My Last Margarita
It’s a rare day when I don’t hear a song playing over and over in my head. Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” The Beatles’ “Hey Bulldog,” or the theme from the Brady Bunch might appear, full force, seemingly out of nowhere, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I never know how long this will go on — it might be a few minutes, hours, or weeks.
The Germans, who really do have a word for everything, call this musical torment “earworms” (Ohrwurms). Since Ohrwurm also means “earwig,” and earwigs have the completely false but still unpleasant reputation for crawling inside the human ear and burrowing into the brain, it’s an apt description.
I find worms and earwigs when I’m working in my garden. The earwigs usually scurry away in all directions from the trowel or rake, while the worms do their best to escape through the tiny tunnels they’ve eaten into the soil, bunching up and stretching out until they disappear.
The songs in my head sometimes play fast and jumpy. Other times, they oscillate from distant and almost inaudible to loud and distracting.
***
In February of 1974, when I was thirteen, I went on a school field trip to Mulegé, Baja California Sur. In one of the school vans on the three-day drive from Northern California, students passed around the rumor that in Mexico “anyone tall enough to reach the counter” could buy alcohol. (This is not true; the drinking age in Mexico was, and still is, 18.)
On the second day of our trip, we arrived in Ensenada in the early evening, where we planned to spend the night in a campground before the final drive southeast across the peninsula to Mulegé. My besties, two teenage girls slightly older than I, vowed to get themselves a bottle of tequila. When we stopped to refuel the vans, one of my friends bought limes, 7-Up, and a small bottle of tequila at a tienda next door to the gas station that also sold pastries and syrupy, Mexican Coca-Cola. The clerk who rang her up accepted her U.S. dollars and didn’t ask for identification.
It was completely dark by the time we arrived at a dusty campground near the Pacific Ocean, a few kilometers south of Ensenada. My friend kept her tequila hidden in her jacket as we unpacked the vans and put up the tents. After dinner, we sat around the campfire singing songs. My friend beckoned me over to the side of the van away from the fire, pulling her jacket open to reveal the bottle she’d bought at the tienda tucked into her pocket. I was about to have my first margarita.
It was a primitive affair: a half-inch of tequila poured into the bottom of a plastic cup and topped with 7-Up, with one quarter of a lime floating on top. I brought the cup to my nose and sniffed. Under the scent of 7-Up and lime juice, I detected something else: a vivid, concentrated aroma, like the steam that rises from a drenched campfire. I winced and took a sip. It tasted awful.
In spite of its taste, I quickly finished my first margarita, then asked for and received a second one; the first one hadn’t registered yet. This established my pattern with tequila: I don’t feel the first one, but the second is lethal. This knowledge has rarely stopped me from having that second one.
Until that night, I’d snuck the occasional nip from the glass of cheap red wine my father drank once or twice a year, and had gotten tipsy on beer at a school fundraiser. But I’d never been truly intoxicated. That night in Mexico, I got blindingly, sickeningly drunk. A complete novice when it came to drinking, I didn’t pace myself. I guzzled the second drink in just a few minutes.
Almost immediately, the sky started spinning. No matter how hard I tried to focus, my vision pitched and slid. Closing my eyes didn’t help. Soon after the spinning started, I staggered into the bushes that surrounded our campground. I heard the other kids laughing as I vomited into the dirt. When I returned to the campfire, I tried to act like nothing had happened, but the urge to vomit soon returned. Back to the bushes I went, at least three more times, until my stomach was hollow.
In spite of the fact that one of the students had gotten drunk in public that afternoon in Ensenada, and caused such an uproar that the police arrived, none of the teachers seemed aware of our surreptitious bar behind the van. After each episode of vomiting that night, I came back and joined in the sing-along, only to leave again. Neither the teachers nor the other students asked why.
That night I lay in my sleeping bag, sick and miserable, watching the tent roof above me gyrate. The next morning I experienced my first hangover. I begged one of the teachers for an aspirin, which she gave to me, without comment.
That episode with tequila killed my curiosity about alcohol for the rest of my adolescence. I had no desire to repeat the horrors of my first — and second — margaritas, and stayed away from all forms of drink until my early twenties. Just the smell of a beer could bring on nausea. Every time I heard the Eagles’ “Tequila Sunrise,” I cringed.
***
An earworm is also known as “involuntary musical imagery” or “stuck song syndrome.” According to the British Journal of General Practice, “Recurring tunes that involuntarily pop up and stick in your mind are common: up to 98% of the Western population has experienced these earworms. Usually, stuck songs are catchy tunes, popping up spontaneously or triggered by emotions, associations, or by hearing the melody.”
