High Sobriety

by Jill Stark

  Beth says that she has no plans to stop drinking. She’s by no means a massive drinker, in comparison to some her age: on an average night out, she’ll have six or seven drinks. Unlike some of her friends, she hasn’t mastered the ‘strat vom’ (strategic vomit), where you stick your fingers down your throat and make yourself sick so that you can keep drinking; when she drinks too much, that’s the end of her night. She admits that when her mum told her about me still getting drunk on the weekends, she was surprised. But after thinking about it for a while, it didn’t seem so weird. ‘I was like, well, I enjoy drinking and I enjoy getting drunk, so I don’t actually know what would happen to me to make me stop doing it.’

  The alcohol campaigns warning young people about the perils of binge drinking miss the mark with these girls — they don’t relate to images of kids being arrested or beaten up. What might sway them is an advert highlighting the health hazards of too much booze: they know that it’s bad for their livers, but that’s where their knowledge ends. The kind of statistics that Craig Sinclair from the Cancer Council highlighted, about the risk of breast cancer, might be enough to get their attention. ‘You’re not quite aware what you’re doing to your body when you’re drinking in excess, but with smoking, the advertising about that, and the stigma, was so strong that I knew I didn’t want to be a smoker,’ Beth says. ‘But I didn’t feel the same thing for alcohol. It’s such an inherent part of Australian culture. If there were adverts that really showed you what you’re actually doing to yourself when you’re drinking, you might stop and think. That’s probably what smoking was like 50 years ago.’

  After I leave Beth and her friends, I think about their experiences and conclude they’re not dissimilar to mine at that age. They’re probably not drinking any more than I did, and I must confess to being a fan of the old ‘strat vom’ in my early twenties, although we didn’t have cool shorthand for it back then — it was just a self-induced drunken spew. The big difference is how much more insight they have into the drinking culture they inhabit. They’re aware that using booze as a social crutch is not a great long-term strategy. They know that it’s probably bad for their health. Yet they still drink regularly. Their peers and their community expect it of them; and when they try to opt out, they feel shunned. If these switched-on young women think that it’s more acceptable to binge drink than it is to drink moderately or to abstain, then this isn’t just a youth problem. They live in a community that exalts drinking as the cornerstone of all social interaction: their bosses tell them that not having Friday knock-off drinks is un-Australian; their parents buy them booze and teach them that a glass of wine is how to unwind after a tough day; and their music festivals are sponsored by alcohol companies, and headlined by multi-millionaires who sing songs about getting wasted. Can we really expect them to drink moderately in this environment?

  As I reach seven months of sobriety, this point is underscored tragically when Amy Winehouse is found dead in her London flat. The divinely talented 27-year-old singer, who battled addiction and penned a defiant hit about resisting rehab, literally drank herself to an early grave — vodka bottles were found next to her body. Within hours, wailing fans were getting pissed outside her home, sobbing and belting out her songs. They created a shrine using, along with flowers and cards, beer cans, wine glasses, and bottles of vodka and gin. It seems that even if it kills you, alcohol’s cool.

  August

  LAST NIGHT, FOR the first time since I stopped drinking, I didn’t feel like the odd one out. At a reunion dinner with friends from my Age traineeship of five years ago, the non-drinkers were equal in numbers to the drinkers. Of the eight of us, two were pregnant, one doesn’t drink, and then there was me, the social animal of our year — who, on our induction trip to Sydney, was one of the last to go to bed, after persuading everyone to have one more for the road and join me in a rendition of ‘Flower of Scotland’ — now sensible and sober. Three of them have since left The Age, and one works in our Canberra bureau, so we rarely get to catch up as a group.

  It was a fun evening, with lively conversation, fond memories, and, for once, a mocktail list that was both interesting and reasonably priced. But as we spilled out onto the street around 11 o’clock, I was reminded of why I rarely venture into the city after 9.00 p.m. Young guys clutching cans of bourbon and Coke were hollering to their mates and jumping into the road, trying to hail cabs; girls in skimpy dresses smoked cigarettes and screamed out incoherently against the backdrop of an ambulance siren. We flagged down a cab and adopted a women-and-children-first policy, sending our pregnant friends home before the rest of the group.

