Notable Bottles

I

My dad stores a bottle of Coca Cola in his office from the St. Louis Cardinals' World Series win in 1982. Sun and time seem not to have dimmed the label or the treacly black liquid, unmoved and uncapped for three decades, so what remains is a beverage whose final cause has shifted from conveying its own short-lived sweetness to carrying the abiding joy of a moment long gone but never lost.

II

We had very few and very many bottles growing up. My parents rarely drank in those days, and their house was not yet a shrine to the wine they more often collected than consumed. On the other hand, my mom, a nurse, had a pill for every ailment, and the mirrored medicine cabinet upstairs was the storehouse for bottles of every shape and size, many filled with long-expired drugs that had been prescribed and therefore potentially useful at an unknown future date, and at least one bottle was a hodgepodge collection of capsules for numerous symptoms experienced by children during long shopping trips or family vacations, so the small white bottle with its label ripped off was often thrown haphazardly at the bottom of a purse like some sort of suburban drug cocktail, Tylenol laced with Dramamine. But I never remember seeing my parents drink.

III

I'm not sure why I didn't start drinking in high school when everyone else was clanking bottles of Natty Light and PBR in Alex's backyard over in Fremont, the cast party where my friends seemed to know their lines and stage directions for a raucous rager while I read Franny and Zooey under a knit blanket by flashlight trying to ignore the shouting and the smell of vomit steeped in chlorinated pool water. It seems implausible, but I really wonder if I was so damn scared by that insipid video I saw freshman year — with the high school quarterback who drank, drove, fell asleep at the wheel, and was paralyzed — that I simply gave up on the idea of drinking altogether. At least for a long time.

IV

I celebrated my 21st birthday in Germany watching a Noah Baumbach film alone, observing the cheerless protagonist aim to recover his life after a psychiatric hospitalization, falling in love with a flittering self-conscious bubble of a woman. For me then, it was just a film. Later that spring, as massive white stalks of asparagus appeared in the market and ice cream shops replaced ice storms, I made my way to Munich's Viktualienmarkt and had my first beer alongside Weisswurst with Süßer Senf. I enjoyed the otherworldly white sausage more than the diminutive .2 liter glass of Münchner Weisse, which left me wandering the market in a stupor, feeling from the weight of alcohol so long deferred as if I'd been drugged and left for dead rather than experiencing a slight buzz.

V

In San Francisco I had the unfortunate experience of meeting a beautiful woman regrettably named after a second-rate department store cologne. Her taste in whiskey was even worse than her father's taste in scents, though in my eagerness to please her, I bought a few bottles of Jamison. Thus began a misguided and ardent courtship. I had started drinking bourbon a few years earlier after visiting my then-girlfriend's father in Kentucky, and I amassed a modest but sophisticated collection of bottles that I occasionally sipped in small glasses the way I was taught in a cozy house in Crandall Station. As I continued the affair with the city girl, I had substituted real whiskey with bland amber water and real love with a sad and barren tryst.

VI

When the emptiness started to fill me up, I checked myself into a hospital for a night of deathlike sleep induced by Ambien, then woke up to a breakfast of paper-thin pancakes with a woman whose neck was stitched as if her head had been fully detached the day before. I could see my high school's football stadium through the window. After reading Butcher's Crossing barefoot and belt-free on the patio, the doctor saw me. "Girl troubles, it sounds like, son." An apt if uninspiring summary of the situation. "If you agree to take this prescription, I can get you out of here this morning." My sister had driven three hundred miles that night with two kids in the back seat to pick me up as my parents gazed upon four famous stone-faced presidents in the Black Hills of the Dakotas. We got the bottle of Prozac later that day, and a few years later I threw it away, unopened.

VII

When I got sick again, I was given a bottle of holy water from Fatima. Though I was then Catholic — I'd been confirmed and sealed by the Holy Spirit with chrism oil years before — I essentially denied the miraculous. To appease the giver, though, I took a dab of the water each day and made the sign of the cross on my forehead, begging God without belief to heal me. Over time I stopped taking medication, but I never ceased sprinkling the water and making the sign of the cross, and the hopeless prayer became hopeful as my dry bones drew holy breath. Health returned, and in my hubris I too often thought myself the healer. But the gift of divinity is strange: It transcends all physical reality and manifests in material things. And I'm quite sure the water healed me.