Hey Y'all, Watch This...
Here's my latest little story, which is currently untitled and UNEDITED...I never edit things til way after they're finished and I haven't even re-read this story yet. Hope it don't blow...
When I entered high school liquor became an increasingly prominent feature in my life. I don’t quite know how it happened or what it was about being a high school freshman that served as a catalyst to the introduction of booze into my world, but the same thing happened with most of my friends, leading me to believe that it was probably hormonal. Regardless of why I started drinking, the byproducts of it have put me in a genderless, equal-opportunity fraternity of once, future, and currently intoxicated.--(The rhetoric of this piece so far is a bit misleading, as it gives the impression that I’m probably a raging alcoholic who has frequent “liquid breakfasts” and is on a first-name basis with the owner of the local pony keg. For both the benefit of factual accuracy and my parents mental health, I think it’s important to note that I’m merely a casual drinker who has a tolerance closer to that of a girl scout than that of Slash from Guns ‘N Roses.)-- Seeing as how the Teetotalers lost their political clout over a century ago and with prohibition a distant memory, this fraternity is rather far-reaching. It’s probably the only club in the world that has more members than abstainers. This group includes everybody from the 14-year old kid guiltily sneaking his first sip of bourbon out of his folks’ liquor cabinet to the chronic Alki who’s been in and out of rehab more times than Liz Taylor’s been hitched. Being a club of such grand scale, I think it’s necessary to give the organization a nice, spiffy acronym like S.P.A.B: The Society for the Promotion of Alcoholic Beverages. As for a slogan, I think it would be nice to channel the spirit of Karl Marx, a man who looked like a German hophead if I ever saw one, and use “Drunkards of the world unite!” as our battle cry. The only stipulation for membership is that you need to have been drunk once in your life, and the one thing needed to maintain that membership is the telling of drunken tales.
In the 21st century incarnation of Sodom and Gomorrah that we call western civilization, the “drunk tale” has become our oral tradition. Once you enter high school, odds are one out of every ten stories you hear start with “Dude, I was so wasted”, “What’d I do last night-‘cause I don’t remember shit”, or “So we were just sitting back having some (insert drink here) and…” During your college years this ratio will jump from 1:10 to about 1:3 and the topic sentence of “I had no idea what that stuff was last night, but I think I’m blind in my left eye” will be used with more frequency. Stories of random drunkenness have the wonderful quality of being repetitive, but rarely boring. Most drunk tales start with a bare bones structure that has been used millions of times over, but then take that premise in new directions over time. Just like the oral histories of the ancient Greeks, drunk stories evolve from generation to generation, with each new group of hangover victims leaving their distinct mark. The Greeks had Homer and we have the guy bragging about how he did four keg-stands in fifteen minutes and then vomited in line at White Castle. Not exactly a match of equals, but we’ll take what we can get at S.P.A.B.
For me, the best stories are the ones about the first or second time out drinking when people have low tolerances and high levels of inexperience and naiveté. This might sound a little sick, but the more fucked up a person gets, the better the story is. No one wants to hear a story that crescendos and then abruptly ends with, “and then I went to bed.” What I want in a drunk tale is some combination of public lewdness, complete loss of inhibition and/or bowels, and humiliating experiences; the more embarrassing the better. Another great aspect of the culture of drunk storytelling is that it purges the participant of their past indiscretions by airing them out in public. If you can laugh about that time you did 6 shots of Jaegermeister and hit on an elderly man waiting at the bus stop, you’re better off than if you keep it bottled inside. Plus, I’m better off for having heard the story; everyone wins.
To prove the earnestness of my convictions I’ll recount my first encounters with booze, much to the chagrin of my ever-dwindling dignity. My first time drinking is fairly straight instance of pillaging the liquor reservoirs of our parents. One of my friends was the youngest child of a man in the middle of his second marriage who had 4 kids with his first wife, 2 with the second, and more than 7 decades of life on the books. To say he was a neglectful parent would be cruel and unfair. It was more that he was expected to be a father at an age when he should rightly be reveling in all the joys of being a grandparent: i.e. being able to dote on the kids and play with them without any responsibility or disciplinary measures expected of him. His father was the victim of a familial clerical error that sent him to the same job twice, and he wasn’t quite up to a second go-round at the whole fatherhood thing. What his mother’s excuse was I have very little idea other than relative incompetence. No disrespect intended here, but she had an airy quality about her that made it seem like she never resided in the present. She was the type of person who would start up a conversation with you only to immediately lose interest and drift off into the ether while she continued talking. She most likely had some deep problems occupying her mind, but being a fourteen year old kid I simply thought she was loopy.
As a prime indicator of their parental ineptitude, they let my friend move his bedroom down into their basement with his bed resting directly opposite their unlocked and fully stocked liquor cabinet. One night when a few of us were chilling in his basement, someone suggested we get shit-faced. Being a newbie, I was weaned on very weak screwdrivers for an hour or so until we collectively deemed ourselves drunk enough to start doing shots. This is when the dreaded bottle of Ouzo out for consumption. His father being first generation Greco-American, this very Mediterranean beverage was in great supply. For those who haven’t tasted Ouzo, it’s a lot like a combination of natural black licorice and vodka, and contains a deceptively high proof. Before I knew it we were all lying on his cold linoleum floor bitching about how evil the fairer sex were. I of course joined in the chorus of lamentation despite the fact that in ninth grade the most action I’d ever gotten was during a rather lackluster game of seven minutes in heaven. We all woke up the next morning with heads throbbing and I slowly began walking the 3 miles make to my house, cursing the satanic Ouzo all the way back. To this day I can’t drink an anisette based liquor without cringing a little bit.