  As we drove out of the city, it seemed that Melbourne was one heaving mass of drunkenness. The staff that work in these late-night venues must have balls of steel.

  I used to be one of them — I spent more than ten years working in bars. From my first job at 18, in Dad’s golf club, to an Irish pub in Christchurch, New Zealand, and a homely boozer in Melbourne, bar work taught me patience, diplomacy, and people skills. And it toughened me up. I learned pretty quickly how to escape the advances of drunk businessmen and how to defuse a fight before it started. Copping verbal abuse, wiping up spew, and being hit on by cavemen was just part of the job.

  For the most part, I loved it. And I was good at it. At the Jekyll & Hyde in Edinburgh’s New Town — a horror-themed pub, where the toilets were hidden behind a false bookcase and staff donned lab coats to sell cocktail-filled test tubes, before performing the Time Warp en masse at last orders — I learned to pour three pints at once, ensuring that a queue of thirsty punters were served speedily enough to avoid a riot. It was a good laugh. I made lifelong friends and met some fascinating customers.

  Bar work even led to my first big break in journalism. Among the regulars at Champagne Charlies, a small, city-centre Edinburgh bar popular with suits, was a group of guys from Scotland’s then highest-selling newspaper, The Daily Record. I was a first-year journalism student who used to practice her shorthand on cigarette breaks. I hassled the boys about work experience every time they came into the pub. I had something they wanted: beer. They had something I wanted: access to a national newspaper. It seemed a fair swap. I got my work-experience placement and, just over a year after finishing my degree, via stints at a local paper and a press agency, these pub regulars became my colleagues when I landed a job at the Record.

  But bar work is for the young and nimble. Being on your feet for nine hours and knocking off at 3.00 a.m. loses its appeal when your bones are creaking and you’re ready for a nana nap by ten o’clock. Your threshold for tolerating drunken idiots also drops. But more than anything, it gets harder to keep up with the lifestyle. Boozy lock-ins were common in six of the seven pubs and clubs I worked in. Even if you worked a day shift, you’d knock off, sit on the other side of the bar with your workmates, and pour your wages back into the till.

  There’s a collegial atmosphere when you’re part of an unburdened workforce of students and backpackers in their twenties. On busy shifts, bar work can feel like trench warfare: it’s you and your mates behind the barricades, against the snarling hordes on the other side. Nothing speeds up the bonding process quite like an inebriated halfwit trying to feel up one of your new friends as she clears tables. When I was a backpacker in Christchurch, my workmates at The Bog Irish Bar became my surrogate family. We worked hard and played harder. It was one of the happiest times of my life, although much of it is a blur. Looking back at travel diaries, it seems that I drank for more than 300 of the 365 days I spent in New Zealand. My travelling buddy Sharon, who I met working at Jekyll & Hyde, got a job in an office and wasn’t far behind me, but I think working in a pub definitely meant that I drank more than she did.

  I’m not surprised to learn that a 2007 study out of Britain’s Office for National Statistics found that bar staff in England and Wales were twice as likely to die from alcohol-related problems as the general population. Researche
rs speculated that the high risk levels might be related to social pressure to drink at work, lack of supervision, separation from family members, and the recruitment of people who were already heavy drinkers. I think about the bars I’ve worked in, where young backpackers are thousands of kilometres away from their parents, and colleagues share the night’s horror stories over knock-off drinks. It’s not difficult to see how an unhealthy pattern might develop. Full-time bar work makes it easy to fall into a habit of daily drinking.

  It has been five years since I pulled beers when I started my only bar job in Melbourne. I’d been struggling to get full-time work in journalism since moving from Scotland, and, even though I was freelancing for The Age, it wasn’t enough to pay the rent — so I found myself returning to the only other trade I knew. At 29, I wasn’t overly enthused by the prospect of getting back behind the bar. I was too old to hack the pace in nightclubs and late-night bars, so I found a pub that kept civilised hours. The Rose Hotel in Fitzroy is an old-school, no-frills pub, where the walls are adorned with pictures of footy legends, and the locals keep their personalised stubby holders behind the bar. The decor, which looks like it’s hardly changed since the pub was opened in 1861, has a cosy, lounge-room feel. Just two streets back from the Brunswick Street party precinct, this homely boozer is a rarity in a suburb that’s become so gentrified, the blue-collar workers who built it have been largely priced out of the area. There’s trivia on Monday, and a meat-tray raffle every Friday night; it’s a country pub in the middle of the inner city.

