Alcohol dependency runs in my blood. Our family tree—as far back as Adam, best I can tell—has nursed an on-again, off-again, back-on-again relationship with alcohol.
My grandmother, for instance, was a raging drunk. Perhaps that’s a crass way to put it, but in the final days of her life, that was the moniker she adopted for herself, and it seems a denigration of sorts not to give her words their proper authority.
Yes, Carol Mouk was an energetic drunk. She once used the word violent to describe it. She was prone to fits of drinking in solitude, and then exploding in community. My mother still weaves stories of Grandmother’s drunken loose temper, how she’d sometimes smoosh her obstinate children’s faces into pancake stacks when they wouldn’t eat, how she’d throw shoes across the room at children in flight. In those days, my mother and uncles were children on the run, but not from flying shoes or frisbee pancakes; they were on the run from the bottle.
My grandfather, a paper salesman by trade, traveled a great deal, his time divided among home, the road, and the office. On account of Grandmother’s drinking and my grandfather’s absence, mother took a keen interest in looking out for the baby in the family, her little brother, Lee. They were brother and sister, yes, but my grandmother’s relationship with the bottle turned normal familial relationships on their head. My mother became a surrogate mother to Lee, protecting him from my grandmother’s fits.
I reckon the dynamics of energetic alcoholism throw every family dynamic off kilter.
I never knew my grandmother as a drunk, except for by reputation. Grandmother had done a stint in the crazy ward, where she was dried out good and proper. In the ward, she met Jesus and got religion all in the same whack. I never thought to record her telling her story before her passing, but this I recorded to memory: I only ever knew Grandmother as a fireball, an electric cattle prod, a woman who moved people to their quickest and best moments. After she sobered up, she was an encourager, an AA sponsor, a devoted Episcopalian, and she could throw the “prettiest little parties” in all of northern Louisiana.
Sober, Carol Mouk was a miraculous saint. It’s the way I knew her.
In light of my grandmother’s history with the bottle, it should not surprise me, I suppose, that my immediate family’s relationship with alcohol was standoffish. Generations do that—pendulum swing. I recall seeing my parents drink on only one occasion before I was twenty-one—beer with pizza—and though they never said as much, I think the prohibition days were birthed from some sort of solidarity with my grandmother, who’d up and cold-turkied her drinking problem and hadn’t fallen off the wagon.
Although my parents were devoted Christians, they did not excuse this familial prohibition with Scripture or try to force an anti-alcohol theology on my sister or me. Instead, we were told what I have conveyed here about my grandmother’s disease, and they left it at that. This seemed good enough reason to avoid alcohol altogether, at least for a time.
But the Baptist church we attended in my teenage years had a different approach. There we were taught of the unholy trinity, the triumvirate of sins that spelled by-God separation from the Crystal Sea and Golden Roads. These sins—premarital sexual relations, voting as a Democrat in any electoral cycle, and consuming alcohol—were surefire badges of the lost. There was, of course, some support in the Good Book for one of the three aforementioned spiritual prohibitions, and it wasn’t for alcohol.
The well-meaning pastors tried their best to support prohibition by way of Scripture—“do not gaze at wine when it is red” (Prov. 23:31) or “do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit” (Eph. 5:18)—but no one seemed able to explain Jesus’ turning water into wedding wine (John 2:1–11). Paul’s admonition to Timothy to “use a little wine because of your stomach” (1 Tim. 5:23) was considered a nullity with the advent of Pepto-Bismol. There was no nuance to the issue; instead, anti-alcohol rules were supported by way of reductionist logic.
When it came to alcohol, I never bought the whole-cloth prescriptives of my youth. Even in those days, I reckoned the old Baptists to be fearmongers at best, and intellectually dishonest at worst, though I dared not breathe a word of it.
The Bible had its views on sexuality; that I understood. But I didn’t suppose the drink and Democratic ideology to be such bad things, especially if practiced in moderation. After all, moderation gives liberty, and where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom (2 Cor. 3:17)!
Freedom in all things!
Freedom in politics! Freedom in alcohol! Freedom, freedom, freedom!
I exercised freedom in and from all things relating to alcohol—even freedom from moderation.
I had my first real drink at twenty-two, two nights before I was married. Embarrassed by the prospect of purchasing convenience store beer, I cajoled my father, experienced closet drinker that he was, to walk from the lakeside hotel where the wedding party stayed to the neighboring EZ Mart. Ten minutes later, he met me and my groomsman Connor—a closet alcoholic in his own right, I later discovered—on the pier overlooking the lake.
Under a waxing moon, the three of us dangled our legs off the pier in Guntersville, Alabama, and talked of life, love, and my coming marriage. I was walking away from the days of boyhood, from the days of endless academia, and I was walking into responsibility, into manhood. The man in the moon half smiled down on the rite of passage as I killed the back third of a beer. I felt the warmth in my chest against the chill of early November. It was an innocent first drink, my first move into the world of adulthood. And once I started drinking, I remember quoting these words of Oscar Wilde and feeling free as I did: “Moderation in all things, including moderation.” This is the logic of a future addict. Looking back on it, perhaps I should have resorted to another quote by Wilde, who perhaps was speaking with the wisdom of retrospection himself: “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.”