NOT KNOWING: THE ROCK & ROLL OF DRINKING by Richard Schmitt
”Drink! for you know not whence you came nor why:
Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.”
– The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
Quit drinking and friends say do you miss it? They ask nervously, as if inquiring about your amputated leg. They are people who’ve never had to quit drinking. Or haven’t yet anyway. They are “responsible drinkers.” And they assume “drinking” is a singular thing, like having a wart or owning a pit bull. Drinkers don’t ask the question because they know the answer. Answers actually. Because “drinking” is not one thing.
For instance, do you miss hangovers? Easy question: NO. But what about those tepid mornings after a big to‑do when the day begins with friends rising groggy from floors and couches and beds not their own? Waking up after a crazy night in a college town, graduation maybe, or just weekend bar-hopping with a clutch of pals? What about my friend Moe who shows up one Sunday morning after a long night that started early the day before? He comes shuffling into my yard barefoot and holding up his pants with one hand, bits of grass stuck in his dark bushy hair. I’m on my porch with a few layover friends, all of us buzzed and bigheaded from a fun night. We’re out there with coffee feeling fine and hungover and comparing notes: ”Where’d we go after . . . ? Did we shut down the . . . ? What happened to . . . ? When did we get these tattoos . . . ?” The morning debriefing, as anyone who parties royally knows, is a big part of drinking. Reliving the hazy hoopla caps the night and produces a lot of laughing and gentle head shaking in mystifying wonder. Do we miss hangovers? Of course not. But mornings after in all their cloudy configurations are part of drinking. What we can and cannot recall becomes a cherished part of the story. Passing around the aspirin bottle and trying not so much to make sense of it all, which is futile, but to resurrect it, commit it to memory. A night to remember! On the porch we are still wired, sipping coffee in a muted, spaced-out way, vapors of guilt and regret hovering about our cottonmouth heads. We are happy to have done the night, satisfied to have created it, like a work of art messy and original, reminiscent of previous work but one-of-a-kind all the same, ranked and slid into the hierarchy of party nights, the history of dubious survival stories: we are not jailed, we are not dead, we had fun. We are pleased to have lived it, in spite of the losses. There are always losses.
Which brings us back to my friend Moe retracing his steps in my yard. He knows he was here at my house pounding down wine early last night before he went off to a friend’s bachelor party at a local country club. “Good party?” He has no idea. All he knows for sure is that he woke up about an hour ago in a field near the golf course. He is missing his phone, wallet, shoes and belt. We laugh, but not in derision. Moe understands we chuckle out of recognition, because we’ve all been there, waking in shock and loss, consciousness rising to befuddlement. What the hell . . . ? We’d rather not have lost our stuff that will be a pain in the ass to replace, and yes, coming alive with a roaring headache in a dew-soaked field under a baking sun and the barefoot trek back to town has its challenges, a sandstorm thirst for one thing, but it probably means one hell of a good time was had, one to remember, if only that were possible, one to rehash and relish with the neighborhood group of like-minded compatriots asking anyone who might know what in god’s name happened last night, because not knowing is a big part of drinking.
Do you miss drinking? What is missed is unknown.
Oklahoma City, 2002. A man walks into a bar, the man being me. I’d started a new job, teaching at the University of Central Oklahoma, and went driving around to scope out the area, to get the lay of the land. I wanted to see the memorial where the famous bombing occurred. Midday I drove south from Edmond through residential streets. A few blocks north of downtown on the corner of Walker and 30th, a neighborhood once shabby now artsy, I spotted The Red Rooster Bar & Grill. A beer would be nice. I parked nose-to‑the-curb as the lines indicated I should, there were no other cars, a single hog-like motorcycle rested on its kickstand, everything was quiet, inviting.
I know people who’ve never walked into a bar cold. Alone in an unfamiliar city, a neighborhood unknown, a building closed off from the outside, a solid slab door, windows glossy black, the only sign of life a blinking red neon Budweiser. Overhanging the door, one word: BAR. Do you do it? Park the car, walk in blind. Literally blind if the place is ill lit and the day outside is blasted with sky-blue Oklahoma sun.
