Born Merry & Approaching the Age When Happy Hour Is a Nap: Alcohol

“There’s a fair chance I was born with a slight buzz because no one ever warned Mother not to smoke or drink while she was pregnant. Indeed, many of my generation are here or were here because of alcohol and other parental escapes. Mother died thirsting for a glass of wine, which I would have poured if it had possessed the gummy consistency her doctor ordered.”—Skip Eisiminger

Skip the B.S.

By Skip Eisiminger

“Eldritch Science: With the right spirits in your adolescence,/you may plunge right into obsolescence.”—The Wordspinner

“The Right Brothers: Here’s to the brothers who helped us to fly/may the two Gallos never run dry.” —The Wordspinner 

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—11/10/2014—What the British call “tea time,” and my mother called “wine-o’clock,” I call “Miller time” though it’s usually a Bud Light these days, not a Miller High Life or a highball.

There’s a fair chance I was born with a slight buzz because no one ever warned Mother not to smoke or drink while she was pregnant. Indeed, many of my generation are here or were here because of alcohol and other parental escapes. Mother died thirsting for a glass of wine, which I would have poured if it had possessed the gummy consistency her doctor ordered.

Dad had two or three scotches every night for as long as I can remember until a prescription for his prostate led a cold-turkey retreat. Of course, if I’d had to care for three children while my spouse was away fighting two hot wars and one cold, I might well have been a heavier drinker. And, if I’d had to lead a battalion of African-American combat engineers across France and Germany in World War Two, I certainly would have been a heavier drinker.

So, I come by my own drinking habits honestly, which began with the collection of “heel-taps” that Mother and Dad’s guests left after their cocktail parties. If I was lucky, there was an olive or cherry to add to my “mixed drink,” usually consumed on a Sunday morning after throwing the papers and before dressing for church. Meanwhile, my future wife was licking the film of liqueur left in her parents’ cordial glasses.

My first overindulgence, however, had to wait until I joined the Army and was shipped to Germany, where the saying is, “In wine lies wisdom; in beer, strength, and in water, bacteria.”

An abundance of strong beer one night led me out of the Kajüte Bar, into a tree, onto a horse-drawn cart, and up a mine-shaft tower before my buddies talked me down. For reasons best understood by Sigmund Freud, climbing was my way of painting the town red, but the worst that ever happened on one of these binges was some hair loss. Late one night, I walked a young lady to her sister’s apartment and then passed out on their carpet. The next morning, I was startled when I awoke and saw a razor and some shaving cream beside me. One look in a mirror and I realized I was no longer a unibrow, but I decided I liked the look so much, I still shave between my eyes.

Even with the 3.2 percent beer sold in the PX, the Army seemed determined to make me and the rest of us GIs alcoholics. At the Heidwinkel “Swing Club,” the beer was free on Monday nights from 7 to 9, and, on Friday nights, all mixed drinks were a dime. One Friday night, Sgt. Harry Harris got stiffly drunk on less than a dollar. When we slid him off of a tent half and onto his lower bunk, only his forehead and feet touched the mattress. Given the planked condition of our buddy, his stretcher bearers drunkenly debated the symptoms of catatonia and rigor mortis but, when his belly sagged, we went to bed.

Though there was always a case of beer in the basement, a year passed before I realized I’d married into a family that had once brewed the stuff. My wife’s maiden name is “Barmwater,” which means “yeast water,” so there’s a good chance this barmy Anglo-Saxon family was brewing beer in the 14th century. Though most Germans today will tell you that the head on their beer is a Blume, or flower, the Beowulf poet might have called it a “barm.” True to form, one of our wedding presents from my wife’s grandmother was an antique beer mug with a pewter cap. The cap, I’m told, was required during the 19th century to keep fleas and the plague they carried from the beer. My brother-in-law’s gift was a glass boot which if not held with the toe down would cause a bubble of beer to wash back in the drinker’s face.

After I was discharged, I returned to college, where Steve Wagnell, my sophomore English teacher, introduced me and several others in the cast of the play he was directing to boilermakers—eight ounces of beer chased with a shot of bourbon. After four or five of those, I woke up fully dressed in a shower with no one around who was sober enough to tell me why the water was running and I was in it.

