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Tuesday, June 10, 2008
I BEEN DRINKING
DeYarmond Edison
Bickett Gallery Residency
self-released : 2006
My parents are lifelong teetotallers, so maybe it's weird that my first taste of alcohol was administered by them. I must've been in elementary school, and we were visiting my maternal grandparents. My immediate family is not a hard-drinking family, although we come from a hard-drinking line. My maternal great-grandfather smoked cigarettes and drank whiskey all his life and lived into his 80s; near the end he would just sit in his bathtub with a Texas gallon, his fingernails and toenails carbuncular with nicotine. My mother loved her grandfather but also used him as something as a cautionary tale for young Brian, and sometimes played me against him. I remember once, when I was really little, my mom told me to tell my great-grandfather that I wished he wouldn't smoke, and while I recall having no such wish, I dutifully told him what my mother instructed me to tell him. In retrospect I resent this manipulation a little, in the same way one grows to resent being lied to about Santa Claus, whatever good intentions were involved. (If finding out the truth about Santa Claus was traumatic, imagine when I found out about God.)
But so on this one visit to my grandparents' house, I found a little airplane bottle of whiskey in a drawer. I don't remember how I came to be offered a taste of it - probably I expressed curiosity. I do remember how the centimeter or so of goldish-brown, chemically scented whiskey looked at the bottom of a paper Dixie cup, and how foul and alien it tasted, and how I then resolved, much to my mother's satisfaction, that it was "yucky" and that I didn't understand why people drank it. To hear her tell it, beer tasted even worse.
There was obviously never drinking alcohol around my home, but my mother had a bottle of Creme de Menthe on a high shelf that she used to bake these really yummy Creme de Menthe brownies. In the summertime, while my parents were at work, I would get the bottle down and drink small swigs of it, much to my four-years-younger brother's trepidation and intrigue, eventually convincing him to drink it too. We never drank enough to get drunk (although perhaps my little brother got a bit loopy once or twice), or for my mother to notice the diminishing bottle. Only in adulthood have we even told my mother about this, which has joined the roster of her favorite childhood-related stories to tell about us. I realize that my current, fairly moderate alcohol ingestion still makes my mom a little uneasy, in part because her lifelong teetotalling has rendered the effects of alcohol out of all proportion to reality in her mind, partly because, never having developed a taste for it, she doesn't understand why anyone would drink it besides getting wasted and embarassing themselves, and partly (probably mostly) because of the extremely self-destructive substance use of my teenage years.
DRINK AWAY THE PAIN (SITUATIONS)
Mobb Deep
The Infamous
RCA : 1995
[Buy It]
Perhaps appropriately, my memory of the first time I actually got drunk is muddled. It might have involved Zima, although I prefer to believe this is not the case. It might have involved the day when my friend and I raided his parents liquor cabinet, made a vile concoction of pretty much everything in it, and proceeded to jump on his trampoline while we drank it (that we did this without getting sick blows my mind, but the young are made of tough stuff). But the closest thing I have to a true memory of my first time getting drunk is this: one friend of mine's family lived on a farm, and that farm had a log cabin that was remote from the house, which my friend's grandfather had built. Much of my early substance use took place at this cabin, which had a fireplace and decent chairs and a bed where we could spend the night. Up in the rafters, we found a jug of moonshine that my friend's grandfather had made. It was cloudy pink and contained floating flecks of something dark. I'm amazed it didn't blind us. But after consuming some quantity of this moonshine, I remember going to a punk show at the local Exchange Club (one of those shadowy organizations like the Elks Lodge or Rotary Club), laying on the floor with a spinny head while punk kids either pretended to or maybe actually spit on me. (Another booze related memory - coming home at 5 am after having snuck out to a party to find my father unexpectedly awake, and trying to explain A) where I'd been and B) why I was covered in chocolate pudding.) I remember going home to my friend's house and discovering that his mother had cooked up a deer (these were country people), and I remember eating some of this deer despite the fact that it turned my stomach because I was afraid of seeming strange or drunk.
