Why Drink?

Three years ago at this time I had cancer. My dermatologist had discovered an “interesting” mole on my left forearm, removed it on the spot and sent it for testing, and scheduled me for Mohs’ surgery to remove more flesh and biopsy the “sentinel” lymph node in my armpit. It would turn out to be a malignant melanoma, the kind of cancer that, left untreated, would have killed me. He saved my life, much of the rest of which, it seems, I will spend visiting him and my surgical oncologist for follow-up appointments so they can admire their handiwork and charge my insurance, good ol’ United Healthcare, several hundred dollars for the privilege. A year ago when I saw the surgeon, I was telling him about a litany of recent sports injuries—a (minor) brain bleed from a snowboarding crash, a broken finger when I tripped while running—and he issued me this warning, “Stop doing dangerous things.”

At the time, I did not really know what to make of this. I still don’t. What is dangerous, and what is not? I run, I snowboard, I boulder—but I’m hardly reckless. I’m not out on precarious mountain paths, I avoid half-pipes and double black diamonds, and I don’t have the strength or ability to put myself in real trouble at the climbing gym. I even quit skateboarding, though I think about it all the time and, if I want, I can almost feel the vibration of asphalt under my feet. If anything, I’m too timid. I may be 50, but then again I’m only 50. I should be able to activate beast mode once in a while.

I’m careful about other things, too. I put sunscreen on my face and neck every single morning, I slather the rest of me in SPF50 to go running, and I’ve invested in lightweight long-sleeve T-shirts for further protection. I cook, serve, and eat green vegetables of one kind or another—bok choy, yu choy, water spinach, lettuce, cabbage, green beans—for dinner every single night. I avoid microwaving plastics. I skip ultraprocessed foods. I wash my hands. I take time to breathe when getting out of bed. I take each step with intention. I adjust my rearview and side-view mirrors. I stretch. I warm up. I don’t do dangerous things.

Or maybe I do. Because I drink. Most nights I’ll have a glass or two of wine, maybe a cocktail. Sometimes I’ll have a beer at lunch, especially if I’m on vacation. Once in a while, for dessert, I’ll skip the ice cream and sip a little Japanese whiskey or Armagnac. I rarely get drunk, or even much past tipsy, partly because I must have built up some tolerance but also because I’m not much interested in getting drunk. I want to relax a smidge, and I do enjoy the flavors, the crazy range of flavors produced by fermentation and distillation of a zillion ingredients in a zillion different ways. A structured Barolo the color of old bricks, a thick Guinness, a tart celadon Last Word cocktail—the history and the alchemy involved in their creation are marvels of human achievement that we all (more or less) get to partake in.

Except that now, officially, alcohol is dangerous. The U.S. surgeon general wants labels on alcoholic beverages warning that consumption can increase your risk of seven cancers, including colon, breast, mouth and throat cancers, none of which I’m told are any good. It’s not, of course, that alcohol has suddenly become dangerous. The scientific consensus, however, has evolved over the last several years, away from the idea that moderate drinking is harmless or can even have some health benefits, and toward the understanding that no amount of alcohol is helpful. This, too, is not necessarily new. As far back as I can remember, I’ve known alcohol was a poison: After all, that’s how it was described in 1980s X-Men comics by Wolverine, who drank copiously to almost no effect. And poison, as we all know, is bad for you.

Those of us without superhuman healing factor are now faced with a choice. We can keep drinking, or we can stop. Cutting back does not seem to be an option given the way the warnings are framed: If no amount of alcohol is good for you, then what’s the point of going from ten drinks a week to six? You’re still on the wrong side of the cancer line. You’re still living dangerously.

I’ve been thinking about writing this essay for a long time, several years in fact, and running through the pro-drinking arguments in my head. You should continue to drink, one goes, because alcohol is part of civilization, a delicious and convivial way to understand where we’ve all come from and how we communicate and relate. We’ve been doing this for thousands of years! We’ve evolved techniques and businesses and language and culture around alcohol; drinking has brought us together in innumerable ways. We’ve celebrated with Champagne, we’ve commiserated over cheap shots, we’ve sat in the window seat of a dark bar on a clammy afternoon nursing a glass of sherry and just gazing out at the wetness of creation. To discard this en masse, out of concern over what might happen if we drink, would be to jettison a large chunk of what makes us human.