Sometimes these catchy tunes are more than just a minor annoyance; from the same article, for those with OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder), “Earworms are considered intrusions: unwelcome involuntary thoughts, they are a subtype of obsessions. People experiencing earworms as terribly annoying and stressful are more likely to express typical OCD symptoms (such as mysophobia — a fear of germs, dirt, and contamination).”
OCD runs in my family. So does alcoholism. I wonder if my inability to stop a song playing over and over in my head is related to my inability to accept that one margarita is enough.
***
Amy Stewart begins The Drunken Botanist: the Plants that Create the World’s Great Drinks with a chapter on the agave plant, the source of several alcoholic drinks including mezcal and tequila. About their flavors, Stewart quotes a Scientific American reporter from 1897: “mezcal is described as tasting like a mixture of gasoline, gin and electricity. Tequila is even worse, and is said to incite murder, riot and revolution.”
Tequila and mezcal are made from the roasted heart of the agave. It’s not entirely clear whether the native people of Mexico distilled the agave into what’s now known as tequila, but they did use it to make pulque, a kind of low-alcohol beer. In 1565, the Spaniards introduced the Filipino still to Mexico, which was used to make mezcal and eventually tequila.
At the end of the agave chapter, Stewart addresses the worm issue. The worm, also called a gusano, the larva of the agave snout weevil or the agave moth, is sometimes added to a bottle of mezcal as “a marketing gimmick and … not a traditional part of the recipe.”
Traditional or not, a 2010 study “showed that the DNA from the larva was present in the mezcal it was bottled with, proving that mezcal con gusano does deliver a little bit of worm with every sip.”
After I read this excerpt, I had to laugh. The gusano in a bottle of mezcal is just as embedded into its contents as the earworms that stick in my head, looping over and over through my neural pathways.
***
Late on the third day of our trip, we arrived at our campground, Playa Santispac, a few miles south of Mulegé. With darkness fast approaching, we unloaded the vans, pitched our tents, and began making dinner. The campground was a wide stretch of beach situated between a resort and an RV park. There were no toilets and no showers. No one bathed for two weeks, the entire time we were there.
A rocky canyon west of our campground served as our outhouse. Our teachers told us to cover our poop with sand and to use as little toilet paper as possible. On the second or third day, one of the students went to the canyon where one of the little brown scorpions that crawled up the canyon walls stung him. A teacher drove him to town, but they couldn’t find any open medical facility. They ended up in a store, trying to buy some ice to help with the swelling. While they were there, they explained to the store clerk what had happened with the scorpion. According to the student, through gestures and simple Spanish phrases, the clerk said the bite wasn’t dangerous, and in any case, once bitten there was nothing anyone could do. He advised a shot of tequila to dull the pain.
Luckily, the student recovered quickly, but that event kept me from visiting the canyon unless absolutely necessary, resulting in, shall we say, a protracted level of gastric discomfort.
At Playa Santispac, we hiked the trails around the campsite and explored the town of Mulegé. We swam in the warm, shallow, blue-green water of the Gulf of California during the day and slept on the sand at night. We toured the Baja Sur Prison Museum which, from the outside, looked confusingly to me like a church. Built over 100 years ago and closed in the 1970s, the museum had no bars on its windows, and male prisoners were allowed to spend their days in the town, as long as they returned at night. Female prisoners, on the other hand, had to stay at the prison to cook and clean. Few tried to escape — the miles of harsh, dry desert that surround Mulegé were sufficient deterrent.
At our campsite on the beach, we cooked our meals outdoors. I ate my first-ever avocados, plantains, and papayas, bought from the fruit seller who arrived every few days. I learned how to split an avocado with a knife, twist out the pit, and squeeze lime juice on the green flesh before taking a bite. The flavors and textures of those fruits — distilled, pulpy, intense — reflected the desert climate of Baja, one of the driest in Mexico.
Near the end of our trip, some fishermen invited us on board their boat. At least, they invited some of us. At the last minute, as we were lined up on the beach waiting to go, one of the fishermen informed us that only the boys were allowed to come — girls were bad luck and would ruin the catch. Our teacher, Janet, a short feisty woman who reminded us often that the Supreme Court had just passed Roe vs. Wade, argued that the girls should also be allowed to tour the boat, her fractured Spanish accompanied by energetic hand gestures, but the fishermen were implacable. Eventually she gave up. We females watched as the boys and men from our school group climbed into a small noisy motorboat and zoomed over the clear water towards the fishing vessel.