After that, trying to procure and then find places to drink alcohol began to take up a significant portion of my time (although I wasn't as hard a drinker as many of my friends, who would drink hard liquor before school in the mornings - I liked to drink, but I preferred weed.) One event that stands out in my mind with great clarity was called "Plan Z." Some older boys at the high school told my friends and me that they'd had to ditch a case of some vile beer (Milwaukee's Best, I think) in the weeds by a convenience store because of some dust-up with the police, and that the booze was probably still there. In English class we drew up a map - the aforementioned "Plan Z" - that showed where the beer was suspected to be in relation to where we were, and plotted a SWAT-team-like operation to procure it. (It's not as if a map was necessary, we could have just gone and gotten it - but my budding nihilism was still warring with my native precocity, and I'm pretty sure "Plan Z" was my idea.)
We skipped the next period (the various insane ways my friends and I contrived to escape from school, like driving madly out of the student parking lot, down a steep grassy grade, and into the unguarded bus lot of the elementary school next door, are a post unto themselves) and put Plan Z into action, which involved a screeching halt at the suspected location, fake walkie-talkie cries of "Go Go Go!", a commando raid on the weeds by the convenience store in broad daylight, and, miraculously, the procurement of said case of beer, just where the older kids said it would be (I'm still amazed that this wasn't a snipe hunt, and never got clear on why the older kids didn't just go back for the beer themselves). It turns out my mother was right - beer, especially the cheap beer we favored, tasted foul, and I set about learning to like it with near-suicidal resolve. The discovery of the "beer bong," a funnel and tube that allowed you to down a beer in seconds, helped on this score.
And I did, somehow, grow to like bad beer (now I drink decent wine and good beer, and the idea of drinking 12 PBRs seems not just repulsive but impossible). But the freewheeling days of Plan Z began to shade into darker territory rather quickly. The first time I was caught driving drunk by my parents remains a black day in my memory; I remember how sad and terrified they were, and rightly so - I was so young and naive, and I gave myself so many chances to die. The first time I got caught, I'd been drinking 40s of malt liquour at a party and came home reeking - I just didn't care. The next time, I was grounded for months, months which included a new year's eve. But I just snuck out. Me and all of my friends drove drunk, we were invincible! We really were. But shortly after high school, our invincibility ran out. My friend Jeff H. left one party we were all at around 4 in the morning, after drinking keg beer and doing cocaine. For reasons we'll never know, Jeff didn't go home, but instead drove several miles past his house, doing well over 100, before he spun off the road and disintegrated in the trees. Literally disintegrated, car, Jeff, and all. I remember going to the site with my friends the next day, marveling at the skid marks and the strewn detritus, wracked with something that was grief but also more than grief - our invincibility was over. Suddenly, we were mortal. I'm looking at Jeff's initials, tattooed on my right bicep, right now - "JFH, 1979-1999." Only years later would I come to understand that this memorial for Jeff was actually a memorial for my own childhood. Six months to the day after Jeff's death, another friend of mine died in pretty much the same way, and I started angling away from this group of friends and this lifestyle, fearing what would happen in six more.
DRINKING AT THE DAM
Smog
A River Ain't Too Much to Love
Drag City : 2005
[Buy It]
Now, as previously mentioned, I drink decent wine (good wine when I can afford it) and good beer (wheat beers with lemon or orange are my current favorites). I sit on my porch and have a nice cold wheat beer with lemon and read and think about how lucky I am to have come through all that danger, scarred but intact, and how good it is to drink a cold wheat beer on one's porch rather than slamming down vile swill through a tube. Sometimes when I go out I drink vodka tonics with lime; sometimes I do still drink to excess, like the night when I went to read with a bunch of other poet friends in Atlanta a few years ago and we collectively drank a couple hundred dollars in Jaegermeister shots and my face got fucked up in the parking lot somehow. But this is more of a release valve than a way of life, and I find myself drunk less and less often. The great thing about getting older is realizing that the world is too interesting to be hazed or obscured all the time, locating interest in things outside of internal sensation. Learning to taste a beer and enjoy it because it tastes good and relaxes you. I feel grateful to have survived my excesses for long enough to receive these lessons, while others fell along the way.Labels: booze, brian
posted by Brian
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