I only recount that evening as a prelude to the hangover from hell that accompanied my second night of drinking. It probably would’ve been much better if I got so shit-faced that I ended up relieving the contents of my stomach in the nearest toilet. The lingering peptic acid trickling down my throat and dribbling off my chin would have taught me a sound lesson about the potency of hard booze and instilled me with the grudging respect that liquor leaves on anyone who abuses it. Sadly, I left that night unscathed and blissfully ignorant of how severely liquor could tie my stomach lining into knots. My body would pay in spades for that ignorance.
It was a couple of weeks until I had the chance to drink again. I was hanging out at my best friend Alec’s house one Saturday night when we were invited to a party that some upperclassmen were throwing. Luckily for us Alec was staying with his more liberal-minded Dad that weekend. His Dad was a good man, but he tried a bit too hard to be buddy-buddy with his son, which manifested itself in a level of leniency that probably would have put him out of the running for father-of-the-year. Even at the age of 15 I knew that letting two ninth-graders get picked up for a party that began at 11:30 in the evening wasn’t the best idea. Alec’s Dad knew this as well, but with the proper combination of adolescent whining and false reassurance Alec managed to get his Dad to acquiesce. Our evening was predicated entirely on the premise that there would be a parent present at the party, which was in fact true. The only caveat was that the parent was a forty-something deadbeat mom who drank Vodka like water and taught all of her son’s friends how to properly roll a joint. His Dad wasn’t privy to this information and let us go.
At the time I had never been to a genuine “party” before and had butterflies in my stomach during the car ride over. We were picked up by a possibly the least badass guy in the junior class, evidenced by the fact that he was stuck with the unenviable job of playing chauffeur for two freshmen. Alec and I were going to make up a large portion of the underclassmen at the party and I was determined not to look like a pantywaist, or even someone who would use a term like “pantywaist” in everyday conversation. I thought it imperative that I prove my mettle by holding my liquor like a man, an act which was about as likely as the Washington Generals beating the Harlem Globetrotters. As we pulled up to the house I was frightened by my surroundings. The party house was in a fairly shady neighborhood near the University of Cincinnati and very urban. Being a child of the suburbs, the sight of ’85 Cutlass Supremes blasting DMX and homeless men drinking out of brown paper bags on the corner of the local 7-11 was a bit of a change. After getting over my minor culture shock, I walked up to the house with Alec and entered the house with the familiar stutter-step of someone who’s unsure he belongs in the place he’s about to enter. I knew next to no one at the party and was adequately intimidated by the plethora of upperclassmen staring at me. At least I had convinced myself that they were all staring at me and I squeezed my way through a sea of firmly clutched beers into the kitchen. In the kitchen was the host’s mother, who was talking in Spanish to what I can only assume was her boyfriend and pounding back what I can only assume was one in a very long line of cocktails that she had imbibed that night. I wandered over to the kitchen counter and picked up a bottle of Miller Genuine Draft apprehensively. I glanced over at the mother, then back at the beer, and once more at the mother, but her eyes never once strayed my way. As I opened the bottle of MGD I was still in awe at the parental neglect I had just been witness to. If I had so much looked at a beer the wrong way when I was fifteen my mom would have flipped a shit. This woman treated my underage drinking like I was just grabbing a bottle of Sunny D. This was both unbelievably cool and somewhat unnerving.
I walked down a flight of stairs and entered what was a startlingly dank basement. It looked more like the boiler room from Nightmare on Elm Street than the bottom floor of someone’s house. The room was nothing but a collection of pipes entering and exiting the ceilings and walls of a dusty concrete box, with a giant drain in the middle of the floor. That drain will prove to be important later on. To the left of the staircase was a door that led to the more sanitary wing of the basement. Inside the door was a small area about the size of a two-person dorm room, and was filled with ratty, but surprisingly comfortable couches along with a table and chairs in the center. When I went into the room I was relieved to find Bill McGrath sitting at the table in front of me. Bill was the older brother of Pat McGrath, one of my good friends in my own grade, so I knew Bill fairly well from spending a good deal of time at his house. Bill is a remarkably good-tempered man as are his brother and father. Bill’s mother, Linda, is, to put it as nicely as possible, a strong-willed woman from New Jersey. This woman should be forced to wear one of those BIOHAZARD stickers on her person at all times, as she is a combustible entity that rivals nitroglycerin. Multiple times during my adolescence my I bore this woman’s wrath and had to be put up in sick bay for days afterwards. In her defense, I most likely deserved the verbal assault every time she lashed out at me, and her outbursts are infinitely entertaining when aimed at people other than me. Plus she makes bitchin’ chocolate chip pancakes.
