We Should Call Him Drunk-O

After I turned twenty-one and would come home occasionally for a weekend away from college, this is how my brother would welcome me home:

"Hi, drunk," he'd say. "Been on any benders lately?"

When my father or mother offered me a drink with dinner or after, my brother would spike his eyebrows toward the ceiling. "Are you an alcoholic?" he asked after I accepted.

He told his friends his sister drank a lot, that she owned a book on how to make cocktails, that she had sticky bottles of vodka and blue curaco (everything necessary to make the Blue Lagoon) on top of her fridge, that there was sometimes beer in her fridge, and that she had a favorite bar for every geographic area in which she existed. She had a favorite college bar. A favorite bar in Buffalo. A favorite Canadian bar. My brother told his friends he was worried that his sister was going to become some sort of famous souse: stumbling, bumbling, drooling, a girl who wore tight-fitting clothes and draped herself across pool tables, flinging her legs and arms in the air to heavy metal music.

But I just wasn't that kind of girl. I'd watched other girls become that type of drunk, sure. One of my college friends--a church girl, an ex-Baptist, a girl who once admitted she thought the rest of us were going to hell because we weren't saved by her church--shake a bottle of Labatt and spray it all over her chest when Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar on Me" blasted out the speakers of our favorite college bar. She writhed. She tossed her hair around. She rubbed the sudsy liquid into her tank top. Where was I during all this? Standing behind her, calmly sipping my vodka-cranberry and thinking, Wow. I bet God just loves this.

I wasn't what my brother thought I was, but he kept on believing and he kept on asking how my liver was doing, if I thought maybe it was time to enroll in AA, if I was sure I wanted to have that glass of wine with our pasta.

Last week when he and I met our father out for dinner, my brother started in on his new favorite topic: drinking. He'd just gotten two new bar books, he told our father. He liked the Long Island Iced Teas made at a certain bar in Canada. He liked to sit at bars in restaurants so he could stare longingly at their collections of liquor. He'd just recently asked the bartender at Famous Dave's about her favorite brand of Vodka, and she named something other than Grey Goose, and my brother was scandalized. "It was something I'd never heard of before," he said. "Have either of you ever heard of it?" We hadn't. "I want to try it," he said.

He went on. He was accumulating lumber so he could build a bar--no bigger than the table we were currently sitting at, he told us--for the cabin. He said he was steadily accumulating barware: tumblers, shot glasses, one of those straw holders that splays the straws out in a prickly explosion when you lift the lid. "I'm not going to keep the straws that came in it," he assured us. "That's gross. I don't know who's put their hands all over them."

Finally, my father sighed and put down his fork. "Adam," he said, "you aren't even twenty-one. This is ridiculous. When your sister turned twenty-one you spent every waking minute asking her if she was an alcoholic if she even dared to have a drink in front of you. And now look at you."

My brother narrowed his eyes. "So?" he asked.

My father went on to explain it was sort of hypocritical, sort of bad, sort of scary that he was so obsessed with all things alcohol. He told my brother it made him uncomfortable. He didn't want to talk about it anymore.

"Jeees-sus Christ!" my brother huffed. "I can't believe this! Here we are trying to have a nice dinner and nice conversation, and you go and say something like that!"

My father reiterated: Adam wasn't yet twenty-one and he was sitting at bars and staring at liquor, he was buying book after book on how to make drinks, he was buying things to stock a bar, he was going back to the cabin to get drunk more weekends than not. My father said it just wasn't right. My father said Adam needed a new hobby.

I didn't say anything. I don't think my brother is out of control. I think he is acting like a normal twenty year old boy, and since my brother dropped out of college before he had the chance to go on those typical college-boy-benders, I think he needs to get it out of his system somehow. If he wants to ride across the border with his friends and go to Canadian strip clubs and bars, that's fine. If he wants to go back to the cabin and drink cheap beer and pee outside into the snow banks, that's fine, too. I just wish he'd stop talking about it, because it's getting pretty boring. Each time he starts in on it, I have the itching urge to ask him, "Adam? Are you an alcoholic? Is your liver okay? Do you really want that drink with dinner? Should I get you the number of the local AA?"

But I know if I did that my brother would level me with one of those looks he has--evil, biting, the perfect Little Brother Look. He would cross his arms, glare, and tell me to shut up because I don't know anything about anything. Not at all.