Having an IQ of 110-120

Anthony Bourdain says that a Russian will always drink you under the table. Well, pace that genius, Joseph T. Easter is not Russian, and it is only because of his deficit of drinking buddies that he hasn't proved Bourdain wrong on this score.

Hear this: Joseph can drink a fortified Brewmeister Snake Venom (67% ABV) like it is a 4.5% VB, swilling it down in two or three gulps. And lest you think he becomes sorely crapulous, spewing it up or sweating it out as he sits limp and dazed and semi-conscious, Joseph in fact can be seen digging up a pencil from his pocket, sliding it over his ear and heading out for work barely one eructation after throwing the bottle away.

He can drink a lot more than one bottle after work when he heads to the bar, which is where he is now. He can drink so much, in fact, that he entirely unzips his pants to accommodate his distended stomach full of beer, and lets it drop down until half of his anus is visible (though to whom, I won’t bother saying).

Bourdain, once again, says that your body is not a temple, but rather an amusement park, and you had better well enjoy the rides: his career suggests that one of the more entertaining of these visceral rides is undoubtedly the sensation of alcohol swooshing down your windpipe. For people who truly believe in the miracle of alcohol (and Joseph counts himself among them), the act of drinking is thus a deeply sensuous ritual, a hedonistic release far superior to all the agglomerations of scene and sound promised downtown, better than all the companionship in the world, better than anything. . . So all this beer-loving and booze-rhapsodising has brought Joseph to where he is now, pounding his fist on the bench as he waits on Tony the bartender – who is about 60 years old, but trembles like a mad man - to give him the glass of dark German Pilsner that is destined to ruin his IQ.

Tony, toothless and always in pain, has to grasp his own wrist as he yanks the keg coupler and tips the glass at a 45-degree angle, but still the head won’t appear.

“It must be the gas. I’ll be ten seconds,” he says through his cancerous gums, and so rushes into the cool room.

Joseph knows that this next beer could very well dissolve some fraction of his IQ, which for most of his life has stood in the range of 110-120 – he couldn’t get it exactly pinned down, believing that it lay in the more advanced end of that spectrum. But it is a good score, and therein is the paradox of Joseph’s life. He is smart enough to know what alcohol will do to his brain, but not smart enough for a little softening of the head to be a career-shattering catastrophe.

Joseph even has a customised vinyl bumper sticker plastered on his subcompact Toyota Yaris XP130, with a nod to Martin Luther’s impeccable logic: WHOEVER DRINKS BEER IS QUICK TO SLEEP; WHOEVER SLEEPS LONG DOES NOT SIN; WHOEVER DOES NOT SIN ENTERS HEAVEN; THUS, LET US DRINK BEER. It is cheeky but irrefutable, you have to admit, and easily secularised if Reality is indeed the only hell that exists. Potent stomach-punching beers are the articles he lives for. Dark lagers, stouts and porters, Spalt Spalter, Hallertau, Mittelfeueh, Schorschbrau, ordered in enormous carts, arrives on his doorstep on the weekend, and in the interim he goes to the bar after work and drinks as much German Pilsner as he can. But the thing is, he has this agreement with himself – his one and only agreement, a supposed prophylactic against drowning away his IQ - which is that he categorically refuses to drink beer without a head. And he suspects that Tony the barman intentionally keeps the keg always near flat to slow him down. It is one of those deals that you agree to pretend to ignore. Everyday, he has about ten seconds, lips athirst for more beer, where he is forced to think about what the hell he is doing living like this.

And so here he is again. A glass of German Pilsner will soon be beckoning his endorphins. That much is clear. He will then (so he plans) drink it, without even thinking about it. He will simply be bidden by the subtle orchestration of a spirituous mood achieved by all good bars - for instance the Juno track lighters dim and pink on the rafters, throbbing romantically across the otherwise blanched and washed-out faces of escapees from the workforce getting solitarily inebriated – all of whom manage (by the power of the said track lighters) to believe they are just “social drinkers.”

Except, however, he is thinking about it, and then begins to think about thinking about it. What is there to think? He has no marriage on the line – yes, years of having an IQ of 110-120 have given him an aura of bumbling awkward bachelorhood, neither lupine conqueror nor clever enchanter. And his job – well that’s easy enough to flap away. In fact, it is mundane enough that swilling down some of his intellect would merely make him qualified.

For example, that very day he assessed a student whose unimpeachable comprehension of the “Guide to the Driving Test,” coupled perhaps with the breezy arrogance of wearing a Hawaiian shirt, compelled Joseph to lash out in road-rules pedantry... and when he said the boy should have lifted the handbrake only 90% of the way, what he saw, he could swear, was an expression of bemused contempt. Telling the boy he would fail somehow didn’t relieve him. In fact it aggravated that other feeling pressing at him, this feeling of profound pettiness. He felt just like that miserable umpire so thrilled by his power on the field that he forgets his whole life is dedicated to monitoring a stupid flying pigskin, who gets called out by the players – the ones who make a whole lot more money out of the pigskin than he does - gets called out for living in a bubble. Imagine that. So despicable. So pathetic. To take your life so seriously. Bourdain would never do that.

On his way home he damn nearly cried, but succeeded only in the more virile outlet of punching the dashboard of his Toyota Yaris XP130. Sometimes, it was true, he would make up a rule, he would prosecute a recommendation, or fail a student for lowering the side mirrors when reverse-parking. It wasn’t his fault. He is a burdened man. Bothered. Something is bothering him that has bothered him since he was a pimply pubescent. Discretion: he loves and hates the word. It is the only way he believes he can exercise the surplus 10-20 IQ points he brings along with him to the job.

