My brain feels like a twisted iPod that only plays beer commercial MP3s—Heineken, Amstel, Budweiser, Etc.

Unfathomably, the old Rheingold beer jingle is running through my head:

My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer

Think of Rheingold whenever you buy beer

It’s refreshing, not sweet

It’s the extra dry treat

Won’t you try extra dry Rheingold beer?

They stopped brewing Rheingold in Brooklyn in 1976 and I never drank the stuff—despicable piss water favored by the cirrhotic—in my life.

But, I’d kill for one right now.

I haven’t had a drink or a drug, as they say, in six months. The drug cravings are under control. The drinking thing, however, is touch and go. I don’t break out in a cold sweat every time I walk past a liquor store, bar or club, then again, the urge to have a little drinky-poo pulses through my body about once every 45 seconds after six PM.

Right now, I’m sitting in a café on Avenue A in the East Village drinking another espresso. Two Italian chicks, both about eighteen, are sitting at a table to my right, having an animated discussion.

The Italian chick with black hair in a ponytail and several earrings in each ear is saying something about the boomps on her back to the one with a nose ring and flowing brown hair.

The one with the ponytail says she thinks the soontan lotion she’s using in the park-a in Brooka-lyn is causing the boomps on her back-a. She’s afraid the boomps make her back-a look-a ooghly. She looves her soontan but she hates the boomps. She is very upset about the boomps.

The other Italian chick agrees that boomps, especially ones on your back-a, really suck.

A chick in her early twenties with citrus fruit orange hair is sitting at another table within overhearing distance. Currently, she’s waiting for a guy in his late forties with thinning gray hair to return.

“If I peed in a cup, would you drink it?” she asked him a few minutes ago.

He replied that he’d gladly drink her pee. He posted on Craigslist looking for a chick to piss on him, didn’t he?

“Well, your ad said ‘piss on,’ not piss in your mouth or drink my piss,” she said.

“I’ll really dig your piss any way you give it to me,” he said.

The guy split when the girl handed him some cash. Maybe he’s gone to cop drugs. Possibly, he went to get a plastic cup like the ones that come with piss tests for drugs. Who knows?

It’s like something out of a Jim Jarmusch film. But real and totally and painfully straight.

Ann, who works in the same bookstore as me, is sitting to my left. I’ve been flirting shamelessly with her for weeks. Her section is Religion and Metaphysics. Mine is Bargain Books. I aspire to Travel because it would allow me to play to my strengths. Fiction would be cool too, but it’s too much work. Too many damned people write fiction. A lot less write travel books, even though people that shop for travel books tend to trash the travel section way worse than people looking for fiction.

I’m working in a bookstore because the cognitive dissonance involved with not drinking and/or not doing drugs is making writing impossible, but I still want to be close to the printed word.

In retrospect, this is not a good decision. Bookstores are to writing what paper routes are to reporting. They’re not about literature. They’re about heavy lifting.

I now know things about bookstores—the ass end of the publishing business—a writer should never have to know.

Ann and I have just Lincoln Tunneled into New York, had Thai food on First Avenue, walked over to Avenue A and sat down in this café across from Tompkins Square Park.

The café’s my idea. Ann wants to go to a bar. I’m stalling. I haven’t told her I don’t drink or do drugs anymore. I should. But I can’t. I think it will make me sound like a loser, or even worse, like a reprehensible AA/NA Nazi who could come unglued at any moment.

So, instead of leveling with her, I engage her in a detailed discussion about her favorite drinks. This makes for a long conversation because it is a lengthy list skewed to libations involving vodka and tequila.

White Russians

Stoly on the rocks.

Long Island Ice Teas.

Etc.

And, here we sit.

“Are you ready to go?” she says.

“Huh?” I say.

“Why don’t we go to a bar?”

“Let’s hang for a few more minutes.”

She looks at her cup of coffee, which is nearly empty, and at mine, which is still quite full, and says, “I guess.”

Her tone of voice indicates that continuing down this path much longer will be a significant setback in terms of this date.

Getting it over with and having a drink is looking better by the second. Not drinking is for the birds, anyway. My deal is drugs. I can’t do drugs anymore. Drugs like heroin and cocaine. Drugs get me in trouble and take me places I don’t want to be. Except for weed, which just makes me sleepy and hungry.

