The following is a tongue-in-cheek commentary, but for the conclusion, as per the perils to one’s well-being, and to that of others, from excessive alcohol consumption.
Hard to swallow are the recently announced guidelines for alcohol consumption by the Canadian Centre for Substance Use and Addiction (CCSA).
These draconian cuts – to five or fewer beers per male, per week – down from the CCSA’s 2011 threshold of 15, are alarming and unforeseen. That last set so boasted a bevy of beer’s benefits, why, … I’m routinely two or three over par.
Worse still, some CCSA bureaucrat with an eye for detail, but more critically, nerve, has defined a drink as “one 12-ounce serving of beer,” ignoring the tall-boy’s sensational 16.
As I watch my wife white-wash a blown-up copy of the rigid new rules – a placard about the size of a fridge – onto our fridge, with a vim, vigour, and fervour that’s actually aggressive, I hear my voice quiver, “That big MMA fight, … next Saturday … okay to have the guys over for some wings and ice-tea?”
Then some clips from beer commercials from the 1970s flash across the TV, and I can’t help but grin at their beer-based buffoonery, as the memories begin to flow … We were elementary schoolers back then with such fun for ourselves forestalled fortuitously when 30-ish fathers suggested sips of this putrid poison, packaged in stupid, stubby brown bottles well-warmed in the sun.
Amidst much exaggerated spit-gagging-and-heaves, we’d be protesting profusely, when, suddenly, the strangest phenomenon would occur.
As the brightest ever sun emerged from the voluminous vastness of cotton-like, cumulus clouds, the melodic singing of a choral choir of angels could be heard.
The heavenly candescence then illuminated one’s father in some heretofore unseen Shakespearean posture and pose as he pontificated profoundly in the purest of proverbial prose: “Son, … requisite is the matter of the acquisition of said taste,” proclaimed with such reverential grandeur, it rendered utterly unfathomable any assertions that this finest philosophy had been articulated one billion times before.
Truth be told, this acquiring-of-taste was a troublesome process, not without fair trepidation, as many a green guzzler regurgitated their brief ballasts, in grand geysers to great guffaws.
Nonetheless, graduation to the quaff-quenching quorum, an order quite light on maturity, lesser still in decorum, seemed, for the most part, guaranteed.
So, too, was entry to the York Hotel for our commencement, via fake IDs. These surely were secured from the same, sole source. “Ah, … yes sir,” our spokesman would stammer to the doorman, “the eight of us are indeed brothers. No, no, … you’re right, some of us do have the same name, and,… uh, that’s correct, sir, a few more of us, were, in fact, born on the same day.”
He’d just confirm we had money, then usher us into the Friday night fray.
The York Hotel, yes; it had to be a chain, for every town had one, where silly-sad assemblies of 127-pound teens ordered hour-glass Old Viennas in so splendid a unison of soprano-falsettoed harmony, that some of the whiskered old 70-somethings would doff their drab, blue-grey hats and applaud.
A year or two on, we were somewhat more seasoned. There were free six-packs of Molson Lite when the brewer first launched it, for those of us working at its subsidiary, Beaver Lumber; our age a non-issue.
We’d “dust-cloud” a la Andy Capp, into parties at which we were wildly unwelcome, with cases of empties just consumed by the lake; their higher-pitched, chromatic ring, quieted in the commotion. We’d then consume everyone else’s beer, and within an hour be enthusiastically evicted, laughing uproariously at each other’s swelling welts from ‘belts’ dealt, visible, but not yet felt.
Then, beachside in Florida, scanning the late-afternoon skies for the red plastic font, “FREE BEER! Art Stock’s Playpen,” flapping happily behind some sputtering crop-duster plane. We’d race into our $20 Lido Motel rooms for fast, 15-second showers, knee-deep in tubs of canned suds and melting ice.
One of the guys, “Lasto,” was a lithe and lively, little, white, varsity-soccer-playing guy, with an “afro,” and, animated as hell, he kept us all in stiches.
One night, despite some rather low-key quaffing, some borderline bedlam surprisingly broke out. A Chinese-speaking delivery driver showed up at the front door with nine boxes of chicken balls, stacked squarely from his knees to his chin. In the brightness of the street lights we could see the shadows from Lasto’s arms flailing, his voice wailing, “NINE BALLS, NOT NINE BOXES!” in an endless volley with the driver’s “NINETY BUCKS! NINETY BUCKS! “shouted in return.
We collapsed into hysterics with this preposterous pandemonium, and then, the hilarity was heightened mightily when one of the guys slid the fridge in front of his door, muffling his shouts, but eclipsing him entirely.
We witnessed the demise of the stubby, brought on by mesmerizing Miller High Lifes in long-necked, clear bottles, with cool cap-off-twisters molded into the bottom. Such gimmicks and the proliferate propaganda in the brewers’ packaging amused us to no end, “Our exclusive … aging produces a taste, a smoothness and a drinkability …”
“Drinkability?! WHOA! Who knew?!"
As an aside, the marketing wizard that coined that promotional profundity has surely now moved on to auto-sector superstardom, for two of our neighbours have been driving their new cars up and down their driveways all week, waving wildly at one another, with silly grins, all the while shouting “Garagability! Garagability!”
There was work then too, at the Labatt plant in Waterloo, with a free pint well before noon, one of five officially proffered for the day. We’d cap off the night with a couple more, entertained by the new beer commercials with up-tempo music from the Beatles and Elvis, rolled out routinely with the Stanley Cup playoffs.
* * *
Funny, … maybe not, but, I can number a bottle of beer’s milliliters – 330 or 341 – at first touch, craving a second, hardly halfway through the first. Sometimes I think of the endless cohorts of 20-something, daylong quaffers cultivated to lifelong quaffing commitment, as marketing wizard’s logo now subtly beckons from the ballgame broadcast’s upper corner.
Ever-encouraged, ultra-available, over-indulged.
You know, I can’t recall how that chicken ball debacle ever played out, nor, for that matter, how Lasto ever got out of that room. They’re my last memories of him, but for his lithe form, no longer lively, about to be interred in his proud soccer uniform. DUI.
Beer-based buffoonery, funny, when not fatal.
If you drink, do not drive.
John Epstein is a former, 25-year Orillia business owner who left southern Ontario for the north years ago, and has never been back. He is now a freelance writer, whose column will appear monthly in OrilliaMatters. He can be reached at [email protected].