Inside The Red Rooster I gradually saw the lineup of vinyl stools along the bar, the mirror behind, the tender wiping, a big-gut biker heading out, leaving only one patron in the place. A long-haired Indian-looking dude. Joe. I sat a few stools down from him. We engaged in a first-nod then “how-you-doing” and pretty quick we were talking and “give us another round.”
I wish I could recall how it all went. I remember Joe starting the conversation that ended up, as unlikely as this sounds, with us discovering that 29 years before we had traveled together on the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus. We were teenage vendors in 1973 hawking souvenirs in the stands. We weren’t friends then, but we knew when we worked there, the dates and the towns, and we shouted out, disbelieving, the names of our mutual acquaintances. We discovered we worked for the same underboss, a guy named Roland Pierre, and gradually as the rounds went down and we moved to adjacent stools, we went from comparing notes on an odd coincidence to reliving our younger selves running the seats of civic centers as if no time had passed – Indian Joe! Next aisle over, I can see him. I see him still.
There is no doubt we were both there, “on Ringling in ’73.” Our recollections that day in the bar were precise, and as the afternoon drifted into happy hour and the bar filled up we revived passing each other in the halls, hanging out on the train, getting drunk on the runs between towns. We restored it all in vivid detail drawn up in the air between us as we sat shoulder to shoulder at the bar, strangers just hours before, now brothers reunited because we both happened into The Red Rooster at the same time. Unlikely you say? Agreed. An act of God? Some sort of karmic determination? I don’t think so. I think simply a bar on a corner, a man walks in, anything can happen. And that – anything – is an attraction for some people. Anything is a draw, an adrenalin fix, mystery and exhilaration of the unknown, part hope, part horror. Man walks into a bar, he may come out feet first, he may come out married to his mother. That’s the beauty of utter chaos and random outcome. The only thing sure is plunging into the unknown to swallow a mind-altering substance. Anything might happen.
Joe and I hung out for a few days while I began my new job. At night we went to bars in OK City, he took me to an Indian town that I couldn’t have gone to on my own without getting beat up, we partied hard whenever we got together, waking up in cars and so on, and then one hungover day he was gone. I called his number, no answer. I taught at that school for a year, Joe knew the place, he’d been to my apartment, slept on my couch, but I never heard from him again. I still have a pair of aviator sunglasses he left in my car.
Do you miss drinking? What is unknown is missed.
Running into Joe in The Red Rooster is surely not the strangest thing that ever happened to someone walking into a bar. My point is I miss it. Not the drinking – I’m happy that’s done – but the beck and call. I miss being in a place I’ve never been and seeing BAR and hearing a shout out to me. I miss going in blind, slab-door apprehension, rush of grabbing the handle and whipping it open and stepping inside fast as if you’ve done it a thousand times which you have, as if you belong there which you do. Nod, smile, pick a stool: What’ll it be? Good question.
”It is the wine that leads me on, the wild wine that sets the wisest man to sing at the top of his lungs, laugh like a fool – it drives the man to dancing . . . it even tempts him to blurt out stories better never told.”
– Homer, The Odyssey
People say, you can still go to bars can’t you? That’s a nondrinker question. Going to bars without drinking is like going to Thanksgiving dinner and not eating, going to a carnival and skipping the rides, having safe sex. Hanging out in bars without drinking is as irritating as not being able to sleep. There is no confusion, no ups and downs, no mounds of unexpected pleasure and pits of sudden pain, no slashes of sights and sounds. Reality, so called, is painfully unaltered.
