A L S O_.T O D A Y Sober truths By Caroline Knapp When I quit drinking, the feeling of victory lasted two years. How was I to know the hardest part was yet to come?

The beauty of alcohol A DEDICATED DRINKER SINGS SWEET PRAISES OF THE BOTTLE. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY DAVID BOWMAN Alcohol is beautiful. Name your poison. Vodka is ethereal. Wine is biblical. Mashed malt is liquor at its earthy best. There are drinking clubs in Manhattan where guys sip tumblers of Scotch so rare it costs a hundred bucks a swallow. Can you imagine paying that much to wet your whistle? I can. Scotch is beautiful. If you kissed an angel, her mouth would taste of Glenmorangie Single Highland Malt. I love Scotch so much I don't drink it. Otherwise I'd be a fall-on-your-face drunk. My wife would leave me. The dog, too. I'd never write again, just slump at a bar purring with pleasure. So I drink hops -- dependable, working-class beer. Yuppie microbreweries may rise and fall, but beer will always possess that Old Milwaukee stigma -- despite the fact that it was first brewed in ancient Egypt. Women would mix bread dough with yeast in a large tub and give it a week to ferment. Then they'd filter the mash and season it with spices and dates. The resulting beer was so thick it had to be strained. Their men would drink it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Those pharaoh's boys walked around permanently skunked yet still managed to write hieroglyphs and build pyramids. The feminine origins of Egyptian Bud interest me because American femininity has a dark history with alcohol. In the 19th century, women used temperance as a wedge to get the right to vote. For 50 years they sang songs like "No Hope for the Drunkard" and "Breaking Mother's Heart" and "Crape on the Door of the Licensed Saloon," until the Volstead Act was passed in 1919. America went dry, but women could vote the next year. One wrong made a right. So we can never take the legality of alcohol for granted. Cigarettes will soon be banned. Kegs could be next. Prohibition Part II might be instigated by insurance companies, or Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Or maybe by readers of the sobriety genre, those memoirs that begin by describing the romance of the bottle. The look of it. The color of light shining through dark liquids. The perfect shape of the martini glass. The moisture on the coaster. The simple swizzle stick. But each book contains a righteous but. The memoirist describes stumbling down the stairs bone drunk. Waking up in a puddle of pee. I picture readers giving prim smiles and bursting into some dour temperance hymn: "Little Drinks of brandy/Little Sips of gin/Swell the mighty torrents/Of endless disease and sin." It is against this ghost of temperance that I offer up my account of the pursuit of liquid bread. I know that drinking six, seven, eight beers a night will eventually kill me, but it will have been worth it. If you told me that enjoying F. Scott Fitzgerald or Merle Haggard would kill me, I wouldn't toss my books or albums. But art doesn't kill. They say love can. That's why beauty and alcohol are considered sublime. Most social drinkers aren't running for their lives, however. I was a bartender for a year in the early 1980s at a dingy little art bar in Manhattan, where I still live -- the first one to instigate the practice of draping the tables with drawing paper and providing customers with crayons. As I watched those men and women coloring and drinking, it seemed to me that most social drinkers enjoyed the buzz more than they did the taste of the waters they sipped. All those rum and Cokes, seven and sevens -- soda-pop drinks. But the truth is that liquor is an acquired taste. Remember your first drink, when you were 17? You had it right: yuck! It took me a decade to educate my tongue to appreciate that first taste of a chilly English ale in summer, a room-temperature stout when it's cold outside. N E X T+P A G E: Why face a single day sober? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here.