DRINKERS

“You drink too much!” my Dad groused at me as I headed for the house. Once inside I opened the tap, letting it flow until I was sure the fluid was clear and cold. Then, and only then, did I dunk the glass under the flow, filling it nearly to the brim, and sluice my throat with the cold, clear water.

My Dad thinks I’m one of these faddies who think you need to drink a gallon of water a day or you’ll die. I think that there are two kinds of people: drinkers and non-drinkers. I’m a drinker. These days it’s tea. Usually something complex, like an Earl Grey or a Japanese green tea. I have a cup of the stuff by my elbow pretty much all day at the office. On weekends I’m a water man, mainly because I tend to do more physically demanding things on the weekends. Like pulling and digging out weeds in the patch of his back yard my father insists is a shrubbery maze, but which, to the untrained eye, looks like an elaborate collection of scrub brush. Even though I’m helping him out by assisting in the carving of the maze, as I would helping him tune the carburetor on his old Dodge Charger or ready the yard for a weekend party, he’ll carp at me for my need of water, insisting I’m some sort of social addict. (It’s the same way that the parents in some species eat their progeny at birth. It’s a sort of revenge, really, for being their progeny to begin with.) The truth is I just enjoy the sensation of something wet in my mouth. If I had an analyst (and THEN we’d be talking social addiction), he or she might say I have an oral fixation. But it’s nothing that deep.

There are drinkers and non-drinkers. It’s just that simple. Then, after that, I guess there are social drinkers and solitary drinkers. Or better yet, social drinkers and anti-social drinkers. Bryan is a social drinker. When he comes over to our house he brings a two-liter bottle of cola with him, or sometimes a cherry cola or one of those supposed lemon-lime mixtures I’ve never gotten the hang of, and he’ll go through glass after iced-down glass of the stuff until it’s gone, and then he’ll either go out for more or drink whatever sugar sodas we happen to have lying about until those, too, are gone. When we go over to his house, it's whatever beer I've brought. But, and he confesses this readily, when he doesn’t have people over, he doesn’t drink, almost not at all. He’ll fill a stadium cup with ice, douse it with Cheerwine, and it’ll sit there, making a pool of condensed water on a coaster, all day long.

The anti-social drinker is most often drinking to fill time. People who work alone in cubicles, for instance, will usually have a drink of some kind with them at any given moment. This might be the actual reason for the Water Cooler Syndrome: for decades, people who have been forced to work alone in a small space have by necessity gathered at the water cooler because that’s where the water is and, in their solitude, they need the cold comfort of water. Probably the same reason companies in the 70’s and 80’s thought break rooms were necessary for morale: well, people gathered there, didn’t they? They talked there, didn’t they? The reality was that it was an oasis, and an oasis, no matter how grim or grubby, is an oasis. That’s where the cold, sweet comfort of a soda was, and if it meant being in the company of social drinkers for a short while, well, so be it.

But the true anti-social drinker is the one who doesn’t want to share what he’s drinking. I knew a guy in college who could go through an entire case of beer in a single Saturday, and, naturally, if you knew he had a case of beer, he’d share it with you. Ergo, it was only by accident that anyone ever found out he had beer.

Bryan claims that my habit of drinking tea in the office is due to my being a pretentious bastard—- my fault for bringing it up, really—- but it goes deeper than that. Having been addicted to coffee by the age of twelve, in college I found myself scrounging for the cheapest substitute available. I soon found that the cheap seconds store, which sold off merchandise that manufacturers deemed unprofitable enough to cease manufacturing, offered a large variety of teas from various makers and, more to the point, many different parts of the American tea market. Thus my introduction, in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the mid-80’s, to the many varieties of green tea American importers thought they might be able to sell to the general public but, alas, couldn’t. Thus, a handful of tea bags and a cup tossed into my backpack with my notebooks and textbooks, and I was off, drinking at least one cup of tea per class period, two if it was an hour and a half class with intermission, and at least one between classes. (Man, I drank a lot of tea in college. Then again, I drank a lot of coffee in college, too, since it was all-you-can-drink self-serve in the dining hall. By all rights I should be awake until 2023.)

Then there are wine drinkers, but the less said of them, the better. Suffice it to say that my favorite wine drinkers know nothing of regions versus varietals, nothing of growing seasons or piquancy, absolutely nothing of labels and vintages, they just enjoy the glass of wine offered to them and talk about, for instance, the weather. I can pick a bottle of wine, and then pick it apart to the molecule, tasting every nuance and comparing it against any of the great vintages of the strong soils of the Burgundy region. But I keep it to myself. I’m a nice guy, after all.

