A Drinking Buddy

A Drinking Buddy

Copyright 2013 by

Bill Rayburn

I’ve had my share of drinking buddies in my life. The ones that truly mattered, the ones that helped me plow through life’s latest snow bank, they know who they are. The rest were filler.

And now, on the banks of The Thames River in central London, I rest my elbows on the ancient stone ledge and watch the water move almost imperceptibly past. The tide is out, the rocky, unkempt beach providing an incongruous flavor of dirt to a historic body of water. Behind me in the park Leo cavorts back and forth chasing birds, other dogs and, disconcertingly, two year old children on scooters. Every so often he stops, eyes me and puts his front paws up on the ledge, where he is just tall enough to see what I see.

What brings me here today, on a typically foggy, dank, windy and cold London afternoon, is the lack of a drinking buddy.

Sure, there are those who have struggled with alcohol abuse either directly or indirectly who associate a drinking buddy with sadness and tragedy and death. They are skeptical of people like me who tend to romanticize drinking and those that I drink with. To each his own.

I can promise you this. Had you been alongside through many of my sessions, you’d have realized immediately that getting drunk wasn’t in the top five as far as goals. Alcohol played a role in these resonant, important times in my life. A role. Like the dice cups, the over-abundance of Sinatra I keep playing in the juke box or my stereo, the sense of humor, the flirting with the cute bartender, the sudden dip, like the wing of a faltering plane, into subjects so deep and dark and revealing as to prompt thoughts of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

To be alongside me at these times requires flexibility, an agile and astute mind, a wicked sense of humor, a thirst for drink and thought and good background music, and the ability to be blunt and empathetic, usually in the same sentence.

I live in a historic city that is known for many things, one of which is its appreciation of drink. Not having a sidekick has not kept me out of the pubs, of course. It has, however, kept me out of pubs for anything more than a pint or two.

The concept of a drinking buddy has taken a battering over the years, with political correctness driving it back into the shadows. And there are, of course, many more spot lights in the world today and that means problems that went unreported in the past are now front and center, splashed across daytime TV for all to see. Alcohol has ruined countless lives and families. It sure wasn’t a healthy, cleansing elixir in my Irish clan, where moderation meant you could occasionally remember your name before you hit the sack.

But drinking has been, is, and always will be, a part of my life. When life has kicked me to the ground, have I overindulged to escape and seek compensation? You bet. But almost every single good time and happy time and memorable time in my life has been influenced by alcohol as well and, ladies and gentlemen, through my eyes, that is a trade-off worthy of making.

But I miss having a partner in crime, a key component to drinking. Having the soul mate, and whether male or female is irrelevant, next to me takes the focus off of drinking and relegates it to a secondary role.  Conversation becomes the star of the show. And conversation can take on many, many forms. Some of the best conversations I’ve had with a drinking buddy were as we sat silently next to each other, nursing a drink in contemplation, climbing down the dark ladder way to the catacombs of our souls, thinking our own thoughts, tasting of ourselves, only to climb back up and say, “Hey, you know what I was thinking?”

Having no one to drink with is a lonely scenario. I don’t let it get to me, for the most part, because I have had it good in the past, and probably will regain it in the future.

But for the present, I guess I’ll climb down and then back up that ladder way and say to myself, “Hey, you know what I was thinking?”

And then just nod to myself and say quietly into my glass, “Yeah, I do.”