And part of what makes us human, another argument goes, is our appetite for risk. We inflict harm on ourselves, often in low doses, because we generally get something out of it: friendship, camaraderie, triumph, the raw pleasure of a good wine on the palate. The risk—the unimaginable prospect of cancer decades hence—is worth the reward in the here and now. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow the crops fail, the sea levels rise, and the Cybertrucks detonate.

This is where I took a break to go have a drink with my friend, the novelist A., who I hadn’t seen in a long time. Over extraordinarily good Scotch at Travel Bar, in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens, I told him I was writing this piece, and A. responded, “I feel like the whole reason to run is to be able to drink.”

All of these arguments feel like post-hoc rationalization. No, they are post-hoc rationalization. We—I—want to keep drinking, so we invent justifications that seem as if they’re rooted in the deep history of our species, as if they spring from our very DNA. We love stories, especially stories that tell us we are good people doing the right thing, and we choose to believe these stories over the evidence, right before our eyes, that the opposite is true. We are, sip by sip, chug by chug, snifter by flute by goatskin, killing ourselves a little bit each day and proclaiming it a celebration of life. The more we drink, the easier it is to believe.

A lot of us—a lot of you—have decided that enough is enough. No more alcohol. Maybe you never really liked the taste or the tipsiness. Maybe drinking became a real problem for you. Maybe you are simply very rational, have weighed the evidence, and chosen to avoid this obvious risk factor. Maybe you have converted to a stringent form of religion that forbids alcohol, in which case I am very happy to have you as a (paid, presumably) newsletter subscriber!

If you have chosen to stop drinking, I understand. And in a way, I’m jealous of you, because you’ve made a clear decision about the matter. You know what’s important to you, and what’s not, and you’ve acted on your beliefs. That’s to be commended. Meanwhile, I’m out here just fucking waffling. I can list out the inspiringly vague pros and the indisputable cons, and still not come to any real conclusion.

Which means, of course, that I have chosen. I had a drink (or two) in the middle of writing this essay, and I’ll have a glass of wine tonight (I’m making macaroni and cheese, so there you go), and I have plans to get drinks with friends after work later this week (hi E.! hi S.!), and although at first I’ll probably think about the risk I’m running, I’ll soon get caught up in the moment’s pleasure—the pleasure of the taste, of the featherweight blunting of my brain activity, of biochemically relaxing around people I love. I want to say I need this pleasure. That I’ve earned it, that I can’t exist without the dollop of joy from an extremely cold beer or a well-made Manhattan, that I can’t imagine a world in which I deny myself such pleasures.

But that would be a lie, and I like lying to myself even less than I like lying to other people. The truth—for me if not necessarily for all who continue to drink—is that I like taking risks. I’ve been very, very lucky in life so far. I’ve survived cancer (only stage two, but still). I’ve gotten hurt and I’ve healed. I’ve skidded on snowy Vermont roads and steered into the slide and made it home to a warm Airbnb. I’ve quit jobs and found new work. I’ve pushed myself and discovered that I can actually push myself a bit harder. The truth is, I like doing dangerous things. I like beating the odds. I believe in my own luck, and that even if—when—I find myself in trouble I’ll find my way out of it. I’ve been doing this for 50 years, and although I know the laws of physics and chemistry and time and space cannot be broken, although I’m surely by now on the downslope of gravity’s metaphorical rainbow, I have to believe I can engineer a soft landing. Sorry, doc: I enjoy doing dangerous things, and there’s nothing more dangerous than defying fate, and laughing in its implacable face. The boulder is waiting for me, whatever I choose.

Besides, it’s not like I’m about to start smoking. That’s certain death. Duh. 🪨🪨🪨

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