Drinking personalities Booze and the itinerant bibliophile BY TANYA WHITON

I’ve long pondered the relationship between drinking and writing, usually while indulging in the former and neglecting the latter. I was precocious, see: I published my first poem at 11, and drank my first whiskey sour at 12. Both writing and drinking fostered the sense of distance that I felt from people, a feeling that gave rise to an inner narrator, an observer. Both writing and drinking gave me access to another identity as well ¾ a character who could behave badly. In reality, I was a hopeless geek, a teacher’s pet, but "She" did all sorts of things I would never do. She made mistakes that could be turned into entertaining stories.

And so began my decline.

By 16, I’d shaken off the dull role of promising honors student and begun devoting serious effort to wasting my potential. Tales of excess and failure delighted me: I read all of Tennessee Williams, ticking one finger at a time off my mother’s bourbon. With the crackdown that accompanied my parents’ discovery of my myriad bad habits, I became obsessed with grim novels exploring the themes of societal injustice and existential meaninglessness: Orwell and Camus awaited. I got sneakier; I ran with a bad crowd. When I arrived at college, I digested great swaths of feminist critique and the literature of the oppressed while sloshing in a tub of cheap domestic beer.

It seemed to me that drinking went hand in hand with being the sort of writer I wanted to be: adventurous, exploratory, unafraid of the seedier side of life. It was an activity that satisfied my always pressing desire for atmospheric specificity: Each type of drink lent a different tone to an evening, and thereby created a different sort of story. The range of human emotions and responses were available in various liquid forms, as were a whole series of personas to experiment with:

The Continental: In a tribute to the Left Bank crowd, a traveling friend and I dressed up in white linen and pearls for an evening of port and langusta for a last night in Lisbon. Our last night evolved into our last luncheon: at noon, with a 3 p.m. flight, we were polishing off yet another bottle of Portugal’s famous export. He dropped me at the airport, and I shrieked across the check-in area to my two friends from home, who pretended not to know me, which had me mystified and hurt until I visited the little airplane WC and saw that my teeth were purple, as was the front of my shirt. Without warning, it seemed, the Continental could become an Ugly American.

The Rock Widow: I spent most of the early ’90s debating a very important question: Should I, or should I not, get a tattoo? In that era of rapidly proliferating microbrews, I considered the pros and cons of permanent decoration, while attending heavy metal shows and sampling the numerous heavy, hop-laden concoctions put out by local breweries. If I had a tattoo, would I be seedier and more adventurous? Wearing the same black T-shirt night after night, I doused myself in amber ales, feeling inexplicably both angry and happy about it, BadMotorFinger blaring from my car stereo.

The Pirate: On a spring break trip to the Bahamas, I met a fellow on a party barge who gave me a Hurricane. As the boat cruised past Paradise Island, I dared the fellow to get me another Hurricane. He did. Then I dared him to jump off the boat with me, and after handing our watches and shoes to a buddy, we did. The shore patrol threatened us over their bullhorns as we paddled for shore, and after running through some shrubberies, we spent the remainder of the night drinking rum out of tiny plastic shot glasses in our bare feet. I poisoned myself so thoroughly that now, 14 years later, I still can’t drink rum.

The Go-Go Dancer: One of the line cooks at the bar I used to work in invited a fellow bartender and I to join their stage show, which included a Gimp, a lot of broken glass, and some fairly obnoxious three-chord punk. I didn’t much care for the other bartender, a tall, beautiful and enigmatic blonde because, well, I’m a bitch. But we were in it together, and so after two shots of Wild Turkey, we got up on stage and shimmied madly along with the dulcet sounds of Stinkypants. Mid-shimmy, I turned and saw that she had one pointy boot parked on the Gimp’s leather-clad butt, his leash in one hand, and I realized that here, unbeknownst to me, was one of my very best friends.

Drinking has made me friends and enemies; writing has made me friends and enemies. Both drinking and writing have made me, alternately, a friend and an enemy to myself, since, underneath the personality experiments I’ve been conducting for the last two decades, I’m still just a geek, a teacher’s pet. I can’t write at all after a night of carousing, so perhaps I should spend some time pondering the relationship between writing and hangovers. But that’s another story.

Tanya Whiton can be reached at twhiton@prexar.com