Learning to Drink in Salt Lake City
Postcard of downtown Salt Lake circa 1970s (The Salt Palace is in the foreground).
"A Drinking Life" is a slow, intermittent autobiographical sketch. Although I write about beer full-time these days, it hasn't always been central or even very important in my life. But it has always been a presence, even as my life passed through very different phases. In today's post, I follow its roots back to the beginning—and a little bit before. You can find the introductory post here and the most recent post here.
In early November of 1983, when I was a sophomore in high school, my Mom was transferred from Boise, Idaho, where she had worked for decades at Mountain Bell, to Salt Lake City, the site of one of the now-independent telcos. This was the brave new world of deregulation Ronald Reagan promised, and breaking up the Bell system was one of his signature achievements.
I can’t say whether it was smart public policy, but the result was a disastrous for me, ushering in the worst years of my early life. In Boise, junior high school included grades 7-9, so I had logged just two months of my high school career when we relocated—but I landed in a place where my classmates already had more than a year of high school under their belts. We arrived just after Halloween, when the days were short and the winter inversion had settled into the valleys, cloaking the city in its bleak, gray-white claustrophobia. I was the new kid, just starting out in high school, and living in what seemed like a bleak outpost high up in the Wasatch Mountains.
All of that made for a tenuous start, but it was only the beginning of my troubles, which blossomed when I realized we’d moved into a community with social antibodies designed to protect itself from people like me. Salt Lake City wasn’t just a new, unfamiliar place, it was the worldwide capital of the Church of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons). That is still true, but Salt Lake has become more worldly and diverse; in the 1980s it was still the insular capital of a religious community—the Mormon Vatican. And like the Vatican, the laws and mores of the faith governed the town and every interaction in it.
I knew basically nothing about the Mormons when we arrived. In the 1980s, Idaho contained the second-largest concentration of the faithful outside Utah, but they were still a numerical minority in Boise. More than that, they were a cultural minority, exercising little force in the city’s day-to-day consciousness. The 350 miles that separate Boise and SLC might as well be a continent. Idaho Mormons—at least the ones I knew—behaved exactly like everyone else.
Take for example my best childhood friend, a titular Mormon. His father was a bookie and his mother was a salty chain-smoking anesthetist whose vocabulary would have startled a sailor. (Needless to say, she was one of my favorite people ever.) She used to drive a giant Chevy like Mario Andretti, the soundtrack of Johnny Cash blaring as we kids slid back and forth across the bench seat with every multi-G turn. My friend’s father looked like Kojak, down to the bald head, and used to pull rolls of bills the size of mangos from his pocket. They were an exciting family, and the Mormon side of their identities were vestigial and nominal. The term for drinking and smoking members of the church was Jack-Mormon, and it seemed like that’s all Boise had—though few were as colorful as this family.
About the name “Mormon.” In popular parlance, people invariably refer to the “Mormon Church.” The word Mormon comes from inside the Church, too: the sacred text is the Book of Mormon, and the Church endorses use of the “Mormon Trail,” which describes the transcontinental path the faithful traveled to get to Utah. As a name of the flock, however, it really bugs the Church. So, back in the 80s, everyone referred to it as the LDS Church, a shortened version of the unwieldy official name: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Not long ago, the Church hierarchy decided that wasn’t any good either, and now they encourage people to say “The Church of Jesus Christ.”
There isn’t anything nefarious about this. Mormons have been persecuted for their beliefs so long that they just want to blend in. The name “Mormon” is freighted with so much meaning the church can’t control that they reasonably want an alternative. Despite that, it's the name we all know. I’ve used “Mormon” in this post not as an epithet but for clarity—despite the Church’s efforts, “Mormon” is the term the rest of the world uses.
Until I arrived in Utah, I didn’t even realize Mormons weren’t supposed to swear, cuss, or drink. Outside Utah, there was no mechanism to enforce behavior. A small and highly evangelical faith, the Mormons work extremely hard to recruit people to their cause and are loath to eject them. Idaho Mormons, consequently, went out drinking and smoking on Saturday night and followed it up with a well-dressed excursion to Church on Sunday morning, just like all the other normie Methodists and Presbyterians in 1970s and ‘80s.
In Utah, the calculus was different. Like any religion, the Church ruled out all the large vices—killing, thieving, adultery—but they prohibited even small infractions as well. Caffeine is a no-no, so Mormons didn’t drink coffee. Today there’s a Starbucks in every neighborhood, but at that time coffee shops were rare, disreputable little affairs. I recall one in the Sugarhouse neighborhood that actually required you to become a member before entering. Caffeinated sodas were also out—again, a huge deal in the Coke and Pepsi era before the proliferation of various waters and sports drinks. To compensate, there were a lot of ice cream shops in SLC because sugar and fat were a-okay, and people still needed social places to gather.
