High Sobriety (7 page)

So I decide to ask one of the only non-drinkers I know how he copes with a life of permanent sobriety. Nick is my friend Bridget's husband. He grew up in Canberra, where the two met in high school. Being around him is easy; he's a natural conversationalist who will always make you think and often make you laugh. He's a full-time entertainer, performing stand-up comedy, magic, and conman tricks for corporate clients and pub crowds. I've never asked why he doesn't drink, but I've always wondered. Today, over lunch in a Northcote cafe, he tells me. ‘I started drinking when I was about 17, the usual house parties where everyone goes along and drinks too much. There's a history of alcoholism in my family, and I have a really addictive personality, so I would come home from school and have a beer by myself. All day I'd be like, I've got to get home and have a beer; I've got to get home and have a beer. I didn't really notice it was a problem until I was about 18 and my girlfriend died in a car accident, and that knocked me about a bit, so I started binge drinking. I'd get paralytically drunk all the time. I'd drink every day. Then I just realised I can't be a person who drinks.'

Eighteen months after having his first drink, he stopped. Not one drop of alcohol has passed his lips since. A self-confessed control freak, he won't even nibble a rum ball at Christmas or eat food that's been flambéed. The pressure to drink, he says, is enormous and unrelenting. But it hasn't come from the people he expected. His teenage friends had no problem when he quit drinking. Neither do the working-class men for whom he now performs, in tough pubs in Melbourne's western suburbs. It's people in suits who give him the hardest time. ‘I feel like I could do a lot better in business if I drank. I have corporate functions where everyone goes for a beer, and people want to chat to me afterwards and buy me a drink. I can say, “I never drink when I'm working,” but after the gig's finished, I don't have an excuse. Not drinking makes me slightly removed from the event in a professional sense. I often say, “I might just have a Coke.” It creates this weird tension.'

I'm becoming very familiar with that tension. Sometimes it's so uncomfortable I almost feel like apologising to the drinkers in my company. I ask Nick why he thinks people are so disarmed by non-drinkers. ‘It's like they think, you've made a life decision that I don't understand, and I worry about what's behind that. It's kind of like if someone has a very different political opinion from me — if, say, they're pro-life — I'm always a bit like, “What's behind that culturally, because in my head I'm seeing you bomb abortion clinics,” which is entirely unfair and untrue, but I think it's the same with alcohol.

‘It's the thing that if two people go through a terrible experience together, they've shown a soft side; they've been through a war, and now they've bonded. It's the same with alcohol: “Well, we've been drunk together, we've lowered our inhibitions.” It's that thing about the reason you shake hands is to show that you don't have a knife in your hand. Alcohol's a social lubricant. You say things you might regret later on, so if you're prepared to drink with someone, you're saying, “I'm prepared to let the real me out.”'

I can relate to this. By choosing not to drink, it feels as if I have unwittingly broken a contract to be disinhibited. I have welched on that tacit agreement between drinkers to be candid, open, and in some ways vulnerable. When this contract is broken, it can turn ugly.

Nick says that celebrations, as I discovered with the beer-peddling birthday-party host, are particularly fraught. ‘Weddings are tough. They bring out the worst in people when it comes to alcohol. People would give me champagne, and I'd say, “Sorry, I don't drink.” “But it's for the toast. You have to have a drink.” They want everyone to drink: “We are here to celebrate, you will celebrate, and we'll force this celebration down your throat in the way we want you to celebrate it.” Everyone has to have a glass to drink, and it gets quite nasty.'

How will I cope with that sort of pressure? How will I get through my own birthday with a non-alcoholic toast? If I'm to survive three months of this, I'll have to start stockpiling excuses. I ask Nick for advice. He tells me that it's important to always have a glass in your hand. That way, if someone asks if you want a drink, you can simply say, ‘No, I'm good, thanks.'

Also, I'm warned never to say, ‘I'm not drinking' or ‘I don't drink', as this only invites discussion as to why not, and immediately there's a barrier where there needn't be one. ‘Just say, “No, thank you,” and stare them down. “Go on, have a drink.” “No, thank you.” “Are you sure?” “No, thank you.” And just ride out the five-second awkward pause,' Nick explains. ‘I used to tell people early on that I was an alcoholic. I don't think I actually was because I did just say, “I'm going to stop drinking,” and then stop. But I'd tell people, “I'm an alcoholic,” and they'd say, “Oh, sorry,” and back away.'

I like Nick's style. I've already been asked at least a dozen times why I'm not drinking. I can usually tell by the delivery where those who ask place on a scale that ranges from genuinely interested to obnoxious wanker, and I tailor my response accordingly. With that scale in mind, I formulate my own top-ten excuses for sobriety.

1. I just want to prove that I can do it.

2. My friends bet me I wouldn't last a month.

3. It's for charity.

4. I'm trying to lose weight.

5. I'm training for a marathon.

6. I've just come out of rehab.

7. NASA doesn't let its astronauts drink before shuttle launches.

8. My psychiatrist says I shouldn't drink on these pills.

9. Drinking makes the baby Jesus cry.

10. It's one of my parole conditions.

But I suspect that none of these justifications will suffice. It seems the only excuse you can proffer for not drinking that passes the ‘you can have just one' test, other than Nick's ‘I'm an alcoholic' line, is to say that you're pregnant. Anything short of being up the duff is open to negotiation. I start to envy pregnant women, who can happily turn down a drink without feeling as though they're altering the group dynamic or breaking a social contract. Theirs is seen as a decision of necessity, not choice, and therefore they're off the hook.

When I decided to stop drinking, I knew it would be tough, but I thought it would be a simple proposition of abstaining from the act of consuming alcohol. I wasn't prepared for the complex moral maze I'd have to navigate along the way.

