 | The good stuff. |
I wake up cotton-mouthed and still in a state of zombie-like sleep deprivation despite having apparently been asleep for the previous nine hours. Tired, but too uncomfortable and jittery to sleep, my mind swirls with negative thoughts, primarily the mountain of work that awaited me on Monday and the sad state of my personal affairs. I am hungover for possibly the three hundredth straight Sunday morning.
As I have for the past three hundred weeks, I will swear all week that I will catch up on sleeptonight Im going to bed at eight!but I know it will never happen. The next weekend will bring the same, repeated sequel. Constant tiredness, eternal grouchiness, the expense, and the thirst, my God, the thirst! Yes, alcohol was having a distinctly negative impact on my life in nearly every possible way.
I look at myself in the mirror. It has to stop. I cannot live like this any longer. I make a solemn promise to myself, a real promise, not a fake promise like Ill call you, or I do, but a true oath: From this moment forward, I will never drink again... except for champagne.
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Champagne is wine carbonated by the process of in-bottle secondary fermentation, particularly, wine originating from the Champagne region of France. Contrary to popular belief, the French monk Dom Perignon did not invent champagne, although he did perfect the process. Rather, champagne is thought to have been invented by the sixteenth-century French regional sales manager Robert de Rochambeaux, (known to his friends as Bobby Good Times), who was trying to find a way to get the maid of honor at his cousins wedding out of her dress in less than forty minutes. Needless to say, it worked.
Before I quit drinking besides champagne, I did some research and discovered I was not the first Champagne Guy. Turns out, in the 1800s, there was a singer named George Leybourne, who leveraged his mediocre celebrity career singing to bored Victorian couples on the English seaside into a clutch endorsement deal shilling for champagne companies. The Champagne maker Moet commissioned him to write and perform songs extolling the virtues of Champagne, especially as a reflection of taste, affluence, and the good life. He also agreed to drink nothing but champagne in public. He even called himself "Champagne Charlie." Legend has it he died while in bed with six young French maidens, each trying to out do the other in a fellatio competition performed on him in which the prize was a bottle of...you guessed it, champagne! Now, thats livin'!
* * *
The key to my decision to abstain from alcohol other than champagne was my realization that with champagne, youre not actually drinking, youre celebrating! You see, champagne actually has markedly different physical properties than other kinds of alcohol. Consider some common side-effects of intoxication by other types of alcohol as compared to intoxication by champagne:
1) Self-Pity: Everyone knows the typesix beers in, they start going on about how they lost the state championships in 1994 because their dads shitty car broke down on the way to the game. Then its how great their old girlfriend was, the one who left them for the guy who was better looking, and more successful, and had a really nice Mitsubishi Eclipse. Then its on to how they cant get a good job because theyre white, and they want to get the old band back together, and theyve just been diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer, and blah blah blah...
Enough with this shit, you finally cry out. Stop crying in your beer!
Have you ever heard the expression, Crying in your champagne? Fuck no, you havent. Thats because when youre celebrating with champagne, you are happy and life is good. After a couple glasses of Dom, you dont have problems. You talk about how this year youre going to finish that novel youve been working on for the past six years, and everyone agrees that this time youll get it done. With a little Cristal, your team WON state in 1994! In fact, if youre drinking champagne, you threw the game winning touchdown. With champagne, youre ten pounds lighter, and funnier, smoother, and more glamorous than youve ever been. Its a fact.
2) STDs: SceneAfter downing six Red Bull-and-vodkas at the Las Vegas Hard Rock, you hop in bed with a woman you met at the bar. You cant find a condom, but in your alcohol-induced state, you decide to gamble. She looks clean, you think to yourself. She leaves. You feel gross. You pass out.
The next morning your liquefied internal organs will be most likely be spilling out of your urethera courtesy of some heretofor unidentified virus that came your way courtesy of Vicky or as she should be known, The Quim Reaper. Alcohol strikes again.
With champagne you may be just as likely to fall into bed with a stranger after the party. And yeah, you might forget to put that condom on before you play Just The Tip with Sally Saturdaynight. But with champagne, youll never catch anything from her but a case of the hiccups. Thats because champagne has been scientifically proven to protect against AIDS, the clap, the drip, the shanks, the flakes, the crabs, the bubble, and assorted other social diseases. Thats right, if youre drinking champagne it is impossible to catch an STD.
