's good and occasionally it's filled with love and greatness.
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And something's lost. To pretend that there's no loss would be to imagine that everything I learned and did was just medicine. In fact, wine and beer put me in contact with the truth about civilization, with some vaultingly beautiful tastes and with some very interesting people.
I hope to hold the loss as both real and surmountable. I plan to tell the truth about it. Finally,
if my experience and my truth can stimulate someone to a larger vision of themselves and the world,
I'll drink to that.

I Used to Drink

I have a life long romance with wine and maybe a half-life love affair with beer. My uncle Alex Anguert introduced me to French wine when I was ten or eleven. He also taught me to play chess and be kind to ladies. He and I were the only wine-lovers in our family and I can't say when the sense of being bigger than the stifling little life we had left off and my raw admiration for the taste of wine began.

I didn't have a sweet tooth, ever. As a six-year old, I loved raw rhubarb, and I drank strong tea. I loved big, earthy tastes and fat creamy ones. The crisp fat on a skillet-cooked lamb chop, grilled mushrooms, well-cooked bacon baked in custard with lots of black pepper and stinky cheese were my childhood treats.

So I was over Manischevitz and into scratchy Bordeaux by the time of becoming a bar-mitzvah. I liked the smell of smoked fish and smoky whisky. And I liked the way my different preferences made me feel: they made me feel special, they set me apart.
There was more. My sense of taste was a private, walled-off place where the grown-ups couldn't get me. Their truth didn't matter in there, I knew what I knew.
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Now, in another person's narrative, this would be the place where the foundation of meaning in my life begins. I'd start a career in the kitchen, I'd open my first restaurant when I'm 15, leave home a year later and apprentice myself to André Soltner. It would be the beginning of the Gourmet Hero Journey. But that's not how it went.

In fact, my love of wine led me to a wonderful side-effect: the buzz. It's funny how we try to diminish the meaning of the effect of a glass or two with a simple little almost onamotopoeic word: buzz. It was so much more than a buzz, that first bloom of a wine head. It was distance in a world that was too close, it was privacy in a world that was so invasive. I could leave town with my wine and they couldn't get to me. By the time I was sixteen and off to college, the deal was sealed: I could calibrate how much 'they' could get to me, I could tune my brain.

The instrument wasn't perfect and I made a lot of misjudgments, but overall, it worked. Better yet, wine was a tool that grew in usefulness the more I knew it. A glass of wine became medicine for lots of ills: boredom, lonliness, longing for meaning, anxiety. It became the natural companion of sociability.
At this point, a lot of people would stop. I took it further. I discovered a world in which wine was the object of admiration. Sort of like fancy handbags in the suburbs or muscle cars in Alabama. To know wine was to be part of a world, and what a world it was. The people who loved wine looked and felt like the family I wished I had. They were interested in things and they were capable of becoming interested in new things. They respected knowledge, they respected taste. I felt at home for the first time.
And then I went deeper. I found out that beer is as old as civilization, that the turn from hunting and gathering food to producing it is intimately tied up with the discovery of brewing. I learned that the act of brewing made water supplies safe at the same time that increasing population density made water unsafe. Places that brewed (or made wine) were healthier than those that didn't.
There was more, lots more. The organization of medeival breweries provided (along with shipbuilding) a model for the industrial revolution.

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So wine, and later its more complicated cousin beer, came to be a hobby, a religion, a clubhouse, a textbook, a friend. As time went on, my world and its got closer. Most importantly, wine became an answer to a whole lot of questions. Was I bored? How about a glass of wine? Was I purposeless? Lonely? Sad?
I wrote The New Short Course in Beer. I taught classes, I got invited to Europe. I gave tastings and I visited wineries.
In some tiny circles I was the beer guy. It was an identity.
Like any other religion, wine had its anti-christs. There were the flaming prohibitionists: the Baptists and the Moslems. But there were also the cerebrally-eviscerated middle-class Jews and the buzzed-down budweiser heads. When I started to teach wine classes at university,
there were priggish and provincial academics. Wine-love came with its built-in friends and, conveniently, with built-in enemies too.
One week in 1981, I tasted Saison Dupont and Chimay Blue. I made a new friend and I wrote The Short Course in Beer. In a few years, wine and beer became my friends, my clubhouse, my flag, my allegiance.
Wine and beer were something I drank and something that medicated my cares. Then it became an identity: something I was.More to the point, they were a source of meaning in my life. I was that wine guy, then I was that beer guy and I really enjoyed that.

There was enough to know that not everybody knew it. That world was attractive enough that people wanted to know more. The folks who already knew were an attractive crowd: they spoke languages, cooked good, gave parties. I felt at home.
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Now that's gone. Just as I expected it would, some doctor came along and said my drinking days were over. So what? That is, so what happens when a love affair and an identity mask die? Who am I?

Stay tuned.

nancy my dear,

i can really see how my way of being leaves you feeling un- or under-related to. frankly, i have no idea of how to grow out of it. i  really think it's a shame that you are involved with a man whose stature doesn't match yours.

for instance: in the rich mandel instance, i recall my own feeling of insecurity at the table that night and my sense of estrangement from all the confidence-in-vulnerability that i felt around me. what could i have done about that? i don't know. would i be different now? i don't really know that either.

for instance: with dave and marsha i can imagine that sometime or other i might feel free to address the crowded atmosphere and insert myself into their show, but when i think back to that night, i can't see myself being very different (maybe it's a version of not going where i'm not wanted)

for instance: when you respond to my enthusiasm about a vista by saying 'how is it different from any other view?' it recalls to me your equation of walmart and the woods. it says to me that the thing that's putting me in touch with the sublime is really not special, in fact not worthy of admiring.

and i hear it this way even after reading what you wrote. how is it different from any other view? doesn't make me feel related to, it makes me feel like you took my enthusiasm and used it to begin an argument for some philosophical point.

i don't want to talk about filing cabinets, i want to argue: i don't want to tell you that i understand how you could ask that,i don't naturally turn to 'nancy, i felt misperceived' i want to tell you that you got it wrong.

and when i replay it in my mind, even with the most loving will in the world, i can't see it much differently.

on the other hand:

when i think back to wellfleet, i can see myself being more concerned for you and therefore more aware of the wind.

when i think back to vernick, i can imagine being in a studier place with the waitress.

when i think back to tango, i remember our do-over and i see it differently because i have some new information.

when i think about dave and ally,i think i felt shy.  i think i could have prepared my thoughts beforehand so that i would have felt sturdier and therefore spoken up.

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taking in everything, i can see why you would be disappointed. i see that my limited filing categories and response-ability make it hard for you to be my friend. it is largely on me and it makes me very sad. i see too how this limits your sense of possibilities for us going forward. 

perhaps i've been too optimistic in thinking about a future without offering you the necessary personal infrastructure. i certainly accept your reticence and dampened curiosity as inevitable sequilae to my limited filing space.

so what shall we do? i would hate to lose you and to give up the vision i have of the mutual healing and creative doing we might experience. l love you.  but i also won't hang around (won't be where i'm not wanted) and be a pest if you are feeling pessimistic. i thought we were making progress. perhaps you do too. maybe my pessimistic take on your letter is a pure projection and in itself an example of the limited filing categories of which you complain. i don't know how to read your energy about this, so:

i am here for you to make it better if you want to take it one instance at a time. i'm willing to look at myself because i know that you'll do the same. i love you and i also recognize that for you, this may be a case where love is not enough.

holding you tenderly in my heart, lev

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ps. on the matter of 'people who like wine and beer....' i think i'd like to discuss that in front of lance

we're missing each other here and i think those words have aroused something that we could take a look at.