Nothing Good Can Come from This

by Kristi Coulter

  “Thank you,” I said. “Same.”

  Once I pushed that door open, people started walking through. “My mom has twenty years,” a woman told me. “I stopped at eighteen,” someone said at a cocktail party. A co-worker said, “More than one glass of wine and I feel crappy the whole next day. It’s annoying, but I know it’s kind of lucky, too.”

  One acquaintance, the classic too-long-at-the-party guy who could always be counted on to have one more drink, quizzed me closely during a work cocktail function: “Not even socially? Not even wine with dinner? What do you do when everyone else is drinking? Aren’t you bored? Seriously, not even on vacation, not even at the holidays, not even on your birthday? What about next time you’re in Europe? Or Napa—couldn’t you taste and just not swallow?”

  I was working up a good mental eye roll. I also knew based on history that we were approaching the ten-minute mark, after which he would give up trying to keep his eyes off my tits. I needed to move them somewhere safe. I made my initial escape noises, at which point he blurted, “Today’s my fifth day without a drink.”

  “Oh!” I said. I didn’t want to sound surprised, but the exclamation point inserted itself against my will. “How are you feeling?”

  “Okay,” he said. “Like a fog is clearing.” I nodded. “It’s just hard to imagine not having the occasional celebratory drink,” he said. “I’m hoping to eventually become a moderate drinker.”

  I’d shared that hope once. I’d tried for years to turn myself into a moderate drinker. It turned out adding extra vigilance and stress to a debilitating habit while still utterly failing to drink like a normal person was not the way to go. “It seems like some people are able to do that,” I said carefully.

  “Do you think you will?” he asked.

  “Absolutely not,” I said.

  “Really? You don’t think about just drinking on holidays and shit?”

  “Nope.”

  “But good food is meant to be appreciated with wine,” he said. “You don’t feel like you’re missing out on a big part of life by giving that all up?”

  I looked him in the eye. “I made and then broke a promise to myself every single day for twelve years,” I said. “I failed myself. Every. Single. Day. And now I don’t. Do you think I give a fuck whether my food could taste 5 percent better?”

  He looked miserable. As a vision of the future, I was a letdown. Near us, a group of guys clinked bottles of IPA. I suddenly felt exhausted. It was time to free myself from this situation, go home and kiss my dogs and make out with my husband, or at least kiss my husband and make out with my dogs. “It was nice running into you,” I said. “I should be heading home. Congrats on your five days, I know what a big deal that is.”

  He sighed. “Thanks,” he said. “It is. It actually is a really big deal for me. And I just don’t know what’s going to happen next. I’m pretty scared, to be perfectly honest.”

  There was still some light in the sky. Through the window, I saw a couple walk away from a bench in the courtyard, leaving it vacant.

  “Hey,” I said. “I have a little time. Do you want to go sit outside and talk?”

  He did.

  Desire Lines

  Thirty-three days sober, I decide to try eating food outside my house at night again, something I haven’t done without alcohol in a decade. John and I go to a neighborhood place that serves hipster updates of stuff our grandparents ate, like oysters Rockefeller and deviled eggs. We’ve spent countless nights in the reclaimed-wood booths over rye Manhattans, steaks, and big white wines. They know us. In fact, I almost suggested we go someplace new, where no one would register a change. I’m still in the closet as sober. I’ve only told a few friends, and I feel acutely self-conscious just walking among strangers, as though a sign flashes on me: DO NOT OFFER THIS WOMAN A DRINK. The idea of casual acquaintances knowing something so momentous makes me want to hide in shame. But ultimately, the familiarity and convenience of this place still won out. Our game plan is a simple dinner: no appetizers, no dessert. In and out. “If you’re thinking it will be fun, I need you to adjust your expectations downward,” I say to John as we’re parking the car.

  I’m trembling as we sit down in our favorite booth, the round one in the front window. Our usual waitress swings by and says, “Can I start you two off with Manhattans?”

  I’ve already checked the cocktail menu online for something nonalcoholic, but herbal tea and Mexican Coke are the only options. Still, I tilt my head as if I were thinking it over, then say, “Actually, I think just club soda and lime tonight.”

