How a nation is made
The drunk is not perpetually merciful but certainly the drunk is not certain. Certainly the drunk is thirsty, and perhaps the drunk’s water is not clean. So utopia shall not be dry, say the Quakers. Bring out the bumbo! We’ve had it! Warm everything up, bring me strength. A settler, a cooler, a bracer, a whetter, three stiffners, “‘who has any right to complain?’”1 A shame and shame when it betrays, and swears, and burns. Those boys look like they have so much fun.
“His head is full of bees, he’s well to live, he clips the King’s English, he’s seen the Devil. He’s stich’d, int he sudds, his skin us full, he’s been to France, he’s had a kick int th guts, he’s in a trance. He’s very weary, or he’s out of the way.”2 Sometimes he gets in the way, and so.
The drunk is not certain, so the drunk is by no means sexy to anyone but the other drunk, yes, that one, over there. He’s very weary, his head is full of bees. So y’all will scandalize him harmlessly, tease him and gossip—a primarily neutral mode of information management—to test his intimidation, to admit his admissions, to manage your competitions and reaffirm your connections. Y’all will never fuck him.
He slept well, anyways. He always did; the tavern was the post office, the lecture hall. He measured his distance in tabernae deversoria along a Roman road. His water was not good. He wanted a philosophy club, and he wasn’t ready to visit the library. When he wanted, when he wants, to sleep, he slept. He sleeps. No one really wants anything to do with him anymore; y’all are with the girls. Someone gave him a pillow, and everyone let him be.
What is exciting about fucking the drunk girl? The drunk girl is low to the ground. This is not her philosophy club. He bumbles around like a baby, and y’all will not fuck him. She cannot sleep, because those boys look like they are having too much fun.
I always liked that bit of colonial history—that constitutional conceptions were concocted under drunken circumstance in the local community center meeting house court room hotel public house, that the Mayflower passengers were in such a tizzy over their shortened provisions (Captain Christopher Jones was a greedy drunk) that they cut their trip short at Plymouth Rock.3
When I have one sip of wine, I lose a night of sleep. I used to be alright with this because I found my self-induced insomnia rather romantic. I wanted to belong to a greater vigilance, a tradition of men. How neat if I could write the Next Great Medicated American Novel in my grandmother’s garage apartment. My diet hardly matched the Thompson regimen but the semi-constant Alabama Delta 8/Yes Way Rosé combo was certainly harming me in a way that could only produce gonzo science fiction and a sincere ache in the small of my back from hours of sitting perfectly still. Where else I could’ve sat is beyond me.
Every bit was exciting at two in the morning and dreadfully dull by noon. My misplaced faith felt awfully traditional, slumming it with a settler stranger taverngoer and drumming up the Next Great American Dissension. Tomorrow is a brighter day, from which we will finally know what tonight could have possibly meant. Of course, these nights were spent alone.
I had a book club that never read the book, just the understanding that we would drink wine or gas station margaritas together in public or on the way to the parade, something we would never do by ourselves. If I had another place to go and a way to get home, drunk and dreary and itching to say something that meant something and unafraid of ravishment, maybe I could’ve finished my book. Then again, this is just an excuse.
I try not to drink wine anymore for several reasons that are none of your business. I am interested in the infrastructure. The drunk man collapses into a public and is absorbed by it entirely. He is the anecdote and the constitutional history and the butt of the joke and the stranger who can fade into the background, asleep and untouched. He is the furniture. Y’all don’t know this permission; y’all acquire responsibility the moment you lose your balance; y’all are aware enough to leave or else vigilant enough to bear witness. Those boys sure are having fun. Their stupor belongs to tradition, and it is vigilant enough as is.
- Thompson, P. (1999). Rum punch & revolution : Taverngoing & public life in eighteenth-century Philadelphia. University of Pennsylvania Press. ↩︎
- Benji Franklin synonymizes drunkenness in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1737 ↩︎
- Sismondo, C. (2011). America walks into a bar : A spirited history of taverns and saloons, speakeasies, and grog shops. Oxford University Press. ↩︎
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