A DECADE HAS
passed since I came to Australia for what was meant to be a year-long working holiday, and turned into a life I never got round to leaving. Much has changed since then. My relationship ended, I got my dream job, and I bought an apartment, anchoring myself to a city I'd once known only through the slice of vanilla suburbia portrayed in
Neighbours
. I've seen friends and jobs come and go, and my clothes and hairstyle have changed, yet the one constant — other than taxes, the love of my family, and the rising and setting of the sun — has been alcohol. Wherever I've been and whoever I've been with, I have enjoyed getting drunk, regularly and unquestioningly. Drinking is the international language of social cohesion. When I was backpacking around Australia and New Zealand, it was drinking games that broke the ice with fellow travellers. In almost every job I've had, work friendships have been sealed in the pub. Getting pissed is how we bond with friends old and new, not just on the night itself but also the morning after.

On the tram one morning, I overhear a couple of guys in their early twenties talking about the previous night's adventures.

‘I was wasted, man. I can't even remember getting home,' says one, who's wearing a cap low over a pair of mirrored sunglasses.

‘How the fuck did I end up on top of that car?' the other asks.

Giggling, they try to retrace their evening, fitting their patchy memories together like a jigsaw puzzle.

It's a conversation I've had with many mates over many years. Big nights out are something we revel in, comparing the sizes of our hangovers and the fogginess of our memories over laughs and cups of tea in the staff kitchen come Monday morning. When you get drunk with friends, it's like taking a road trip together, destination unknown. You only need to look at the success of the
Hangover
movie franchise to see that there's a universal narrative about the unpredictable adventures that can arise through the common bond forged by drinking. We might not all have woken up to find Mike Tyson's tiger in our hotel bathroom, or pulled our own tooth out after marrying a Vegas stripper, but most of us will have at least one shared drunken escapade that we can recite proudly as proof that we've lived. Who hasn't woken up groggy and aching, with only a phone number scribbled on a beer mat, a half-eaten kebab, and a smudged ink stamp on the inside of their wrist as clues to the previous evening's events?

Deciding not to drink when your friends are still having these adventures is a bit like watching them go for a joyride in a Maserati while you're desperately trying to keep up on a skateboard. As the second month of my sobriety continues, it seems that no matter how hard I try to get a seat in the car, there's just no room. It's subtle at first, but slowly things begin to change. A couple of times, people arrange to meet up at the pub for a few drinks, and I only hear about it days later. I think they presume that if I can't drink, I won't want to be there; I'm not sure if this says more about their company or mine. When I
am
invited, they raise their glasses to cheers the group, but don't clink mine because it's filled with water. Without booze, it feels like I'm becoming invisible, paling into the background like a cloud in a whitening sky. Some friends disappear altogether, alcohol seemingly the glue cementing our relationship.

Those who do stick around can't hide their puzzlement at my decision. My workmate Cam says to me in exasperation, ‘When's this all going to stop, Starkers?' as if I've lost the capacity for rational thought.

I laugh and say, ‘Who knows? Maybe I'll go a whole year and write a book about it. I could call it “My Year Without Booze”.'

His response, lightning-quick, floors me: ‘Yeah, then you could write a sequel and call it “My Year With No Mates”.'

I force a laugh. He means no malice, but the comment really bothers me. Am I committing a slow form of social suicide? If this is what people are saying to my face, what are they saying when I'm not around?

My abstinence is becoming such a focal point that I'm tired of talking about it. It's become my defining characteristic. I know that people are only bringing it up because they're interested, but it serves to underscore my difference, my otherness. I start to feel an affinity with vegetarians and vegans, who must face these questions of exclusion daily. I'm conflicted, oscillating between enjoying the positive physical and mental effects of sobriety and yearning to belong, in a way I haven't experienced since I was an angst-ridden teenager, pretending to like nosebleed techno in a bid not to be shunned by my peers. But I'm 34 — I'm old enough to know better. Certainly old enough to feel secure in my choices and confident of my place in a group, regardless of what I'm pouring into my glass. How hard must it be for younger people to walk this path? When you're in high school or at university, how do you opt out of a ritual so deeply engrained in society's collective sense of identity without alienating yourself from the world around you?

A recent survey conducted by the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education found that more than a third of all Australians drink alcohol to get drunk. That figure rises to more than 60 per cent in Generation-Y drinkers. Interestingly, 37 per cent of those drinkers said that they'd tried to cut down their drinking and failed. It makes me wonder if some young people are getting pissed not because they enjoy it, but because it's easier than living life on the friendship fringe.

This was the case for a young guy I interviewed a few years back. Steve was a promising junior footballer who started drinking at 15 — the average age at which Australians have their first drink — and quickly became known as a party animal. He loved having a few beers; it helped him to relax. Friends said that he was hilarious when drunk. But he soon found that he couldn't socialise without it. He knew that he was drinking too much, but when he left school and enrolled at the University of Melbourne, where boozy parties and pub crawls were non-negotiable hallmarks of campus life, things began to escalate. It took 18 months of heavy drinking — his daily fix was a five-litre cask of wine and a six-pack of beer — before he could no longer cope and had to quit his studies. This perceived failure set off a chain of events that started with him crashing his car while five times over the limit, and ended with an overdose of antidepressants and sleeping pills.

What shocked me most about Steve's story was not the detail of his deterioration, but the fact that he started out just like me. ‘I was just a normal teenager playing football, having fun with my mates, and drinking a bit at parties,' he told me. ‘There's strong peer pressure; it's socially expected. If you don't drink, you feel a bit on the outer. It's really hard to go out and socialise if everyone's drinking and you're not.'