Drinking It All In
By Lisa Falour

Why do I drink? There are dozens of reasons, besides habit and physical dependence. In fact, the latter has been diminished since I took my first alcoholism cure in 1997, then another longer one in 1998. When I stop drinking now, I am ill for only two days, and even then it is mild, and can be countered with a few aspirin, a tranquilizer or two, and something for my stomach. I like to drink daily, starting nearly first thing in the morning. Not due to hangover, I seldom have those anymore. I know to stop drinking before getting to that point. In the evenings, I like to drink milk an hour or two before bed, and then to read awhile in bed, so no, I seldom get hangovers anymore. My severe sleep apnea was recently diagnosed, and I have begun treatment for it. A machine pumps oxygen into me when I stop breathing at night, which used to be an average of 30 times per hour. According to the hospital report, I never go into any type of full, deep, restful sleep. I wake up dog tired, and need some alcohol more than tea or coffee (I’ve never liked coffee, anyway) to get going. In a big glass of fresh juice, preferably. Then, my stomach begins to cooperate, and I can eventually eat some type of breakfast. Ramen noodles, oatmeal, leftover meats and vegetables are my favorite breakfast. I think if I could have anything I wanted for breakfast it would be a bowl of miso soup and a platter of sashimi. And, of course, a glass of sake.

My parents, the beatniks, always had a gallon of hearty burgundy in their trailer, cottage or rented apartment -- whatever sorry place they had settled in for the time being. They drank as much of it as they liked, though my mother drank more than my father did. He had a Webcor three-speed machine, and they’d listen to records, dance about, drink wine, and then cook a meal with the odds and ends poor people have in their larder: chicken wings, ribs, beans, pots of stew or of chili. We ate as much butter and salt as we liked, at table. The empty wine jugs became lamp bases or my mother painted them with pretty decorations and they became other such useful objects.

In the ‘60s, after my Mom had dragged my father back to Cleveland and insisted he give up his pie-in-the-sky ideas of work as an "ecological consultant" or as a "computer programmer" for IBM, in order that he should go work in the electric motor repair shop of his father, we lived in a rented apartment in a wooden house in East Cleveland, Ohio. Though money was more than tight, they saved up so my Dad could have a martini when he got home from a very rough day at the office. Once, I saw my mother serve it to him while he was in the bath, trying in vain to get the smell of the shop out of himself. I asked to eat the olives in the bottoms of the glasses, and was often told yes. They tasted funny, but I liked them. I think the first thing I learned to "cook" was a martini. I was about 6 years old I think. No, I didn’t mix them for my parents, it’s not that sinister. I just used to ask Mom (sometimes Dad) what was in their recipes, and they told me. I like to cook and am curious.

My grandparents on both sides loved a drink, and when my maternal grandparents moved a few doors down the street from us, I watched Grandma drink scotch most of the day. Her moods were uneven. Sometimes she’d joke merrily and other times she was in the worst depressions. Mostly, I remember how she’d sigh and hope for riches she knew she’d never enjoy. In her way, she kept her little apartment as tidy and just-so as any old English or French or Italian lady, and, in fact, Grandma was Slovenian. My Grandpa was born there and immigrated when he was 12 or so. She was born in Cleveland, but grew up among "Slovaks," as they called themselves. She often spoke dreamily of the family saloon and the fine profits it had brought in, all ruined by Prohibition. My mother’s family had been well off due to drink, and constraints against drinking had tossed them into a poverty from which they never recovered.

From as early as I can remember sitting at table on special occasions, I was allowed one drink. I liked the smell and the taste of beer, but more often, it was "cold duck," a cheap sparkling wine, for birthdays or other holidays. I saw my little brother running around excited after one of these, and when I asked, my mother said, "He’s a little drunk." A toddler had been allowed a cocktail! Oh, well.