Bill, however, received none of his mother’s unbridled rage from the McGrath family gene pool, and was jovial 24-7. When I sat down at the table across from him, Bill was brushing back his long, and fairly greasy, black hair while looking askance at a couple going at it on the couch next to us. I vaguely new the guy on the couch-I think he was Argentinean-and I had no clue who the girl was, but knew that she was far too good looking to be with that guy. Bill was holding a handle of Smirnoff in his hand and asked me if I wanted to do shots with him. I of course said “yes,” because I still needed to maintain my ever dwindling sense of machismo. Agreeing to this was a horrible idea for two reasons. First off, I had never done shots before and had no idea how quickly they will fuck you up or how many I needed to get me fucked up. The correct answer to the last question is probably about two because I was a lightweight in more ways than one. This leads directly to the second problem with this idea, which was the man I was doing shots with. Bill McGrath kept alive the validity of the stereotype that says the Irish can hold their liquor. However, I don’t think that Bill’s ancestry was the main reason that he could drink me under the table. I think it was more that, even though he was only 2 or 3 inches taller than me, Bill outweighed me by a good hundred pounds. Not only that, but the man was two years older than me and had a considerable advantage on the tolerance front.
That having been said, we began trading shots. The vodka tasted horrible in my mouth and I tried to wash the taste down with MGD, but I didn’t like the taste of beer either and it just compounded the nastiness in my mouth. I kept on taking shots because I didn’t want Bill to think I was a pussy and because I knew that this stuff would eventually get me crunk as hell. I tried to stop breathing in with my nose when I took the next couple of shots because I knew from my 7th grade science fair project that 70% of taste is related to smell. I probably should’ve done that project on varying blood-alcohol-contents based on weight, as that would have alerted me of the remarkable idiocy of what I was doing. After doing about 6 or 7 shots I picked up my nearly empty beer and slowly ambled out of the room and back up the stairs. I was in that wonderful early euphoric state of drunkenness where you still have limited control of your body and your head feels fuzzy like static on a TV screen. I grabbed another MGD off of the kitchen counter and went into the living room where Mallrats was playing. I plopped down on the floor immediately thinking, “I love Mallrats,” a reaction that I would have drunk or sober. Someone had a basket of pretzels that tasted abnormally salty like I was just eating the solid grains of salt that come on those doughy Super Pretzels at baseball games. This was especially unpleasant for me because I normally knock all the salt off of soft pretzels when I get them. In my disgust, I attempted to head upstairs to the bathroom, very clumsily stepping over the sea of bodies lying on the floor and the one unfortunate soul who had passed out on the steps. When I reached the bathroom I found it occupied, and being in no state to exercise patience, I made my way all the way back to the basement.
In the time that I had been upstairs the small basement den had become crammed with people. As I walked in I discovered that all the seats had been taken so I popped a squat next to the door, using the wall as a back rest. The air in the room was permeated by a now thin blue haze and had a rather odd smell to it which didn’t register in my mind. It’s very hard to describe exactly what pot smells like other than, well, pot. The only accurate descriptor I’ve ever heard used is that weed smells like a skunk, but not quite so offensive to the olfactory sensors. But ask anyone who’s ever smoked reefer to smell a little herb or residual smoke and they will identify it immediately as being weed. However, at the time of the party I had never even seen pot before and had no clue what the smell was. I looked around at the other people in the room and recognized no one save one of two juniors from my school, but thanks to the wonderfully calming effects of liquor I was at ease in the situation. Most of the kids were from the local arts school downtown and fit the bohemian mold rather nicely. Most of the guys either looked like wanna-be Rastafarians or groupies for the band Orgy, which for the pop culturally challenged means: black hair, black clothes, pale skin, piercings galore, and copious amounts of mascara. The women generally dressed in various modes of hippie chic, ranging from the flower child throwback look that emphasized poor hygiene and an absence of bras to the more Rasta-girl look that screams pothead to even the most casual onlooker. I, on the other hand, was wearing a sweater from American Eagle and a pair of khaki cargo pants, but I didn’t get one evil eye or snide remark about my preptastic attire. One great aspect of potheads is that they are some of the least judgmental people on the planet. Why do think Jamaicans are so nice and laid back? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not because of their national GDP.
The guy sitting directly across from me was fiddling around with what I now know was joint. He looked a lot like a former US soccer star Alexi Lalas (you know, they guy with the flaming read hair and badass goatee) or the lead singer for The Spin Doctors. The man was very intent on his joint and didn’t look up for quite a long time. Anyone who says potheads are nihilists or slackers has obviously never seen them roll a J. These folk take a great deal of pride in their craft and spend hours perfecting their product with fingers as nimble as a weavers’. When he had finished rolling he lit the joint and began passing it around the room. I’d never so much as smoked a cigarette so when the duchy was passed to my right hand side I declined. In the state I was in I really didn’t need to take any hits, but my surroundings decided to make me take one. I’m not talking about peer pressure, but about hot-boxing. Before I knew it the room had become a microcosm of the Greenhouse Effect and the amount of vodka coursing through my system enabled a ridiculously potent contact high. After about 15 minutes of working to stay awake, I curled up and fell asleep on the floor.
