Signs the Cheap Tequila Is About to Start Making Decisions

Cheap tequila starts making decisions somewhere between the third pour and the moment you tell a stranger they have an old soul.

The signs the cheap tequila is about to start making decisions never really change.

Standards drift early. The phone leaves your pocket like a gun in act two, and everyone at the table pretends not to hear the countdown.

Nothing supernatural is going on here. A 1.5-ounce shot of 80-proof spirits counts as one standard drink, and nobody pouring your fourth is measuring.

The window opens quietly and closes with somebody’s shoe in a hedge.

Signs the cheap tequila is about to start making decisions

Generosity shows up first. You buy a round for six people whose names you will never learn and whose wedding you will somehow attend in October.

Ordering shots for a table without asking is a hostage negotiation where you are also the hostage.

Then the narration starts.

You begin explaining your own life to a bartender who is nodding at a point six inches above your head, and you have given him a nickname.

He hates it. You will use it four more times.

Your hands get bigger. Everything within reach turns into a prop, and the prop turns into a bit that is never as good as your face believes.

Somebody says “one more and then we go.” In tequila, that sentence has no enforcement mechanism and no history of ever being honored by a single human being.

• Shoes are off in a building where shoes are a legal requirement.
• You are holding eye contact like you are proposing a merger.
• The lime has stopped being a garnish and started being load-bearing.
• You have described yourself as “not even drunk” while gripping a barstool the way a man grips a ferry railing in weather.
• Someone queued a nine-minute karaoke song in a key that does not occur in nature.
• Your ex got promoted from mistake to unfinished business.
• Pull-ups. On something structural.

Around here you quietly confirm that you can do a backflip, speak conversational Spanish, and out-arm-wrestle a man named Deacon who does this professionally.

Two of those have never been true, and the third is Deacon’s whole personality.

A plan gets announced.

Plans announced after 1 a.m. have the structural integrity of a wet napkin, and this one involves a second bar, a third bar, and a beach nobody can name.

The bathroom mirror gets a pep talk. It is the most sincere conversation of your entire year, it lasts ninety seconds, and no record of it exists anywhere.

You apologize to furniture you walked into and thank furniture that held you up.

Your dancing narrows to a single move performed with the commitment of a man who has been told the building is on fire.

You acquire a new best friend in the bathroom line.

She understands you better than your family does, she will never be seen again, and neither of you exchanged one piece of information that could be used to find the other.

Somebody’s underwear is going to end up functioning as a napkin tonight, and nobody at that table will claim ownership in the morning.

All of that is confidence. Coordination goes later, in a parking lot, to applause.

Your phone is the accomplice

A meta-analysis of experimental studies found each 0.1 mg/ml rise in blood alcohol lifted the stated likelihood of skipping the condom by roughly 5 percent.

Your judgment has a price, and that price is denominated in shots.

The phone goes down before the body does, because typing requires no balance and no shame.

Your thumbs move faster than your conscience can file an objection.

The contact saved as DO NOT is being consulted like a financial advisor with a strong track record.

Cheap tequila has a type, and the type is whoever hurt you most efficiently.

• Text one is a joke.
• Text two is a paragraph.
• Text three is a question, sent at 1:41 a.m., to somebody who is asleep next to a person who is not you.

Voice memos are worse.

A voice memo has a timestamp, a waveform, and a tone of voice that gets played back to you in somebody’s kitchen by somebody’s roommate.

Nothing that begins with a 47-second voice memo has ever ended in a wedding.

Your bank app has been taking minutes this whole time.

You will use the word “chemistry” about a person you met eleven minutes ago in a hallway.

You will promise something about your stamina that your body has no plan to honor.

Then arrives the phrase “no strings,” which is historically the exact process by which strings get manufactured.

Hand the phone to whoever is having the worst night. Sober misery makes an outstanding bouncer.

About that other 49 percent

Check the bottle.

Federal rules allow an agave spirit to come from a mash that is only 51 percent agave, with up to 49 percent from other sugars.

Nearly half of a mixto shot never met an agave plant. It met a cane field and a deadline.

The agave has gone nearly free, too. After a planting boom, prices crashed to around 40 US cents a kilo, with middlemen paying as little as a dime.

So the well pour costs less to produce than it has in years, which is why it keeps arriving in threes nobody ordered.