Gallery Crawl wine drinkers are the worst of all. I mean, in my town, the art galleries that beg you to come once a month and look at the offerings of local artists, hoping to lure maybe three or four buyers out of the multitudes of gawkers, offer the free wine so that a few more might, in a tipsy moment of dementia, be moved to pony up half a grand for an over-layered slab of latex paint or a moody splash of watercolor on art-store parchment. Of course it’s cheap; of course it’s white zinfandel, what more did you expect? And hey, by the way, it’s free. Quit acting like you’re an international oeinophile at an international judging. Go buy a turquoise ring from the Native American stand in the corner.

Then there are whiskey drinkers. I’ve never been able to drink whisky without a beer behind it or some kind of mixer over it. I can sip brandy straight, so long as it’s pretty good brandy, but I’ve never been able to raise a glass of bourbon, for instance, to my lips and drink it, straight, iced or watered, without feeling that I was doing something aesthetically and functionally wrong. In social settings where drinking is de-rigeur, since a snort of alcohol is the quickest and easiest way to diffuse that social irritant known as nerves, I will usually defer to whatever wine is available, since I am, paradoxically, a beer snob, and I would rather not drink any of the rice-infused stuff pushed on the greater American public by our larger corporations.

Jim is a whisky drinker. Sometimes to his detriment. I’ve seen him at functions where he went straight for the Scotch at 6:30 and was unable to keep the string of a conversation straight by 8. (At which point his wife, the simple and lovely and gregarious Grace, will usually find some reason they need to get home, and guide him by his fore-arm back to the car. And if they happened to come in Jim’s MG, she’ll patiently grind the gears until she gets the thing into first, then grind again until she finds second, and then, I swear, she drives the thing in second all the way home, stoplights and all.)

It was after one such appearance that the social dri nkers began buttonholing the anti-social-drinkers at the water cooler in our office. I noticed the knotting of bodies as I rounded the corner, but had work that badly needed attending to, so only stopped long enough to fill my tea cup and head for the microwave, but I was there long enough to hear “Elaine said she think Jim smells like he’s been drinking.”

Had I acknowledged it, I might have been drawn into the conversation, and might have defended Jim’s odor courageously. “Nonsense!” I might have said. “I work elbow to elbow with him, day in and out, and NEVER have I…”

Or had I? There were some mornings when he smelled a bit, say, musty. Is that what caused it? I t could be, couldn’t it? But say, what business was it of mine? I mean, he wasn’t coming in functionally impaired, for crying out loud. He was serving clients, pleasing clients, doing his job. There was always laughter around when Jim was dealing with his clients…

Maybe he was getting the clients drunk, too?

No, no, no; perish the thought, I thought, perishing the thought as I headed away from the microwave and back to my office where Jim should have been waiting for me, standing over the schematics for a medical building, puzzling out why the one physician wanted his office in the innger-ring of the building, while all the rest had acceded to having theirs by the moat. The drawing room—really, we called it that—was empty. Suddenly I missed Alan, for the first time since he left the firm. Had I walked in on him, during a break in our collaborative work, he’d have looked up at me and said “What are you doing here?” The implication being that my contributions were worthless. It was as close as he ever got to actual humor.

But Jim wasn’t there, and I started to look at the floor plan again, and then it suddenly dawned on me that Jim was probably out doing damage control.

I didn’t want to think that, but there it was. I was almost instantly in denial. It was the same thing I had gone through during Alan’s weird demise, only then I had gone through it in slow motion. I didn’t want to face up to the fact that Alan and the partner he had wronged were spending entire days blamestorming, trying to figure out an iron-clad reason why what went wrong was someone else’s fault. Like a five year old whose parents are fighting, I ducked my head down and covered my ears and pretended it wasn’t happening, because my parents aren’t mean like that, and my parents don’t fight.

Finally I ducked my head out into a corridor, and there it was: a knot of people by the reception desk, and Jim behind the glass doors of one of the other partners’ office, speaking loudly and gesturing passionately. And so it began.

And the horrific thing is that it went on for weeks, and Jim kept servicing clients and smiling and laughing, and once or twice a week he would be summoned to a partner’s office and talk loudly and gesture passionately for 20 minutes or so while a knot of company people gathered and nattered at the reception desk. On a good day there would be merely the one partner; on a poor day there would be all five partners, and the ambient volume of the the argumentations would rise and fall like the sound of waves crashing on a beach. And then Jim would emerge looking like he’d aged ten years and go into his office, and most of those days that’s the last I’d see of him until the end of the day.