An indeterminate amount of time later I was awakened by the basement den door being opened onto my crumpled body. Everyone in the room except two people on the couch had left the room and I decided it was time to go upstairs. I grabbed my beer and went back out into the main basement area and found that I had to pee really badly. As soon as the urge to urinate hit me I noticed a toilet standing right in front of me. It was as if God had known that I needed to piss and had manifested a toilet to please me, which was odd seeing as I hadn’t been to church in quite some time and was sinning like a banshee that night. I walked up to the toilet, unzipped my fly, and let forth a healthy stream of urine into the toilet. After about fifteen seconds some guy walked right past me and into the basement den. It was then that I realized that there wasn’t a door to this bathroom. As a matter of fact, this wasn’t even a bathroom. It was simply a toilet sitting in the middle of his basement. These thoughts certainly didn’t keep me from relieving myself and I continued to look around as a peed. I glanced down and saw a steady stream of liquid running down the basement floor towards the storm drain in the center of the room. My brain recognized that it was my urine flowing down this mans floor and that this toilet wasn’t connected to anything, but these realizations didn’t provoke any action. I finished peeing and zipped myself up, not neglecting to flush the non-working toilet before I went upstairs. Oddly enough, Alec did the same thing later on that night, proving conclusively that drunks have no concept of internal plumbing.
After my surprisingly unsanitary bathroom break I stumbled back upstairs to the living room where everyone had already begun to pass out. I found an open spot where I could sit down and started watching TV. I was holding on to the same beer that I had picked up in a kitchen more than an hour earlier. I’m not sure if this is a widely experienced phenomenon or simply one of my personal idiosyncrasies, but after I reach a certain level of drunkenness, I find that the act of drinking requires a great deal of work. The process of actually lifting the bottle to my mouth becomes an inordinately difficult task and with every gulp I feel like I’ve just exerted all the energy that my body contains. At that time, drinking that bottle of MGD made me feel like I was on a chain gang slowly chipping away in a rock quarry, each sip knocking off another tiny sliver of shale. It took about 15 minutes of this backbreaking work before I blacked out. At least I assume that I blacked out because when I awoke I was lying asleep underneath a grand piano and the party had died. Alec was shaking my shoulder telling me that we had to go, which even in my drunken haze didn’t make to much sense seeing as neither of us had a car. As it turned out woman who used to go to our high school had taken pity on our neophyte asses and offered to let us sleep it off over in her dorm room at UC.
From that point on my memory has become fairly blurred. However, I am quite sure that my coordination was beyond repair. When we arrived at her dorm complex the woman warned us to stay quiet and try to act normal. This advice fell on very drunk deaf ears. My sense of balance was so bad that I couldn’t avoid hitting the cement guard rails in a parking garage road that was about twenty feet in width. I suspect that I took about 4 steps sideways for every one step forward, and that was with some assistance from Alec and the woman. I also neglected to keep quiet, rambling on like, well, a 15 year old who’s never been drunk to the point of temporary retardation before. As soon as we reached her room I passed out on the floor with all my clothes on and my head resting on a textbook like it was a pillow. I was awakened at 7 o’clock in the morning, once again by the process of shaking me and calling my name, because we had to get out of the dorm before people started milling around. Apparently it’s poor form to have two fifteen year old boys sleeping in your dorm room. Damn puritanical society and it’s stigmatization of teenage sexual relations making me get up at the ass-crack of dawn. Because of this I found myself stumbling down the same parking garage road with no recollection of having seen it before and nursing a hangover that would make even Keith Richards reel a bit. The drive back to Alec’s house was deathly silent, I suspect because all our attention was focused on our throbbing temples. The woman let us off on the side of the road as it lay directly between Alec’s house and mine. We exchanged beleaguered farewells and trudged on home.
As soon as I got in my house I bee lined to the refrigerator and chugged about a quart of orange juice, fully intending to go fall into bed and not wake up until Christmas at the earliest. When I turned around I found my mom standing in the kitchen and tried to think of the least confrontational path up to my room. As I was walking out of the kitchen, my mom informed me that I a dentists appointment, that morning, at 9:30. It was at around that time that I think I lost any vestige of belief in a loving god that remained in my psyche and resigned myself to the life of a cynic. From a theological viewpoint the dentists’ appointment could be seen as an appropriate punishment for my sins of the previous night, namely invoking the god Bacchus with unhealthy frequency. However, God gave his son the ability to change water into booze and I view any divine punishment of mortal drinking habits to be hypocritical and reeking of nepotism.
With my newfound agnosticism in hand my mother drove me downtown to see my dentist and his dreaded assistant. Once there the assistant proceeded to poke, prod, pull, scrape, and buffer my teeth and gums in a manner that suggested a deep admiration for the Marquis de Sade. As I lay back in the banana yellow leather-coated dentists’ chair, listening to infuriating soft rock and having my molars violated while my frontal lobes attempted to burst through my forehead, I vowed never to drink again. I am now quite familiar with this sentiment and get it every now and then if I let myself go a bit too much. However, the hideous confines of the dentists’ office are to the hangover victim as Kryptonite is to Superman. After this experience I didn’t touch a drop of alcohol for almost a year, much to the relief of my liver.
Thankfully I later faced my fears and now can drink again. I personally think it should be produced my lifetime as a made-for-TV movie, but, alas, I am not a woman who has experienced spousal abuse or a member of the cast of Designing Women, so my suggestion was cut down. That being said, I still think this is a good enough drunk story and one that serves a dual purpose. Not only is it a fun yarn to tell to all your friends, but it’s also a useful parenting tool. I don’t know about you, but the second my kid turns fourteen I’m going to get him or her shit-faced on a bottle of Cinnamon Schnapps and schedule a 6:55 dentists appointment for the next morning. That way they’ll have a healthy respect for alcohol and the oral tradition will be passed on to another generation.
