Winston Churchill was at a dinner party, a bit tipsy when a woman approached and said: “You, sir, are drunk!” To which Churchill replied: “Yes, madam, and you are ugly, but tomorrow I shall be sober.”

Vast experience tells me America has a drinking problem, and I can prove it. Exhibit A would be this: Men are fond of sex, talking about it, dreaming about it (mostly dreaming about it), theorizing about its probability. Given this obsession, you’d think they’d go to the places where women are, but in very large numbers, they don’t. They’d rather drink. In the contest between booze and sex, the bottle wins every time. The bottle’s a sure thing. In the average American bar, pub, tavern, roadhouse, saloon, joint, lounge, taproom, watering hole and canteen men outnumber women to an astronomical degree. Scientific research conducted in person says 25-1 would not be an exaggeration.  

On occasion one of the fellas will bring in a wife, girlfriend or date, but aside from that, a woman in a bar is a stray – which of these pieces doesn’t fit? Of course, she will be exactly like the other drunks in the bar, drinking for the same reasons, but she typically won’t be as good at it or as fun to be around as her male counterparts. She could be nice, maybe have a real job and a family, but behind her back the male professionals in the bar will call her a loser, or worse, a skank or a slut. Name-calling is one of the seven deadly sins of the modern drunk.

“The most humbling thing about drinking is the instantaneous erosion of recent memory.” The other six sins are Lying, usually to yourself. Smoking, anything really, and a drunk will often smoke cigarettes, cigars and pot all in the same day (in the olden days, a drink of whiskey and a cigarette was called “The cavalryman’s breakfast.”) Many lushes claim, “I only smoke when I drink,” which allows them to achieve the lying-smoking megasin. Driving drunk is on the list. After years of drinking, the barfly will never think he’s drunk. He’s always okay to drive. Sophisticated operations have bar chums texting each other with intelligence regarding cop sightings along nearby routes. Gluttony. Drinking and ungodly eating decisions are close relatives. You’ll eat at the bar, on the way home and then once you get home. Sin six is gambling/blowing money. Dudes bet on everything in a bar, sports mostly, but they’ll make shit up. I’ve seen hundreds of dollars wagered on what the next guy entering the bar will be wearing or how long an unsuspecting patron, passed out at the bar, can keep a French fry balanced on the bill of his cap (put there by his barmates). Needless to say, drunks will cash their paychecks at the bar and then buy the whole place drinks, purchase stuff using their phones while in the bar because an infomercial flickered on the bar TV, and generally make drunk financial decisions that fuck up their lives.

The first so-called “growler” was a tin pail, often wiped down on the inside with lard, said to create less foam and more beer. Kids would drag the pail to the tavern, fill ’er up and take it home to Pops. Lastly, the Modern Drunk will hit his friends. It could be that the guy he just had his arm around threatened to take his keys. Or that he had a booze-induced flashback to some personal slight that happened ten years ago, or that someone looked at him sideways or welched on a bet or sat on his barstool or left without saying goodbye. It can happen in a blink, and best friends are suddenly knocking over chairs and rolling around on the beer-splashed tile.

I guess it sounds like I’m piling on the Modern Drunk. I’m not, just looking in the mirror and pointing out an American reality. The dude that used to be known as a social drinker is actually just a drunk, a Modern Drunk, but a drunk just the same and he’s everywhere. Used to be that if you weren’t drinking at work, not sneaking around with a flask in your sock, then you weren’t a drunk. Since everything’s out in the open in the twenty-first century, drinking most days of the week is the new normal and almost universally accepted.

“A bar is a place to cheat, carouse, stand apart, boast, whore and be left alone, but also a place in which a free society can conduct its informal business.” Men need places to go to be with the male fraternity. Back in the day, say the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, if you were blue-collar like everybody else, maybe in a mining or logging town, or if you worked on the assembly line or in the munitions plant, the only place where you didn’t get bossed around, the only place you could have a pleasant thought or a wave of optimism was the bar, the joint. We all know what Ben Franklin said: “Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” You could throw back a few beers, share a laugh, tell a lie, dream a dream with people who were like you, in the same boat. For those couple of hours, men felt like they had some control over their existence. It was a powerful lure – still is.

Americans consumed 36 million gallons of beer in 1850 and 855 million gallons by 1890; Irish and Germans marketed beer as “liquid bread.” That bread was big business. Bars and taverns started offering free food, the proverbial free lunch, to its drinking patrons. A little salty snack would lead to another round: “The sardines were more than fish, they were silent partners.” A drinker’s gotta drink, even if it’s against the law. The Germans brought their beer with them from the Old Country, and you know their names: Pabst, Schlitz, Busch, Stroh, etc. Believing this was a land of liberty, they dismissed Prohibition (1920-1933) as an assault on the principles that brought them here. So they kept on brewing or distilling all through Prohibition. By 1930 Chicago had over 10,000 illegal bars, and Al Capone was making $100 million a year selling illicit hooch, all in cash.  

“It’s only when you’re among teetotalers that you realize how indebted you are to the chemistries of alcohol.” There’s a certain romance in a good bar. At its most, should I say, intoxicating, drinking establishments the world over offer unique refreshment and camaraderie. But there’s gonna be drunks there, so I recommend keeping your head on a swivel and avoiding the budding “Churchill” in the group who, with a cigar-clenched grin, can slice you wide open with his tongue. Remember he only smokes when he drinks, and he always drinks.