How You Tell A Wino
I don’t drink all day
A solid Wino has wine for morning coffee. I have coffee for morning coffee. A true Wino kills a Magnum a day. I don’t actually know how much a true wino drinks. I got the magnum size from a good friend of mine. His sis drank a magnum a day. I guess a magnum a day habit is enough to rate you a Wino. But I don’t know for sure…I’ll check it out.
Well, here’s what I found out:
One bottle of wine per day is a significant amount of alcohol. It is above the recommended guidelines for moderate drinking, which generally suggest no more than two standard drinks per day for men and one standard drink per day for women (because their body chemistry and structure are different).
I forgot where I found this…trust me.
So this means a single bottle of wine is too much.
But what exactly is a single bottle of wine?
It wouldn’t be a split. That’s too puny. A five year old can put away a split. It wouldn’t be a Jennie. A Jennie is only 500 ml. (that’s two thirds of a regular bottle.) No, a bottle is what’s on the shelves. 750 ml. is a normal wine bottle. A standard.
A Magnum is two standard bottles of wine.
[BTW where do they come up with these names? Like Nebuchadnezzar. Wasn’t he a King of Babylon? Had the hanging gardens. Worshipped Baal. Or how about Jeroboam? He was King of Judah. Worshipped a Golden Calf. I don’t know the reason they use these biblical names to label wine bottles. Maybe wine has a lot to do with the Bible…I mean, they drank a lot of wine in Biblical times. Jesus turned water to wine. Good reason to follow Jesus around. Chase after him with water jugs.]
What do I know?
I do know you drink a Nebuchadnezzar a day you got a big drinking problem…
I don’t think a human can drink a Nebuchadnezzar a day.
A Wino Elephant maybe. This is not a hot dog eating contest we’re talking about. We’re talking about Wino’s. How much a functioning Wino drinks!
Keith Richards is not a wino. Maybe he looks like a Wino, I don’t know. He gave up drugs and cigarettes. He even gave up drinking all day long. Now he has an occasional drink. He’s a sober dude at eighty.
He’s no longer a Wino…if he ever was.
Achieving Wino status with the One Bottle Rule
Ria Health says if you’re drinking a bottle of wine a day that’s 2.5 to five times the recommended daily amount for normal consumption.
I don’t know if Ria Health is the gold standard. But other so called experts tend to agree. So what the hell. I’ll call it the one bottle rule.
Drink one bottle of wine per day and you’re a legitimate wino. One bottle. Not a Split. Not even a Jennie. A standard bottle. 750ml. which is 196 ml. shy of a quart. Once you reach the consumption of one standard bottle of wine per day every single day seven days a week you’ve achieved Wino status. You’re then free to increase your dosage to whatever level you feel comfortable with, gaining, I would assume, champion wino status with a Magnum per day.
Now I know what a wino is.
Hearing Judy Collins sing about a wino don’t sound too bad.
Kind of like being a Wino is no big deal.
Is Judy Collins a Wino?
I don’t think so.
Which brings me to the point of this blog post.
How do you tell a Wino?
Go to the expert
A turn in my life recently has given me some experience in the fine art of spotting Winos and even potential Winos.
I was, after comprehensive vetting and strict scrutiny by a board of so-called-experts, accepted into the ranks of The Brand Ambassadors Of Alcoholic Beverages.
That would be the BAAB or just Bab for short.
Here are my credentials if you don’t believe me:
Oops! Wrong card. That’s triple A. Haven’t used it in years and they keep updating me, debiting my bank account every year without asking, lousy bastards. Where’s that other card?
Here:
This card means I’m qualified to work as a Booze Free Sample Dude.
As a Booze Free Sample Dude I’ve had the unique opportunity to observe and identify Winos in their natural habitat. Which is not necessarily the corner dive bar.
NO!
You’re typical Wino doesn’t hang out all day at a tired old bar. Like this couple:
No by any means.
Your typical Wino thrives in a unique ecosystem.
Spotting the typical Wino
I’ve been installed at a kind of Wino hunter’s blind near where the Winos roam.
That’s right.
I’ve learned a lot about Winos and Potential Winos.
They’re not like you and me.
Or maybe they are like you and me.
I don’t know.
I confess I’m not really an expert yet. In fact, I’m currently on a learner’s curve. I’m trying to pick them out. Maybe you can help me.
A sampling
Snow White bought a magnum. Does that make her a wino? Could be she was buying for the Seven Dwarfs. That would not make her a Wino.