  “Same here,” John says. He won’t quit drinking completely for another few months, but he doesn’t drink around me, even though I tell him it’s okay.

  “Oh,” says our waitress, smiling. “Trying something new!”

  I hate her for letting on that she knows anything has changed. I want her to be an entirely different kind of person in an entirely different kind of restaurant who says “Very good, madam” and silently retreats. I’m tempted to blurt “I’m pregnant!” just to stop her from asking, which of course she doesn’t. She doesn’t know I can’t yet tolerate anyone taking an interest in my wobbly new Amish self.

  “I might as well have handed her a copy of The Watchtower,” I say to John when she’s gone.

  “Oh, come on,” he says. He’s very relaxed about all of this so I hate him, too. We are witnessing a death and he’s too stupid to know it.

  “Remember that wedding we went to?” I ask him over our waters.

  “Can you be slightly more specific?” he says.

  “The one in that no-drinking Baptist church in Ann Arbor where the reception was in the basement and that friend of yours married that guy she’d met in Ireland and then found out he was gay and just wanted a green card and then he vanished and it took forever for the divorce to be official?”

  “Oh yeah,” John says. “In 1994.”

  “This is exactly like that wedding.”

  He’s kind enough not to make me walk home.

  * * *

  Thus began the six-month phase of my life characterized primarily by rage at the restaurant industry. I mean, not the entire thing. I made exceptions for restaurants in countries where alcohol was banned, or places I’ll likely never visit because they make women walk around in black body bags and can go fuck themselves right off the face of the earth. But the rest of them were directly in my firing line, for the sole reason of lacking fancy enough things for Sober Me to drink.

  In my last half a dozen drinking years, I’d become a foodie, prancing all over Seattle eating bone marrow and pickled quince. I ate bagel-and-lox ice cream in New York. I paid a fortune in Florence to eat a pigeon neck stuffed with tripe. In Tokyo, John and I spent two hours combing one block for a no-name, no-sign speakeasy we’d seen in Gourmet. We stumbled into a disco, a wrestling gym, and a sushi bar back kitchen before giving up and going to the Park Hyatt like every other Lost in Translation–loving tourist in town. My foodieism was partly based on sincere interest but also driven by the fact that I’d started making a lot of money and had picked up the idea from Oprah or somebody that the tasteful thing to spend it on was “experiences.” For some of my co-workers, this meant taking flying lessons or running marathons in South Africa. I didn’t have the risk tolerance for that level of adventure, so my experiences often revolved around putting weird and pricey stuff in my mouth. And at that echelon of dining, it’s never just about the food; it’s about the aperitifs and wines and grappas to go with it, all the drinks crafted or selected with the same obsessive attention to detail and virtually all of them alcoholic. Which was just fine with me, and a handy way to tell myself I was an epicure, not an addict.

  In a Munich hotel so modern and stark it had glass-floored elevators, I requested a table for one. “You are eating alone?” the host said in exaggerated alarm, hand at his heart.

  “Yes,” I said, irritated. It was a business hotel, for one thing. Surely I was not the fir
st person to show up for dinner without a hot piece of ass at my side. I was tired and hungry and flattened out from meeting with depressed colleagues on depressing topics all day. And, of course, desperate for a drink, the part of dinner I always looked forward to most. I gave him a big smile, was rewarded with a window table, and ordered a glass of wine right away.

  Wine in hand, I looked at the dinner menu. There were only five entrées, one of them “schnitzel, reinvented.” Normally, I would have gone for that because my foodieism had reached such a state that regular invented food was no longer enough to fully satisfy me. But a single word in the next entrée threw a wrench in my routine.

  “Is this the kangaroo?” I asked the waiter. “Or is it something else that’s just called kangaroo?” He gave me a blank look. “You know, the way mahimahi is called dolphin.” Another blank look. I guess Germans were not all that up on fish trivia.

  “It’s kangaroo,” he said, shrugging.

  “I think I have to order that,” I said, assuming I had hit on an oddball national staple.

  It tasted more or less like venison (and the three glasses of Gewürztraminer I washed it down with weren’t the best match). Back home the next week, I asked a German friend, “What’s the deal with you guys eating kangaroo?” If you listen closely, you can still hear him laughing.