When I entered high school liquor became an increasingly prominent feature in my life. I don’t quite know how it happened or what it was about being a high school freshman that served as a catalyst to the introduction of booze into my world, but the same thing happened with most of my friends, leading me to believe that it was probably hormonal. Regardless of why I started drinking, the byproducts of it have put me in a genderless, equal-opportunity fraternity of once, future, and currently intoxicated.--(The rhetoric of this piece so far is a bit misleading, as it gives the impression that I’m probably a raging alcoholic who has frequent “liquid breakfasts” and is on a first-name basis with the owner of the local pony keg. For both the benefit of factual accuracy and my parents mental health, I think it’s important to note that I’m merely a casual drinker who has a tolerance closer to that of a girl scout than that of Slash from Guns ‘N Roses.)-- Seeing as how the Teetotalers lost their political clout over a century ago and with prohibition a distant memory, this fraternity is rather far-reaching. It’s probably the only club in the world that has more members than abstainers. This group includes everybody from the 14-year old kid guiltily sneaking his first sip of bourbon out of his folks’ liquor cabinet to the chronic Alki who’s been in and out of rehab more times than Liz Taylor’s been hitched. Being a club of such grand scale, I think it’s necessary to give the organization a nice, spiffy acronym like S.P.A.B: The Society for the Promotion of Alcoholic Beverages. As for a slogan, I think it would be nice to channel the spirit of Karl Marx, a man who looked like a German hophead if I ever saw one, and use “Drunkards of the world unite!” as our battle cry. The only stipulation for membership is that you need to have been drunk once in your life, and the one thing needed to maintain that membership is the telling of drunken tales.
In the 21st century incarnation of Sodom and Gomorrah that we call western civilization, the “drunk tale” has become our oral tradition. Once you enter high school, odds are one out of every ten stories you hear start with “Dude, I was so wasted”, “What’d I do last night-‘cause I don’t remember shit”, or “So we were just sitting back having some (insert drink here) and…” During your college years this ratio will jump from 1:10 to about 1:3 and the topic sentence of “I had no idea what that stuff was last night, but I think I’m blind in my left eye” will be used with more frequency. Stories of random drunkenness have the wonderful quality of being repetitive, but rarely boring. Most drunk tales start with a bare bones structure that has been used millions of times over, but then take that premise in new directions over time. Just like the oral histories of the ancient Greeks, drunk stories evolve from generation to generation, with each new group of hangover victims leaving their distinct mark. The Greeks had Homer and we have the guy bragging about how he did four keg-stands in fifteen minutes and then vomited in line at White Castle. Not exactly a match of equals, but we’ll take what we can get at S.P.A.B.
For me, the best stories are the ones about the first or second time out drinking when people have low tolerances and high levels of inexperience and naiveté. This might sound a little sick, but the more fucked up a person gets, the better the story is. No one wants to hear a story that crescendos and then abruptly ends with, “and then I went to bed.” What I want in a drunk tale is some combination of public lewdness, complete loss of inhibition and/or bowels, and humiliating experiences; the more embarrassing the better. Another great aspect of the culture of drunk storytelling is that it purges the participant of their past indiscretions by airing them out in public. If you can laugh about that time you did 6 shots of Jaegermeister and hit on an elderly man waiting at the bus stop, you’re better off than if you keep it bottled inside. Plus, I’m better off for having heard the story; everyone wins.
To prove the earnestness of my convictions I’ll recount my first encounters with booze, much to the chagrin of my ever-dwindling dignity. My first time drinking is fairly straight instance of pillaging the liquor reservoirs of our parents. One of my friends was the youngest child of a man in the middle of his second marriage who had 4 kids with his first wife, 2 with the second, and more than 7 decades of life on the books. To say he was a neglectful parent would be cruel and unfair. It was more that he was expected to be a father at an age when he should rightly be reveling in all the joys of being a grandparent: i.e. being able to dote on the kids and play with them without any responsibility or disciplinary measures expected of him. His father was the victim of a familial clerical error that sent him to the same job twice, and he wasn’t quite up to a second go-round at the whole fatherhood thing. What his mother’s excuse was I have very little idea other than relative incompetence. No disrespect intended here, but she had an airy quality about her that made it seem like she never resided in the present. She was the type of person who would start up a conversation with you only to immediately lose interest and drift off into the ether while she continued talking. She most likely had some deep problems occupying her mind, but being a fourteen year old kid I simply thought she was loopy.
As a prime indicator of their parental ineptitude, they let my friend move his bedroom down into their basement with his bed resting directly opposite their unlocked and fully stocked liquor cabinet. One night when a few of us were chilling in his basement, someone suggested we get shit-faced. Being a newbie, I was weaned on very weak screwdrivers for an hour or so until we collectively deemed ourselves drunk enough to start doing shots. This is when the dreaded bottle of Ouzo out for consumption. His father being first generation Greco-American, this very Mediterranean beverage was in great supply. For those who haven’t tasted Ouzo, it’s a lot like a combination of natural black licorice and vodka, and contains a deceptively high proof. Before I knew it we were all lying on his cold linoleum floor bitching about how evil the fairer sex were. I of course joined in the chorus of lamentation despite the fact that in ninth grade the most action I’d ever gotten was during a rather lackluster game of seven minutes in heaven. We all woke up the next morning with heads throbbing and I slowly began walking the 3 miles make to my house, cursing the satanic Ouzo all the way back. To this day I can’t drink an anisette based liquor without cringing a little bit.