I served this gentleman a free sample and he bought two bottles.
Same with this guy!
IF I had the guts or the stupidity to show you their faces you’d see how joyful they are.
This is typical Wino behavior. They arrive at Safeway and charge straight to my counter, down a few free shots, often with strange even tortured expressions only to lunge at the bottles that line the shelves. Once they find what they need a kind of beatific glow envelops them.
This young man free sampled this wine. Then he grabbed a bottle. Whereupon he thanked me profusely, insisted on me texting his photo back to him. Did I card this kid before serving him wine? Shit. Maybe he’s not a wino…
This is my friend Rob. He’s a regular at my free sample bar. He’s smiling. He’s smiling cuz next week he’ll be in Manilla with his girlfriend. That’s right. He aint hanging in Safeway no more roaming the aisles with a pack of winos.
Rob is not a Wino.
He’s on his way to the Philippines.
I visited the Philippines back in 88. Rob assures me it has not changed markedly. I wouldn’t mind going back to the Philippines, get away from this marin county Wino rat race and this stupid free sample gig. Do I really think that? No. The Philippines is just as fucked up as Marin county. Only tropical and everybody loves you in Tagalog. I figure one place is good as the other. You gotta Be somewhere. Besides, what would Scruffy do with me halfway around the world?
This lady showed me her I.D. then sampled some wine. She liked the wine so much she bought a dozen bottles. She carried a little dog in her purse which may or may not identify her as a wino.
This is a urinal specifically designed for short people?
I don’t know if this was the builder’s intention. This is after all the Safeway men’s room and this is the only urinal. Perhaps the designer was a really short person and he just naturally assumed most people and winos would not mind peeing in a real low to the ground urinal….
Tall Winos will use this urinal and spray the wall by mistake.
Why am I showing you this?
It’s just one damned thing after another!
This is what Winston Churchill used to say.
Winston was not a wino.
Wait a minute!
If you figure Brandy and Champaign are wine then by god Winston Churchill was most definitely a Wino.
Winston drank a couple bottles of champagne a day…or so I’ve read. Mixed with that, brandy and whiskey. So maybe he was just a plain old fashioned Alcoholic not exclusively a Wino.
I gotta get off this topic
Fact of the matter is, there’s a lot of so called Winos out there.
I’m practically a wino myself.
I don’t call myself a wino quite yet because I have yet to reach the one bottle a day level required of your standard heretofore determined Wino.
I’m keeping it to a half bottle.
Yet I do have quite a few bottles hanging around.
Uh oh…where’d I put the wine bottles?
I give away my wine to normal people.
Not winos.
But what about all the people buying wine?
Are they all Winos?
These are normal people buying all this wine
I see it at Safeway.
Bright young happy people loading up on wine.
Filling shopping carts.
It’s like wine aint alcohol.
Just a real nice refreshing beverage nice normal-looking people are guzzling like Kool aide.
Forget the bottled water.
Drink wine.
Because the world’s going to hell
That’s right.
It’s easy to spot the Winos.
Because everybody’s a wino!
You gotta be a wino these days.
Just to cope with how crazy everything is.
6 thoughts on “How You Tell A Wino”
Citing Wikipedia: “Marguerite Duras was an alcoholic, she figured, from the moment of her first drink. Sometimes she managed to stop for years at a time, but during her bingeing periods she’d go all-out: start as soon as she woke up, pausing to vomit the first two glasses, then polishing off as many as eight litres of Bordeaux before passing out in a stupor. “I drank because I was an alcoholic,” she told the New York Times in 1991. “I was a real one – like a writer. I’m a real writer, I was a real alcoholic. I drank red wine to fall asleep. Afterwards, Cognac in the night. Every hour a glass of wine and in the morning Cognac after coffee, and afterwards I wrote. What is astonishing when I look back is how I managed to write.”
Jesus…that’s AA meeting level drinking. My old man drank like that. He didn’t do much writing….
Eight liters is close to a Nebuchadnezzar!
(Decided to contribute a drinking story from my novel, A History of Holes. )
Blind Leading The Blind
The day Warren died. Mark’s mother called to ask if he would go by Warren’s apartment at Fox Plaza to find the old letters she had written him. Warren’s sisters were flying from Philadelphia to handle the cremation and his estate — and she didn’t want them to find her personal letters.
