A Drinking Life

by WILLIAM L. HAMILTON

New York Times

Published: October 9, 2005

JUST when you thought drinking had become politically correct - the sexually equalizing rise of the Cosmopolitan, female bartenders, restaurantlike lounges with bar chefs, and cocktail menus among mixed company - along comes Frank Kelly Rich to remind you that drinking is drinking after all.

Frank Kelly Rich offers his experiences and instructions in his magazine, Modern Drunkard, and in a book by the same title.

Mr. Rich, the editor of Modern Drunkard, a monthly magazine, puts the boozing back in booze. From Denver, a city he claims to live in because he was driving through and found a bar he liked so much he stayed (the Lions Lair), Mr. Rich and his publication, which started as a zine in 1996 and has a circulation of roughly 50,000, acknowledge the inescapable facts of drinking: excess, ecstasy, epiphany, serious lapses and imaginative leaps in accepted behavior and the moral conundrum of how something that feels so good can be so bad.

Now, at 41, Mr. Rich has put the total of his knowledge and experience into a book. "The Modern Drunkard," being published in November by Riverhead, is not a memoir but an instructional guide. It covers subjects like planning a lost weekend, circumventing an intervention and, in an extensive chapter, drinking on the job. Mr. Rich isn't kidding. Keeping his tongue in his cheek would impede the flow of alcohol.

Mr. Rich is out drinking every night, or has a party at his house. On rare nights off, he has two drinks and goes to bed.

"I'm trying to drink different drinks every day," he said in a telephone conversation on Tuesday. Mr. Rich's fallback is a gin and tonic with bitters, what he calls a Hemingway Code Hero because Papa drank it, as do several protagonists, whom lit-crit classes call his "code heroes." You possess honor and a death wish.

Born and raised in Las Vegas, then Reno, one of seven children, a son of a cocktail waitress and a cabdriver "with a gambling p roblem," as he put it, Mr. Rich joined the Army at 17, left after four years and traveled the world and its bars.

"Bars are the great schools of thought," he said.

Confident that he won't remember a word, Mr. Rich now carries a digital tape recorder when he goes out drinking to capture what he believes is the wisdom of the unwound tongue.

"Oh, yeah, like, every week," he said, asked if he regrets anything he has said or done, which includes fistfights (which are covered in the book).

But in an age of political correctness, when "a person is more likely to be judged by what he refrained from doing than what he actually did," as Mr. Rich writes in "The Modern Drunkard," his own sense of achievement sounded reasonably secure.

The Hemingway Code Hero

Adapted from Frank Kelly Rich

2 ½ ounces gin

2 ½ ounces tonic water

Splash of Angostura bitters (3 shakes of the bottle)

Juice of a quarter of lime.

Stir ingredients, with ice, in a glass. Serve.