I did love serving as barmaid for my Grandpa when he’d come to visit. He’d install himself in the easy chair in our living room, the very one he died in years later on Father’s Day after a good meal, and my mother promptly poured him a shot of whiskey, and sent me to deliver it to him. I had to move slowly so as not to spill any. "Here, Grandpa, Mom sends you this and says a beer will come next," I’d tell him, and he’d grin and say too loud (he was deaf, many years in machine shops), "Heh, heh, heh, GOD BLESS YA!" Down the hatch it would go, and I’d take the empty shot glass back to Mom, who’d smile and know that all was well and the holiday family gathering could continue in good, um, spirits.

From the time I was about five and diagnosed as having Lupus, I’ve had fierce stomach aches. I need to shit at least ten times a day, and it may be liquid, may be solid. It usually hurts a lot. There can be blood. I remember eternities spent on the family toilet, grunting in pain, tears rolling down my cheeks. That intense gut-pain. How I hate it! Paregoric was the answer. It had a strong licorice taste, so was given to me in a shot glass with a sugar cube. The paregoric continued until I was in my early teens, when my mother freaked out when a bottle of it went missing. She kept asking me if I had taken it, and I told her no, I had no idea where it was. They used to be everywhere around the house, it seemed, those bottles of paregoric, and I certainly wouldn’t have swiped one, anyway. Why swipe what is always at hand? Anyway, I didn’t understand about hard drugs then. They had a squeeze dropper on them, those little brown bottles from our kindly neighborhood pharmacist. Who prescribed them, I don’t know. I didn’t find out until adulthood that there is a strong drug in paregoric and drug addicts can enjoy it. Did my parents abuse paregoric? I don’t know. It was always around. It did ease stomach cramps well, though the taste would end your appetite for a day or so. I just remembered, I had a toy bear, and I named him "Tobin," after Mr. Tobin I now realize, our pharmacist in East Cleveland. I hadn’t made the connection then between the names, it was just a name I saw on all the bottles around the house. "Tobin Pharmacy."

There were "pep pills" around always, as Dad called them, but my mother referred to them as "diet pills" and she went to see a notorious doctor in Akron to get her steady supply. When I was 16 or so I took one of these. 24 hours later, everything around me was cleaner than it had ever been.

By the time I was 10, my parents had taken the $2,000 settlement they’d received for getting rear-ended by a drunk driver (they both had severe whiplash and never recovered -- nor did our cute little convertible TR3 automobile) and bought a ramshackle haunted house in a middle class suburb. The house had come from a Sears catalogue some many years before, and had been added on to by various inept weekend fix-its; thus, the roof always leaked. The whole thing held together with spit and a few rotten, rusty nails. I hated the house with its "root cellar" and unused basement toilet and darkroom, but was thrilled to get my own bedroom. True, it was the coldest room in the house, and I was prone to pneumonia, but I was happy in it. Study became my refuge from the horrors going on downstairs, and by the time I was in the 7th grade, I was on the honor roll. I stayed on the honor roll or the merit roll until I was about 16, was fed up with being bullied and ridiculed at school, and learned to get bad grades so they’d leave me alone. It worked, to a point.

By the time they had a house and all its inherent responsibilities, my parents took to drinking a lot, and there were always gallon bottles of gin to be found in the kitchen. Mom had "highballs" with lunch, but for Dad, it was a series of gin martinis in the evening. They both smoked like chimneys. My father knew when to quit, or so he claimed, but it was nearly always three or four martinis, until he was blotto. He’d listen to music and didn’t like to be disturbed.

I didn’t get my period until I was 15 -- I’m told this is common in girls whose mothers drank during pregnancy. When I did get my period, it came with a vengeance. Alcohol eased the cramps, and also the horrible intestinal pains I had daily. It was easy to swipe quite a bit of it, unnoticed. This was the era of Tab and Fresca, and I just added some alcohol to my sugar-free soft drink. Tasted bad, but what the hell.