I realize this is a twisted position. One difficult to reconcile for folks preferring level terrain, something safer than walking into a mind-bending maze that changes with every sip you take. My girlfriend for instance, who refers to herself as “unwild,” likes to know things in advance. She plans, she schedules, she drinks a glass of wine or two in a civilized fashion. I know she wouldn’t walk alone into a strange bar. Which is great, very safe, I approve. I am certainly not advocating anyone embrace perilous behavior. I quit drinking because it went destructive in various ways. But drinking is not simply consuming alcohol. It’s climbing and falling, but not too far. It’s being unable to breathe and catching your breath. It’s taking impulsive lefts and rights, it’s embracing mayhem and menace, flashes of hilarity and despair, the blindness before sight and whatever is revealed. It’s walking through doors to improbability, finding a friend 29 years gone, a week later never seeing him again.
Do you miss drinking? It is the unexpected things that stay with you.
I’ve been teaching for twenty years. The students I’ve gotten to know best are the ones I drank with. Some of my colleagues will hate this and disavow it. Claiming their warm and fuzzy classroom sessions and extracurricular efforts cannot be more enriching. Claiming mantles of power stifle no intimacy. Claiming student/professor drinking undermines authority. And that may be true about students. But I’m talking about people. Human beings at once shy and silly. I’m not talking Animal House parties, I’ve been to those and found them best left alone. But downing beers and shots in college town watering holes often spawns strange new life. Conversations, exchanges and interactions, relationships not possible with students in the light of day on a campus or in a classroom. Teachers will say they know their students well, and I believe some do, especially in middle and high school because I taught there too, and the time required with them and their ingenuousness makes easy a family-like bonding. But under the bold lighting of a college classroom the vulnerability doesn’t emerge so easily. On both sides of the desk there is often sanctimony and self-centered frivolity, earnestness and ego, fear and loathing, and flat-out pretension. Qualities somewhat diluted by alcohol. On warrior weekends, during pub crawl, graduations, I got to know people, not students. People who would not have spoken to me in class or on campus. The former students I keep in touch with now as lives go on are the ones with whom I got sloshed. A few of them have become great and lasting friends. That would not have happened if we hadn’t walked into a bar.
Do you miss drinking? You don’t miss what you think you’re going to miss.
I love everything about wine, the history of it, the leafy rows on drained hillsides, the critical timing of the harvest and the people who make those decisions. I love oak barrels in dry cellars and dark bottles in wooden racks, I loved having a stash of wine. I had slots for 300 bottles in my house and kept them full. A tiny collection by industry standards. I miss the way the bottles shimmered in my dining room and hung from walls in the kitchen, beautiful and heavy. I miss wine gear: corks and their screw devices, stoppers and pourers, anything chrome, gimmicks like auto aerators and wacky bottle holders, and of course the sparkling carafes and glasses. I miss the clubs and catalogues and websites and the deliveries from FedEx and UPS. I miss the practitioners and tasting rooms and wine-centered travel and wine-country maps and the Napa Valley wine train. I miss going to other countries and comparing what they produce to our huge California reds that have so embarrassed them.
But I found, surprisingly, when I quit drinking, that what I missed most of all was shopping for wine. The clubs were convenient and relatively economical but I greatly miss roaming the aisles of polished bottles and reading the artful labels front and back. A wine shop is like a library for me, I’m happy checking things out, making comparisons, judgements, and most of all choices. Predicting the effect of one wine over another and planning when one will go best and with whom. I think the attraction to shopping is the unknown factor. You read, you research, you rely on instinct and prior experience, but it’s the mystery of the untapped bottle that is the lure. The risk of choosing. The delight or despair of those first sips after picking out the bottles and carrying them home like newborns, deciding which has to go first, popping the cork, pour, smell, sip, taste, swallow – always swallow never spit. The first glass is like the first year of life, all discovery. Second glass second best. It’s pretty much downhill from there. After the first bottle it’s just drinking. Your newborn develops at bottle two into a mouthy middle-schooler, then at bottles three, four, five and – god forbid – a jaunt to the local pub, the entire experience has gone obnoxious teenager who by morning you never want to see again. Because wine lives there is always loss.