Another biggie was refraining from swearing, and not just the bit about the lord’s name. Common profanity was considered out-of-bounds, though this seemed more performative than religious. Because any language needs colorful intensifiers to communicate emotion, Utahns invented a whole bespoke vocabulary that replaced standard American profanity. (Performative acts worked in both directions: to the profane teen developing a chip on his shoulder about the repressive culture, there was something immensely satisfying about letting a “damn” fly in public.)
And then there was booze, the greatest social taboo of all. While some of the minor infractions might have earned the sinner a frown, the otherwise-pious practitioner was forgiven these mere misdemeanors. They were, to borrow a term, venial sins. Drinking was far more serious. It was religiously verboten, but more than that, to a culture that elevated buttoned-down social behavior, alcohol use—any alcohol use—seemed wild and dangerous to local Mormons. Drinking publicly carried a stigma that went beyond religious transgression—it contained elements of moral weakness, but also, in its public visibility, defiance. Drinking alcohol was the most public way of declaring yourself “not-Mormon.”
For the new arrival, this was all very startling. It felt like there was no area in public space in which behavior wasn’t regulated or at least observed. We learned fairly soon that it wasn’t just public space—one’s private life was also scrutinized. Within a week of arriving, a member of the local ward (a geographical region like a Catholic parish) appeared at our door to welcome us into the community. He asked about our previous church, an unsubtle way of determining our religion, and invited us to join the congregation that Sunday. My mom politely but firmly declined, not recognizing how significant the encounter would become. It seemed like every neighbor was aware of our rejection of this offer within days. The word got out at school, too: at my very heavily homogenous high school, the Mormons did not hang out with non-Mormons socially. They, too, knew almost instantly whether you were in or out of the group. To a teen looking to fit in, it made the transition, which was already awkward and painful, seem like an impossibility.
In the decades to come, I would make my peace with Salt Lake. The city hosted the Winter Olympics in 2002, and as an aspiring filmmaker, I made a documentary about how locals were handling the cultural invasion they’d invited in. I managed to interview local politicians and officials from the Church—and got some great B-roll of the scrum of the event. My interview subjects were remarkably transparent and introspective, and what I took away from the experience gave me a very different understanding of the place than I had as a teen.
What I discovered was a community that felt constantly under siege. Since the inception of their faith, Mormons themselves had been targeted by politicians. They fled from town to town until deciding to pack up and move to Utah, then far from the reach of the United States. Their separation didn’t last long, though, and they were soon back under Uncle Sam’s thumb. Church members ran for office so they could protect their community and try to preserve their culture. They still seemed fearful and beleaguered, resigned to the reality that they would never be seen as mainstream, normal Americans.
It created something like an Escher paradox of insecurity. Locals felt the threat of a majority culture surrounding them, so they created a safe space where their practices would be considered normative. To do that, however, they created a sealed-off environment that felt aggressively anti-Mormon to the people living in Salt Lake.
Take how they handled alcohol. Mormon lawmakers didn’t outlaw booze like Baptists sometimes do in the Bible Belt. They understood that social opprobrium was a more powerful than the law, so they just made drinking a more visible act. If a drinker wanted a glass of wine with dinner, they wouldn’t find it for sale at a restaurant. Instead, they brought a bottle and paid a hefty “uncorking fee” to have it at the table. The process was intentionally visible, both to cow any stray drinking Mormons from public displays, but it also marked the non-Mormons. Anyone willing to go through that rigmarole was making a public announcement—anyway, that’s how it looked to my family at the time. With a more subtle sense of the culture, I would later come to see the Mormon side of this. Having been oppressed for generations, Mormons are loath to visit that on non-Mormons. From their perspective, the liquor law was a happy medium—drinkers were still permitted to drink, but they had to do so in deference to the dominant culture’s sensitivities.
As I suffered through a miserable and lonely sophomore year, I had all the capacity for seeing others’ perspectives that a 16-year-old boy typically has—none—and to me the heavy hand of the Church seemed like persecution all the way down. It’s typical for high schoolers to feel alienation and estrangement, but because I had landed in a culture built by and for a group I didn’t belong to, my sense of alienation was reinforced every day.
And so, I did what teens do—I rebelled. I worked at Wendy’s so I could buy a car, which for our generation was a form of freedom. I exercised that freedom by engaging in some exceptionally crazy stuff on four wheels (a 1972 yellow VW Karmann Ghia), but I managed not to kill myself. Along the way, I found some friends, somehow. They weren’t all non-Mormon, but for various reasons none of them could penetrate mainstream culture at Highland High any better than I did. Some I found hanging out at the smoking area of the school (Gen X, baby!), one I found because he arrived about the same time I did and we clumped together almost instinctively. But most I found on the debate team, which I stumbled into in search of an elective. It was a good fit. I have a mind for rhetoric, and what is more satisfying to an angry teen than learning how to argue? It may seem absurd to non-debaters—nerds dressed in ill-fitting blazers carrying briefcases around define nonthreatening—but there’s a mental violence in the clash of a debate that is as brutal as anything a jock can dish out in the hallways.