Soon, I started not attending school. I just wanted to stay in my room and listen to music and drink. I’d pass out, then wake up at dinner time and pretend everything was fine. I got my mother to write me notes about the absences. Her penmanship was excellent and she thought it was a joke, I think, those odd notes I asked her to write for me with crazy reasons as to why I had to stay home sometimes. Most of the rest of the time, I wasn’t questioned, not being known as a "bad girl." Once I got use of a car, I used it to drive miles away to seek help for my drinking, in a big old farmhouse run by hippies. "Head Help," it was called. "I’m worried about a friend of mine who drinks," I told them -- in fact, I did have several school friends who drank too much already, but really it was me. No matter -- I got no useful response. They mostly seemed occupied with painting a mural of a Pink Floyd album on the wall.

Around 1968, my mother got pregnant for the third time, and abortions were illegal then and she was Catholic. Off she went with my father for a weekend. The problem was taken care of, to the horror of Mom’s immortal Catholic soul, and then later my father got a vasectomy. I knew none of this until my mother was dying of cirrhosis in 1986. I only knew something Very Bad was going on with my parents. They needed money! When I read the story, "The Rocking-Horse Winner," I understood it fully and immediately.

In college, I took speed more than alcohol, though by hanging out with the campus gays, I did enjoy the bars on the weekends and the disco music and dancing. I stole just enough from my student part-time jobs to buy myself a six-pack of beer each night. I didn’t have the brains to steal more and put it in the bank. Nearly everyone I worked for was a criminal anyway, and so much cash was going undeclared and unsupervised, it wouldn’t have been noticed. My lesbian lover, Barbara, was a mean drunk. I left Ohio in large part to get away from her and have been heterosexual since then -- Barbara scared me that much. Still, we had two years full of fun, driving around in the countryside in her old car, sipping Pabst beer and eating Beer Nuts. One day, I dared her to drive us home with both of us stark naked in her car. She did it! I forgot all about this for some 20 years until she reminded me of it in an overseas phone call. She said the truck drivers, those who were up high, loved it, and we’d nearly caused some accidents. I only vaguely remember this. Not because I was so drunk, just because it was a lark.

In New York City in the late 1970s, I continued to take speed, mostly because I was too poor to eat. (A Didrex was $2 a pill and lasted about 16 hours.) Alcohol was also not on the budget except you had to have something in your hand to look sophisticated at Studio 54, and so I learned about the Tanqueray and tonic with lots of lime. I also learned never to set that drink down, as I’d been date-raped back in high school when I was 17, and still think something was put in my drink. But in this case, at Studio, the drink was mostly to wet your whistle. The Tanqueray was a funny drink, a bit like tequila or the Ricard they drink in France. It seemed to sharpen you, unlike a whiskey, which made one all warm and fuzzy inside. Tanqueray with tonic and lime wasn’t a drink that’d have you singing songs and hugging strangers. No, it pulled you away, increased your cynicism. I was a New York punk -- not the leader of the pack, but up there with the alpha males -- and being critical, seeing the horror of things, was essential. Lynne Tillman tried to get me to read Céline, but I settled for going to see Suicide at CBGB.

It wasn’t until 1982 that I started to drink alone and way too much, and that started after I vas violently raped and had to have a partial hysterectomy. I was in the hospital for 10 days, and needed a month’s bed-rest after that. During this time, my job at a major publishing house fired me for being out sick too long. My fiancé, David, promised he’d come take care of me, but he seldom visited, and I took to sitting in my bedroom window and watching the cars in the evening along Prospect Park Southwest in Brooklyn. Tired people, coming home from work. I’d mix a pitcher of vodka martinis and sit and sip them out of the correct chilled martini glasses, and stare at the headlights, envying all those people with someplace to go, even if it was just to their lonely beds. Those people, at least, had some purpose in life. Some sense of direction. One thing I can say for myself, I always seem to find work, and this time, despite a severe recession, I went to work as a dominatrix. I was thin, having been on Dilaudid at the hospital and fed intravenously for a long time, and my intestines were in the process of developing adhesions, so food of any type was out of the question. Too painful to deal with! Years later, when the adhesions were corrected, I was told my intestines had glued themselves to one of my lower ribs! The doctor said he’d never seen such a mess, and actually apologized for not believing how much pain I had said I was in. I’d had two hours of laser surgery and smelled like a burnt chicken for two weeks after, while "cranberry juice" leaked out of the hole in my navel. Haven’t been able to sit and enjoy a meal ever since -- need to go to the toilet and lie down. Pain!