Nobody has been ruined by an expensive bottle in a quiet room. Ruin runs on speed and on a bartender who likes you slightly too much.

Look, the sombrero bottle is fine at 9 p.m. By 12:45 it is a subpoena.

The plastic cap is a disclosure statement. You signed it at the register and then tipped on it.

The agave is innocent

Tequila contains no special chaos molecule. It is ethanol with a birth certificate from Jalisco.

The agave did nothing wrong. It was in a field minding its own business.

Congeners take most of the blame, those fermentation byproducts that give darker spirits their bite. Bourbon carries 37 times as many as vodka.

Drinkers in that study felt worse after bourbon. Their next-day performance came out impaired by exactly the same amount either way, which ruins a popular excuse.

Blanco sits near the clear end of that scale, which makes the sombrero bottle less chemically deranged than the whiskey your uncle drinks with a straight face.

What tequila has is a delivery system.

Nobody sips it in a round of seven while a bartender counts backward from three and a stranger films it.

A margarita takes twenty minutes to finish. A shot takes four seconds, comes with a countdown, and gets handed to you by somebody with an agenda.

The upper myth

Somebody at your table believes tequila is a stimulant. That person also believes their car runs faster after a wash and that airport beers do not count.

Every bottle on that shelf is a depressant.

Tequila feels like an upper because it arrives fast in a room that was already screaming, and the excitement gets credited to the glass.

The unpleasant part comes from a classic balanced placebo experiment. People who believed they were drinking alcohol acted more intoxicated than people who really were and had been told otherwise.

Your expectations were wearing a badge the entire night.

Cheap tequila is not the author of your night. It is the notary who stamps whatever you had already drafted.

That is why one bottle turns a man into a mediator and turns the guy beside him into somebody demanding a rematch from a parking meter.

Nobody free-pours a measured shot on purpose, either.

Every heavy hand at that bar quietly adds a drink you never counted, so your fourth shot has been doing the work of a sixth since roughly 10:15.

The lime and the salt are a patch for a product that needed one, and the ritual around them is marketing that stuck.

Your standards resigned around round four and declined to leave a forwarding address.

Where the memory stops recording

Blackouts tend to begin around 0.16 blood alcohol, roughly twice the legal driving limit, at a point where judgment and impulse control are already wrecked.

Notice that order. Judgment quits before the recording stops, which is why the story reaches you secondhand, in a group chat, with photographs.

Everyone has a friend who swears they recall the entire night, and everyone has watched that friend get shown a photograph they cannot explain to anybody in the room.

Nobody was possessed. Somebody was awake, chatty, affectionate, and running without a hard drive.

The last thing you remember is the second-to-last round, and even that is a rumor.

This is usually where a friend starts filming.

Filming your friend instead of handing them water is not a bit, and every person at that table knows it while it is happening.

About 178,000 Americans die each year from excessive drinking, and roughly 61,000 of those deaths trace back to a single occasion.

The funny sign and the dangerous sign are often the same sign.

The morning invoice

Researchers studying hangxiety in social drinkers found the shyest participants reported the sharpest spike in anxiety the next day.

The quiet one who finally loosened up at 11 p.m. is the one awake at 7 a.m., running the tape at half speed with the sound turned up.

They will spend the morning preparing a legal defense for a room that had already forgotten the whole thing somewhere between the parking lot and brunch.

There is also a receipt for $212 from a bar you cannot locate on a map.

Taking the keys back

Water is the cheapest thing behind that bar.

Time is the only thing that has ever sobered anybody up, and water is how you buy some of it.

Eating first matters more than eating after. The 1:40 a.m. tacos are a memorial service.

• Count pours, not rounds.
• Put the water beside the shot and drink the water first, like a coward with a future.
• Give the phone to somebody boring and stable.
• Pick your number before the first pour, then tell a friend who sincerely enjoys being annoying about it.

Know where funny stops. Mental confusion, vomiting, slow or irregular breathing, clammy skin, and trouble staying conscious are signs of an alcohol overdose, and they need 911 instead of a couch.

Coffee does nothing here.

A cold shower does less, and walking somebody in circles around a parking lot has never reversed a single ounce of anything for anybody.

Nobody has ever regretted the shot they skipped at 12:50 a.m.

The tequila will make its pitch again tonight around 11:40, wearing the same plastic hat. Let it pitch your friend instead.