April is the Driest Month
Tay Pay Pryor, White Lotus, boat drinking and my break from booze.
My name is Tay Pay Pryor—and I'm D R U N K .
My Laurastans recognize TPP immediately.
In Chapter Six, “The Month of Roses,” Little Town on the Prairie, a teenage Laura Ingalls is working in town when she sees two drunk men — one tall, the other short and round, both plastered— march up and down Main Street singing, “Pull for the shore, sailor!”
The men pause and face one another. The short fat man declares gravely to the other, “My name is Tay Pay Pryor, and I’m drunk.” The men nod and start marching again. They repeat this refrain as they shove their legs through the screen doors of businesses (drunk person logic) while the owners (understandably) protest.
Undoubtedly bored at her mind-numbing sewing job, Laura laughs until she cries, but when she tells the story at home, Ma isn’t amused. Ma says, “I begin to believe that if there isn’t a stop to this liquor traffic, women must bestir themselves and have something to say about it.”
I’m not Tay Pay Pryor, but I’m 56 and my liver hates me. Time to bestir myself.
I struggle with depression and anxiety. I struggle with sleep. All these dumb studies say drinking is bad for these things. After trying therapy, SSRIs, meditation, exercise, sleep hygiene, talks, and walks, I am left with one remaining experiment in my elimination exercise.
Where the rest of the world participated in Dry January. I’m inaugurating Dry March 16-April 11. As usual, I’m late to the party, but to be fair, I’m usually the last to leave.
I come from a long German/Irish line of drinking. My paternal grandfather was an alcoholic, not the functioning kind. I could have been a Princeton nepo baby with a New Jersey beach house if my grandfather hadn’t taken the roaring 20s next level and wound up disinherited.
My father grew up, stopped working odd jobs to fund Good ole’ Joe’s bar tab, joined the Navy, went to school, met my mom, and became a college professor. He’s not an alcoholic, but I did grow up in what we would now describe as “different times.”
If you think Mad Men exaggerates the drinking culture that predated Mothers Against Drunk Driving, trust, the show does not. Every dad I knew drove with a longneck in one hand.
When Mom shopped at Piggly Wiggly, staples included eggs, bacon, Kool-Aid packets, 5 Kraft Mac & Cheese box dinners for a dollar, a jug of Carlo Rossi Chablis, and a case of Milwaukee’s Best slid under the shopping cart on what I always thought of as the “beer shelf.”
Family dinners were boozy back then. By 6 p.m., Mom was nodding off in the Spam. Dad started as fun Irish dad, but he could turn mean and pick on Mom until she ran off crying. No wonder she’d rather fall asleep first.
Mom put the kibosh on boozefest around 1980, and our family alcohol consumption reduced to one bottle of Beringer White Zinfandel split 6 ways on Thanksgiving dinner. Festive!
But now I get it. Mom didn’t like Dad when he was drinking. And the grandfather cautionary tale loomed.
For years, I assumed abolition was instigated by people who hate fun. Turns out those activists were women tired of men’s bad behavior. The movement was closely aligned with abolition and suffrage. When Ma shook her head and Laura’s boss, Mrs. White, said, “It was a disgrace to snakes, what men would do with liquor in them,” the women were thinking of Mrs. Tay Pay Pryor.
My version of feminism has been that I would be Tay Pay, not his wife.
At 23, I committed to the bit of tortured artist and moved through many cultures that normalize heavy drinking: the restaurant business, the wine business, writers, musicians, Montana (single or double?), New Orleans…
Did I fall into boozy situations or seek them out? Hard to say, but when I watched the full moon party scenes in White Lotus, I kept saying, to my partner’s increasing concern, “Yeah, been there, done that, with those people, on that boat.”
[Except that one thing. Eyew. NO.]
The thing is, I love cocktails and wine and unexpected adventures so much, I’ve carefully avoided alcoholism so I don’t have to quit, which might be the most alcoholic thing I’ve ever heard. But the thing is, while I can stop at half a glass of Beringer White Zinfandel, I don’t see the point.
Through the influence of a European partner over the past decade, I’ve made great strides in moderate drinking, paced with food. Not that Europeans can’t be alcoholics (hey, Russia), but they don’t, for instance, have Midwestern college party towns where drinking to the point of projectile vomiting on the street is considered not only a normal rite of passage but a desired one.
I’m not sticking my leg through business screendoors or vomiting down Main Street, but sadly, what would have counted as abstinence in my thirties is no longer enough.
Are you feeling sad most of the time because your serotonin is gone? Are you drinking because you’re bored and maybe a little empty inside? Are you, at 56 years of age, and despite knowing better from the previous 1000 hangovers, still drinking the cheap wine provided by the Airbnb, and blubbering all over your friend the next day?
But my real turning point was watching Parker Posey as Victoria Ratliff in White Lotus.
From Party Girl to pill lady, Parkey Posey and I grew up together. We were born the same year, one month apart—October and November 1968; she’s the Scorpio to my Libra. We both have this Deep South/New York split and hybrid accents as a result.
Repeat after me: Lorazapaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaam.
I’m not Victoria Ratliff or Parker Posey. Too poor. Not famous. But I am some version of Parker Posey playing Party Girl aged into Victoria Ratliff.
Which is a long way of saying, I’m two weeks into my elimination experiment.
Here’s my diary, for those who might be dry-curious:
Week One
More clear-headed.
Sleep is better, but not amazing.
Baseline of depression/anxiety has improved
A little bored on the weekend in my small town, but the novelty of sobriety gets me through. OMG! I’m so noble and pure! I’m BEAMING.
Week Two
Still no miracle sleep, but still better sleep.
By now, I’m alarmed at how much better my brain is functioning:
I can keep score in pickleball without having to ask every point. Keep in mind, I play with people twenty years older than me, some diagnosed with dementia.
I can write. I can plan. I can think. I can teach without asking my students a question and then staring into space while they wave their hands, Professor! Professor!
I survived a retirement dinner with an open bar. I washed down my rubber chicken with a flat ginger ale. Yuck. But I did it! My reward was a clear head the next morning.
6-8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, I was very, very grumpy. The stunning sunset off my deck? Booorrrriiiing. I looked at the calendar to see when I could start drinking again.
Sunday, a stupid amount of energy takes hold of my body.
Like, right now, I want to buy a pickaxe and level my sloped yard for spring planting.
I went to yoga instead of lying on the sofa poking at the NYT Spelling Bee pretending my brain isn’t overcooked mashed potatoes.
I furiously type this post. I will end up deleting half.
But here are the two biggest sells:
The gloom cloud gripping on my chest cavity has eased. I haven’t felt this hopeful since before the pandemic.
I feel…proud of myself.
Is this my new life forever?
I set the end date for April 17 because that’s the day my gay oenophile bestie arrives for a weekend visit with bougie wine. I can give up the Kirkland Signature Red and Carlo Rossi, but I’m not quite ready to quit you, Gevrey-Chambertin.
Or as my fellow Catholic, St. Augustine, once said, "Give me chastity and temperance—but not yet."