by Kari Byron
In those years of meeting new people constantly, alcohol helped me break the ice and strike up conversations. A drink melted away my fear—and theirs—and I could talk to anyone, about anything, and be charming AF (I thought) while doing it. I used to say, keep your lovers close but your bartender closer.
While I was traveling, every night was a party. After the second glass, when most people around me were closing out and asking for waters, I kept going. Most mornings I woke up with a hangover. Many nights, I didn’t sleep at all. I’ve had chronic insomnia since I was a kid. I used alcohol to shut down my racing mind.
In Egypt, I tried drinking heavily to make myself pass out, and, instead, stayed up all night painting a cityscape on the wall of my hotel room in a crazy fit of insomnia. Hotel management wasn’t as pleased with the mural as I was. I had to run out of there, lying down in the back of a local taxi chased by cops with machine guns. Of all the countries I visited, my most insane experience was in Australia, a country and people known for hard drinking. I got so wasted there, I put on a party dress and knee socks and drunk sleepwalked through a flood. And the next day? I was right back at the bar, ordering a hair of the dingo, mate.
TO LIVE LIFE TO THE FULLEST, HEAD OVER TO THE BAR
From Australia then back to San Francisco, I’d gotten on a track of trying to live each day to the fullest—as Bukowski would say, “beating death in life”—and that meant drinking. A lot.
He’s far from the only writer whose work is alcohol-soaked. Famous wit Dorothy Parker was an alcoholic, as were Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, Stephen King, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Carson McCullers, Jack Kerouac, and the list goes on endlessly. Drinking seemed like a requirement for literary achievement, and added to the romance of a writer’s life, something about pouring martinis and one’s soul onto the page (speaking of martinis, Ian Fleming, James Bond’s creator, shook, not stirred, massive amounts of them).
Oscar Wilde, a heavy champagne drinker, once wrote, “Work is the curse of the drinking class,” but it might’ve been even more apt to say, “Drink is the curse of the writing class.” They just go together, like peanut butter and jelly, peas and carrots, rum and Coke.
I wasn’t driving creativity with drinking anymore. I was just drinking. I wasn’t creating great art, just wasting time. I’d wake up and think, What should I do today? Guess I’ll head over to the bar . . . It was a habit. What was that Dean Martin quote? “I feel sorry for people who don’t drink. When they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day.”
I’d love to tell you a rock-bottom story, if I could remember it. I’m sure it happened, but I was blacked out at the time. I did get kicked out of a bar once because I bit a biker dude. He was getting inappropriate, so I chomped on his arm. The last thing I remember was the taste of leather.
* * *
About Alcohol, De-Mythstified
We did so many shows about alcohol that attempted to answer:
Are beer goggles a thing? For this test, I rated photos of thirty random men on a scale of one to ten while sober, tipsy, and drunk. The idea being, when drunk, I’d give the men higher ranks than I would have when straight. What I realized was that, when sober, confident-looking guys were attractive to me, but when drunk, they seemed cocky which was a turnoff, but the vulnerable, sad guys looked appealing. My score was kind of strange. I was harshest about the photos when tipsy, liked some guys when straight, and others when drunk. I’d say that, for me, the beer goggles test was inconclusive, but plausible.
Is drunk driving more dangerous than drowsy driving? To test this, Tory and I drove on a closed course when sober, after downing a few shots, and after staying up for thirty hours straight. We were both better drivers well rested and straight, no surprise there. The drunk test showed marked impairment behind the wheel, but being exhausted was far worse. In my case, I made three times the mistakes compared to drunk driving. Tory was ten times as bad. So the answer is: Don’t drive when drunk or drowsy!
What works to sober you up? For this test, the guys did five shots, and then tried a handful of sober-up cures—black coffee, a slap in the face, ice water dunk, vigorous exercise—after which they tried hand-eye coordination tests used by astronauts of drawing along a zigzagging line for accuracy and speed. According to the data, coffee and an ice water dunk? Did nothing. But five minutes of exercise or receiving a slap did show some improvement. So next time you need to sober up fast, have someone slap you really hard, and then run in circles until you fall down. Just a suggestion.
One off-camera alcohol myth: My producer and I were being eaten alive by sand fleas while we were working on shark myths at a lab in Bimini. I asked Jamie how he got away unscathed. “Gin, inside and out.” Not the answer I expected. He rubbed it on his legs and drank some. I tried it and I swear they started to leave me alone! Not really science but an anecdotal sample of two. Too bad MythBusters isn’t making any new episodes. That would be a fun one to test.
* * *
Ariella was one of my three roommates at the time, in a small but lively apartment. We all lived like this, and I was taken aback that she’d singled me out and told me flat out to stop. In my mind, I was only keeping up with her.
I said, “Thanks for your concern, but I’m fine.”
Her words stuck with me though, and, as angry as I was, I did take heed. I was so mad because, well, she was right.
I slowed it down and stopped going to the bar for a minute. Shortly after that, I met Paul, and he became my focus. I had this wonderful boyfriend, so why did I need to go to the bar every day and night? Paul and I would party together, too, but nothing like I’d been doing on my own or with my friends. It was more fun to be at home with him, drawing, anyway. Maybe I grew out of it or maybe I realized I really never needed it.
