"Are you sure you want to have another drink? We all know by now what a lightweight you are..."

People have called me many things when it comes to drinking, but a lightweight has never been one of them. This safari guide had known me for going on two weeks now, so I wasn't quite sure how he could actually say that with a straight face, but he appeared to be serious.

This is about to get real, so here I feel the need to stop and explain that I have passed out in more countries and on more continents than most people have probably ever been to. No, I wasn't a narcoleptic, I had the other condition that ends in -ic.

That word begins with alcohol, and so did all of my international pass-outs. I have woken up in bars, on boats, in jails, and in two unrelated instances, a garden hedge. My tendency to pass out in unintended and unexpected places was not necessarily limited to overseas destinations. However, those were by far the most common. Why was that the case? Well, there is a simple, albeit unsavory, explanation: when FLYING INTERNATIONALLY on commercial airlines, I was rarely willing to risk bringing my cocaine with me.

So, I would get to a new destination, and start my day drinking the way I aways did, but then by about early evening, have no idea how or where to locate the cocaine that was the other important part of my regimen. I'd forget what an important part of keeping me awake and (somewhat) functional that cocaine played in my daily life, but have no clue where to find it in a country I'd never been to before.

It was a terrible one, but I had a system, and international travel always shook that system the f*ck up! Suffice it to say, many of the places I passed out (I'd realize upon waking) were a direct result of me trying to find cocaine in an unknown, foreign place, but having no luck. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and so I had no problem walking up to complete strangers in bars, clubs, or even on the street and asking them if they knew how to help me find it. Actually, it's pretty much the one and only time I ever pulled out my translation phrase book.

Obviously, the phrase book wouldn’t have the exact sentence I needed, but you could take sentences like "Do you know where the library is?" or "Can you take me to the hospital?" and just replace "library" or "hospital" with "cocaine." I was a full-blown cocaine addict for well over twenty years, and you'd be surprised how often this worked.

You'd also be surprised how long I could continue looking for coke when it didn't. Looking and drinking, drinking and looking... and depending on how long this went on, and depending on whether or not any cocaine ever showed up to reenergize me, well... that's a recipe for passing out in a hedge or a snowdrift.

Or a bar or a restaurant or a club or library or hospital or friend's house or stranger's house or a hotel or a motel or a car or a plane... the list goes on. So many places, and these are just the ones I remember. Sometimes, I wouldn't even recognize where I was waking up. I'd come to, and think, where is my phrase book, this time I need to figure out how to ask, "Do you know where I am?"

When the safari guard called me a lightweight, though, I knew exactly where I was (or figured it out pretty quickly), I was on the back of an open-air Jeep in the Savanna, at dusk, and the bumpy road we were on informed me that I'd probably just been startled awake by particularly nasty POTHOLE. "Yeah, I can really knock 'em ba-- wait, what? Did you just call me a lightweight?

"Well yeah, what else would you call someone who passes out each night on the ride home after only two drinks, and the other day you even passed out on the boat after only one little froufrou drink!"

Ah. I see what's happening here, he has been calculating only the drinks he sees me drinking, and he's come to this conclusion: that I have a couple sundowner drinks each evening after our safari drive, and immediately fall asleep. He's not counting the ones that I drink in the morning at the hotel, or in the bathroom, or from my pocket flask, or from the tiny airplane bottles I have in my CARGO PANTS pockets... but how could he? I try to keep those somewhat secret. As far as this guy's concerned, the only addiction I have is to the insane amount of gum and mints that I pop constantly into my mouth all day, every day. (Like when leaving the hotel, or the bathroom, or messing with my cargo pants...Sooooooo many mints.)

They didn't even sell these mints in Africa, so you'd think that'd be a sign right there. Where is this silly American getting all these mints? Did he waste a sizable portion of his allotted 21kg maximum weight to bring a whole 7-11's worth of gum and mints with him on our tiny prop plane? To me, that reeks of alcoholism even if my breath didn't. And yes, yes I did:

I brought a shit-ton of high strength gum and mints from America. When people think of paraphernalia, they think of drug stuff like pipes and syringes, but an alcoholic travels with accouterments, too. The downside to ours is that no one recognizes it as such, so every time you pull out your personal stash of gum, you run the risk of everyone within a five-foot radius asking if they can have one, too, and suddenly the mints you packed (instead of extra underwear) are being whisked away and passed around an entire van or plane.

Maybe you want to CHECK INTO REHAB with me here...

Or if that sounds too depressing, join me as I compare ALCOHOLISM AND ALZHEIMER'S!