In graduate school, I read an interview with my eventual mentor, James Dickey, in which he claimed to be “on the wagon,” but the first time I met him, I smelled alcohol on his breath. Then, about midterm, he invited me and several others in class to go to a bar. Toward the end of the semester, he admitted, “I am crazy about being drunk. I love it like Patton loved war.” After Dickey’s death, his older son Chris quoted his father saying, “I have been drunk, more or less, for about the last 25 years.” This included the two years I was taking his classes, but intoxication was not an obstacle to his genius. Stoned or sober, he could read any poem aloud once and tell the author precisely where his arrow had missed the mark.

Howard Hunter, the former dean of arts and sciences at Clemson and my first academic boss, started a weekly poker game in “the Deanery,” as he called his home, when he grew bored of retirement. Howard’s wife made “space nuts” for the club, and her husband bought the beer, which he once described as “the excreta of yeasts which serves as an excellent anti-oxidant.” The dean and his trusted colleagues in chemistry had made “beaker gin” in Hardin Hall to help faculty through that dry period in American history. At one game, Howard reminded us that Clemson’s Esso Club began serving alcohol the same day in 1933 that Prohibition was repealed. His Deanship was among the first to drink legally again. After the lessons learned during Prohibition, he said, brewers and distillers were exempt from the draft.

But hands down, the most esteemed member of the dean’s poker club was Barry Hannah, who was twice nominated for the National Book Award. After many Wednesday night games, Barry would buy a six-pack from our host, go home, drink the six-pack, and write until three or four in the morning.

Though Barry did some of his best writing with what he called his “support group” and the bourbon cavalry he and his “group” sometimes called upon, he eventually regretted what came to be called the “bad Barry” years. Said the writer in one interview, “I don’t care whether alcoholism’s a disease or not, you’re still guilty of the ugly things you said . . . . But the trouble with drinking, much as I hate to admit it, is it helped the work. The first two drinks were wonderfully liberating. You think better. You’re braver, and you’ll say anything. If you could just hang in there with two or three, it’d be beautiful. The trouble was I couldn’t.” You might be surprised to learn that Barry often sat and wrote within a block of here at the Study Hall, a bar with a built-in excuse should anyone call. The Study Hall was across from the Library Bar and Grill.

It was shortly after Barry moved to Alabama that Shane, our 14-year-old son,and I built a tree house near where the Clemson Square apartments are now located. After the derelict structure was completed, Shane asked to spend a night in the woods with a few of his friends. Innocently, my wife prepared him a thermos of hot cocoa because the forecast called for sub-freezing temperatures. About two in the morning, the university police called to say I needed to collect our son. He’d crashed a fraternity party after drinking a half-quart of his own stolen “anti-freeze” and passed out in the Clemson House lobby. Since this near-death experience, which led to an alcohol allergy, he has not had a beer or mixed drink in nearly 40 years.

A few years later, when our daughter returned from a spring break with a three-foot funnel and her name gaily painted on the side, I belatedly figured I better start raising the bar before any grandchildren arrived. So, when our son-in-law invited me to the Old Mecklenburg microbrewery in Charlotte a few years ago, I ordered a Bud Light and a brat.

The metabolism of some arboreal sloths is so slow, 30 days from end to end, that their food often ferments in the gut. The blood-alcohol level then soars, poisoning the unsuspecting beasts and causing some to tumble to their deaths. As a beer drinker who has felt the wrath of the yeast, I have invested in various “laxatives” to expel my “toxins,” which has given me a better purchase on my “tree.” Ben Franklin thought two glasses of champagne made him a better party guest. He also thought beer was proof of God’s love, but more than one child of God has been smothered by it, too.

Keep safe, man and beast.

Note: The photograph of poet James Dickey above derives from http://jamesdickey.blogspot.com/. Elizabeth Boleman-Herring, Weekly Hubris’s Publishing-Editor, who also studied with Dickey in the mid-1970s, can vouch as well for his never showing up sober for class. However, she can also attest to his astonishingly productive and impromptu “reads” of student poems, and his unfailing ability to make all our work better and stronger, and to teach us something unexpected and unforgettable in every class, however powerful his pre-seminar tipple may have been.