Drinking has never caused me any problems. Except throwing up, passing out and occasionally acting like a moron. But, everybody drinks too much and boots up. It’s part of life. Big deal. Eight out of ten people walking down the street at this very moment have probably had a drink in the last several hours.

The anti-drinking thing is NA Twelve Step toad puke propaganda.

Total abstinence. Alcohol is a drug.

Bite me.

Instantly, I make a decision. My New Twelfth Step is Having gotten a headache and an attitude because of these steps, we came to the conclusion that it was time to go out and have a few for a change.

Those killjoys need to remember how to party.

“We’ll go someplace in a few minutes,” I say. “What places do you like?”

Discovery—like learning where someone enjoys drinking—is one of the neat things about hanging out with new people.

Ann names her favorite watering holes south of Fourteenth Street as well as some spots in Williamsburg.

Momentarily, I wonder whether I should really level with her. Tell her the truth. Explain that I’m in an experimental liquor- and drug-free phase for spiritual reasons. Everybody digs and respects spirituality, right?

What if the asswipes from NA are right? Come morning, am I going to be sitting in a puddle of my own puke in a doorway in Harlem nodding out and scratching myself all over?

“Why don’t we go to the Mars Bar?” Ann says. The Mars Bar is on Second Avenue, right above East Houston. It’s a good place to get so drunk that you won’t remember where you’ve been when you wake up in the morning.

“The Mars Bar?” I say. “Isn’t that kind of ten years ago?”

“That’s why it’s cool.”

I am starting to drool, but still trying to put up a fight.

“Let’s get more coffee,” I say.

“Come on,” Ann says.

The Piss Drinker at the other table returns. He sits down next to the chick whose urine he’d like to consume. They kiss. He puts something in the girl’s hand. She puts it in her mouth and washes it down with water.

Fuck. It’s all around me.

“Let’s go someplace where something is happening,” Ann says.

This is New York. The city so nice, they named it twice. Something is always happening somewhere.

I am coming to the fork in the road. I will have to take it.

The fact is that I can’t turn around without staring at a beer ad. Or go into a restaurant without being asked what I want to drink. Or turn on the radio without hearing the successor to My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer.

A fact is a fact is a fact.

And it is time to face facts.

I am f-u-c-k-e-d.

“Where you want to go?” I say.

“Doesn’t matter,” she says. “I’m dying for a drink.”

“Yeah, sure. Why not?”

“Good.”

I feel energized by my choice.

We leave the café and turn south down Avenue A. It’s a glorious summer night, a great night for a drink. Dry air. A cool breeze. A lot of people are out.

We walk past a place with a lot of chrome and big open windows on the street.

“Let’s stop here,” Ann says.

Well, it’s as good a place as any.

“Sure,” I say.

We get a table by one of the open windows on Avenue A.

A waitress with an arm covered in tattoos, wearing fishnets and combat boots, comes up and asks what we want to drink.

“Long Island Ice Tea,” Ann says.

“Hmm,” I say. “Let me think.”

The left side of my brain is still saying things like club soda, orange juice and mineral water. I wish it would stop. The right side is saying Stoly on ice. Heineken and a shot of Cuervo. Fuck that. Two Heinekens and two shots of Cuervo.

“I don’t know,” I say.

The waitress is toying with her peroxide blonde hair.

“Club soda,” I say.

The waitress starts to walk away.

“Wait a minute,” I shout.

The waitress turns around.

“Stoly,” I say.

“Stoly or club soda?” she says.

“Stoly and club soda.”

She nods.

“No, wait,” I say.

Ann gives me a queer look.

The waitress looks peeved.

“Make it a double Stoly. No ice.”

Done deal.

The waitress brings the drinks.

I gulp the Stoly like a man who’s been walking in the desert. Tastes great. Less filling. I shiver as it goes down.

I look at Ann. She’s sipping her drink.

I flag down the waitress and order another round.

It is the right thing to do.

Robert Guskind has been writing for a long time. An award-winning Washington-based journalist and contributor to major national magazines and newspapers, he now lives very close to Manhattan, where he continues to write, shoot photographs and work on a book based on his travels and experiences as a reporter and formerly disreputable dope fiend. He is all better now and is a regular contributor to Cherrybleeds.