Leftover Wine

My lifelong relationship with alcohol has not been entirely untroubled. It is conventional wisdom that those with conservative lifestyles are most apt to run wild when they do give into temptation. My experience does nothing to challenge that wisdom. That experience is not limited to alcohol use. I’m not referring to pharmaceuticals, but I’ll leave my dabblings in other vices for another essay – or perhaps not. Early caution with alcohol in my teens was followed by reckless excess in my twenties followed by a teetotal stretch in my thirties, at last mellowing out to “normal” (light to moderate) consumption in my forties.
 
I was not precocious with my vices pre-college. An all-male prep school (1964-70) and observant parents probably would have made that difficult even if I were inclined toward them at the time. I was a literally sober young man my first two years of college as well. I enjoyed those years, the tail end of hippiedom, for their music and free love values but felt no desire to alter my mind even with so old-fashioned a drug as alcohol. That changed when evenings at a local pub with the boys left me on each occasion with a pleasant buzz. The buzzes were legal: the drinking age in DC at the time was 18. So, in my junior year I began stocking my own shelves in my dorm room. At the time I favored wines – nothing stronger than port and sherry. It was from overindulging in merlot in a fellow student’s dorm room that I experienced my first full-blown hangover.
 
Hangovers are at least as old as the technology to brew alcohol. That technology is prehistoric, but the English word “hangover” is fairly recent, the earliest known appearance in print is in a 1904 slang dictionary. Before then the preferred word was “crapulence,” which I rather like better. But no matter how you say it (“cruda” [rawness] in New World Spanish, “resaca” [flotsam] in Old World Spanish, “Kater” [tomcat – you figure that one out] in German, etc.), it’s an unpleasantness with which most of us gain familiarity in life.
 
After that dorm evening of bibulous conviviality with friends and merlot, I returned to my own dorm room three floors below. It was the size of a walk-in closet, but it was a single, so I never had to endure a roommate in college. I fell into bed in the small hours of the morning with my stereo playing a stack of LPs. Sometime after 4 a.m. I awakened to an awful sensation. Whatever was inside me had no intention of staying there. I leapt out of bed and hurried down the hallway to the bathroom: no simple task with the walls seeming to swirl around me. I entered a stall, dropped to my knees, and hugged the toilet. You know what happened next. I could not understand how so much liquid kept emerging. It seemed to exceed by far what I had ingested. At length the heaves became dry and then subsided. I returned to my room still nauseated. Playing on the stereo (no kidding) was Melanie’s Leftover Wine, a song that to this day I cannot hear without queasiness. A couple more hours of sleep did not prevent the subsequent daylight hours from being less than my happiest.
 

Dorm room at GWU 1972

A wiser young man than I might have concluded that this was no experience to duplicate. I did not draw this conclusion. Instead, similar events recurred with alarming frequency over the next several years as I remained willing to pay for nights before with mornings after. The first real nudge toward change came at age 26 on a Sunday morning in New Orleans when I crossed a traffic-free one-way ten-foot wide street in the Quarter. A police officer called out to me, “Sir, you just jaywalked!” I was thoroughly hungover and dehydrated from the night before – also lightheaded. I stood in the glaring sun as he wrote me a ticket. The world turned weirdly gray and in the next moment of awareness I was on my back on the sidewalk as the sky slowly came into focus.
 
“Sir, are you OK?” the officer asked.
 
“Yes.”
 
“Sign here,” he said.
 
I at last concluded hangovers shouldn’t be duplicated. My intake declined thereafter. Still, it wasn’t until age 30 that I became a full teetotaler. I remained so for a decade, which had the mixed blessing of making me the designated driver for every evening out with friends. After age 40, tentative experiments showed I no longer sought the buzz and so no longer needed to shun the bottle. Since then entire years have gone by when I haven’t consumed as much as the CDC’s recommended maximum for a single week (14 drinks), and there has been no year with a week in it that met that maximum. Never again have I felt anything like those long-ago dorm room blues. I might even play a Melanie album tonight including Leftover Wine. As nostalgic flower child music goes, it’s actually pretty good.