  So yes, I was willing to make an ass of myself over food if it meant something new and shiny to focus my mind and my money on. And especially if it offered cover for my drinking, which it did. Bartenders were making their own syrups and bitters and garnishes from stuff they’d grown on rooftop reclaimed-water gardens, and I wanted to try all of it, including one Bloody Mary garnished with house-pickled vegetables and a chunk of locally raised, humanely killed ham. Oh, and flights! I could never pass up the chance to drink four different versions of something under the pretense of studying their nuances. Even the word “flight” promised buoyancy and perspective, though if they’d been called chutes to hell I would have found an upside to that, too.

  When I stopped drinking, all my bourbon flights and artisanal gins and biodynamic Chardonnays came to a screeching halt. And so did my pickles and pigeon necks and tender pea shoots harvested by the teeth of fairly paid angels. Because for all the wild creativity at work in Seattle bars, almost none of it was in the service of anything booze-free, and without something sufficiently chic to drink, I couldn’t seem to set foot in any of my old foodie haunts. Nonalcoholic drinks were usually limited to club soda and the coffees and teas from the dessert menu, which reminded me of some uber-Christian clients of John’s who’d drunk hot chocolate throughout a five-course meal we ate together. The rare mocktail was something sugary and citrus based, more or less a house-made lemonade. One local vegetarian restaurant even offered smoothies as its nonalcoholic options. “A smoothie is a meal!” I exclaimed in disbelief, probably a little too loudly. If I didn’t want a milk shake, it was Diet Coke (“Chemicals!”) or tea (“I’m not drinking hot liquid with dinner!”) or, the horror, some form of water. If I drank water, how would people know I had taste? How would they know I was cool? How would they know I was anything at all?

  Some people say your emotional development stops at whatever age your serious drinking started, and that’s where you pick back up when you quit—which would have made me a high school junior in a forty-something body. I don’t know how well this theory holds up: my sober self didn’t suddenly feel a need to wear Betsey Johnson lace tights and give hand jobs in the backs of cars, much to John’s disappointment. Nor did I find myself craving Benson & Hedges Menthol Ultra Lights or poppers. But my teenage self had been desperate to feel like one of the cool kids, and that need reemerged with a startling ferocity that extended to everything I poured down my throat. For me, cool had never meant the most famous scotch or the priciest wine. It was the liquid equivalent of a bowl of steamed baby turnips I’d once cooed over in Seattle’s first certified-organic restaurant. Were they good? Sure. Cute? I guess. Were they still a boring root vegetable cooked in the most basic way imaginable? Well, yes. But eating them made me feel noble by association, like one of those people you hear about who can appreciate the simple things in life.

  I was not one of those people by a long shot. I was an exhausted, overworked drunk who thought she’d spend the rest of her likely shortened life throwing money at problems she had no other clue how to fix. Eating those turnips let me pretend I was grounded. Paying a lot for them let me feel rich. Sucking down enough booze alongside them let me ignore the fragmented wreck I actually was. And in my pickled mind, it all added up to cool.

  * * *

  I grew up in a mean, new-money, gold-plated Florida town, the municipal equivalent of Trump Tower. We moved there from Georgia the day before I started kindergarten, when my father got a teaching job at the state university. It was a sleepy beach town then, with curving roads designed in World War II to be hard for Nazi invaders to navigate. We spent every weekend in the Atlantic Ocean and most afternoons in the screened-in pool that my dad vacuumed and chlorinated on Sundays. I went to public school and the public library and carried my vinyl dance-shoe tote to a community center that by the looks of it was also designed to be unappealing and unnoticeable to the Nazis.

  While we were living our standard professor’s-family life, hordes of people began arriving from up north. “Yankees,” my parents called them. The word conjured up a jaunty vision that the blunt, demanding people around me didn’t exactly match. Why did they talk to waitresses like that? Why did they seem mad all the time?

