Village life: It was my first beer blast

I remember almost nothing about my first two years in college. I spent them at Miami University in Ohio, an impossibly lovely Georgian Revival campus, back when Bo Schembechler was the football coach.

It's odd. Several other places where I've spent two years are branded into my memory. From the Kingdom of Tonga I still can vividly conjure whole sequences of specific moments, smells, people, cockroaches and mice, what I ate, even the clothes I wore.

You'd think Miami would have fared better in my brain. It was my first time away from a very regulated childhood, and the liberation of that change, the realization that I could do what I wanted, was momentous.

My transcript shows that I was a good student. I arrived a virgin and left that way, waiting for the frowsier anonymity of Kent State to accomplish that deed. The orderliness of Miami was more like a church than a launch pad — too much redbrick goodness for the kind of adventures I was drawn to. Compliant steadiness isn't as memorable as mischief.

So when I went back to Miami recently for a conference, my first return in 42 years, my mind drew a disorienting blank. I recognized the architecture, but nothing stood out.

The accompanying town of Oxford is tidy. Its manicured High Street almost cloyingly evokes the words "chaming" and "quaint."

Miami didn't seem like my kind of place.

It is amusingly ironic that the one memory I have of Miami is that it was the first place I ever got drunk.

It was just after my 18th birthday, in late autumnal November, a bright, fragrant Friday pungent with the arousing rot of oak and maple. I had been to a fraternity "beer blast," in itself a highly exotic adventure for me, where out of curiosity I had quaffed two large cups of beer — 3.2 beer, the only kind we were allowed in Ohio in 1967.

It was still light when I'd had enough and decided to walk home alone.

Striding across a smooth quadrangle of grass and walkways back to my dorm, I observed myself with delight. I felt great. It felt great to be drunk! I'd just accomplished one of my worldly goals.

I was a “happy” drunk from the start, and as the alcohol tickled my brain cells, the world seemed brilliant! Welcoming! Loving!

I didn't hug a tree. What I felt was a surging up of my self, an exhilarating moment of possibility and relief.

I was going to be more cosmopolitan than my parents. I was going to do things on my own. I was going to have fun.

I don't remember anything else about that day. But thus began my drinking life.

Ah, drinking, drinking.

How strange that alcohol was the marker, for me, of greater sophistication. My father was a fanatical prohibitionist, and in the arrogance of my youth, his all-or-nothing logic marked him a hayseed. He thought drinking was a slippery slope, and I did not believe him.

I proved him wrong.

I did not rush out to more beer bashes. In fact, I can't remember being drunk again for many years. I had a glass of red wine at my cousin Herbie's first wedding (the first of six) so I'm glad I was there for it. I didn't drink much again until the deliberate, playful zealotry of off-hours boozing in Southern California and Peace Corps.

And then I came to Flint, a hard drinking town.

Leave it to Flint to be the place where the fun stopped and the patriarch's doomsaying began to ring true.

In the '80s and '90s, it seemed we were drunk every weekend. We walked the stations of the cross from Hat's Pub to Billy's to Churchill's to the White Horse to the Rusty Nail. Our dramas made good stories, but multiplied hurt and disruption, waves of extravagant remorse and sorrowful confession.

My writing group at the time used to meet and drink ourselves into exhaustion. Poetry readings at Hat's drew the drinking class. And it seems to me, along with the emergence of wonderful work, we took a kind of bipolar pride in our spirited foibles.

At some point, drunks stopped being funny. Many in my literary community eventually read a 1975 essay by Lewis Hyde about poets and alcoholism focused on John Berryman, and it bothered me — it resonated. Hyde contended that Berryman's alcoholism did not necessarily enrich his writing life — but that it infused it, sometimes painfully, with obvious self-delusions. And of course, Berryman ultimately killed himself.

I have never believed that poets or artists have to be pathological, addicted, tormented, to create great work. And I have been uncompromising with my students, arguing against the corrosive romance of the screwed-up writer. There are enough delusionary traps in the writer's path.

In his 1997 revisitation of his seminal essay, Hyde wrote: "The puzzle, of course, is to figure out how to know when we are telling the truth and when we are sincerely deluded. How do we know when we are in control and when we are out of control?"

In my drinking life, I've often invited that question. Flirting with a loss of control is a luxury — one to be sparingly invoked. An old woman, after all, must keep a clear head. As for truth-telling, that's the writer's business. But I'm a skeptic, too. I take "in vino veritas" in small but respectful doses.

I still enjoy a drink, as I've often mentioned here. And, as my friend Maria at D'Vine Wines in the Farmer's Market knows well, I never fail to enjoy suggestions for delicious bottles for my dinner parties, and for this beautiful wine, I am grateful.

But since that long ago first drink at Miami U., I have learned to exercise my will — or abandon it, from time to time — not in rebellion, but in affirmation of a good and harmonious life.

Here's to the celebrations of the holidays. Here's to designated drivers and happy drunks. Here's to knowing when to stop.  Here's to waking up without a hangover.

And most of all, here's to spurning the dark side. Flint has had too much of that.

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Columnist and poet Jan Worth-Nelson has lived within walking distance of East Village Magazine since 1981. Her 2006 Peace Corps novel, Night Blind, is widely available. You can find her essays, fiction and poetry on her web site, www.janworth.com and her blog, http://nightblindblog.blogspot.com/index.htm. She is the interim director of the Thompson Center for Learning and Teaching and teaches writing at UM-Flint.