I only recount that evening as a prelude to the hangover from hell that accompanied my second night of drinking. It probably would’ve been much better if I got so shit-faced that I ended up relieving the contents of my stomach in the nearest toilet. The lingering peptic acid trickling down my throat and dribbling off my chin would have taught me a sound lesson about the potency of hard booze and instilled me with the grudging respect that liquor leaves on anyone who abuses it. Sadly, I left that night unscathed and blissfully ignorant of how severely liquor could tie my stomach lining into knots. My body would pay in spades for that ignorance.
It was a couple of weeks until I had the chance to drink again. I was hanging out at my best friend Alec’s house one Saturday night when we were invited to a party that some upperclassmen were throwing. Luckily for us Alec was staying with his more liberal-minded Dad that weekend. His Dad was a good man, but he tried a bit too hard to be buddy-buddy with his son, which manifested itself in a level of leniency that probably would have put him out of the running for father-of-the-year. Even at the age of 15 I knew that letting two ninth-graders get picked up for a party that began at 11:30 in the evening wasn’t the best idea. Alec’s Dad knew this as well, but with the proper combination of adolescent whining and false reassurance Alec managed to get his Dad to acquiesce. Our evening was predicated entirely on the premise that there would be a parent present at the party, which was in fact true. The only caveat was that the parent was a forty-something deadbeat mom who drank Vodka like water and taught all of her son’s friends how to properly roll a joint. His Dad wasn’t privy to this information and let us go.
At the time I had never been to a genuine “party” before and had butterflies in my stomach during the car ride over. We were picked up by a possibly the least badass guy in the junior class, evidenced by the fact that he was stuck with the unenviable job of playing chauffeur for two freshmen. Alec and I were going to make up a large portion of the underclassmen at the party and I was determined not to look like a pantywaist, or even someone who would use a term like “pantywaist” in everyday conversation. I thought it imperative that I prove my mettle by holding my liquor like a man, an act which was about as likely as the Washington Generals beating the Harlem Globetrotters. As we pulled up to the house I was frightened by my surroundings. The party house was in a fairly shady neighborhood near the University of Cincinnati and very urban. Being a child of the suburbs, the sight of ’85 Cutlass Supremes blasting DMX and homeless men drinking out of brown paper bags on the corner of the local 7-11 was a bit of a change. After getting over my minor culture shock, I walked up to the house with Alec and entered the house with the familiar stutter-step of someone who’s unsure he belongs in the place he’s about to enter. I knew next to no one at the party and was adequately intimidated by the plethora of upperclassmen staring at me. At least I had convinced myself that they were all staring at me and I squeezed my way through a sea of firmly clutched beers into the kitchen. In the kitchen was the host’s mother, who was talking in Spanish to what I can only assume was her boyfriend and pounding back what I can only assume was one in a very long line of cocktails that she had imbibed that night. I wandered over to the kitchen counter and picked up a bottle of Miller Genuine Draft apprehensively. I glanced over at the mother, then back at the beer, and once more at the mother, but her eyes never once strayed my way. As I opened the bottle of MGD I was still in awe at the parental neglect I had just been witness to. If I had so much looked at a beer the wrong way when I was fifteen my mom would have flipped a shit. This woman treated my underage drinking like I was just grabbing a bottle of Sunny D. This was both unbelievably cool and somewhat unnerving.
I walked down a flight of stairs and entered what was a startlingly dank basement. It looked more like the boiler room from Nightmare on Elm Street than the bottom floor of someone’s house. The room was nothing but a collection of pipes entering and exiting the ceilings and walls of a dusty concrete box, with a giant drain in the middle of the floor. That drain will prove to be important later on. To the left of the staircase was a door that led to the more sanitary wing of the basement. Inside the door was a small area about the size of a two-person dorm room, and was filled with ratty, but surprisingly comfortable couches along with a table and chairs in the center. When I went into the room I was relieved to find Bill McGrath sitting at the table in front of me. Bill was the older brother of Pat McGrath, one of my good friends in my own grade, so I knew Bill fairly well from spending a good deal of time at his house. Bill is a remarkably good-tempered man as are his brother and father. Bill’s mother, Linda, is, to put it as nicely as possible, a strong-willed woman from New Jersey. This woman should be forced to wear one of those BIOHAZARD stickers on her person at all times, as she is a combustible entity that rivals nitroglycerin. Multiple times during my adolescence my I bore this woman’s wrath and had to be put up in sick bay for days afterwards. In her defense, I most likely deserved the verbal assault every time she lashed out at me, and her outbursts are infinitely entertaining when aimed at people other than me. Plus she makes bitchin’ chocolate chip pancakes.
