Designated Drinker

I don’t drink.  Never did.  I just can’t stand the taste of anything alcoholic- with the exception of (preferably vintage) Champagne.  (I have a bottle of Veuve Grande Dame chilling in my refrigerator right now.  But I’m waiting for someone great with whom to share it.  Hurry up. Champagne doesn’t stay forever, you know.)

But I’m not against alcohol.  Au contraire. I like the look of a man with a glass in his hand.

I wouldn’t dream of dating a teetotaller like me.

My history of dating guys who liked to bend an elbow goes back to high school.  For thirteen months – a lifetime in teenage romance years- I went steady with Jimmy.

I liked Jimmy.  But Jimmy liked only two things- his car and booze.

I’m not talking about beer here- the usual teenage tipple.

I’m talking about the hard stuff.  His father owned a very successful liquor distributorship, and sixteen year old Jimmy was determined to be his old man’s very best customer.

Many a time after school we would go back to Jimmy’s house.  There he would pour me an après-class Royal Crown Cola in a big tumbler.

He would then pour himself a Crown Royal- same tumbler.

Think about that.

Or don’t.  I can’t have you guys getting cirrhosis of the liver by auto-suggestion.

By junior year, I had a very good idea what Betty Draper’s life must have been like. The long hours of never eating, only drinking.  The flashes of temper and crazy car rides. (Bad combo: fast car+ Seagram’s.)

Finally, it all blew up on me when I was begging (read nagging) Jimmy to take me home from some party in Chicago.  I had a strict curfew and a paranoid mother.  (Another bad combo.)

I asked one too many times, I guess.

Jimmy- under the influence as usual- slapped me right in the face.

That slap was my last call at the bar.  It carried me right out of the relationship.

Bill liked vodka.

On the rocks with a twist.

He had truly come of age doing business in the era of the three martini lunch àla Mad Men.

And he could more than handle it.  Unlike Jimmy, Bill was a happy drinker.  Convivial, expansive, generous, smiling. (Much more so than when he was sober.)

We used to go to Gene and Georgetti’s three times a week back in those days. ( I got rather tired of it after the first fifteen years or so, but Bill never did.)

He loved the clubby atmosphere and the way the bartender pored his Stoli.

And he could always navigate the drive back to Winnetka safely- no matter how much he had imbibed.

This drink-and-drive-home seems so fool-hardy now.  But back then, neither one of us thought much about it.  I was night-blind, and for me to take the wheel would have been certain death.

So we took our chances.  (And other people’s too, I’m sorry to say.)

The night of his forty-sixth birthday I surprised Bill with a party of all our friends there- and a Porsche 911.  This gift posed a problem.

My brother and sister-in-law – in on the surprise- had driven us down to G&G in their car. Truly shocked and delighted by my stealth birthday op, Bill had over-celebrated, safe in the knowledge that Kenny would drive us back home.

But not before I made him step outside to reveal that sleek, silvery beauty- topped with a big red bow.  (The guys at Autohaus had obligingly delivered it to the restaurant, and the valets had hidden it until the big reveal.)

Bill reeled outside, completely baffled as to why I had him- and all the other party-goers- standing in the freezing early April Chicago weather waiting for something.

He was not disappointed.

But he was buzzed, to say the least, and now he had to drive his new baby home.

He sobered up fast.

My last husband, The Kid, dearly loved a dirty martini.  So much so, that I always thought he should just drink a jar of olives- with a dash of gin thrown in.

(And yes, he was over twenty-one, so don’t scold me for letting him drink.)

But I got a real education in the art of holding one’s liquor from Mike- my Irish husband.

He had been born to booze royalty.

His father -a darling William Demarest lookalike- was a former bartender who had never lost his skills.  He could pour a beer to the top of a bumper and never even have to look to see when the glass was full.  He knew automatically when to right the bottle.

And Senior’s drinking habits were legendary up in upstate New York.  Mike’s dad had built the longest private home bar in the area.

When I went to the tiny hamlet of Old Forge, I looked upon this monument to alcoholism with reverence.  It was huge.  And there Mike’s dad happily would host the entire town at long drinkathons to get them through the black fly days of summer and the brutally cold (almost) Canadian winters.

Either by heredity or environment, Mike was a man who could hold his liquor.

He did confide in me that only once was he behind the booze curve.  He was down in Bermuda with old friends and they drank Dark and Stormies (black rum and ginger beer) starting at ten am and ending somewhere after midnight.

It was sip, sip, sip all the day long, and Mike’s County Mayo head wasn’t meant to handle Caribbean rum in that prodigious and steady a stream.

Somewhere around the fourth day of his vacation, he gave up and handed the Bermudians the crown.

He would stick to Irish whiskey- like Jamison’s and Tullamore Dew.

A few days before we left Aspen on the way to our wedding in Lake Placid, three of Mike’s ski instructor buddies showed up at my house around eight one night to “kidnap” him for a bachelor party.

“Don’t wait up, Ellen” one of them called as they hustled him out the door.  “And he won’t be in any shape to talk to you when he gets back, either,” he furthered cautioned.

Mike turned to me and winked.

That wink said it all.

I knew what those guys had let themselves in for.  Even if they didn’t.

I went to sleep and slept like a top.  (How do tops sleep?)

Around six am, there was a knock on the front door.

I put on a robe, just in time to see Mike breeze in, not a hair out of place.  Fresh as a daisy. (Why is a daisy fresh?)

“Did you have a good time…” I started to ask.  But my question was interrupted by the sight of Ski Instructor Buddy #1 on crutches.

Before I could find out what had happened to him, my attention was newly-diverted to Ski Instructor Buddy #2.  Now stowed away in the back of an Aspen Police car idling in front of my house.

There was absolutely no sign of Ski Instructor Buddy #3.

He had vanished from the scene entirely.

Mike was grinning.

“They asked me what I wanted to drink and so I started them in on single malt,” he explained.

Say no more.

So here’s looking at you, kids.

Belly up to a bar sometime and think of me.

But if it’s dark out, don’t call me.

Happy – and safe- Memorial Day, everyone.

L’chaim!