And then one day, a Thursday as it turns out, I got a call from a friend at another architecture firm. “I heard about what’s happening to Jim. Is it what I heard? Is he being sabbotaged?”

I said I didn’t know, and two or three other things I don’t firmly recall. Suddenly things were adding up: Jim was being forced out. He’d carefully and patiently spent his entire adult life creating the niche that he desired, where he sat in his office and glad-handed clients and prepared reports touting the value of the firm’s repeat business, occasionally doing some architecture on the side. And the other partners, the younger partners, were bringing in new clients, medical clients who didn’t mind spending money, younger corporate clients who didn’t know they could grind us down on the per-square–foot price of any building if they just kept at it.

So the rumor mill started grinding out the rumor: Jim smells as if he’s been drinking. Perfect. It’s subjective enough that he could have just had a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, and one of the more naïve office staff might mistake it for the after effects of a long day’s journey into night. And the older he gets, naturally, the more he’s likely to have the symptoms of a long-time drunk: the shaking hands, the memory loss, the slight dimishment of equilibrium. And it was no simple morals charge. I mean, it wouldn’t be the same as if they had started murmuring “Jim smells as if he’s been whoring." No; if the charge is alcoholism, then the possibility is that he’ll sooner or later turn into a liability. Not in terms of drunk driving charges, which are easily fixed, or even in charges of public drunkeness, which can also be fixed. It’s simply that Jim will become “unreliable.”

Which means we stand a chance of losing clients, which means we stand a chance of losing money. None of which is true, but in the eyes of the partners, it’s the most deadly serious, most dastardly charge in the whole of heaven and earth. The partners are, after all, amongst that slice of the American population for whom impoverishment of any kind is the deadliest of deadly sins.

Things continued to simmer along for another week, and I found myself quietly thinking that this whole thing was blowing over, that Jim might weather it out. It wasn’t like Jim owed me anything, or that I owed him, or that my job was at stake if he lost his, or anything even remotely like that. It was just that I was tired of him walking out of those whirlwind discussions ten years older. I was tired of seeing him with a damn-near-defeated look on his face. And then one day things came to a head.

It was very odd. It happened almost without notice. One minute Jim was walking into a regular partners’ meeting, and then he looked back at me, with a grim, determined, yet defeated look on his face. The partners’ meeting had turned into the gunfight at the OK corral. He passed through the glass doors, and within minutes the volume got to that point where you could hear a few words at a time, and oddly enough the words I could make out most office were the other partners: “Jim, now, calm DOWN!” Outside, the knots were forming again, only this time the discussion was who was going to get what; they were carving up Jim’s projects and clients, like the progeny dividing up the wealth of their dead parents (it’s a kind of revenge for having been their parents in the first place). Had Alan been there, he would have been oiling over to my office to try and explain why it was in the firm’s best interest that we get the Lake Norman Medical clients, and why that somehow went with the Paradiso Retail Group and their planned gang center in the northern corridor.

After about ten minutes, Jim stormed out of the conference with a determined look on his face, his cheeks blazing red, and I felt a surge of confusion, like Jim had either chosen to man the barricades and ready for one last charge or was going to quit the battle in a fit of pique. I looked to the partners’ faces for a clue and got no help there. I thought about joining the knots in order to perhaps gain some insight or intelligence on the situation, but decided that, on balance, I had better get back to my office and see about getting some work done.

“Can you come in here?” Jim said over the inter-office phone. Yeah, I said, and put down the three-sided scale ruler I had been fooling with. I had spent most of ten minutes measuring and re-measuring an office, instantly forgetting each measurement as soon as I had taken it. I was banking on the fact that it was ten minutes til noon, and I could get out of this place, this suddenly claustrophobic environment, for an hour, during which I might have lunch. Or, perhaps, given the circumstances, I might just drive around with the top down, enjoying the near-Fall weather and trying to just relax and unwind.

I walked the twenty paces to Jim’s office thinking of what to say by way of encouragement, atta boy, Jim, give ‘em hell, you built this place into what it is, they can’t get rid of you, I’m behind you all the way, because that’s what I wanted to be saying, because I wanted Jim to beat the bastards.

I rounded the corner and walked up to Jim’s door (wood, not glass, closed, which it almost never was), knocked and entered. I took a seat across from him, slightly to the left, where he put his clients’ chair because of some business school voodoo or other. Jim was sitting across from me, looking down and away, an open bottle of Scotch and a small glass half full of amber liquid at his elbow, slowly shaking his head, and quietly muttering, “I don’t know, I don't, I just don’t know. I don’t know, I don't, I just don’t know.”

James MacFarlane Williams