Maria behind the counter at Vons rested her hand on the neck of the bottle of wine I wanted to buy and breathed deeply, twice, so that her cloth face mask puffed out.
I hadn’t seen her in a couple of months, and I was stumped for something clever yet welcoming to say.
“Have you been drinking today?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Why do you ask?”
She did not answer.
She rang up the bottle and I paid for it on the plastic-covered debit card machine that had not been disinfected between customers like they do at Target. She handed me the receipt and said, “Take care,” not “Have a good evening.”
As I walked to the car, I realized that she thought I might be too drunk to sell wine to. It was 5:30 in the evening, and I hadn’t had a drop to drink.
I remembered standing in line at a La Familia market in Santa Ana four years ago, waiting to buy two weeks’ worth of $1 frozen burritos for my friend while my friend stood in another line to buy a fifth of vodka with some of the money I had just lent him. I watched him talk to the clerk, then turn around to point at me. It was only then that the clerk sold him a parka (<- speech-to-text interpretation. What I said was, “the vodka.”)
[Side note, Apple’s iOS speech to text is better than Microsoft Office 365 speech to text. But both recognize “COVID-19.”]
The clerk who sold my friend a parka was concerned for alcoholic beverage control rules. She recognized my friend as someone who came out of the house after drinking all day to buy more alcohol he didn’t need. I am not that guy. I never leave the house after I start drinking. I always make sure there’s enough of something in the house so I won’t have to leave. Is that wrong or is that good planning?
[Side note: today is the 29th anniversary of the day I moved into this house. I have been shopping at that Vons for 28 years 364 days. Tonight at Vons, I bought a $16.00 bottle of wine on sale for $10. Tonight, Roommate is asleep on the couch, and the channel for the last movie she watched has turned into soft core porn, and now there are two naked men wrestling on the screen while a third watches. I am in the other room listening to the Big Band channel.]
So why did Maria think I had been drinking?
Maybe it was the way I broke social distance rules. There were no groceries on the conveyor belt, so I put my bottle of wine on the belt and stepped forward. The customer in front of me hadn’t collected her change yet, and Maria said, “Sir, please step back to the Red Square.”
I skipped back jauntily and said, “Oh I’m sorry.”
Then we had the interaction at the register that I told you about before.
One time when I was a young adult, when I had had more to drink than I should have had and had briefly stopped respecting social norms, my mother gently chided me with her worries about alcoholism, and she recited a litany of relatives who had the gran mal. It was a long list. The relatives who didn’t have alcoholism in their families were comparatively well off. The drinker’s families all struggled, no matter how good their jobs were.
I have been acutely aware of the signs since then.
Once, in the 80s, a younger coworker was talking about how much fun he and his friends had had at the local beer bar, and he ended with, “I was so hungover I couldn’t come to work the next day.”
I told him, “I’ve never been that hungover, and I would never tell coworkers if I had.”
He was struck by my message. He went on to become a CIO at several companies, and I trust he never missed a day of work again with a hangover. So at least I got that going for me.
I worked at a liquor store to pay bills during my later years of college. The experience gave me a warped view of good and evil. The man who came in every afternoon in his utility company uniform and bought a 24-pack of 16-ounce Lite beers was a good customer, not a temporary customer. The woman who came over in a sheer black blouse to flirt with me for a half pint of Gilby’s Gin was a fun diversion, not a sorry spectacle, right up until the night she killed herself. The would-be Lothario who died in the alley after buying three tenths of Gallo Red Port in 90 minutes with change he had got from strangers outside was a good guy, and we were sorry to see him go. Another young fella came in the next day at lunch and bought one 16-ounce Colt 45. Then the next day he bought a 16-ounce at lunch and a 40 after work, and the revenue stream was back where it needed to be for a day.
Once, after a Little League game, we all went to the Jolly Jug with several of the Dads and got burgers and sodas and French fries while the Dads had a couple of beers, and then a couple more. It was daylight when we left. We made the turn onto Santa Anita, and a car directly ahead of us was barreling right at us. Dad reached out his hand to hold me in my seat and swerved out of the way. Many years later, when Dad got a DUI at the same intersection, I realized we had been the ones in the wrong lane.
I’ve never had a DUI.
I’ve never been a daily purchaser of alcohol.
I’ve never died of acute alcohol poisoning.
I’ve never committed suicide.
I would say I’ve never missed a day of work with a hangover, but I might be substituting “Fuck it” days for hangover days. I can’t remember.
And I had never been asked in a halting fashion by the neighborhood grocery clerk whether I am now the guy who comes out in the evening to buy more alcohol after I’ve been day drinking.
Until today.
I think it’s the mask.
The Billy Pulpit 