Alan S. Oser

My friend Sally brought her 95-year-old father to our house for a visit at the cocktail hour some years ago. He was a distinguished man, a former college professor who had been an amiable, popular figure on campus. Although his hearing was fine, he had lost the power of speech.

I shook his hand and he sat down quietly to listen to my conversation with Sally. He listened attentively, taking it all in apparently, but could not make a comment. Then I had an inspiration. I said I had Chivas Rigal Scotch and offered him a drink.

I will never forget the beam of pleasure that crossed his face. The smile widened when he sipped the Scotch. He rolled the liquid around in his mouth before swallowing, and beamed throughout, eyes twinkling.

Don't tell me that alcohol doesn't have its uses. It obviously has its dangers as well, and with that I have had some embarrassing experiences too. But used properly it can provide pleasure late in life when other sources of pleasure have lost their potency. Fine food can perform the same function, but I think that quality liquor, for many men, holds first place.

It takes the maturity of age to do alcohol justice. Although the elderly may abuse it, I think younger people are more vulnerable until they have had a disabusing experience. One bad experience was enough for me, although I have come close to a couple more. The first horrible one inoculated me against any wish to overindulge.

The year was 1954. I had been commissioned as an ensign in the United States Coast Guard only a month earlier. Right out of Officers' Candidate School in New London, Connecticut, I was assigned to a shore base, a port security unit at the foot of Wall Street in lower Manhattan. I was one of several new officers who arrived at about the same time, and the commanding officer decided to give a party to make us welcome. Wives were invited and mine came.

"Lesh have a drink," the executive officer said to me after the first dull hour. He seemed to have had a few already, whereas I still held my first in my hand. Feeling that alcohol might be the cure for boredom, I joined my superior officer at a table that looked about to buckle under the weight of two punch bowls, one filled with Manhattans, the other with Martinis. I sank the ladle deep into the Martini bowl and sloshed the liquid into a glass.

According to the legend that grew in subsequent years, I repeated this process seven times, three more in the Martini bowl and four in the Manhattan bowl. I remember staggering from the party on my wife's arm, while with my other arm I attempted to hold the executive officer upright as he staggered alongside me. We parted from him at the curb and a taxi driver, to his subsequent regret, drove us to my parents' house in Queens.

Urgently summoned by my wife, my father came running from the house to the cab door just in time to see me heave the undigested contents of what seemed like two full punch bowls. My father, in an extreme exhibition of paternal solicitude, cleaned up the rear floor of the taxi with paper towels that were rushed to the disaster scene by my distraught mother.

If that were the end of the tale, I might have continued on the path of overindulgence. It was not. I was scheduled to appear the following morning at an apartment in Manhattan that my wife and I had rented, and await the arrival of furniture. During the night I had wretched repeatedly, straining my internal muscles so drastically that I could not stand up, or lie down for that matter.

Consequently I had to crouch, bent over in the posture of a parenthesis, for two hours in an empty apartment, waiting for the men delivering the furniture. This amused them mightily when they finally arrived. They laughed. Fortunately, I did not. I might not have survived if I'd tried.

The memory of that experience has kept me from extreme overindulgence ever since. There have been incidents of mild overindulgence, it is true, at a couple of dull dinner parties. My drooping eyelids, soon to be followed outrageously by a snore, have horrified my wife on two or three occasions. Now she strictly forbids me from taking more than one drink at a dinner party. You are not as amusing after two as you think you are, she tells me. I argue with her only on the rare occasions when I get to that point.

All this is trivial in comparison with the problem of a wealthy builder and racehorse owner I once knew. He was a true alcoholic. It was said of him that by noon every day he had consumed an entire bottle of Scotch. I knew of that reputation when as a newspaper reporter I interviewed him at his office one morning. We started at 11 a.m. He sat at his desk, with an open bottle of Scotch, one-third filled, at his side.

He did not drink from it during the interview, and he seemed completely sober when he spoke. Perhaps his words were blurred a little, but they made perfect sense. After a half hour of conversation he walked me through the spotless boiler room of his apartment complex, showing all the pride of a captain inspecting the bowels of his battleship. In the afternoon this builder would go to the track, and deal intelligently with trainers and jockeys and other track folk.

But within a year he was dead. Like many alcoholics he did not eat properly. He was overweight, and he went to a spa in North Carolina for a weight-reduction regimen. He came back slimmed down, but he survived for only several weeks after that. Whether this was cause and effect I never learned.

I prefer to focus on the happier side of alcoholic beverages, which means limited, controlled consumption. It means drinking companionably, not alone. It means finding the right companion, the one inclined to answer the question "Will you join me for drink?" promptly and affirmatively with the time-honored words, "Don't mind if I do."

Unfortunately, no such companion is with me right now. Nevertheless, I don't mind if I do.