When you tell people wine is alive they think you are speaking metaphorically, waxing poetic, or showing off your cultural suavity. But nothing could be more down-to‑earth than wine. It is the dynamic marriage of dirt and time, always in flux from rootstock to popped cork, wine grows and matures. Terms like “old vines” and “late harvest” remind us that wine changes constantly, it is never the same from one second to the next, from grape to hopper to barrel to bottle wine lives, and there is no way to predict exactly what state it is in at any given moment or what it will grow into or what its effect will be. That’s the wonder of the unknown. You can guess, but you cannot know what is developing, something may be this or that, miracle or massacre, magic or mess, means to an end. The unpredictable life flow of wine, the indeterminable deviations are what I miss, the unexpected things no one can plan, control, or recover once the changes have taken place. With wine, as with life, you cannot go back, and time is everything.
Adelaide, Australia, 1980, man walks into a bar. I still worked for Ringling then, international unit, a close-knit group of us hitting major cities by chartered bus. I realize now, though I didn’t think about it then, I must have been seen as a loner. Most of the people on that tour were couples or had families. I was single and comparably easy to deal with by the management. I wasn’t one to have a bunch of demands or work-related problems.
I know it was the first night in Adelaide, which means we’d traveled early that day from wherever we’d been, then set up and worked the show, and by late that night retiring to my hotel, a high-rise place, I was beat. I had a book and the hotel bar, small, quiet, a soft-lit oasis, not a nightclub or a party palace. The type of bar in which traveling salesmen loosen their ties and tension with scotch. I expected a drink or two, then up to bed. That was the plan. I sat on a stool sipping warm cognac and reading in the dim light which I often did in bars. The place was empty but for the bartender. Her name was Kim and she was 21. I don’t know if that was her first job, probably not, she was likely a waitress somewhere or something. It’s unusual for someone that young to be a bartender at a major hotel chain. It was a comfortable bar, leather and wood. I drank cognacs one after another without feeling them because it was quiet and I was tired and absorbed in reading. It wasn’t until later in the light of my room that I realized how beautiful Kim was. I can’t tell you how we got there, or why, because I don’t know. What I recall are impressionistic images from the bar, her hair somehow shining in almost no light, her voice deep and murmuring, her hand sliding snifters of cognac across the bar top to me. I see us, and feel us, in my room very late. I hear the sound her voice made but not the words. I think we were content in stillness and quiet. I remember the bed very soft, and near dawn a thunderstorm came and we stood naked at the window watching the lightning from high up and hearing the sky rumble close above us. My breathing goes shallow now when I think of that first night and I know that’s how I felt then. I could barely breathe in her presence. When I try to recreate the sensations of that night, and the next two nights, I feel at ease, comfortable, floating. That’s how we were from the start until nearly the end.
She asked me to move to a different hotel to protect her job and I did right away that morning. A mom and pop motel painted red and white, the door of our cottage-like room opening straight out onto the parking lot. For two days we were not out of arm’s reach. She took time off from work and I took her to the show with me and the married guys with their wives out of earshot, wide-eyed by her beauty, said “Christ almighty, man, wherever did you find her?”
In a bar. I found her in a bar, or she found me, unexpected and inevitable.
I’m not proposing anything that hasn’t happened before. Couples meet in bars. I don’t expect you to buy some tragic tale of lost love. I don’t buy that stuff myself, it was a chance meeting is all, a flare‑up that might have burned longer. A lucky break, good chemistry, fun, a memory chalked up to man walks into a bar. When I wasn’t working we were in bed in our motel drinking and calling out for food. I suppose we knew on some level there was no way to end this happily but I suppose too we hoped for some further miracle, some fluke out of our hands, good or bad, maybe we’d elope to Tasmania or suddenly wake up bored or angry. We knew we were sailing blind without power but didn’t think about it. And we drank an immense amount.
Too much as it turned out that final night. We were in bed effectively unconscious when the bus came early in the morning. The knocking, then pounding, on the door in vile daylight. “Schmitty my boy, let’s go.” When I open my eyes now to that room white is what I see. The sheets and pillows were glowing and thrown all over concealing our clothes and shoes and the bus was right outside the door, not ten feet away, clacking with that nasty sound large diesel engines make when idling and belching fumes that came through the door and windows. It was a horribly-sunny day. We were more than hungover. We were sick. I had to leave. And there was no time for anything.
