On Beer

I like to imagine that Brett Kavanaugh and I have nothing at all in common. God knows we don’t share a taste for beer. I’m not a big fan of alcohol in general.

By the time I began university, alcohol was seen as the province of the hopelessly uncool, as your old man’s relaxant. When I tell my British friends that there was no bar in such venues as the Fillmore Auditorium, they’re incredulous, but to have been heard longing for a beer in there would have gotten one ostracised as an obvious narc. Pot was what you wanted, daddy-o (not that anyone outside of West Side Story had called anyone else daddy-o since March 1958), or something much stronger — LSD, or mescaline, or peyote. The preferred substances blew your mind, and, with any luck, enhanced your understanding of the universe. Beer made you sloppy, and need to pee. The one seemed so much more interesting than the other.

Even in different times, the idea of being around a bunch of jocks, as in a fraternity, would have appealed to me about as much as that of being in the armed forces with a lot of moronic patriots who wanted to kill “gooks” for Christ. But the main reason for that might have been that I wasn’t one of them. I’d ached in childhood to be athletic because athleticism ensured the admiration of one’s peers. As much as I adored sports, though, I was never any good at them. The prospect of going to fraternity “rush” parties and being sneered at by the sort of guy who’d always chosen me begrudgingly for his team at school hardly inspired me to cut my hair (which I hoped would come to resemble Brian Jones’s, or at least Zal Yanovsky’s) or trade in my Thom McAn Beatle boots for penny loafers.

I didn’t go out drinking on my 21st birthday, as I continued not to detect alcohol’s allure. Indeed, it was only years after I escaped college that I realised that drunkenness allowed one as shy as I to sneak out of himself for a while. (With my typical wonderful timing, I made this discovery on the dime of my first adult girlfriend, who, as an alcoholic’s daughter, was duly horrified.)

I wonder why someone like Judge Kavanaugh needed to sneak out of himself.  He was presentable, and athletic (though I can’t imagine the competition for spots on the varsity teams of Entitled Little Pricks Prep, or whatever it was called, was as fierce as at the high schools you and I attended), and bright. I can only guess that it was because It’s What Jocks Did. Isn’t it funny how dutifully most jocks, supposedly paragons of valor, are terrified of  being seen as not entirely manly for not wanting to behave exactly as the worst among them expect them to?  I think, in this regard of professional baseball players, who are forever slobbering all over themselves because great players of decades past — presumably including those who decided that it was natural and reflexive, but unmanly, to rub a body part newly struck by a 95-mph fastball — chewed tobacco. Another, better, example: When a baseball player hits a walkoff home run, his teammates jump up and down like little girls at the sight of a basketful of adorable kittens as he crosses home plate. It looks almost like self-parody, but it’s now The Done Thing, so no variation is tolerated.

Alternatively, maybe the rich jocks at Entitled Little Pricks drank because of what they were afraid they might do, and figured that if, for instance, they fondled each other’s genitalia or stuck their tongues down each other’s throats, they could always claim later not even to remember having done so.

I’ve lived in the UK for most of this century. The British, much more than Americans, will actually brag about how immoderately they drink, and how hellacious their hangovers are. At parties, they will slurredly declare, “I’m not leaving until there isn’t a drop of alcohol left in the house!” I’ve never been able to figure out how over-indulgence in self-destructive behaviour came to be seen as cute or admirable. How is getting hammered any sort of accomplishment? Anyone — even I, athletically hopeless as I am, and no one’s idea of valorous — can do it. You simply keep pouring alcohol into yourself.

Approximately biannually, I enjoy a lovely cold Heineken or Sapporu, but generally believe most beer to taste like something in which you might pre-soak your dress shirts, and that, in an attempt to appear normally manly, young men must train themselves to enjoy it. It’s kind of a stupid person’s beverage, I think, in the sense that you need to drink a waist-jeopardisingly lot of it to get the same buzz you’d get from, say, a single large shot of vodka. That Anheuser-Busch has been one of the National Football League’s key advertisers for many years explains why many American men believe having a Bud Light in hand at every opportunity is the right and manly thing to do. Never mind that Bud Light tastes like beer-flavoured soda pop.