Meatless and Sober in America: A (sort of) Horror Story

The first thing you notice when you quit drinking, even temporarily, is how much it effects the people around you. Not yourself, necessarily; just the people who normally interact with you.

"What, you're not drinking?" They say, worry-bafflement lines furrowing their brows. "Are you on medication or something?"

That's one response. Another is contemptuous amusement. "How long you think that's gonna last?" -- always delivered with a sneer. Then there are those who equate drinking with masculinity and therefore assume your testicles fell off when you were doing jumping jacks at the gym the previous day. (I won't tell you what those people say, but it rhymes with "hag.") What it all amounts to is that the change you have made changes the way they deal with you. Some are suspicious, as if they feel threatened. Others are angry, as if you've suddenly passed harsh judgement on their own lifestyle. Some utterly lose interest in you. "Give me a call when you're off the wagon," is a common response, as if we are entering a voluntary and mutual suspension of friendship.

A few others are encouraging. "Good for you!" They exclaim, and, perhaps being nondrinkers themselves, immediately find you more approachable and interesting than they did yesterday, when your conversation was littered with talk about beer, bars and hangovers. But you've switched sides! Turned coat! Jumped ship! You're playing for the other team now! Suddenly they see you as if for the first time, and like what they see. I've literally bumped friendly acquaintances to full-fledged friends merely by eschewing the grape for a few months.

Another thing you notice, if you quit drinking longer than temporarily, or permanently, or even vastly reduce your drinking to the occasional beer or glass of wine, is how it effects your own behavior. The time formerly spent in bars or pubs or dissipating oneself in front of a TV with a beer in hand is now free to do -- what? The first weeks of total sobriety were a clumsy attempt to answer that question. I found I exercised more, having more energy; and also needing ways to interact with people that didn't involve staring at them from over the rim of a shot glass, took my exercise more socially. Instead of the gym with earbuds wedged in place, swimming or yoga classes with a friend. Instead of hiking solo, hiking with pals who, being sober or nearly so, weren't hung over on Saturday mornings and could do a hard eight miles in the Verdugo Mountains. Instead of taking my laptop to the sleazy biker bar across the street to do my writing between sips of beer, I took it to the library in the park, which was certainly quieter and had less people in it who would stab you in the femoral artery with a screwdriver if you looked cross-eyed at them.

I also started doing things, like going to the movies, which do not require alcohol as part of the social ritual. (True, they require soda, popcorn and candy, all things I shouldn't be consuming, but to hell with it -- I'm not a fucking monk, people.) In this way I was able to re-discover my passion for cinema, which had waned in recent years. But it did also put me in the position of having to drive home from the theater through Hollywood, and the crowds of drunks who always seem to be having a better time than me. Certainly they were wearing less clothing.

It changed my behavior in more subtle ways as well. I live across the street from said dive bar and from two stores that sell alcohol; also down the block from another bar (which poses as a restaurant, but nobody is fooled). I used to frequent all these places to satisfy my thirst for beer and Irish whiskey. Now I look at them the same way I regard vacuum-cleaner repair stores: as places I have absolutely no fucking interest in setting foot in. It makes my neighborhood more closed-off than it did before, changes the way I move around. When, on my nightly walk, I pass by yet another liquor store on Burbank Boulevard, which is very brightly lit at a rather dark part of the street and thus resembles a huge pinball machine, I am now struck not by temptation but how vulgar the place looks. I used to nip in there on impulse, sometimes to peruse the isles, sometimes to buy a half-pint of the True to curb my restlessness or ease my boredom or take the edge off some frustration I was experiencing. But not anymore. I just walk by, disinterested and vaguely disgusted, because, goddamn it, I never liked pinball. Also because the guys walking out always do so with a furtive air, as if they've just left a strip joint. Did I look like that, when I slunk out with a bottle of Jameson in my hand?

It goes yet further. Because I no longer drink very much, I also tend to avoid situations where drinking is the center of activity. Like barbecues or parties thrown by folks I know who are heavy drinkers. Everyone is thrusting beer and wine and booze on me the moment I walk in, and I don't want it, and I get tired of explaining why. Once, I simply walked around with someone's abandoned half-empty beer for hours, and that convinced people I was one of the brotherhood, but I sure did get tired of holding that warm, sweaty can. So did watching people dissolve into slurring, red-eyed drunks who kept touching their noses to make sure they were still there. Suddenly I understood how all my non-drinking friends had felt in college, enduring every manner of low-farce buffoonery for years while simultaneously being told how "lame" they were for not ending the night in a puddle of vomit.

Of course there are times when I do miss the drinking life a little, and occasions -- three this year to be exact -- when I have guzzled myself blue. Each incident was one which merited exiting the wagon. The first was when I found out my novel Cage Life had won Best Indie Book of 2016. The second was at a wake in Hollywood for the make up effects artist Elvis Jones, who had died in Central America while on location. The last was on my birthday. (The morning after each binge was a reminder of why I decided to cut back so drastically in the first place.) I can't promise there won't be more of these one-off debaucheries, but by and large I think there will be less. I've discovered, or rather re-discovered, what life is like on the soberer side of things, where alcohol is consumed like slices of pie -- one at a sitting -- and not like Doritos, devoured until the supply is exhausted. And I kind of like it. But I can't say it has been easy. No, strike that: I can say it's been easy, but I can't say it's been convenient. Because there are a thousand things that constantly conspire to annoy you and try to make you renege on your pledge -- not so much devils on your shoulder as devils in your path, jabbing you with their tiny pitchforks and calling you a fucking f-----t.

