My sixteenth birthday is celebrated at my favorite Thai restaurant, where all the adults order wine or cocktails, which I, Sarah T. — like, finish off for them while they smile indulgently, because I am full of sixteen-year-old ebullience, and adorable. By the time the pad Thai and satay are served, I have staggered to the bathroom, and then I am on the floor: Cold tile, a spinning sink, people pounding on the door. I call for Kathy, a friend of my mother’s with whom I am not especially close, but it is her, for some instinctive reason, I want. She is allowed into the bathroom, where she repeatedly and expertly shoves her fingers down my throat (my instinct was right), holds my head and hair as I vomit, and cradles me in her arms. I do not remember eating any pad Thai, or how I made it home (I think they had to carry me out). I remember waking up the next morning to a pile of unopened presents, and my mother, on her way to work, giving me a slice of birthday cake she has proudly saved for me; I don’t remember her saying a single other thing about any of it. Maybe she was simply glad I wasn’t into drugs, wasn’t shooting heroin. I sit by myself on the harvest-gold living room shag carpet, eat my slice of birthday cake, open my presents, and feel lonely and ill. I decide to adjust my attitude and view this experience as a positive rituaclass="underline" It is my initiation into a complex, messy adulthood, and by making a spectacle of myself I have insisted on and offered evidence for my presence in the world. It is a Happy Sweet Sixteen.
At seventeen, Marie and I have brunch with my mother on a blindingly hot Sunday afternoon, gulp down multiple bottomless mimosas, then Marie and I decide to go see Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I have already seen three times, at the Cinerama Dome in the heart of seedy old Hollywood. We wait in line, the mimosas souring our mouths, roiling our bellies and brains, and the one-hundred-plus-degree sun sweating us out, when the heated world kaleidoscopes from orange to black, and when I come to, I am lying on the ground, ringed by happy tourists happily snapping pictures of the strung-out Hollywood chick on the sidewalk. I find this delightfuclass="underline" Let them think I am shooting heroin, sure: Tara I: Portrait of a Complex Junkie Teen. Marie, freaked-out and scared, wants to take me home, but No way, I want to see the movie, I insist, sloppily, aggressively, and so she drags me into the icy theatre, where my stomach and brain chill to lucidity and I enjoy Raiders in all its widescreen Cinerama Dome glory. Again, this is a blast. I do not consider the alcohol to have been sneaky or mean; it has done exactly its job, has giveth me the gift of a story for future dates and an insight into Indiana Jones’s exploits I have hitherto failed to appreciate.
My seventeen-year-old high school boyfriend could pass for twenty-five, so perhaps he was the one to buy all the booze for those senior-year sunken — living room parties; perhaps we all filched from our parents’ unmonitored supply. Perhaps they even bought it for us, believing, like my parents, that today’s teens are going to have sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll anyway, so better to do it at home where it’s safe. I am nervous of this gorgeous, manly boyfriend, of my ability to transition from awkward-phase adolescent to an actualized adult woman, my teenage home life has become disorienting and destabilized, and alcohol, I have found, is a loyal, cheerleading friend. It whispers sweet everythings in my ear, unclenches my stomach, and enriches the iron in my blood. It doesn’t help the medicine go down; it is the medicine. Most of my friends are drinking now, to varying degrees; we all seem to be on buddy-buddy terms with Sarah T. There is a year of glorious weekend beach parties fueled by teenage lust, arrogant incaution, many, many bottles of cheap red wine, and everyone just barely making it home with foggy, lurid brains, sandy underpants, and green teeth. Even at the time I am dimly amazed — as I still am — that none of us were killed or killed anyone else, that we drove home through those perilous winding canyon roads and made it through our senior year of high school half drunk, college-bound, and unscathed.
But why would we be scathed? Getting fall-down, whoopingly drunk needn’t ring an alarm bell, be a trigger for family counseling or a trip to a hospital’s dry-out ward. Drinking is so much fun, giveth so much, makes one so damned witty and adorable. Just look at Arthur in Arthur. Drinking even gives one an inexplicable but so-adorable English accent.35
Dudley Moore had already been delightful in Blake Edward’s 10 a few years earlier, but if Bo Derek became my generation’s iconic, top-scoring incarnation of beauty in that film (along with a symbol of cultural appropriation for those white-girl corn rows), in 1981’s Arthur, Moore sealed his reputation as the archetypal and indelible Charming Movie Drunk.
And really, how cute is he, this diminutive, inebriated man-child? Arthur Bach is the fortyish wastrel son of a filthy-rich family, called upon to do nothing but enjoy himself, which, for him, means drinking himself into a riotously good mood and cracking himself up with his own nonstop wit: “Isn’t this fun?” he rejoices, sloshed, in the backseat of his chauffeured Rolls Royce. “Isn’t fun the best thing to have?” Yes, yes! He actually awakens himself in the morning — unhungover — by his own joyous cackle, and his laugh is the real soundtrack to the movie, thankfully drowning out Christopher Cross’s awful theme song. Arthur plays with toy trains, overpays a hooker while sweetly calling her “darling,” takes bubble baths while wearing a top hat. People around him either smile at his childlike silliness, his tipsy malapropisms and humorous stagger, or, if they disapprove—“He gets all that money, and pays his family back by being a stinking drunk? It’s enough to make you sick,” one guy disdains — are themselves made to look like assholes, disagreeable downers just looking to bum out this elfin charmer, and us.
The one thing he is called upon to do is marry Susan, daughter of another filthy-rich family. But Arthur has fallen in love at first sight with quirky working-class Linda (Liza Minnelli in the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl role, which she somehow nails while also being horribly miscast) and he balks. When his family threatens to cut him off without a cent, however, he reconsiders. As his butler/best friend Hobson (a deliciously, witheringly dry John Gielgud, who later insisted he had no idea the movie was a comedy) points out:
HOBSON
Poor drunks do not find love, Arthur. Poor drunks have very few teeth. They urinate outdoors. They freeze to death in summer. I can’t bear to think of you that way.
Arthur polishes off a brown-bagged bottle of something while driving, and we are meant to find this madcap, completely unalarming, as his car swerves and careens across the bridge to Long Island. His father-in-law-to-be disapproves of his drinking:
FATHER-IN-LAW-TO-BE
I don’t drink because drinking affects your decision-making.
ARTHUR
(slurring)
You may be right. I can’t decide,
but neither the asshole father-in-law-to-be, nor Susan, have any objection to Arthur’s getting back behind the wheel of a car. At dinner, Susan (Jill Eikenberry, amazing at oozing parodic sincerity) plays the loyal, understanding girlfriend card:
SUSAN
Arthur, don’t you get it? You can get drunk. You can throw up. You can forget to call me for months. You can’t lose with me. I know you too well. I’m much stronger than you are. I know how alone you are. I hate how alone you are. I’ve cried because you’re so alone. . Don’t drink anymore, Arthur.