  The alcohol and hospitality industries cop a lot of flak for fuelling Australia’s binge-drinking problem, but it’s not all aircraft hangar–sized nightclubs and 24-hour bargain-basement bottle shops. There are lots of places like The Rose, where people feel connected to their neighbours. In country towns, communities are built around the pub, with social events, sports clubs, and fundraisers often organised through the local watering hole. In the city, it’s less common; bars can be cold and uninviting, their trade and staff transient. That’s why I fell in love with The Rose. It’s a pub with a soul. Each year they stage a street party to raise funds for the local primary school. The bar’s also part of a pub cricket league, involving 14 Fitzroy establishments that play off before an end-of-season ‘Super Sunday’ event, which attracts hundreds of people and brings in cash for local charities.

  My first shift was a baptism of fire: a wake for the former owner, a formidable woman who had run the pub, with her husband, for 13 years, before selling up in 2001, when my former boss, Tony, and his wife, George, took over. Hundreds of people had gone to the funeral, far more than the small chapel could cater for. Many came back to The Rose afterwards, to continue the celebration of their former publican’s life. They raised their glasses to her good humour and generosity, and played the Hawthorn club song again and again for a woman who lived for footy and had become a substitute mother to many of the locals. Laconic men with callused hands and sun-blasted skin shed tears openly. Then there was laughter, as they remembered her inability to suffer fools. I realised very quickly that this was more than a pub — it was a community. For me, thousands of kilometres away from my family, and after four years without a stable job to which to anchor myself, working at The Rose was the first time Melbourne felt like home.

  I go back to the pub to speak to Tony, and to my friend Brigitte, a Rose regular I met over the bar and went on an overseas holiday with a few years back. When I walk in, there’s Brian the plumber sitting on his usual stool, drinking James Squire. When he leaves, he gives Tony a wave and lays his empty pot glass on its side on the bar, as he always does. Andy, another plumber and the former social club president, embraces me warmly. As usual, he’s drinking his VB in a stubby holder, with a copper handle he made himself. It’s 5.30 on a Thursday evening, and the bar is filled with the usual eclectic mix of blue-collar workers, office staff, old blokes and young blokes, families, hipsters, goths, and students.

  Tony greets me with his usual ‘Jilly!’, and we hug as I remind him that I’m his favourite barmaid. He may or may not have uttered these words during knock-off drinks one night, but I turned it into indisputable fact and never let him forget it. He can’t quite believe I’ve gone this long without drinking. When he took me on in 2005, I was one of the few people who drank cider; he used to joke that the pub went through more Strongbow in the months after he hired me than they had in the previous year.

  The three of us sit down in the dining room, and I ask Tony what the pub means to his regulars. He tells me it’s a place of safety and familiarity. He holds, behind the bar, many sets of house keys, left in his care by locals in case they lock themselves out. ‘It’s what makes the pub good for me and what makes it different from all the other pubs. It’s got that human touch to it, and it’s connected. It keeps you very earthed. It makes you realise it’s not just about making money,’ he says.

  One of my favourite Rose regulars was an old bloke called Jack, known to the locals as ‘the old diamond’. Most weekdays, this then 89-year-old former boxer would drive his Mazda 323 to the pub, park himself at the bar, and do the crossword while drinking a beer. He’d come in at about 11.30 a.m. and stay for a couple of hours. We’d chat about his life, football, and the weather. He’d crack jokes at Tony’s expense, and call me ‘lass’ in a grandfatherly way. Sometimes he’d pick up his groceries on the way to the pub, and I’d pop his lamb’s brains in the fridge, on top of the Coopers Green, to keep them cool. Now, at 95, he lives in a nursing home. He no longer drives. But he still comes to the pub by taxi. His family were wary about his regular visits as he grew older, worried for his health. Tony sat down with them recently and worked it out. ‘I said to them, “If he doesn’t come here, he will last a couple of months and he’ll die because all he lives for is to come here.” He’s got no friends at the home, but he’s got a lot of friends here. He walks in, he gets seated, he gets his glasses handed to him, he gets the newspaper given to him, he gets his beer, he’s got his own chair. So for someone like him, coming to the pub is the difference between life and death. We came up with a compromise: we agreed to take him from heavy beer to light beer, and his family would leave his taxi money behind the bar so we can pay the driver.’