That day, with the men and boys from our school on board, the fishermen caught a huge sea turtle in their nets. They interpreted this as a stroke of good luck, and made a gift of some of the turtle meat to our group. All that night, we heard the men shouting, laughing, and smashing tequila bottles against the boat’s deck. In the morning they and the boat were gone.
Angry about not being allowed on board the fishing boat, I swore I wouldn’t touch the turtle meat. The teachers who’d accepted it from the fishermen weren’t sure what to do with it either. Eventually, they decided to grill it over the coals in our beachfront fire pit. It smelled good, and I overcame my annoyance enough to try a small bite. Pearl gray, rich and oily, it left an odd, not-quite-fishy flavor in my mouth.
At the time, I didn’t know that sea turtles were fast becoming an endangered species, their plummeting numbers due, in large part, to net fishing. The boys in our group who had gone on board the boat told us the brutal story of how the fishermen had killed the turtle: they flipped it on its back and slit its throat. It took hours to die, its flippers slowly tracing circles in the air.
That night I watched the sky darken across the Bahia Concepcion. Tequila, turtle, papaya, plantain — this is what Mexico tastes like, I thought.
***
It’s amazing what can get stuck in a person’s head. Not only songs, but deeply ridiculous ideas — the belief that females are bad luck, or that catching a turtle is good luck. The conviction that a margarita is as harmless as a soft drink.
I didn’t know that my paternal grandfather was an alcoholic until I was in my thirties. According to my father, his father was either drinking to excess or completely sober. These cycles lasted for years: long periods of sobriety followed by short, terrible ones of constant drinking. Drunk or sober, he was angry and abusive, both physically and emotionally. My father spent his childhood tiptoeing around him, hoping to avoid his notice. At the age of 22, my father joined the army, was shipped overseas, and didn’t see his parents again until he returned home five years later with a wife and baby. That baby was I.
After my early experience with tequila, I stayed away from booze until I was 21. After that, like my grandfather, I had periods of regular drinking followed by abstinence. I didn’t plan any of this — it had more to do with who I was hanging out with than any deliberate actions on my part. I drank whatever my friends drank, including cheap wine and beer, and the occasional tequila sunrise or margarita. After I got married, my standards rose, and my husband and I enjoyed California wine from nearby vineyards. We nodded sagely at wine-tastings as our server poured a tiny amount of wine into a glass, describing the vintage as having notes of asparagus, clay and sparrow feathers. Later, we laughed hysterically at what we hoped was a convincing act as two insufferable wine snobs. It was all in fun.
None of that early drinking seemed like a problem to me. I never drank too much, or at least, I didn’t think I did. I took long periods off from alcohol — pregnancies, for example. But in my fifties, my nightly wine-with-dinner became more than just a way to relax. I depended on it to ease the stress of the day. I started having wine before dinner, with dinner, and after dinner. Added up, it was a lot of wine, every night, for years.
Caroline Knapp’s memoir, Drinking: a Love Story, hit me hard. When I read her assurance to her mother: “Two drinks a day. I promise I’ll cut down,” after her mother found an empty bottle of liquor hidden behind the toilet, I completely stopped drinking for a month. How many times had I said the same thing to myself? But I soon convinced myself that I wasn’t in Knapp’s league. After all, I’d stayed away from booze in my teens, and only recently had I really started to drink more. I could quit any time, I told myself. Just watch me.
A few pages later, Knapp writes, “It wasn’t love at first sight, I don’t even remember my first taste of alcohol. The relationship developed gradually, over many years, time punctuated by separations and reunions. Anyone who’s ever been shifted from general affection for a lover to outright obsession knows what I mean: the relationship is just there, occupying a small corner of your heart, and then you wake up one morning and some indefinable tide has turned forever and you can’t go back. You need it; it’s a central part of who you are.”
By the time I read Knapp’s book, I’d already crossed a threshold. My years of not paying attention, of allowing my drinking to increase, of guzzling margaritas, had changed something fundamental. Like my grandfather, I wasn’t capable of cutting down anymore. I either drank or I didn’t.
***
Under “Serving Size” in The Drunken Botanist, Amy Stewart writes, “A cocktail is not supposed to be an enormous drink. The modern martini glass is a monstrosity; filled to the rim, it holds eight ounces of liquid. That’s four or five drinks, more than anyone should choke down in a single setting.”
