Booze

I’ve lost track of all the times someone has asked me why I don’t drink.

Not many find themselves jimmying open a window just to sneak into a fraternity ABC kegger without some form of liquid courage. Despite that, four of my ruffian friends and I squeezed through and joined the party. Not long after I found myself flirting with a first year wearing a two-piece made of sour candies. This was all topped off with a hasty escape once one of those friends decided to steal the keg and walk through the front door with it. Chaos ensued.

So why wouldn’t I just drink?

My father taught me to fetch beer for him as soon as I could walk. I’d waddle him his bottle, he’d pop the top and let me have the first tiny sip. I still have a photo of me as a baby, hands wrapped around the neck of a Molson, chewing at its lip. Alcohol was always around in my childhood, never anything significant in my eyes. So, when I reached high school and all my friends started to drink, and by drink I mean they adopted the motto “black out or back out,” I just didn’t.

Most of the time, when they ask, I give some sort of flippant answer about how it’s ‘just not my thing’ which raises more eyebrows. I get it. With lots of friends, an affinity for motorcycles and women well out of my league, I come across as a someone that might pride himself on the speed with which he can shotgun a PBR. I don’t present as the sober type. It has its upsides and its downs, but the real reason I don’t is because of what sobriety rewards me: the memories.

Telling stories, that’s my greatest passion. Even as a child my eyes would light up as I bumbled my way through telling any and everyone who would listen to my silly tales. As I started high school, and my friends began blitzkrieging their livers with their parents’ missing liquor, I learned that those nights out, at parties, bars, clubs, whatever, were an endless source for the stories I loved to tell so much. The only problem was that if you took part, more often than not, those stories wouldn’t be there come morning, so I joined in, but started my streak.

I’m a social butterfly, a glutton for punishment. It could be that I’m an utter lunatic, but I love being sober among a room full of drunks, among the inebriated, unaware that they shouldn’t act on impulse or their baser instincts. Not that I can judge. I’m probably worse since I’m right there with them, without the hooch to blame my actions on. I can still hear my best friend’s mother’s voice when she caught me skinny dipping with a girl in her pool “Caleb, you’re supposed to be the good one.” She was right, I should have, but nobody wants to hear that story.

What does it say about me that I tend to party just as much as everyone else, sober as a bird? (Which is an expression that I never agreed with. If ever there was an animal that acted like belligerent frat boys, it’s geese.) Even sober, I managed to amass a collection of adventures that seemed straight out of a National Lampoon’s film, and retelling them has always been the best part.

Getting tossed out of a basement bar in Chinatown because I got the entire bar wasted, on five dollar pitchers, through a mass game of ‘never have I ever.’ Having a drunk girl pull my emergency brake on the highway. Lebron James flipping me the bird over Snapchat; these stories, for whatever reason, pile up around me and I never feel more like myself than when I’m telling them to someone for the first time.

I suppose that’s both my passion and my reason for not drinking; the nights out, the precious time spent with friends, and all of the memories that come with them. I’ll just have a water but grab a seat and maybe a beer and let me tell you a story.