  Jack comes in three days a week and drinks two or three pots of light beer. There’s no money in customers like him. But for Tony, these are the punters that make coming to work worthwhile. ‘The pub’s been good to us. We’ve met so many good people through here. It’s been fantastic in that sense, and that’s the biggest spin-off for us. There would be a huge hole if this pub went. Just that meeting place, that connection. I just think of our friends — I have no idea where they would go.’

  There’s no doubt that The Rose is a second home for many regulars. I could walk in there any day of the week and the same groups of drinkers would be standing in their usual spot at the bar, or at their favourite table, just as they did six years ago when I was pouring their beers. That familiarity is comforting, but I remember wondering back then if it was more than that for some of the locals. The men who would spend five, six, seven, or more hours a day, every day, in the pub couldn’t be spending much time with their wives and kids. When they’d try to leave, they’d be badgered by their mates to have one more for the road. For some, a few beers down the local was more than a ritual; it was a problem.

  The Rose sits just a block away from the controversial ‘Cheese Grater’ complex — an eight-storey apartment block that was completed in 2010, despite years of legal wrangling and more than 550 objections from local residents and businesses, who argued that it would ruin the character of the area. As more apartment buildings spring up, locals worry that these high-density dwellings will further erode Fitzroy’s community feel. Tony laughs when he tells me it may be the pub that stops this from happening. ‘It’s funny, with the Cheese Grater and a few of the other high-rise apartment blocks that have gone up, they don’t socialise at all in
those blocks. They all just go in, get in the lifts, in their front door, and they don’t see each other. Then they come here to the pub, and they get talking to people and they go, “Oh, you live in the same block as me. We’re two doors from each other,” or, “We’re on the same floor.” It becomes a real hub of your community, where people actually meet each other and their neighbours more than they do in their own home.’

  Tony says his priority as a publican is to ensure that no-one comes to harm, even after they leave the premises. ‘They’re all grown-ups, and I’m not there to be their parent and tell them what they can and can’t do because quite often you’re doing more harm by just throwing them out anyway. They’ll just go off and stagger somewhere else. For some people, you’re better off keeping them here where you can keep an eye on them. I’ve walked people home from here, I’ve driven people home, I’ve had people walk off from here and I’ve had to go and find them.’

  I think I only refused to serve a customer on a handful of occasions during my six-month stint at The Rose. With a pub full of regulars, it was hard to say no, even when you knew they’d had too much. But how much is too much? Alcohol-related violence across Melbourne has led to a crackdown on irresponsible service. Bar owners and individual staff members are liable for big fines for serving intoxicated patrons. The liquor licensing department has stepped up its random checks. But the definition of intoxication is open to interpretation. To the letter of the law, it’s hard to see how Tony can legally serve anyone.

  According to the Victorian liquor licensing department’s guide on how to spot a drunk person, the signs of intoxication are many and varied. There are the no-brainers: violent behaviour, vomiting, falling over, or sleeping at the bar. But then there are more subtle changes in behaviour: becoming argumentative, annoying other patrons and staff, using offensive language, or displaying inappropriate sexual behaviour. Physical signs include spilling drinks, glassy eyes and lack of focus, swaying and staggering, and bumping into furniture. Finally, you might notice changes in alertness: rambling conversation, loss of train of thought, and difficulty in paying attention. They’re helpful tips, but if I’d cut off every sleazy windbag who used foul language, talked shit, and knocked a drink over on the way to the toilet, my bar-wench career would have been over very quickly. The guidelines point out that this list is by no means exhaustive, and does not necessarily give conclusive evidence of intoxication, but they do expect a lot from staff, who are probably on minimum wage and face landing their boss with fines of up to $14,000 if they get it wrong.