the four horsemen of addiction

i. beer

One night at the Copper Kettle, our bartender had to wrestle some temperamental kegs downstairs, and I briefly stepped up behind the bar. Working at this pub, I always poured the wine and made the cocktails for my tables, but the taps were something else. They were someone else’s domain. Still, it’s a pub, and you can’t keep the regulars waiting too long on their next drink. Jimbo — who only drinks bottles of Bud Light poured into plastic cups — coached me through how to pour a Guinness. It’s the only beer with a waiting time, where you’re left to lean with both hands on the bartop and listen to the tale of the Guinness-drinker for the minute and a half that it takes for the beer to settle. It’s the common man’s drink that requires patience. It’s not some specialty cocktail with infused liquors or house-made syrups. Nothing comes out in smoke or is set on fire. It’s just a beer that begets waiting.

I worked at that pub for three months and never did learn how to recognize different types of beer (e.g. lager, pilsner, IPA, etc.). The bartender always had to give an extra reminder about which ones he handed me. To be fair, I can’t really differentiate them by taste either. Beer is beer is beer. Yet, I’ve always been a beer drinker. In undergrad, I was one of three people in our friend group (JP and Finlay being the other offenders) that drank beer. It was a strange minority to find myself in as most undergrads everywhere drink beer, but we came up in the wave of hard seltzers in Austin, and there were more options for us than beer, jungle juice, or a poorly proportioned vodka sprite. When we were in Houston last year, JP and I ordered pints of Shiner Bock for old times sake, and I was surprised to discover that our friends were right all along. Shiner Bock really does taste like shit.

ii. coffee

My first ever job was in a coffee shop in Sugar Land. On Highway 6, just past 59, right next to an Arbys. I worked the opening shift from 8am to 2pm every weekend, and my manager hated me. Since then, I’ve come into my role as a closer (the mortal enemies of openers in the infernal struggle for whose fault it is that our place is running like shit). Most notably, for all of sophomore year, I closed the SAC Starbucks five nights a week. It got to the point that I couldn’t drink sweet coffees anymore because of how the smell of espresso and syrup stuck to my clothes and reminded me of being trapped in the SAC with only idiots for coworkers.

As a result, I’ve really become a proponent of black coffee. But I still remember trying to drink an Americano at work when I was 17, and I thought it was one of the nastiest things that I’d ever tried. What really tipped me over into the realm of espresso and black coffee was going to Italy, where I’d purchase 1€ espressos for the right to pee in various establishments. I’m very easy in that sense. Introduce something or someone to me on a good trip with the right amount of sun, and I’m open to loving anything.

iii. phones

These days, my phone is the sum and totality of everyone that I love the most. It’s the minutiae that no one warns you about living rootlessly abroad. Your deepest connections are from years ago, and you desperately foster them through late night calls and memorizing time differences and knowing that their lives are becoming entrenched elsewhere without you.

But even before that, it’s been a form of escape for me. And I don’t mean social media, even though that’s the big talking point for our generation. It’s where I read, where I write. It’s where I find music and new books and word puzzles.

It has always been a form of escape. A way to make the actuality of my life less — less hard, less boring, less immediate — just less. Easier to bear.

iv. cigarettes

Ah, and so we arrive at my most controversial vice. Bear with me.

I can start by saying that it smells like home. My dad has been a heavy smoker all of my life and the majority of his. My mom, to this day, complains about how his clothes smell, but I’ve never been able to parse out what that scent is like to other people. I’m nose-blind to it. This home crap is a cliche, of course, and it isn’t even my strongest association these days.

Now, it’s sharing cigarettes with Shromona and Upamanyu on our terrace in Reims, talking shit about our weird landlady right above her bedroom. It’s rolling them in Marie’s little room in Paris, each sitting with one leg hanging out her window. It’s Emilio and long car rides in Texas, swearing up and down that there’s never been a blue sky quite like this. It breaks up my day, gives me an easy out.

My favorite kinds these days are the ones at night. After a long work shift and walking by the DC Wharf or under the elevated train in Queens. Slipping out from a bar or someone’s apartment in the wee hours. When it is just me and the lights of an empty street and I can attempt to gather the wayward parts of my being, asking the sidewalk, ‘What would I be if I were still me?’

I was sitting on the terrace of a cafe last Tuesday, and a stranger walked up and very politely asked if I smoke. I said yes, and she handed me a pack of Vogue Original (those skinny, French lady cigarettes). She told me that she was quitting, so she wanted to give it to someone who would use them. I like to think that this could be me one day, forsaking my vices for a better life. Not yet though.

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
(A guest recommendation from Grayson Pike)

Are you experiencing life’s full emotional spectrum? Or are you merely existing in the penumbra of your responsibilities, where life’s colors are only partially revealed? Does modern society, with its Zoom calls and familial expectations, truly afford you the chance to dive into the depths of human feeling? What if you died tomorrow and departed this world never having truly known the radiant warmth of unabashed love or the chilling solitude of genuine loss? Or even worse, what if you continued on, living without purpose, making excuses for your muted existence until you finally slip away, unnoticed, like a shadow at dusk?

Don’t worry! There is something you can do. You can read this novel. Yoshimoto allows you, for a moment, to escape into her story, where the mundane becomes luminous. Learn to discover joy in the smallest moments and most fleeting connections. Before it’s too late.

None of these are good for me, I know. They are addictive for a reason — for sentiment, for ease, for relief, for ‘style.’ But I think they constitute the quotidian indulgences, which make my life more enjoyable. Admittedly, I also have a bit of an obsessive personality, so perhaps I am more susceptible to these common pitfalls of humanity.

I’m not sure if this is an endorsement of my vices or an apology for them. Mostly, we got a really good picture of this line-up in Berlin, and Devika gave me the idea of writing about each of them. Nevertheless, I have enumerated for you my associations for each of my horsemen — their origins or their justifications.

What are your horsemen? Do you have any terrible things you keep close to you because of how they make you feel?

As always, I hope the universe remembers to treat you with gentle hands,
Jessie