Getting drunk

Arizona Summer Wildcat

New York, where I had grown up, to Connecticut. It was December, which meant that my new, overcrowded school stuck me in whatever classes it deemed empty enough to hold one more person - without exception, these classes turned out to be filled with football players and sociopaths.

I joined the school's literary magazine, and developed the most knee-shakingly intense crush possible on a girl there. She was a year older than me - a junior - and much more socially adept, which meant that any form of romance was out of the question. Of course, such logic is opaque to an adolescent boy who's never kissed a girl.

Soon it was time for the junior prom, the only high school tradition sillier than the prom itself. I lay awake wondering whether Susan would go (of course she would), and who she'd go with. I had observed and noted an assortment of guys who'd exhibited an interest in her and who she seemed to like as well. Which would it be?

One night at around nine, Susan called me. "So, the junior prom is coming up," she said. "Do you want to go?"

I didn't yet realize that Susan's timing (the prom was a week away) and the fact that she was asking me (a distinct reversal in the usual way of things) was a definitive sign that she'd been holding out for someone better than me, someone who had either asked another girl to the prom or died. But it wouldn't have mattered. At this point, all I could fathom was that some great valkyrie had descended from the heavens and deemed me, a mere mortal, worthy of accompanying her to the junior prom.

My resultant bliss lasted until the prom itself, which was one of the five worst nights of my life. It was a cavalcade of horrors, a great dark fleet of nightmares, each deadlier than the last. But the one moment that I remember most vividly probably seems rather innocuous. It's this: Susan and I are sitting at the little table with her carefully-selected friends and their dates. At the table next to ours is a guy named "Jeffers Englehart," a musical prodigy and one of the many people I suspect Susan of liking more than me. His face is red, his breath smells of formaldehyde, and there's something dangerous about him.

"Are you drunk?" Susan gushes with admiration. "Oh, Jeffers!"

This was my first real introduction to alcohol. To me, beer was as foreign as the native cuisine of Vietnam. My parents didn't so much ban it from the house as ignore its existence. There had been no cautionary tales about the ravages of alcohol, no heartfelt warnings about the dangers of intoxication - rather, it was tacitly assumed that nobody in our family would drink. And though I had already performed my share of teenage rebellion and was scheduled to do a fair amount more of it, at no time was I even slightly interested in consuming alcohol.

In my first year at Amherst College, ostensibly a "dry" campus (as most campuses are), it was impossible to breathe the air without raising my blood alcohol level near legal driving limits. Still, I was determined to avoid drinking. It wasn't a matter of resisting temptation - I was as tempted to drink as I was to slam my head in the drawer of a filing cabinet. It was a matter of accepting that I was different from everyone else in a way that is terribly significant both in and out of college.

Some people have shelves that hold rows of empty beer bottles as decoration. Do they really think that Heineken's label design is on an artistic level with the PietÊ? Or is it more likely that some of the most enjoyable moments of their lives were inspired by a chemical lowering of inhibitions, and they feel the need to erect a shrine to those hazy, torrid nights? Well, if you're not capable of experiencing hazy, torrid nights without outside assistance, I'm terribly sorry for you.

Maybe my resistance to drinking is a knee-jerk reaction to what I see as the intense sadness of booze culture. Maybe I never grew out of my immature association of alcohol with the vapid cultural elite of high school, people like Jeffers Englehart, who I wanted to resemble as little as possible. Maybe it is possible to enjoy a glass of wine with dinner on a purely culinary level and not allow it to affect your life any more than a glass of Diet Coke.

If that's the case, I really don't need to drink.