He went – as much to see the inside of Warren’s world as to find his mother’s letters.
That night he walked down Polk Street to Fox Plaza.
The manager merely unlocked the apartment door and stepped back in the hallway, mumbling how sorry he was Warren “had passed.” Then he left Mark alone in the apartment.
Mark had never seen depression turned into a place. Since returning to San Francisco alone, Warren hadn’t gone outside except to buy groceries or to visit his doctor. And his apartment showed the effects of his imploded sadness – tobacco smoke that congealed on the window, obscuring the view of Market Street, 12 flours before. The carpet resembled a beach with washed up flotsam: men’s underwear, women’s panties, match books from leather bars on Folsom street, and tuffs of bread that had fallen and hardened like petrified wood.
A pale trail lead between the sofa, where a blanket was curled, to the sink counter with a miniature jury of empty bourbon bottles. The refrigerator had black mold around the edges of the door — and refused to open. And the bathroom resembled a savage greenhouse— “.
Mark couldn’t help thinking Warren’s apartment was messier than Tony’s. Then he silently chided himself, for the comparison was unjust. Tony was hibernating Warren had given up on life.
On the floor near the sofa were packets of unopened letters from Mark’s mother. Kneeling, Mark thought of taking them to her….then dropped them back. What good would it do? It was all too late.
Exhausted by what he had found, Mark took the elevator to the lobby and walked on out on rainy Larkin street, looking for the nearest bar. In San Francisco, one was never far away. At the corner of Golden Gate, a yellow palm tree flickered in the darkness. Raging with thirst, Mark started toward the neon sign – to drink and forget.
Reaching the intersection, Mark glanced across the street.
Up the block came a man in a dark suit with a white cane. Seemingly familiar with the neighborhood, he moved confidently forward, his cane tapping back and forth him – yet not seeing the scaffolding in front of the apartment building he was approaching.
The man neared the scaffolding, extending his can before him. Then, as fate would have it, his white cane went through an opening in the side of the bars. The man moved forward, banging his head against the bars.
Startled, he stepped back, then thrust his cane back at the spot where he had hit his head.
Again, fate mocked him – letting the cane miss the metal scaffolding and poke at nothing.
Again the man stepped forward and again stuck his head.
Now frightened, he lurched back, slashing the cane like a sword — moving back and forth in jerky movements, like a mechanical soldier bumping against a wall.
From across the street Mark watched, feeling squeezed inside a dilemma: either he went to get drunk to forget Warren, or he crossed the street to help the blind man.
Crossing Larkin, he stepped up beside the blind man. “Excuse me, sir, but there’s construction scaffolding here on the sidewalk. May I help you around it?”
Clamping onto Mark’s forearm with his hand, the man nodded. “Yes, thank you, sir. I don’t live far away.”
They walked down to Market Street, then turned right and continued on, block after block, until they reached Castro Street and started up Twin Peaks, all the while the man went on talking about his career in the garment business in New York, getting diabetes and growing blind.
They continued over Twin Peaks and started down the other slope. Tired and growing angry, Mark felt like yanking free from the man’s grip and telling him.” Look, this is far enough! I’m tired of you taking advantage of me.” But he nothing of the kind to the blind man – merely affirming what he had said or adding an occasionally, “Uh huh,” as phatic language to reassure the speaker he was listening.
They walked all the way down to St. Francis Drive and, turning left, started down a stone steps leading to a cul de sac.
Abruptly, the man’s cane went out and tapped a lamp post. Retrieving a set of keys from his pocket, he walked up to a darkened house and slid the key into the front door lock as though the key and the lock had been waiting for each other all might.
Stepping into the lobby, the man turned back. “Here I am. Thank you so much for your help. Good night.” Without using his cane, he crossed the lobby and disappeared up the stairs.
Feeling tricked by the man for making him walk all the way across San Francisco,
Mark stepped out on the sidewalk and glanced at his watch. “Two-thirty,” he thought. “The bars are closed.”
He started down the sidewalk then slowed, realizing the blind man had taken him where he could no longer get drunk.
He started home, no longer thirsty.
Tims nickname at work was Wino . He never. drank wine ever. He did drink alot of beer and occasional whiskey . I would try and track him down and bring him his lunch at work i’d ask the mexican laborers if they knew where Tim was working.They always looked puzzled . Then I would say[The Wino] and they would smile and point out the direction he went.
Can you write more about it? Your articles are always helpful to me. Thank you!