Clacking. Knocking. Pounding. “Hell-lo, Mr. Schmitt, you got fifty people waiting on you out here.”
I had a large heavy trunk. I grabbed what I could see, slammed and latched, sandstorm thirst again, what I left could be got again in the next town. What we were leaving though, the shock of what was happening – God, how we’d mismanaged this! Why didn’t we run off when we had the chance? Fly to some fantasy place beyond the world of jobs and buses and tour directors pounding and shouting. “We are waiting, are you – ”
“I’m coming. I’m fucking coming!”
I dragged the trunk without strength to lift it, the driver loaded it into the possum belly. The bus clacked and belched. From the windows above, smirks and scornful stares – you can’t keep secrets in a group like this. The bus was making a special stop here for me since I’d bailed out of the hotel where I was supposed to be with everyone else. I was troublesome now, and in trouble. I wasn’t easy to deal with that morning. I’d caused complications, problems. The director stood there, incredulous, shaking his head when he saw the condition I was in.
All the while I frantically packed and lugged I was aware of Kim. Half-dressed she ransacked the desk drawer and the nightstand for paper and pen and finally fell to scrawling on the torn-off cover of a pizza box. She wrote some sort of note or directions. I had no clue what she was doing but I sensed it was as vital to her as me getting on the damn bus was to everyone waiting outside mad and impatient.
“Kim, I gotta go.”
“Just a second.”
“I can’t.”
“Wait.”
She struggled, fretted, crossed out, rewrote what I knew were crucial parting words she wanted me to have, a connection maybe to some future, something down the road, or what the last three days meant to her, but she couldn’t get it right and the time was gone and she was crying now.
“Now, Kimmy please, I have to go.”
“Oh, God!” She tore it, what she labored over, she tore it in two.
“No!” I reached for it, took her arm and tried to turn her to me as she twisted away and tore again and again the cardboard, destroying what she had written.
The bus horn blared. ”Yo Schmitt! Get on the fucking bus now!”
I did. I had to. I know I had sunglasses on. I know I didn’t look back to the room. I feel now how hard it was to do that. In my hand, balled up, I had what by chance I’d managed to grab from her, a tiny torn corner of the bottom of the cardboard she’d been writing on. I have it still, a scrap is all, in a cigar box, in a filing cabinet drawer, in a closet.
Kim would be 56 now. I think of her sometimes, as she was in 1980 of course, and I have four words in her handwriting, blue ballpoint still vivid. Just the last four words, the bitter end of what she was summing up of those three days. “. . . and time for everything.” That’s all I have of what she was trying to say to me 35 years ago. The rest is unknown.
Do you miss drinking? You misunderstand, I say, sometimes drinking isn’t even drinking. The word haunted comes to mind.
A drinking life is wonderful, wild, destructive, and lonely. I am not promoting nor can I defend the pursuit of such black holes. I miss quiet rooms of polished wood and leather and head-banging places with cement floors hosed out in the morning. I was once – who knows where – in a bar with tables and chairs welded to a steel floor. On my first trip abroad, clueless and not yet twenty, I walked into the Hôtel Hermitage in Monte Carlo wearing American blue jeans and sneakers. I’d never heard of the place where James Bond-like characters played baccarat in tuxedos. I ordered a gin and tonic and later calculated it cost $60. Outside Memphis, Tennessee there was a bar you couldn’t lean on, it wasn’t attached to the dirt floor. In The Elbow Room in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, a man fired a handgun at another man. That’s the loudest noise I ever heard. At The Beachcomber in Kodiak one payday I ordered a beer and never finished it, “slipped a mickey” I woke up penniless hours later, bad headache. Drunk in a men-only bar in Australia I suggested to outback fellows the size of rugby players that they must be gay. Drunk in England I called an entire table of Scottish highlanders “limeys.” (They called me “Yank” first.) Drunk in a place called “Coontown” in Florida, I walked into a bar where there wasn’t a white person for ten blocks. Of course there are stories behind these and other fiascos. But always the same story: man walks into a bar seeking the edge of a tossed coin.