Martini glasses aren’t the only containers that have increased in size over the years. I’ve seen wineglasses big enough to hold half a bottle. I can recall many a gathering with women friends over the years that featured wine — “Mommy juice,” as some of my friends called it, especially those currently raising toddlers — as a harmless part of our visit. Oh, how much fun we had, getting tipsy in the middle of the day, laughing so hard our cheeks hurt! Never mind the foggy afternoons that followed, the headaches and nausea, the looped mommies picking their children up from school or the sitter.
In the same section of the book, Stewart writes: “A nicely proportioned drink, sipped while it’s still cold, is a lovely thing. Have a second one if you want, but do get in the habit of mixing one small, civilized drink at a time.” In other words, take your time and enjoy the ritual of making the drink. Drink it slowly. The gentle warning of “have a second one if you want” means that one should be enough.
What if you just can’t behave like a civilized human being and sip your lovely cocktail? What if something in you overrides your best intentions every time, causing you to drink that lovely cocktail as quickly as possible, before its effects reach your brain?
***
I drank my last margarita 45 years after my first one, in a Mexican restaurant in Eugene, Oregon. When the waiter came around to take our drink order, he mentioned that margaritas were the special that night. It was a typical dark, rainy Oregon evening, one that made a tropical drink sound extra appealing. “Sure,” I told him. A few minutes later, my next-to-last margarita arrived, salt-rimmed, on the rocks, with a wedge of lime jammed onto the edge of the glass.
I finished that margarita before the chips arrived. Not yet feeling the effects, I promptly ordered another. My entrée and the drink came at the same time — naturally, I took a healthy swig before starting to eat. Long before I’d finished my meal, I drained that second margarita, the last one I would ever drink.
As my husband paid the bill, the second margarita connected with the first one. By the time we got to the car, I was more than tipsy. My tongue started to feel heavy and my stomach heaved. I recalled, foggily, all of the chips and guacamole I’d shoveled down my throat, which, upon reflection, now seemed like a bad idea.
I didn’t know that margarita would be my last. It wasn’t, unfortunately, my last drink; that was over a year away. 2020 brought a global pandemic, political upheaval and, for many people, a complete change in the way they lived their lives. Levels of stress and anxiety skyrocketed. Trapped in our homes, we binged on whatever worked: Game of Thrones, The Handmaid’s Tale, food and booze.
The weekend after the January 6, 2021 US Capitol insurrection, I woke up with a hangover and an upset stomach. I couldn’t remember how many glasses of wine I’d had the night before. I’d been keeping track over the past year, trying to stay under four glasses a night, still far too much for a woman who weighs less than 125 pounds. The fact that I couldn’t remember how much I’d had was a whole new problem. I felt sick, embarrassed, and more than desperate. I was 60 years old. How had I not managed to solve this?
In her memoir about living with face-blindness, You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know, Heather Sellers writes, “I think everyone has one day like this, and some people have more than one. It’s the day of the accident, the midlife crisis, the breakdown, the meltdown, the walkout, the sellout, the giving up, giving away, or giving in. The day you stop drinking, or the day you start. The day you know things will never be the same again.”
Something changed that day. I knew, without knowing how I knew, that I had reached a turning point. Through my headache and nausea, I announced to my husband that I was going to stop drinking for a year.
***
In a photograph from 1960, my paternal grandfather and grandmother, at ages 54 and 48, stand in the front yard of their home in Los Angeles holding their first grandchild, four-month-old me. Both smokers with deeply wrinkled faces, they look at least 10 years older than their ages. My grandfather, his thin body bent from hard work, has a desperate look on his face, as if he were barely hanging on.
The day after my twelfth birthday, my grandfather died from peritonitis, an infection caused by a hole in the gastrointestinal tract. He was 66. Cirrhosis of the liver contributes to peritonitis, and heavy drinking often causes cirrhosis, but I never heard any of my relatives mention drinking as a possible reason for his death. I don’t know if they didn’t make the connection or if, like so many uncomfortable topics in my family, it simply wasn’t discussed.
The first weeks after I quit alcohol, the urge for a drink was loud, insistent and impossible to ignore, like a song stuck in not only my head, but my whole body. I couldn’t fall asleep for days on end — anxious thoughts spiraled through my brain on their own frequency. Instead of looking forward to my six o’clock glass of wine, I dreaded that time of day: the cravings were strongest then and hardest to resist. It was then that I remembered the sea turtle, desperate for air, slowly expiring on the deck of the fishing boat in Mulegé all those years ago.
After a few days of this I realized I would have to quit for good. I couldn’t imagine going through withdrawal again. Knapp writes, “Alcoholism, after all, is a progressive illness; it sneaks up on you so subtly, so insidiously, that you honestly don’t know you’re falling into its grip until long after the fact.”
