This is Fun

This article is my Descriptive/Narrative essay assignment for my ENGL 251 class at the University of Regina. It is mostly true, with some necessary "embellishment" needed to make it a good story. When people ask me why I don't drink any alcohol, this is the reason:

“He’s vomiting again!”
“Eighteen year old male -”
“Bed 16! Stat! Crash Cart ready.”
“Uuuuuuhhrhhrrrraaaah”
“Cyanotic, breaths shallow, slow and irregular -”
“How much did he drink?"
“Body temp 32, with seizures -
“Can I have a squirrel?”
“Lethargic and confused.”
"Only one glass. He didn't even finish it."
“BAC point three four!”
"Seriously! Look! I’m trying to save his life. How much did he drink?"
"I told you. Not even -"
"God dammit! Don't lie to me you idiot! How much did he drink?"
“I’ll name him Harvey. Harvey’s a good name.”
"One glass."
"You can't tell me he only had one glass, more like twelve. How many?"
"Code blue!”

It’s a miracle I survived. Emergency Room doctors and nurses get to see this more often than they want to. New adults stumble into the ER, their clothes and bodies covered from head to shoe top in the aftermath of the explosion at the vomitus factory. If they are lucky, they are still awake, not yet having fallen into a coma after their body temperature has plunged into hypothermia, while their skin has turned a deathly blue as respiration slows to a stop, and the hypoglycemic seizures twist their body into pretzels . It’s just a matter of time before the brain finally succumbs to the toxic chemicals they have freely forced into the bloodstream.

The strangest part about my near death experience is that it should never have happened. It simply wasn’t possible that three quarters of a glass of severely over ripe grape juice did all the damage that it did. After all, I had just turned the magic age of 18; according to the ritual, I should have been downing shot after shot of whatever the bikini-clad waitresses were pushing, as if my chances of scoring with them increased after every glass. Then, after striking out at the bar, my next step should have been to stumble back home, pass out on the couch, and wake up with a pounding headache and spend the morning with my face no further than three millimeters from the water in the toilet. This is called “having a good time.”

“Finally!” exclaimed Fatima as the study group completed eight weeks of research, observation, and writing about mathematics education in elementary schools.
Vanessa grabbed the pages from the printer and exclaimed, “Beer time!”
“I’ll drive.”
“No, Lloyd. You drove last time. Enjoy yourself this time,”
I replied, “It’s not a problem, really. I can’t drink anyway. I’ll drive."
A small smile came to Fatima’s face. “My uncle’s a Friend of Bill W. Twenty years next month.”
“That’s quite an accomplishment. Congratulations to him.”
“How long have you been a Friend?”
“I’m not, but I appreciate his work.”

I did eventually learn what had happened to me on my eighteenth birthday. When alcohol enters the liver, the enzyme Alcohol Dehydrogenase goes medieval on alcohol’s reactive hydroxyl group, replacing a deadly poison with a slightly less poisonous aldehyde. That’s the theory, but my body doesn’t work that way, never has. It cannot grab the slippery alcohol molecule long enough to remove a single hydrogen atom. You would have more success asking a paraplegic to stand up and beat Usain Bolt in the 100 meters.

In most humans, the liver is able to process about 90 - 95% of the alcohol you ingest before it reaches the brain and starts killing off useful brain cells. The rest of the alcohol is slowly excreted through your breath and urine. Since my liver cannot process any of the alcohol before it reaches my brain, the effect of drinking a single glass of wine is the same as four entire bottles for most other people. I zoom past tipsy without even looking, hit and run over drunk, and crash directly into “I’ve forgotten how to breathe properly”. Because I cannot drink any alcohol, I am often mistaken by others as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous.

One August long weekend, we were driving to my in-laws to spend the weekend. I was having those coughing fits that make you curl up into a the fetal position. The force of the spasmodic coughs squeezed my stomach in a space the size of a shot glass, which has the natural side effect of making one heave, retch, and cough some more. Arriving at the Shoppers before it closed, I sprinted into the store, blindly grabbed some cough syrup, paid, and hurried back to the van. While my wife Deborah continued to drive, I downed a shot of the cough syrup and proceeded to fall asleep almost immediately.

During that entire weekend I was either asleep, snarling at my kids over the tiniest of infractions, avoiding everyone altogether, or cursing the burning pokers embedded in my eyeballs. Deborah was pissed. It was not a great weekend, and the hacking continued, no matter how many slugs of cough syrup I downed. Going home was going to be one of those trips featuring the “Silent Treatment” that husbands know so well. While sitting down to supper, I picked up the cough syrup to take another belt, and saw the ingredient list for the first time.

"Oh Shit!”

The phrase that rang out in my in-laws kitchen was definitely out of place for me, my family, and my in-laws. The entire kitchen went silent. Everyone turned their heads and stared at me. I handed the cough syrup over to my wife and quickly grabbed a glass of water. Her voice was quiet and shaking as she read out the label, "Non-Medicinal Ingredients: Alcohol". I was not quite such a donkey after all. For the first time in my life I was actually drunk, enjoying all its wonderful gifts including the nausea, headaches, and the malaise that come with the hangover as you dry out. People actually look forward to this?

After spending my life as a mandatory teetotaler and permanent designated driver, I cannot say I have missed on the social experience of drinking alcohol. When meeting people on cruise ships or in other scenarios where alcohol is heavily pushed, it does give me the interesting talking point, “Did you know there is enough poison in that wine to kill me?” In some ways, the drinkers are jealous of my life. Nights out are cheap when you don’t have to buy an overpriced bottle of wine.

Louise set her glass down, “Nice choice of wine to go with the Barramundi, dear.”
“You’re welcome,” replied Dan. “Lloyd, no wine? Here, have a glass,” he offered. He held the half-empty bottle in his hand: ready to pour.
“No thank you,” I politely responded, giving him the brief version of the story of my condition.
“Wow, never heard of that before. Too bad. I’m guessing you just don’t understand what we have been saying about how important it is to get the wine pairing correct. I personally just can’t imagine having supper without a good glass of wine to go with it.”
“No, I suppose I don’t,” I laughed, “but I have found that fresh lemonade or a Coke goes well with just about anything.”
“To a great cruise!”
As the others at the table lifted their wine glasses, Deborah and I joined in with our virgin Cuba Libres.
“Salud!”

This is Fun by Lloyd Johnston is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.