“. . . there is something to be said for the freefall. The wild life. It’s ruined us, but it’s helped save us too.”
– Carolyn See, Dreaming
Happy now to have ditched drinking – it’s been two years – I am still puzzled by the loss of such idiocy. Walking in and walking out, scowling and smirking, looks like you-must-be-crazy. And still breathing I’ve arrived at middle age reformed and surely not unscathed. I don’t know why, and I miss that, the not knowing.
Being addicted to unknown chaos is like being addicted to anything, risk is part of the attraction. You count on luck, a lifeline between disaster and fun. However crude a vessel drink may be, it nevertheless carries us, provides a ride, a trip heretofore unknown. Of course you might say the same about drugs or sex or religion or any number of other things. People swim with sharks, shoot rocky rapids, handle venomous snakes. We’ve all seen those guys on TV jumping off cliffs in puffy suits like human stingrays trying to fly. B.A.S.E jumpers leap from bridges and skyscrapers with mere seconds to arrange their survival. How many people face seconds to certain death and employ the means to do something about it?
In the ’80s in Las Vegas a friend of mine, Mike, used to dance on a highwire while high on cocaine. I tell my girlfriend this and she says: “Oh, that can’t be true.” True is what it definitely is. Mike would party for days drinking and snorting coke and doing two shows a day at the MGM Grand. He was young and had too much money. He survived that somehow and I met up with him twenty years later, retired, overweight, and hooked on methadone. He sat at a desk all day puffing cigarettes and eating TV dinners. Who was I to tell him he was going to die? One day going to buy dog food in Walmart he collapsed and was carried out on a stretcher. Doctors said stroke, high blood pressure, imminent death. Mike quit everything cold, pills, booze, even cigarettes. He embraced Bikram yoga and sweated off seventy pounds, turned back the clock, restored his youthful vigor. He turned fifty last year and took up skydiving. Serious skydiving. Zooming freefalls with flips and kicks and so on. I went to the place they do it in Florida. Weekends it’s mobbed. People dropping from the sky like raindrops. All of them lighter than air from adrenaline. Mike begs me to join the fun, and I’m sure it would be an eye-opener, something new to know.
But I have no interest in taking on new addictions. I know where that game lands. First it’s fun, then recreation, and then – well, Mike is the example here. He’s been going a couple times a week for months and has now achieved some sort of ace skydiver status. Soon he’ll be a skydiving instructor and will perform in those flying, falling groups you see on the Discovery Channel. A bunch of folks leaping into thin air, hooking up in elaborate configurations, making connections in geometric shapes, colorful maneuvers at 150 mph, floating free again and ripping the cord, pulling the ball and chain, I don’t know the lingo, but I know where this would land. I’d be hooked, and being hooked always means going further, finding and taking yet another next step closer to the edge. Some edge. Any edge.
”There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others – the living – are those who pushed their luck as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later.”
– Hunter S. Thompson
After a lifetime of stomping into black holes and skipping along edges Hunter Thompson decided to go over. Two of the last words he wrote were “No Fun.”
Do you miss drinking? I miss what I don’t know.
Do you miss drinking? I miss what hasn’t happened yet.
Do you miss drinking? I miss the grip and pull, the door swinging wide, the whirling dark within.
Do you miss drinking? I miss living.
Goodness gracious, friends chime in, that doesn’t sound healthy. Maybe you should find yourself a god. I quit drinking on my own, which the twelve-steppers disapprove of. The AA people recommend embracing some sort of higher power, some unknown entity, some god or gods. But isn’t that substituting one unknown for another? No, they say, you have to know God. But what if it’s no god? What if it’s just an edge to go over or pull back from?
Not knowing is my only religion, and I miss it.
Richard Schmitt’s nonfiction has appeared in Chattahoochee Review, North American Review, The Gettysburg Review, SNReview, and The Best American Essays 2013.