I wonder if this is how my grandfather felt when he wasn’t drinking — sweating through the days, hanging on, but barely. The look on his face in the photograph from 1960 haunts me.
***
The Drunken Botanist contains recipes for mixed drinks, as well as fascinating stories about the many varieties of plants that people have “fermented and distilled,” as the back of the book puts it. In spite of its title, however, you will not find the words “alcoholic,” “drinking,” drunk,” “drunken,” “excess,” “intoxication,” or even “moderation” in the index. The book does include this stern warning about opium poppies, once used in laudanum-laced cocktails: “The plant is illegal and its by-products quite dangerous.” Besides the gentle suggestion regarding serving size, no such warning exists for the dozens of recipes for cocktails.
About the 1980s, when Caroline Knapp and I were both in our twenties, Knapp writes, “Everyone drank, or so it seemed, and it seemed utterly normal — utterly normal — to pass a whole evening in a restaurant or bar, ordering a third or fourth or fifth bottle of Merlot for the table. ‘Let’s go get a drink.’ ‘Wanna meet for a drink?’ ‘Let’s talk about it over drinks.’ These were standard phrases in my circle.” I’ve read studies indicating that people who drank were happier than people who didn’t, and other studies that claimed that Resveratrol, a component of red wine, is good for the heart. Of course, these studies came with the qualifier, “in moderation.” But what, exactly, is moderation? Moderation varies from country to country. In the U.S., for example, women are advised to have only one drink per day (men get two), while in France, women are allowed 2.5 drinks a day (men get almost four). Finally, alcoholic drink content varies, from low, as in most beer, to medium, the area wine usually occupies, to high: whiskey, vodka, and tequila.
Watching me pour a third glass of wine one night, my father once remarked, “Your grandfather hated wine. He said wine-drinkers were sissies.” I don’t know exactly what my grandfather drank, but I’m fairly certain it was the hard stuff, which he would have called moonshine, rotgut, or mountain dew. Guaranteed to get you drunk as fast as possible. None of this phony wine-drinker’s swirling and sniffing.
During the 2020-2021 pandemic, I knew I was drinking too much. I knew it and yet seemed completely unable to do anything about it. Cutting down was impossible. Taking a few days off didn’t work. Drinking only on weekends was a joke. As Kate Julian writes about drinking during the pandemic in “America Has a Drinking Problem” (Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2021), “The drinking that increased was, almost definitionally, of the stuck-at-home, sad, too-anxious-to-sleep, can’t bear-another-day-like-all-the-other-days variety — the kind that has a higher likelihood of setting us up for drinking problems down the line.”
***
I stopped drinking gradually, then all at once, the opposite of how I started. Over the years, I’d eliminated certain drinks that just didn’t agree with me anymore: Rusty Nails (upset my stomach), gin and tonics (went immediately to my head), Irish coffees (the caffeine buzz made me dizzy), and in 2019, margaritas. Wine was last to go.
A few days after I quit drinking, the Champs’ 1958 hit song, “Tequila,” lodged in my head. It’s been there ever since. It was as if my brain said, oh, you’re giving up alcohol, are you? Well, here’s a little something to remind you, over and over and over, of what you’re missing. Have fun!
***
I have an old postcard pinned to the bulletin board above my desk, from a pack I bought in 1974 in a shop in Mulegé. On the back, in English and Spanish, the inscription reads, “Amid an exuberant setting of tropical date palms, planted by the old Spanish missionaries, Mulegé River runs to meet the Sea of Cortez. Picture taken from the Mission, which overlooks the valley and the town.”
Frayed and wrinkled, the postcard shows a river lined with palm trees under a pale blue sky. Not far from the edges of the river, the palm trees cease abruptly. Barren brown hills fill in the corners of the picture.
I’m struck by the contrast between the lush palms and the desert. There’s no transition between them, no gentle shift from one landscape to another. The palm trees end. The desert begins. Just like that.
In the last few months, I haven’t had any hangovers, my stomach problems have diminished, and my feelings of disgust at my lack of control are gone. Best of all, I’ve been sleeping well — no more waking up at 2:00 a.m. after four hours of mediocre, drunken sleep. The cravings have lessened, though they’re not gone entirely. 6:00 p.m. is still my worst time of day, and I still hear “Tequila” more or less constantly, but even that’s not as bad as it could be.
My decision to stop drinking was a gift I gave myself. Stopping meant recognizing my inability to approach this problem any other way. I dedicate my sobriety to my family, and especially to my grandfather. Seems we’re more alike than I ever realized.
I look at that old postcard often.