So one night I’m in Boston for a friend’s wedding and after an evening of running around, drinking beer and having fun I wake up in the middle of the night in a hotel bed and can’t breathe.
Absolutely no clue what’s happening.
But I’m pretty sure the 3 AM hotel desk dude doesn’t have medical training and I don’t know if I feel bad enough to go to the hospital (which I’m guessing is not an uncommon thought for a number of people who are currently dead) so I cough my way through it and because I was still at the age where I thought I was bulletproof, didn’t think much more about it.
Not long after that I’m having beers with friends and the same thing happens.
If you’ve been paying attention you might have picked up the pattern and realized I was having allergic reactions to “friends” because it couldn’t be “beer” or it would screw up my lifestyle which was largely based on beer consumption.
Hey, friends come and go, but beer will never let you down.
I never had beer borrow money and fail to pay it back.
I never had beer promise to be at a softball game and fail to show up.
I never had beer say it was giving me a ride home and then leave the party without me.
Beer does what it promises to do and that’s more than you can say for about 93% of the people you know.
True-story alert
I’m reading People magazine (the first American publication to realize we had the attention span of squirrels combined with the intelligence of recently-concussed Irish Setters) and see that Paul Newman can drink all the beer he wants because he does 250 sit ups a day.
Bingo.
I was smart enough to know I couldn’t keep drinking beer at the pace I was on and not end up with one of those bellies where guys have to make a philosophical decision about wearing the belts under or over their flab and in the 1950s it was mainly an over-decade where guys wore their trousers about six inches under their armpits and had ties about three inches long and I was 100 percent positive that Bud Abbott look wasn’t a good one.
So if all I had to do to prevent that problem was whack out 250 sit ups every day, I was in and shared that information with my best friend and beer-drinking buddy, so we both start doing sit ups like Sylvester Stallone in one of the training sequences of a Rocky movie.
After a couple weeks of sit ups we buy a case of beer (because 12 each was about right) and go to a park to get drunk (which is a pretty good clue about our entertainment options in the late 1970s) and after about one-and-half beers my friend looks over and says:
“I’m feeling kinda full.”
Which I’m glad he admitted because I was feeling the same way and that’s when it dawned on us that Paul Newman could “drink all the beer he wanted” because he wanted two. We immediately stopped doing sit ups because we didn’t want “six-pack” abs, we wanted “12-pack” abs and apparently those don’t exist unless you count this:
(And guys wonder why they don’t get laid.)
I go see an allergist
So after a couple of coughing bouts I finally go see a doctor and he sends me to an allergist and he does that thing where they lay you on your stomach and stick little bits of pollen, kryptonite or radioactive uranium (I wasn’t paying close attention) under the skin on your back to see which things your skin doesn’t like and they come back and say I’m allergic to mold, ragweed and people’s bullshit. (OK, I totally made that up; I wasn’t allergic to ragweed.)
I ask where I’m encountering mold because I already know where I’m encountering bullshit and the guy asks me if I drink beer and I ask him if the pope shits in the woods.
So why wasn’t I allergic to beer when I lived in California?
The guys says (and he might have made this up, which I think doctors feel pretty free about doing because the rest of us have little to no idea how our bodies work) that my body could tolerate a certain amount of allergens and then when it hit its limit, said enough is enough and because Missouri doesn’t get any breezes that haven’t floated over all kinds of asthma-inducing crap first, I was allergic to beer here in Missouri, but wouldn’t suffer as much if I lived near a coast which is why I had no problems on my recent trip to the California coast and after just one night back here in Missouri woke up to find out what the Snot Gremlins had been doing all night.
Neat, huh?
What my father left me
My father was a policeman and I wound up with his .357 Smith & Wesson revolver, but after I developed some political opinions, didn’t feel comfortable owning it because I was telling other people they shouldn’t have handguns because they were way more likely to accidentally shoot themselves, a family member or a household pet than a second-cousin of the Manson Family, which (even though I owned the handgun for sentimental reasons) made me a hypocrite.
So I gave it to one of my brothers and not long after that, his house got burglarized and the burglar took the .357, a leather jacket, a pair of high heels and a ham. (Not sure if this guy was a burglar or someone on a scavenger hunt.)
My brother told the cops if they saw a guy running down the street, wearing a leather jacket and high heels, while waving a pistol and eating a ham sandwich, they’d found their man.
Anyway…
That .357 was one of the two things my dad left me and the other one was asthma. (According to the World Health Organization – and when has anyone ever questioned one of their opinions – asthma runs strongly in families and is about half due to genetic susceptibility and half due to the environment so when I brought my dad’s lungs to Missouri, I hit the Cough-A-Lot jackpot.)
But my dad had asthma when they didn’t have albuterol inhalers, so he got to lie in bed and cough his guts out and one day he had a newspaper lying on the floor next to him and this was in the fall of 1960 so pictures of Nixon and JFK were on the front page and my mom being a smartass asked my dad if he was spitting on his candidate Kennedy and my dad said:
“No, I’m spitting on that bastard Nixon.”
She looked and my dad was telling the truth, so it’s pretty clear where I got my politics, asthma and tendency to be a smartass.
Which brings us right up to today
I’m not the only one with allergies, but it’s a bad time for allergic people because all you have to do is cough or sneeze in public and people grab their children and run for the hills like you just announced you had the Black Plague and need a hug.
So if you don’t have allergies try to remember other people do and just because they cough doesn’t mean they have COVID-19 and if you need something to relax you I have a suggestion:
Have a beer.
(And if you think I’ve stopped drinking beer because I live in Missouri, think again: I did the smart thing and stocked up on Claritin.)
I absolutely love your writing. 😊