So, alcohol had become my lover by early 1983. That, along with a diamond and hashish smuggler, who came over every Tuesday evening like clockwork. I bought him a black toothbrush (seemed appropriate), and we took bubble baths together in my huge 1920s Brooklyn bathtub. He was so amazed when I’d calmly pick up his feet one by one, hold them on my chest, and scrub his feet with a loofah sponge. He brought me a bottle of wine, and hash to smoke, and I usually cooked him a cornish hen. He’d sleep over. My fiancé never noticed this, as he was never around on Tuesdays. The lover was very nice and funny and even took a Wall Street job for six months, this being right in his line of criminality, and my only complaint was his penis was too large for me and arranged so that it was very painful to have sex with him. I realize now, I was recovering from a violent rape and shouldn’t have been having sex at all. His sperm smelled bad. I found out some 15 years later, during this time he had been a heroin addict, the sniffing kind. Maybe that accounts for the bad smell of sperm, but more likely, our body chemistries just weren’t matched. Anyway, when I told him he was just too big for me, he took it well. I mean, what man wouldn’t? Funny, I’ve known bigger men than he, but his was like a harpoon inside me. Just not meant to be.

In 1984, I took to drinking at my investment banking job, and was caught several times, though they never came out and said much, as they were doing blow in their offices and smoking pot, and drinking too, themselves, and buggering one another while commiting various Wall Street frauds. Many of them are dead now.

At my next Wall Street job, I took to my lunch hour like a shot from a gun at 12 sharp, but nearly always took my drink with a gourmet meal. $50 wasn’t too much to spend if I liked the menu. My favorite lunch of all was two Wild Turkey bourbons, low proof, along with orange chicken or orange beef, at a posh Chinese restaurant on 55th Street in Manhattan. I was working in junk bonds at the time, and saw impending doom. I quit that job about five months before the big Crash of ‘87. Most of 1988 was spent, drunk, working on finishing my M.B.A. at Baruch College. I carried whiskey in Tupperware containers and labored over Statistics.

By 1991, when my insurance business had failed, I’d taken a lover in the East Village, my husband in Brooklyn having denied me sex for about six years. I’d hang out in his filthy studio, nude, listen to music, paint, and drink dark rum. We smoked pot together and had amazing sex. My liver started to go, so I quit drinking abruptly, and went into a deep depression. My lover said I was changed, even tasted different, and broke up with me. I didn’t smile or laugh for the next 18 months, stone cold sober. "Dark Cloud," they called me at work. I became a workaholic, got a promotion. 12-hour days, not a problem.

1994, divorced for the second time, suddenly pregnant by my French lover, I was promptly abandoned as he went back to Paris. I needed hormone treatments I couldn’t afford, started to miscarry, lost my job -- the boss called me a whore. The lover came back when the baby was lost in a vacuum job, and we spent a couple of months drinking and mixing crack cocaine with tobacco and seeing the sights of New York, two maniac tourists. We rode the Circle Line, were in the audience of talk shows, went to museums. Later, I moved to France to live with him there.

There, the red wine got me. Cheap and abundant. My French husband now says, after seven years of marriage, that our marriage was a mistake. It seems he doesn’t love me anymore. He’s out in Brittany visiting his parents, riding the draft horse which he and his family had promised me years ago and never delivered. I see no light, only the tunnel. It doesn’t matter.