Drink Up! Boozeheads Gather to Get Soused

By MEGAN McCLOSKEY, Associated Press Writer
Fri Jun 3, 5:14 PM ET

The six men teetered down a sidewalk along a seedy Denver street, their maroon fezzes embroidered with two swords and a martini glass tilting wildly under the street lights. "Drink up, boozehead!" roared one as the group headed for a bar in a proud display of drunken solidarity.

Sounds like a rallying cry for a bachelor party, a guy's night out, maybe a bunch of fraternity guys horsing around. But for the revelers at Modern Drunkard magazine's annual convention the cheer sums up a philosophy on life.

"It's all about drinking without apology or remorse," said Jake Nowak, 26, in from Milwaukee for the three-day liquor-fest.

Self-proclaimed drunks from around the nation gathered in a downtown Denver theater and dedicated themselves to drinking, though not always into oblivion. The gathering was more about the camaraderie of tipping your glass with others who won't judge — a group of like-minded folks achieving what Frank Rich, the magazine's founder, calls a "pristine state."

Experts say this type of unabashed drinking is scarce these days — outside the college campus — and the roaring, rollicking drunk is becoming a rare breed.

The pendulum of societal norms has swung in favor of sobriety, said Peter Adler, a sociology professor at the University of Denver. He said there are new expectations of how and when people can feel good about drinking.

"We've changed a lot," Adler said. "Acceptability of drinking in certain times has been questioned."

Risks to health and safety have also contributed to the swing, experts say, as people worry about liver damage and drunken driving. Political pressures have risen to conform, along with educational outreach.

Michael Haines, director of the National Social Norms Resource Center at Northern Illinois University, attributes some of the shift to the aging baby-boomer generation that is determined not to let the excessive behavior of their own youth pervade their children's culture.

The last 30 years has seen a polarization of drinking, with positive values attributed to nondrinkers and drinkers chalked up as slackers or worse.

"We try to draw the line between use and nonuse of alcohol as if it were cigarettes or heroin," Haines said.

During a rare quiet moment during the convention, a crowd gathered in front of the stage like kindergartners at story time — some even sitting cross-legged on the floor — as Ted Haigh, known as "Dr. Cocktail," recounted the history of the cocktail.

"It used to be that if you had a pitcher of martinis you were considered a swinger," said Brian Clark, a pipe dangling from the corner of his mouth. "Now people would be planning an intervention."

Rich and his cohorts aren't looking for excuses to be reckless. They just want to enjoy alcohol.

The convention began on a recent Friday, long before rush hour (or even most traditional happy hours). Step off a sunny street into the venue and you squint in the darkness; a smell, dank and slightly moldy, worsens as the convention goes on.

As a band blared behind him, Rich said his goal was to bring back the class of the old-time drinkers.

"It's about being a gentleman, but still drinking to get drunk," said Rich, a man who drinks enough to know that bars have a "whole different crowd in the morning."

Drunkards here longed for the days when the Rat Pack lifestyle was something to aspire to.

"We need to rediscover the drug of our grandfathers," said Rich, 41, who started drinking young, when his father came home one day, put on a Hank Williams record and poured the 10-year-old and his brother shots of Jack Daniel's.

Although experts say a majority of Americans drink alcohol, the conventioneers know they are a niche group. Even Dr. Cocktail concedes the joy of the drunkard was always "essentially a fiction — unless you yourself were in that exact same state."

To another drunk, "the otherwise hard-to-endure ragings of the overly inebriated might seem as true and real as divine inspiration," he said in an e-mail.

Rich, droopy-eyed on the last day of the convention, put it another way: "Alcohol makes us better human beings."