With the spring heat and summer closing in comes a time of excesses, unpleasant brushing against male bodies, shortness of air, and unbridled alcohol consumption. All of these are offensive to the stylish drinker. Communal drunkenness is to be shunned. More so if it includes the sharing of any concoction in the same container and the exchanging of drool on bottles or straws.
Getting drunk at popular celebrations has no merit. Drinking when everyone else is drinking is too boring to be classy.
The Time and the Place
One can drink where one pleases. To comply with the law or not is not incompatible with elegance. But there are glasses that make a beautiful silhouette, and others that turn the person holding them into a caricature.
During this time of year, you should always drink in moderation, except when everyone has decided it is time to give up drinking. Stylish drunkenness is never sought or planned. To plan to binge is typical of weak-charactered people with dubious tastes. To get plastered is, at the end of the day, the objective of those party goers who favor soirees where drinking is on a par with spraying wine all down your shirt, where flirting is tantamount to eating until you explode, or where the music is drowned out by all the shouting.
The stylish inebriation knows neither the time nor date, nor the content of its fate. Nor the company, nor anything that will come to pass. What’s more, the stylish inebriation denies everything the following day. Although some scholars on the matter, such as my friend Manolo Portabella, consider that the refined thing to do at dawn is to “not deny anything that you are accused of having perpetrated the day before, however strange, absurd and impossible it may seem to you.” And perhaps Mr. Portabella is not wrong because in every gallant drunken episode, there are two key factors: improvisation and an inclination toward the absurd. This means that maybe you shouldn’t try to deny having insisted on leaving the cigarette machine a tip the night before.
How to Act
Idiots get drunk and chant political slogans, becoming even more annoying than they were before they started drinking. The intelligent person’s wit will be sparked by alcohol and will subsequently prefer to embark on a crusade with profound philosophical sermons on the subject of the Asian clam, to gather support to dancing the waltz in any modern nightclub, or to keep a strict silence, immensely eloquent as well as disconcerting for those who do not understand the aristocratic intemperance.
Vandalism
Apart from singing children’s campfire songs, nothing is more to be expected than smashing things up after drinking too much. Towns fail in the fight against vandalism because they try to convince young people that it makes them uncivil and unsympathetic citizens. When all it really does is make them a little bit more of an asshole.
The difference between a wino bum and a stylish dipsomaniac is that the former goes around kicking in the doors of stores, while the latter tries to repaint worn out zebra crossings with Tipp-ex, while taking great care not to stain his suit.
Bathroom
During very special summer intoxications, you can finish celebrating on the beach and even go skinny-dipping in the moonlight, a unique pleasure that the West has stupidly dethroned. Of course: the stylish drunkard must bathe fully clothed with no regard to his or her phone or wallet. That’s what’s funny, unpredictable, and cool. Doing it bare-assed with one arm up so as not to get the cell phone wet is just lame. Moreover, talentless lame.
The Syllables
The drunken lout becomes monosyllabic even in sentences that originally should have half a hundred syllables. They forget consonants, endlessly repeat themselves, and get so close to your nose to talk to you that it feels like they want to convince you by placing their argument directly in your brain.
On the contrary, in refined drunkenness, one lets slip fleeting consonants, but strives to speak naturally to his interlocutor. Of course, if their interlocutor is sober, the drunken gallant looks for another who is at least playing on equal terms. If there are none, he or she will turn to the nearest inanimate object. Better a lamppost than a wastebasket. But the classiest thing to do is to sit on a bench and chat about current events in the world of cricket with the imaginary person next to you.
Ideological Discussions
In stylish inebriation one does not try to convince others of anything. On the contrary, one enthusiastically supports them in their most idiotic witticisms, knowing the destructive effect of gaining the support of a despicable drunkard.
The Ladies
The drunken gallant often returns to when men knew how to speak politely and respectfully to women. And like Don Quixote in his delirium, he strolls around the discotheque brandishing a glass and a smile, locking eyes with the most beautiful eyes, and chatting with the most beautiful women, with no other purpose than to avoid at all costs his drunkenness becoming evident.
Stomach
Bad drunks have stomach aches and evacuate what they have drunk in horrendous spectacles I will not describe so as not to torture you. The good gallant lacks a stomach, is unaware that there is a part of the body that takes care of such dirty things, and does not know how to conjugate the verb vomit.
Verticality
If one has miscalculated. If one drinks to be very happy, as Chesterton recommended — never drink for sadness — if one loses control of one’s distinguished drunkenness, one should officially declare an emergency. This can be done with a timely retreat, although this is more typical of cowards than of good men. That is why the guidelines for stylish drunkenness insist on the cult of verticality. The great litmus test. As long as one is able to remain upright, with a glass in hand, in a relaxed position, and able to remember one’s own name, the drunken bout proceeds along a path of good manners, distinction, and elegance.
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