A police officer, a clerk, a driving or swimming instructor, etc; uses some discretion and makes decisions; enforces rules and follows instructions. This was the pathway laid forth long ago in his Career Advice Booklet for people with an IQ of 100-110. Joseph knew that he should do better than that. So the young student, bristling with life and ambition, said he wanted to be a lawyer. After all, his best friend Geoff Dunstane, who had an IQ of 140-150, was told that he had “what it takes to be a lawyer” emplaced somewhere in his bones. His teacher, Mr Ponderosa, sized him up with his glasses far down his nose, glancing between him and Geoff 5.5 times… then the stern man spat out a sentence so harsh and horrible that Joseph would crumble right there like a biscuit melting in tea. “A lawyer should have an IQ of 120-140. Joseph, you’re not going to be a lawyer,” he said.

It was up to Geoff to spin this appraisal with the desperate optimism of someone talking a stranger out of suicide. He even reminded Joseph that none other than Albert Einstein was a clerk, before fortuity elevated the genius, and the great Stephen Hawking never even got his IQ measured. When Joseph started shredding his exam papers between sobbing face down on his splayed elbows, Geoff became more realistic.

“Joe, cops have to study penal codes. It’s practically law anyway.”

“The average IQ of a cop is 104! Explain that,” Joseph screamed back, his voice agonised by puberty.

“Cops are only dumb-asses in movies,” Geoff said.

“US federal courts ruled that police departments can refuse to hire someone if their IQ is too high,” Joseph was quoting the tear-stained Booklet.

Geoff dissented with a frown.

Joseph sulked and sulked, and the friendship of the two classmates was forever strained by their variant IQs – there were times that Geoff even feigned intellectual amazement, as Joseph in one instance sought to prove that fires could be defined as “living,” complete with metabolism and reproduction. “That’s incredible, Joe. You should write that down,” he said.

When they graduated, Geoff was off to law school, and Joseph was still studying the Career Advice Booklet. He asked Mr Ponderosa one more time what career would befit his IQ range, and the leather-skinned man grew another chin as he looked down at his student, and said, “Joseph, you should become a Buddhist monk.” It was the only joke that had ever passed the man’s lips.

It has been about eight seconds. Joseph is contemplating whether drinking the German Pilsner is worth it. Tony the barman has now come out of the cool room, shaking uncontrollably, and immediately pours the foamy beer into the glass.

At this point, Joseph is sure his IQ stands at about 118. He had just done a test the other day, which confirmed for the fourth consecutive time that he was indeed in possession of 118 IQ points, at least ten of which he could well afford to shave off. In fact, the day he did the IQ test, the ever-reliable algorithms of Facebook offered an article which adumbrated “6 Reasons why Intelligent People Fail to be Happy.” It was insipid bilge, he could instantly tell, but the argument moved him regardless. He had tried careful irrigation of his faculties, he had spent hours in the company of Geoff and his peers, and all that only proved he could not simply blossom more IQ points... but drown those faculties in beer, and they might wilt. That would make him happy. He could even imagine Mr Ponderosa looking proudly down at him, and with his stern finger hushing all objections, he would proudly assign him a career as a police officer or driving instructor, a niche that he would at last fit into like hand in glove. He would be a happy driving instructor. His fist wouldn’t touch the dashboard, except to sweep the dust off. He would walk free and light and joyous from this Purgatory of just-above-average cleverness.

Losing intelligence may either seem very easy, or very difficult. A freak accident can leave you drooling and demented without a warning. But as is the nature of this world, what can be handed to you in an accident can rarely be attained after decades of fervent striving. Joseph – having an IQ of 110-120 – is aware of this. So, aided by these unwanted IQ points, he can read a terrible future in the glass of German Pislner: he sees himself a miserable vessel of alcohol tumbling toward the elusive goal of a pruned intellect – in other words, a "problem drinker."

It is a contest. No, it's a gamble. No law tells us what a mildly good IQ score and a strong beer will do when confronted with each other. They may jostle and joust, or they may - like the great Bourdain - fortify each other in the creation of a wonderful, sweary classiness.

The other drunks in the bar, soaked in piss and vomit, have developed the constitution for vulgarity. They are happy cackling over a napkin blowing in the wind, evidently untortured by consciousness. But among the many other devotees of spirits, there are those who are far less tempestuous about their habit. They brood before, during and after a shot. They even brood about drinking. Maybe they drink to dim the memory of some terrible thing they have seen. They may skulk around the corners of the bar, providing a smoky, mellow opening to a philosophical story. Ask them a question and they’ll launch into bitter reveries and you’ll awkwardly sidle away desperate for a cheery conversation about the weather.

Perhaps Joseph is taking a gamble. Perhaps he could merely prune the wrong branch, and remain as uncomfortable in his skin as he has ever been, like trying to truncate your penis by getting frostbite, only for it to be stuck as a frozen appendage embarrassingly protruding out everywhere. He doesn't know. But that is his IQ talking: even that pestering, nagging worry. That is all the extra IQ weighing him down. He mustn’t think like that anymore. It will all be right when those analysts in his cerebrum have been silenced for good, swishing around dead in the alcohol.

So he drinks.