Bill, however, received none of his mother’s unbridled rage from the McGrath family gene pool, and was jovial 24-7. When I sat down at the table across from him, Bill was brushing back his long, and fairly greasy, black hair while looking askance at a couple going at it on the couch next to us. I vaguely new the guy on the couch-I think he was Argentinean-and I had no clue who the girl was, but knew that she was far too good looking to be with that guy. Bill was holding a handle of Smirnoff in his hand and asked me if I wanted to do shots with him. I of course said “yes,” because I still needed to maintain my ever dwindling sense of machismo. Agreeing to this was a horrible idea for two reasons. First off, I had never done shots before and had no idea how quickly they will fuck you up or how many I needed to get me fucked up. The correct answer to the last question is probably about two because I was a lightweight in more ways than one. This leads directly to the second problem with this idea, which was the man I was doing shots with. Bill McGrath kept alive the validity of the stereotype that says the Irish can hold their liquor. However, I don’t think that Bill’s ancestry was the main reason that he could drink me under the table. I think it was more that, even though he was only 2 or 3 inches taller than me, Bill outweighed me by a good hundred pounds. Not only that, but the man was two years older than me and had a considerable advantage on the tolerance front.
That having been said, we began trading shots. The vodka tasted horrible in my mouth and I tried to wash the taste down with MGD, but I didn’t like the taste of beer either and it just compounded the nastiness in my mouth. I kept on taking shots because I didn’t want Bill to think I was a pussy and because I knew that this stuff would eventually get me crunk as hell. I tried to stop breathing in with my nose when I took the next couple of shots because I knew from my 7th grade science fair project that 70% of taste is related to smell. I probably should’ve done that project on varying blood-alcohol-contents based on weight, as that would have alerted me of the remarkable idiocy of what I was doing. After doing about 6 or 7 shots I picked up my nearly empty beer and slowly ambled out of the room and back up the stairs. I was in that wonderful early euphoric state of drunkenness where you still have limited control of your body and your head feels fuzzy like static on a TV screen. I grabbed another MGD off of the kitchen counter and went into the living room where Mallrats was playing. I plopped down on the floor immediately thinking, “I love Mallrats,” a reaction that I would have drunk or sober. Someone had a basket of pretzels that tasted abnormally salty like I was just eating the solid grains of salt that come on those doughy Super Pretzels at baseball games. This was especially unpleasant for me because I normally knock all the salt off of soft pretzels when I get them. In my disgust, I attempted to head upstairs to the bathroom, very clumsily stepping over the sea of bodies lying on the floor and the one unfortunate soul who had passed out on the steps. When I reached the bathroom I found it occupied, and being in no state to exercise patience, I made my way all the way back to the basement.
In the time that I had been upstairs the small basement den had become crammed with people. As I walked in I discovered that all the seats had been taken so I popped a squat next to the door, using the wall as a back rest. The air in the room was permeated by a now thin blue haze and had a rather odd smell to it which didn’t register in my mind. It’s very hard to describe exactly what pot smells like other than, well, pot. The only accurate descriptor I’ve ever heard used is that weed smells like a skunk, but not quite so offensive to the olfactory sensors. But ask anyone who’s ever smoked reefer to smell a little herb or residual smoke and they will identify it immediately as being weed. However, at the time of the party I had never even seen pot before and had no clue what the smell was. I looked around at the other people in the room and recognized no one save one of two juniors from my school, but thanks to the wonderfully calming effects of liquor I was at ease in the situation. Most of the kids were from the local arts school downtown and fit the bohemian mold rather nicely. Most of the guys either looked like wanna-be Rastafarians or groupies for the band Orgy, which for the pop culturally challenged means: black hair, black clothes, pale skin, piercings galore, and copious amounts of mascara. The women generally dressed in various modes of hippie chic, ranging from the flower child throwback look that emphasized poor hygiene and an absence of bras to the more Rasta-girl look that screams pothead to even the most casual onlooker. I, on the other hand, was wearing a sweater from American Eagle and a pair of khaki cargo pants, but I didn’t get one evil eye or snide remark about my preptastic attire. One great aspect of potheads is that they are some of the least judgmental people on the planet. Why do think Jamaicans are so nice and laid back? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not because of their national GDP.
The guy sitting directly across from me was fiddling around with what I now know was joint. He looked a lot like a former US soccer star Alexi Lalas (you know, they guy with the flaming read hair and badass goatee) or the lead singer for The Spin Doctors. The man was very intent on his joint and didn’t look up for quite a long time. Anyone who says potheads are nihilists or slackers has obviously never seen them roll a J. These folk take a great deal of pride in their craft and spend hours perfecting their product with fingers as nimble as a weavers’. When he had finished rolling he lit the joint and began passing it around the room. I’d never so much as smoked a cigarette so when the duchy was passed to my right hand side I declined. In the state I was in I really didn’t need to take any hits, but my surroundings decided to make me take one. I’m not talking about peer pressure, but about hot-boxing. Before I knew it the room had become a microcosm of the Greenhouse Effect and the amount of vodka coursing through my system enabled a ridiculously potent contact high. After about 15 minutes of working to stay awake, I curled up and fell asleep on the floor.