  I get it now, kind of. These were city people, used to having to fight to claim their space. They couldn’t just turn it off any more than we could turn off being small-town southerners who were shocked when clerks in the city demanded ID with a check. But I was a kid and I couldn’t see any of that. I just saw loud and pushy. And rich, based on their cream-colored BMWs, their thick gold necklaces, their popped-collar Ralph Lauren shirts. The tanning parlors they used, when we lived five minutes from the beach. The bottled water they drank, when we all had taps. Their gated communities, with entrances manned by retirees. “They’re not even armed,” my dad would say. “If someone wants in, what’s an old man going to do to stop them?” The school bus ride got a little longer with every gated community we had to enter and exit, and once inside, I’d gawk at the houses with their two-story atriums, like live-in malls.

  And their kids. Their mean-as-fuck kids, with their own BMWs and gold and popped-collar Polos and insta-tans and hotel room parties. By eighth grade they were pretty much running the world, and my bookish, awkward, middle-class ass with its Mazda-driving parents and house protected only by locks and a cocker spaniel didn’t stand a chance. A dog, they called me. Or that. As in, would you fuck that? No, the boys would agree in not-quite-low-enough voices as I stared at my textbook. None of them would fuck that. And the fuckable girls would laugh.

  Here’s where my story could have gone a few different ways. I could have gotten a makeover, become Suddenly Fuckable! Except I actually looked fine—clear complexioned, no more brace-faced than average, tragic perms long in my past. Cute, even. Just, you know, wrong in a way that couldn’t be fixed at fat camp or the Clinique counter. I could have started handing out sexual favors to convince them I was so fuckable, and thank God I didn’t do that. Instead, I decided that none of what those mean kids represented—dances, dates, kegs—was something the universe wanted me to have. And then, because somewhere inside I liked myself, I decided that even if I could have that stuff, I didn’t want it. Because it was mainstream, and mainstream wasn’t enough for me.

  It was the summer of 1985. I went to the mall and got a short, geometric haircut, with the back shaved like a soldier. I started wearing lace-up black boots and long skirts and red lipstick. I discovered Morrissey and became a primarily cheese-and-Pop-Tart-based vegetarian. In London or New York, I would have just been jumping on a bandwagon, but in South Florida all of this was still fairly new, spread at grou
nd level in record shops and used bookstores. When I returned to school and the boys were extra-super-double grossed out by me, I knew I was onto something good.

  There were towns near mine where kids suffered unthinkable privations like inheriting their parents’ hand-me-down cars instead of getting a brand-new birthday Porsche, or fighting with their siblings for phone time because the family only had one line. At bookstores and punk clubs, I started to meet those kids and befriend them. I got invited to parties and to hang out at the mall. The more hair I cut off, the prettier people thought I was. Boys (and a few girls) began to declare their affections. Outside my own school and city, I became popular.

  Finding a tribe could have softened my attitude toward the kids at school, made me confident enough to slide from culture to subculture and back. I had friends who could pull that off—go to the football game and the New Model Army show. But I didn’t even try. The rich kids were mainstream. Sports—all of them—were mainstream. And I rejected all of it before it could reject me. Regular hair-colored hair, tennis shoes, the Sweet Valley High books I’d once devoured. I attended my senior prom, but I did it in quotation marks, in a black column dress and red lips, the Girl Most Likely to Be Mistaken for a Nagel.

  My commitment to the path less taken was cemented in college, a tiny enclave of liberal arts, bad behavior, and psychic meltdowns on Florida’s Gulf Coast. There was a skeletal core curriculum, but otherwise we designed our courses of study based on whatever our underdeveloped teenage brains found interesting. When I told my adviser I wanted to read all the children’s books that had won the Newbery Medal and write a poem in response to each one, or spend a whole semester on George Orwell’s travel essays, he didn’t bat an eye. I spent four years following the most bewildering path possible to a degree in literature. Given a choice between courses in Shakespeare and Kafka, I picked Kafka. Between Kafka and Gogol, Gogol. I wrote voraciously in unfashionable forms: sestinas, novellas, epistolary poems to a fictional man named Julian, whom I miss. The predominant style among my female classmates was hairy legs and tie-dyes, so I waxed and wore makeup. The music at our parties was parent stuff from the late 1960s, so I went deep into the sort of proto-twee U.K. bands who wrote songs about Yuri Gagarin and Eva Marie Saint.