Truth is, I was a bit of a disaster. I thought I was so funny and charming but in reality, I was a bit embarrassing. (Thank my lucky stars there weren’t phone cameras back then!) Luckily everyone around me at the time was a disaster, too. Drinking to inspire great art might work for some, but for me, it was counterproductive.
INSTEAD OF HELPING, ALCOHOL WAS COUNTERPRODUCTIVE TO ART, LOVE, AND FRIENDSHIP
If my saturated period resulted in museum-quality sculpture and publish-worthy poetry, I might still be drinking. But all those days and nights of partying undermined my creativity. Not partying was when I made good stuff, like my travel journals or the drawings and art Paul and I made for and with each other.
* * *
LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET
I slowed down, thanks to my friendship with Lisa, and a parting gift she gave me when we went our separate ways after Egypt. She opened a little silk bag she’d sewn and took out a book, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. This strange little book of advice spoke to me philosophically about my need for others to bring me happiness, finding poetry, and going into yourself for answers. Before too long, without making a conscious decision, I started drinking a lot less. Lisa is the one who encouraged me to start seriously journaling, to pour my anxiety and depression into my art, and mitigate my insecurity and sadness that way. Emotions, all of them, even the dark ones, were material I could mine for my poetry and drawings. Instead of dulling feelings with booze, I could experience them, and turn them into art.
When I came back to San Francisco, I wasn’t sober by any means, but I had an alternative remedy at my disposal. I could make myself feel stronger by reaching for a pencil instead of a glass.
* * *
WORKING WITH DRUNK PEOPLE
When I started working as a liquor brand ambassador in my midtwenties, I’d spend every night in bars handing out free drink samples. My theory was that it’d be a fun job because everyone I met would be buzzed and feeling fine.
I got a totally new perspective on alcohol by not drinking. At the events, I’d witness normal humans devolve into disheveled animals who slarved over each other after a few free drinks. When
you’re sober, you see the ugly truth, that hammered people are kind of horrible and gross. I got the offer for the unpaid M5 Industries internship at the same time I could have advanced in a liquor-related career. One of the reasons it was so easy to say “no” to the corporate booze job was the idea that I’d have to hang out with drunk people all the time. Not for me. Drinking at work might’ve been a good idea at this job, because it wouldn’t have revealed the ugly truth to me.
If I had an addiction to alcohol, there was no way I could have stayed sober at all those events. Considering how turned off I was watching drunk people, I realized I was the opposite of an addict. I had a man I loved, and a new job I was excited about where drinking was absolutely not allowed. We were operating heavy machinery and one drink would have put any number of people at risk. It was even dangerous to show up hungover due to lingering impairment. Nope, drinking was not part of my future career (unless I got drunk for science), so I just slowed it all the way down. It wasn’t hard at all. Don’t think I could have gotten through the grosser experiments with a hangover.
* * *
I did come out of that time with something: embarrassing home movies of parties that made me look nothing like the cute, suave bon vivant I thought I was. I thought I was the coolest, smoothest person there, but the evidence says otherwise. I will always be grateful that I exhausted my experimental years before social media. For me, I can use my experiences as personal lessons. They only exist in the mythology of my life, not on the internet, where they’d remain forever.
Waking up with a savage hangover many mornings for, oh, about ten years, wasn’t good for my health, either. I was young and thought I was bulletproof, but I must have known that drinking had consequences. The sleeplessness. Drinking dinners. In those days, I weighed around 105 pounds. It would take hours for me to get over the morning sick stomach, pounding head, and the shakes before I felt close to normal. The icebreaker, the little bit of help, had turned into a crutch. I handicapped myself to the point that I couldn’t function without a drink in my hand. Using booze as an icebreaker broke me.
Samplering
It might be a bit optimistic to say that after I met Paul, I just naturally grew out of drinking. It remained a constant battle in my head. Was drinking a celebration or a crutch? Was a glass of wine a simple pleasure or a source of guilt and shame? Alcohol had been a part of the fabric of my life since childhood. I knew too much of it wasn’t good for me, but I liked it.
Much like Grant puking at the first sight of the chair, I drank at the first sight of discomfort. While drinking wasn’t “involuntary” for me by any means, it was certainly knee-jerk. I’d conditioned myself to drink whenever and to whatever quantity necessary to satisfy my current state: anxious, sad, happy, insecure, hungover. It was a habit that at times felt like something I did without conscious thought.
For example, I would reach for a glass under the following conditions:
With family.
With friends.
At any party or celebration.
When meeting new people.
If I felt sad.
When I couldn’t sleep.
To inspire creativity.
It goes without saying that if you imbibe every day in such amounts that you wind up biting a biker on a Sunday afternoon, you’re drinking too much. I had to sit myself down at several points in my life and say, “This might be a problem.” I also noticed that, if I couldn’t see it myself, there were friends who sent up a warning signal every time. Lisa encouraged me to draw instead of drink to chase away the blues. Ariella challenged my drinking rituals during my romanticizing period. Chasing art and dreams with Paul was more fulfilling than glass-filling.