An indeterminate amount of time later I was awakened by the basement den door being opened onto my crumpled body. Everyone in the room except two people on the couch had left the room and I decided it was time to go upstairs. I grabbed my beer and went back out into the main basement area and found that I had to pee really badly. As soon as the urge to urinate hit me I noticed a toilet standing right in front of me. It was as if God had known that I needed to piss and had manifested a toilet to please me, which was odd seeing as I hadn’t been to church in quite some time and was sinning like a banshee that night. I walked up to the toilet, unzipped my fly, and let forth a healthy stream of urine into the toilet. After about fifteen seconds some guy walked right past me and into the basement den. It was then that I realized that there wasn’t a door to this bathroom. As a matter of fact, this wasn’t even a bathroom. It was simply a toilet sitting in the middle of his basement. These thoughts certainly didn’t keep me from relieving myself and I continued to look around as a peed. I glanced down and saw a steady stream of liquid running down the basement floor towards the storm drain in the center of the room. My brain recognized that it was my urine flowing down this mans floor and that this toilet wasn’t connected to anything, but these realizations didn’t provoke any action. I finished peeing and zipped myself up, not neglecting to flush the non-working toilet before I went upstairs. Oddly enough, Alec did the same thing later on that night, proving conclusively that drunks have no concept of internal plumbing.
After my surprisingly unsanitary bathroom break I stumbled back upstairs to the living room where everyone had already begun to pass out. I found an open spot where I could sit down and started watching TV. I was holding on to the same beer that I had picked up in a kitchen more than an hour earlier. I’m not sure if this is a widely experienced phenomenon or simply one of my personal idiosyncrasies, but after I reach a certain level of drunkenness, I find that the act of drinking requires a great deal of work. The process of actually lifting the bottle to my mouth becomes an inordinately difficult task and with every gulp I feel like I’ve just exerted all the energy that my body contains. At that time, drinking that bottle of MGD made me feel like I was on a chain gang slowly chipping away in a rock quarry, each sip knocking off another tiny sliver of shale. It took about 15 minutes of this backbreaking work before I blacked out. At least I assume that I blacked out because when I awoke I was lying asleep underneath a grand piano and the party had died. Alec was shaking my shoulder telling me that we had to go, which even in my drunken haze didn’t make to much sense seeing as neither of us had a car. As it turned out woman who used to go to our high school had taken pity on our neophyte asses and offered to let us sleep it off over in her dorm room at UC.
From that point on my memory has become fairly blurred. However, I am quite sure that my coordination was beyond repair. When we arrived at her dorm complex the woman warned us to stay quiet and try to act normal. This advice fell on very drunk deaf ears. My sense of balance was so bad that I couldn’t avoid hitting the cement guard rails in a parking garage road that was about twenty feet in width. I suspect that I took about 4 steps sideways for every one step forward, and that was with some assistance from Alec and the woman. I also neglected to keep quiet, rambling on like, well, a 15 year old who’s never been drunk to the point of temporary retardation before. As soon as we reached her room I passed out on the floor with all my clothes on and my head resting on a textbook like it was a pillow. I was awakened at 7 o’clock in the morning, once again by the process of shaking me and calling my name, because we had to get out of the dorm before people started milling around. Apparently it’s poor form to have two fifteen year old boys sleeping in your dorm room. Damn puritanical society and it’s stigmatization of teenage sexual relations making me get up at the ass-crack of dawn. Because of this I found myself stumbling down the same parking garage road with no recollection of having seen it before and nursing a hangover that would make even Keith Richards reel a bit. The drive back to Alec’s house was deathly silent, I suspect because all our attention was focused on our throbbing temples. The woman let us off on the side of the road as it lay directly between Alec’s house and mine. We exchanged beleaguered farewells and trudged on home.
As soon as I got in my house I bee lined to the refrigerator and chugged about a quart of orange juice, fully intending to go fall into bed and not wake up until Christmas at the earliest. When I turned around I found my mom standing in the kitchen and tried to think of the least confrontational path up to my room. As I was walking out of the kitchen, my mom informed me that I a dentists appointment, that morning, at 9:30. It was at around that time that I think I lost any vestige of belief in a loving god that remained in my psyche and resigned myself to the life of a cynic. From a theological viewpoint the dentists’ appointment could be seen as an appropriate punishment for my sins of the previous night, namely invoking the god Bacchus with unhealthy frequency. However, God gave his son the ability to change water into booze and I view any divine punishment of mortal drinking habits to be hypocritical and reeking of nepotism.
With my newfound agnosticism in hand my mother drove me downtown to see my dentist and his dreaded assistant. Once there the assistant proceeded to poke, prod, pull, scrape, and buffer my teeth and gums in a manner that suggested a deep admiration for the Marquis de Sade. As I lay back in the banana yellow leather-coated dentists’ chair, listening to infuriating soft rock and having my molars violated while my frontal lobes attempted to burst through my forehead, I vowed never to drink again. I am now quite familiar with this sentiment and get it every now and then if I let myself go a bit too much. However, the hideous confines of the dentists’ office are to the hangover victim as Kryptonite is to Superman. After this experience I didn’t touch a drop of alcohol for almost a year, much to the relief of my liver.
Thankfully I later faced my fears and now can drink again. I personally think it should be produced my lifetime as a made-for-TV movie, but, alas, I am not a woman who has experienced spousal abuse or a member of the cast of Designing Women, so my suggestion was cut down. That being said, I still think this is a good enough drunk story and one that serves a dual purpose. Not only is it a fun yarn to tell to all your friends, but it’s also a useful parenting tool. I don’t know about you, but the second my kid turns fourteen I’m going to get him or her shit-faced on a bottle of Cinnamon Schnapps and schedule a 6:55 dentists appointment for the next morning. That way they’ll have a healthy respect for alcohol and the oral tradition will be passed on to another generation.