first sip of wine

One day, right at the time we had stopped attending the Mormon church, I brought up alcohol with my husband. Now that we believed the Word of Wisdom was nothing but Joe Smith's way to please his wife (couldn't he just have tried being faithful, don't you think that would've worked better than "Thus saith the Lord"?), we could reevaluate the taboo against coffee, tea, alcohol, and tobacco (no, thanks) for ourselves.

So I asked my husband if he thought he'd try alcohol. --I don't know, probably not. I've gone this long without it...

Yeah, I said. Why start? It's not like it's good for you. It's calories and loosing control, and I have relatives who are alcoholics. Might as well not mess with it.

Two weeks later, we had our neighbors over for dinner. They didn't know we were once Mormon, and, since they're not from the US or Europe, they probably didn't know what Mormons were or did anyway. They brought wine. Perfectly sensible, appropriate, polite thing to do. But it threw me into a little internal crisis.

There were four of us. The wife we invited over was pregnant, so she wouldn't partake. And we didn't drink, which would leave only the husband, the man who brought the wine to be polite, to drink. I thought, this is silly, I can't decline wine and risk insult when my only reason for declining would be what? I used to be Mormon? And I didn't want to get into our history. (I still haven't brought it up with them; they don't know they introduced us to alcohol.)

I leaned into my husband and said, "I will if you will."

Yep, my first alcohol was because of peer pressure. And I applied the peer pressure to my husband (he probably wanted to anyway, I don't know). We didn't even have wine glasses. We drank it out of plastic tumblers with colorful stripes around them. I only had a couple ounces. Took it slow, since I had no idea what alcohol would do to me. I didn't even drink enough to feel anything, not even a warmth in my stomach.

It didn't taste very good. It was a semi-dry white. I couldn't tell you what varietal. (Why don't they just say variety? Varietal shouldn't be a noun.)

The next night, I pulled out the bottle and had a bigger glass. Let myself feel what it did to my body. I liked it. Not a buzz, but a warmth. It took me a couple months before I actually got drunk, in the company of my husband, a Jack Mormon, a never-Mormon, and some practicing Mormons (all of whom had their share of getting drunk in the past). My goal had been to get drunk, downing drinks way faster than I ever have since. I knew I was drunk when, on the way to the bathroom, I tripped over nothing, and lay there laughing while sober people looked at me thinking I was an idiot. But I didn't care; I was drunk, and I was happy as hell.

The hangover lasted until 3pm the next day.

Now, the first time I got drunk in Utah--that was a great experience. Salt Lake City, in a bar, listening to great music, with friends. It was a hooka bar and everyone was smoking from the hooka, but I just couldn't do it. Even though everyone was saying, "Oh, come on, it barely has any tobacco in it. It's fine." Which was probably true. The tobacco taboo is just way too strong for me.