And then, there’s Stella. During my pregnancy, I was dry for months on end, which I hadn’t been since the age of fifteen. I realized I liked the control of sobriety. After she was born, the idea of being out of control of myself in front of her, or even away from her, turned my stomach faster than Grant in the vomit chair. No way was I going to be incapacitated if she might need me.
I still have wine, I love it. I am a Northern California girl, and wine is in the blood. I can never turn down a good scotch. But I’ve found that when I drink too much, it can trigger depression, feel terrible the day after, and make it harder to be a good mom.
I guess alcohol is like a frenemy. She can be so much fun and I adore her, but damn, if she can’t make your life harder when she feels like being a bitch.
TO PARAPHRASE WILLY WONKA: A LITTLE NONSENSE NOW AND THEN IS RELISHED BY THE WISEST WOMEN
Chapter Seven
Sexuality
In one of our last seasons, we took on the myth called “Is Bigger Better?” about whether large boobs led to bigger tips. Try going into that one with an open mind. To test it, I wore DD size breast prosthetics while working in a café. No problem about making coffee. I’d been a barista in a former life for years. However, my experience with wearing giant silicone cutlets in my bra was nonexistent.
The most fun part of the episode was shopping with Tory at the Piedmont Boutique in the Haight—where sequined bikinis, wild costume dresses, feather boas, sassy wigs, and prosthetic boobs aren’t consigned to any particular gender or size. Otherwise, it was an adventure in awkward. As soon as the word “boob” came up in an ideas meeting, everyone in the room immediately turned in my direction. Of course, I’d be the one who had to do the testing.
Funny, I can’t remember our doing a myth about “Is Bigger Better?” regarding penis size . . . how did we miss that one? I guess we’re lucky the show got canceled. This particular myth came up toward the end of the series, and my first thought was, Uh oh, we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel now. We always said we’d never run out of myths, but were we really doing this one? Seriously?
The critical thinker in me asked, How can we prove this? How can the data collection be consistent? How will I wear giant hunks of silicone all day and not get a backache? During any of the rare uncomfortable tests, I changed the language of my thoughts from “I have to go to work today” to “I get to go to work today.” From “Come on” to “Get into it.” I tricked myself into being positive. If I’d fixated on the leering nature of this episode, I wouldn’t have been able to do it, but I figured out how to make it interesting for me. I’m usually very naive about the male gaze. According to my friends, I never know when a guy is checking me out. This gave me an opportunity to look for it.
Shocker: Dudes tipped 30 percent more when I wore XL hooters than when I wrapped myself up for the “small” size, or didn’t do anything for the “control” size. What you don’t see in the results on the show is that my natural boobs were tipped the least of all three options! My own body was the least profitable. Should I be insulted? LOL. (Can’t believe I just wrote “LOL.” I spend way too much time on the internet; I have lost all language to convey sarcasm or irony without an emoji or hashtag. #wtf.)
That day, we proved the obvious about making tips, but I also think I proved that by taking ownership of your role in something, you can do things on your own terms in an empowered way. We all had to do some crazy experiments. But I had to represent all of womanhood every time we did a myth about gender. I felt it was important for me to put in my two cents and make sure the myths, questions, and discussion didn’t slant too male. For example, we discussed doing a test on the topic of “throwing like a girl.” I hate all phrases that include “like a girl” (“drive like a girl,” “run like a girl,” etc.), because they are always derogatory. They imply weakness and incompetence. The guys in that room didn’t mean to be negative, and the point of taking on that myth was to discredit the idea that women were bad at throwing. Didn’t matter to me. To me, the whole premise would only reinforce the derogatory prejudice. The entire conversation was like chewing on tinfoil. I said, “As the female representative for the world, I have to object to the way we’re presenting this myth.” I had to speak up, for my sake, as the one who’d have to do t
he throwing or driving or running. But also for the sake of the show, so it didn’t skew so male that it alienated our female audience.
I worked hard to be part of the crew and not “the girl on the show.” But since I was, there was no escaping it. Nearly every day on MythBusters, I was reminded of the line about Ginger Rogers, “She did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels.”
CAN YOU BE A SEXUAL PERSON, A STRONG INDEPENDENT WOMAN, AND A FEMINIST AT THE SAME TIME?
Busted
A page-one Google image search picture of me is a photoshop of my head on a bodybuilder’s body in a white tank top that says Busted. (Double entendre, anyone?) It’s been on the internet for so long, people think it’s real, even though it’s obviously not me. Fake news? How about fake nudes.
Speaking of photoshop, I’ve also seen some weird, fake porn of myself. You can watch me stretch in slow motion thanks to someone out there uploading a series of screenshots of me wearing a gray T-shirt (a T-shirt!) from one episode. In fact, if you were so inclined, you could see stills and videos of me in any compromising position from the show: fixing the microphone in my tank top, running, or bending over to any degree for any reason. I’m sorry, did I say “compromising”? I meant, just doing my job. When I’m on-screen, I basically can’t move my hand up and down in any linear manner, or a hand-job-y GIF is sure to follow. I learned the hard way not to suck the end of a party balloon. That one was too easy for a cyber troll fan to resist.