My most overt act of rebellion was drinking, however. The University of Utah is located in Salt Lake and students used to joke that the most popular drinking game was getting drunk and throwing up on a Mormon. That, more or less, was my governing philosophy (minus the vomit). Kids typically drink because it feels adult, because it makes socializing easier, and because it’s fun. For me, it had an additional delicious element. The heavy social stigma against drinking meant that it was a potent weapon for anyone looking to offend the dominant culture. My friends and I would drink before going out into the world, enjoying the wide berth the public gave us as we stumbled by. To be fair to my 16-year-old self, the cultural pressure to inhibit sinful behavior ran precisely against the teenage imperative to experiment and push boundaries. Looking back, there’s basically no chance I wasn’t going to explore the worlds of beer and liquor.
I looked old for my age, and I learned that liquor stores rarely carded me. At first, I just bought six-packs of beer. By my senior year, I was buying 151-proof rum, which was a way to stretch my dollars. Debate teams were dens of vice—and I don’t think this was unique to the Utah debaters. One of the central pedagogical purposes of debate is to get teens to push boundaries with their minds, which naturally leads to experimentation. Add the social clustering and stress of competition, and you create the perfect conditions for kids to drink—and worse. Competing at a tournament in Berkeley, I had my first bong hit. In Utah that was about as far as it went, but rumors swirled that teams from other states dabbled in harder stuff. It’s even where I started drinking coffee, which was stocked in each hotel room and was a great way to shake off the fogginess of the previous night.
I didn’t actually drink that often, but when I did, there was an angry teen intensity to my efforts. Alcohol represented a distilled, liquid form of pure non-Mormonism, and I drank it in. But it also represented a world beyond that city, a future state of existence I would one day be able to inhabit. Drinking became an escape, but not solely for the drunkenness: I was cosplaying being an adult. I watched adults drink, watched them get drunk, studied how they held their glasses, noticed them swallow whiskey without grimacing. Kids behave differently when they drink, and I studied that, too. Adults attempt to conceal the effects of alcohol, while inexperienced drinkers exaggerate it. Kids love altered states of consciousness, whether it comes from spinning in circles or zipping downhill on a bike. So with a drink in their hand, they wiggle and giggle and make faces when they taste the sharp, bitter taste of alcohol. Much of my career writing about beer has been seeing how it manifests in culture, and I guess I started that habit at sixteen.
So I learned to drink in Salt Lake City. I learned how fast a beer affected me, and how fast strong rum did. I learned how to drink straight liquor with the stony face of a poker player. I got good enough that I passed an unexpected matriculation exam near the end of my senior year. One evening, to slow me down, two of my friends tried to counterfeit my beer by replacing the liquid in bottles of High Life—which had screw-tops—with near beer. It’s the kind of trick that would have worked on most teenagers, but recognized it immediately. They were surprised and impressed, and I was secretly pleased that all my study had paid off.
That was one of the last times I drank in high school. By then I had been accepted to college in Portland, and my mind was already moving north. Salt Lake became more insubstantial by the week, and I spent a solitary summer mostly riding my bike up the canyons and drifting away from that chapter of my life. In the next four years, my drinking would start up again, but in a completely different way. My final summer in Salt Lake—I would never return for more than a few days at a time—was an ascetic time. Salt Lake had lost its power over me, and the need to rebel vanished.
And here we come to the value of those not-quite three years I spent in Salt Lake: it attuned me to the very subtle gestures of culture that played out in every sphere of life. No place was exempt, and in every interaction, people observed each other and registered their behavior. Teens feel alienation precisely because they crave social acceptance. I happened to live in a city where social acceptance was harnessed to a church that governed both the formal and informal rules of society. That had the perverse effect of heightening my sensitivity to the unspoken currents that guide group behaviors. Much of my writing about beer, particularly in books, has been focused on the cultural aspects and how it shapes what and how we drink. I certainly learned more about human anthropology in college and grad school, but it all started in high school.
Life has a wry sense of irony. Despite hating my time in Salt Lake, I wouldn’t change a minute of it. Young people are naturally resilient, and they can develop those muscles struggling through unpleasant times. Soon I would be entering one of the happiest times of my life, and it was certainly all the sweeter for having followed those bleak high school years. I also took my drinking lessons to the campus of Lewis and Clark College, where I would put them to good use. The city’s fourth brewery had just opened, and I would soon be introduced to the concept of the brewpub. I learned that beer came in different colors and strengths, and that something called “ale” existed. But that is a story for a later time.