Adventures at Midlife

The British definitely have a drinking problem. Oh, sure, living in the vast American suburbs, I don’t come across public drunkenness very often, but here I’m constantly getting jostled on the tube by noisy, well-lit people, and I’m tired of tip-toeing around piles of vomit at the train stations. The little British stores that are found two to three on every block sell ultra-large cans of 90-proof beer and lager, which means it only takes about £2 and 15 minutes to get completely sh*t-faced. (A BBC reporter during a segment on drinking tossed back three cans of the stuff in about 20 minutes, and later admitted he couldn’t remember a single thing about the rest of the night, much less how he got home and into bed.)

The drinkers the BBC reporter interviewed all looked about 100 years old, with their ruddy, lined faces and terrible teeth, and it occurred to me that they were probably closer to my age. The stores where they bought their beer were giving them the cans on credit, with interest, which meant their drinking habits were eating into their disability and housing checks.

How is this all going to play out? I remember reading a NYTimes story indicating that older addicts had much different habits and required different treatment than young meth or coke users, and that the substances of choice for older addicts are alcohol and prescriptions drugs. It is no secret that an older woman on my street has for years been hooked on prescription pain killers, and I remember one terrible weekend when her husband called just about everyone on the block, looking for pills for his likely hysterical wife. I visited her once after she’d had a bad fall, her face all black and blue, and wondered if she did it to herself to qualify for the drugs. The entire family is defined by her illness. And my mother-in-law’s elderly cousin finally came home from The Big City to finish drinking himself to death in the kind company of his sisters and their husbands.