It's the same thing when you go vegetarian. Even as a simple experiment, which my present vegetarianism is, sticking to one's guns is a gigantic pain in the ass. You begin to grasp the universality of meat, the way it pervades every aspect of American culture, in ways far more nuanced than alcohol does. Take my experience at the airport yesterday, for example. I arrived at Dulles at quarter past one o'clock for a four o'clock flight back to LAX. After the usual security procedures and so forth, I was at my gate by two. That left two hungry hours before departure, so I perused the vast array of eateries outside my gate. They were, in order: A hamburger joint, a hot dog stand, a cheese-steak shack, a pub that specialized in burgers and wings, a coffee/salad/sandwich shop, and an Asian restaurant. I zeroed in on the Asian place only to find that of their ten entrees, ten had meat in them, so unless I wanted to buy ten vegetable spring rolls at $4.95 a pair, I was out of luck. I backpedaled to the coffee shop, but the only meatless thing they had there was the coffee -- which, for all I know, had fucking bacon in it, Homer Simpson style. At last, about 100 yards from my gate, I found a pizza place which offered six types of craft pizzas, one of which didn't have meat on it. In addition to being largely on the wagon and experimenting in sort-of vegetarianism, I'm also on a low-sodium diet, so eating a footlong pizza was probably a stupid idea, but by that point I was too hungry to care.

Since I was out of town for a solid week, I had nothing in the fridge to eat, and so naturally, this morning, I went to the diner down the street for breakfast. This diner has a menu that weighs about 3.5 pounds and is as thick as my first novel. In that menu, among all those hundreds of choices, are about ten options that are vegetarian-friendly, and if you cut out the dinner salads you have about six. If you're a vegan or the type of vegetarian who doesn't eat eggs, you're basically fucked. Luckily I do eat eggs, but it's still pretty tedious to see a menu the size of a Tolstoy volume and realize your basic choices are iceberg lettuce and Saltines. But never mind the diner. Many of my favorite meals at my favorite restaurants are now, if you'll pardon the pun, off the table. The Shepherd's pie at the Buchanan Arms? Done. A cheeseburger and a milkshake from In 'n Out? Nope. The salt and pepper chicken at Tender Green's? Sorry. The very act of "grabbing a sandwich from somewhere" has become problematic bordering on impossible.

How do real vegetarians do it? Even in Los Angeles, where vegetarians and vegans are common stuff, everything and everyone seems out to make life as difficult as possible for you. What isn't meat-based or garnished with meat is often cooked in beef or chicken stock or some other damned thing that once mooed or cackled. And if you're trying to avoid dairy as well, forget about it. You may as well stay home and invoke the Dark Arts to try to make tofu taste like something other than wet Play-Doh. Shit, even a 7/11 is a veritable death-trap of lurking dairy. The raisins have yogurt. The chocolate has milk. The muffins have -- well, I don't know what the muffins have, but I know my vegan friends can't eat them. And God help you if you get invited to a friend's house for dinner. The poor sod who thought it would be a good idea to have you over will soon regret it when they realize they have to cook you a whole separate meal. But it gets worse! Just try going to a sporting event sober and meatless and dairy-free -- just fucking try it! You'll be shelling peanuts inside five minutes, because that's the only goddamn thing you can eat -- assuming, of course, the oil fits your diet. (My friend Tracy tried to order sweet potato fries the other day, only to be told the oil isn't "vegan-friendly.") Another friend of mine, Lindsey, was reduced to eating Boston baked beans one day at the beach because the only alternatives were fried fish and hot dogs. I know there are times in life we feel the system is rigged against us and it's just self-pity talking, but this time the conspiracy theory is a fact: the system really is rigged! If it isn't a cow or doesn't come out of one, America doesn't want you to eat it. And if it isn't loaded with alcohol or sugar or caffeine, America doesn't want you to drink it. Remember when Oprah Winfrey got sued by Texas cattle barons for "slandering beef?" That shit wasn't an Onion article, it actually happened! The barons didn't win, of course, but the fact that they were even able to bring the lawsuit to trial ought to tell you something. Beef and booze are big business. You avoid them both at your peril and at your serious inconvenience.

Now, before you raise your moral guard, don't bother. I'm not going to adopt the horrible habit of denouncing something now that I've (mostly) given it up. I've known many people who've found Jesus, or stopped using drugs, or embraced veganism or fitness, who have become intolerable prigs and born-again preachers who live to tell you you're going straight to hell, spiritually or physically, if you don't follow in their footsteps. They are nothing but pains in the ass and I have no intention of emulating them, for to do so would involve staggering hypocrisy on my part. God knows I got a lot out of drinking and probably even more out of eating Tyrannosaur-sized portions of red meat, pork, fowl and fish for nearly all of my life. I suppose I'm just curious how the other half lives, and how radical changes in diet will effect my weight and general health now that I'm (gasp!) a middle-aged man. But now that beef jerky and cheese pie and inch-thick T-bones are no longer a part of my life -- at least for now -- and alcohol has become a sort of dessert-treat rather than a staple of my diet, I'm discovering what generations of other people, including my non-drinking vegetarian father, stumbled upon before me: it's not so much that you are what you eat, as you are what you don't.