3) Suicide/Murderous Rampage: Giving people the courage to kick the chair out, pull the trigger with their big toe, or take the express elevator to street level has always been whiskeys job. Nothing says Goodbye cruel world! like a highball full of room-temperature Early Times.
You simply cannot kill yourself if youre drinking champagne. If you dont believe me, try working up the courage to kill yourself by popping the cork on a bottle of Taittinger and pouring yourself a foaming glass. It cant be done. You start writing your suicide note, but after a glass or two, youre squeezing into your old tuxedo, dancing with a mop, trying on monocles and inviting over everyone on your floor to an impromptu soiree at your place. Before you know it, you notice that your nineteen-year-old neighbor, Kylie, is not wearing underwear. You give her some champagne, she smiles, and life is suddenly worth living.
 | The original Billy Dee Williams. |
Its just as impossible to kill other people after getting drunk on champagne. There are no champagne fueled killing sprees. After champagne, you dont want to kill, you want to dance, and laugh, toast your friends and eat shrimp. If you want to go to work and off your colleagues with a semi-automatic deer rifle, go drink a case of beer, or a fifth of Cutty Sark or something, you misanthrope. Us champagne drinkers will be right here, hugging each other, and appreciating how nice we all look in this light.
* * *
Shampoo for my real friends, real poo for my sham friends.
Monty Brogan, '25th Hour.'
* * *
With science on my side, it was an easy decision to start drinking only champagne, and my early experiments were everything I had hoped. I was at my girlfriends parents house for the weekend and strolled in to breakfast at 8 A.M. I promptly poured myself a tall glass of champagne with some orange juice.
Oh, mimosas! That sounds fun, said my future mother-in-law, Denise.
Funny, last year when I strolled into breakfast drinking J&B neat with a Budweiser chaser, it didnt sound fun to join me in some morning boozing. No, back then I had a problem, and was dragging their daughter down to my level.
Now, with champagne, I livened up the place, and had become a breath of fresh air in the oppressive hell that Denises marriage had become. Hey, Denise, dont thank me, thank champagne.
Back before champagne, I would bring a woman back to my place, pull out a bottle of Makers Mark and offer her a drink to loosen her up. Most of the time, shed say something like, I dont drink bourbon, or, Are you trying to get me drunk? or, Is that a picture of your girlfriend next to your bed?! Im leaving, asshole. I'd say that it was not my girlfriend, but her mom, Denise, but by then it would be was too late.
Yeah, since I started only drinking champagne, cheating on my girlfriend has gotten much easier. Last week, for example, I brought home a woman I met at TGI Fridays, and told her the only thing I had to drink was a bottle of White Star I had been saving for a special occasion.
Oh, I love champagne, she said.
Half a bottle later and she didnt even notice Denise's picture on the nightstand. The next morning, she said she loved me, and that although shed never done it before, she would consider my proposal for a three-way with Missy, another waitress at TGIs who I had noticed the previous evening as I drank champagne at the bar by myself. Mr. Moet, where would I be without you?
* * *
Using Champagne Charlies life as a blueprint, I too leveraged my champagne lifestyle into a job as a spokesman for the champagne companies. I started a champagne blog, and began making personal appearances at champagne tastings. My endorsement deals and sponsorships enabled me to quit my job and start drinking champagne full time. I started hosting a popular champagne show on the Food Network, and published books of champagne-based cocktail recipes.
 | Mine. Thanks to champagne. |
I ditched my shitty girlfriend and began dating Scarlett Johannson. Together, we adopted and African child from Namibia. He turned out to be a thirty-four year old bureaucrat for the Namibian Energy Ministry who had a thing for blondes, but as soon as we realized it, we sent him back and got a young, cute African kid. We nursed him with a mix of baby formula and Taittinger Brut, 1996.
Scarlett and I changed American culture. We went on Oprah and she said champagne was the new Cosmo, champagne bars opened around the country, fraternities began hosting champagne parties, Congress declared 2006 the year of champagne, and on-line humor magazines began publishing pieces about people who gave up drinking anything but champagne leading to absurd consequences, all thanks to my decision to become my generations Champagne Charlie.
Now that I drink champagne full time, the emotionally and physically damaging highs and lows of my burgeoning alcoholism have been replaced by a state of constant drunkenness. Today, I am a multi-millionaire, Im married to Scarlett Johannson, (take THAT, Denise!), we have an adopted African kid and two real ones, and I have a huge house with a swimming pool filled with champagne. Yes, life is pretty good... but you know what would make things better? A cold beer. Im getting a little sick of champagne, actually.
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