It’s hard to admit that one spent the majority of their life fighting with alcohol, but that was me. The doctors say self-medicating, others call it courage in a bottle. I liked the effect of passing out stoned cold blind…and not having the nightmare.
One of the major symptoms of PTSD is the reliance on alcohol or drugs, but this becomes an ill-fated means of coping. Like most of my other coping skills, the alcohol was a way for me to escape the reality of being raped. The event itself was very short in relation to the after effects, like drinking from the age of 14.
By my calculations I had used and abused alcohol for 37 years, more than 50% of my entire life. It started in 1971 and ended in 2008. How it started is an easy enough story to tell, how I stopped not so much. Alcohol had me down to the bottom, like ending up in jail down kind of bottom.
That wasn’t enough for me to stop. Well, to be truthful I was ordered to stop, to get to a rehab the minute I walked out of the jail. A condition of release. But that’s another story.
My older brother started it off, the middle one, the renegade. The one with his own life-long problem with alcohol. Maybe I’ll relate his story at a later time, just understand he had his own issues with dad, and the constant moving for his entire childhood life.
This is the same brother that had a t-shirt made up with his favorite nick-namefor me, “Fat _____” (insert your name here for the effect). This was right when the Cosby Kids cartoon came out, “Fat Albert”. Funny eh? Dark blue with cream colored letters. I still have it, all tattered and torn from years of wear and tear and sweat and dirt.
But I digress.
I don’t remember the exact circumstances, as he was told to watch over me while my folks went off somewhere. Must have been a week-long excursion, because by the age of 12 it was common for them to go out all night and just leave me alone to fend for myself.
On this particular weekend, my brother who was attending college at the time had to baby-sit his “baby” brother. It didn’t matter to him one way or another as I certainly wasn’t going to get in his way of his pre-planned weekend fun. A hot day in the middle of semester, the university is at capacity.
My brother was a partier and a schemer by the way. The following story is typical of him. Keep in mind the year and social norms. After the 60’s protests and riots at all campuses around the country, the police just let the students have their fun – as long as things didn’t get too out of control.
Saturday started around 11:00 am, when the liquor store opened of course. But this wasn’t a typical beer run. We pulled around back, rang the bell, and proceeded to load 15 full kegs with 2 taps straight into the back of his pickup. Next, a quick trip to the ice plant where we pulled under the long chute designed for filling large trucks.
We covered all the kegs in ice, threw a tarp over the whole thing and headed to the local market. There we bought out every red plastic 16 ounce cup they had, the type everyone has at their picnic. We also grabbed 2 black markers, a roll of tape and 4 bright yellow poster boards.
From there we drove up near campus, into a student housing area consisting of 8 buildings set in two large quads both with large expanses of lawn in between. Each building was 3 stories high, and was nothing but one small student apartment after another. Hundreds. A common walkway existed out front of each floor, with railings on the upper levels.
The quads were an area of a lot of coming and going. Hundreds of college students on a Saturday waiting for night to fall and the party to begin.
We were the party.
Ignoring any rules or parking signs, my brother pulled right into the middle lawn of the first quad and parked. He wrote “All the beer you can drink $10 a cup” on the poster board, taped them to the sides and tailgate of the truck. And with that, the party began.
My job? Sit on top of the pile of beer and ice, with 2 kegs tapped, one in each hand, and fill cups all afternoon and evening. My brother, his girlfriend and another couple handed out the cups, wrote the magic word on the side, and collected the money. Lots of money and lots of students.
All afternoon and into the evening someone played music on a record player, apartment doors stayed open, and a big swarm of partying students came and went.
Sometime during the party I took the tap and took a big swig between filling. My brother laughed, the girls thought it was funny, cute, “look at his little brother partying”.
I looked 16. I was tall and fat. A big kid.
But I was 14 years old getting drunk for the first time, showing off, clowning around and passing out sometime early in the night on someone’s couch, in someone’s apartment.
I don’t recall getting home or going to bed. That would be the first of many times not remembering what the alcohol had turned me into.
That’s when it started. The first time getting drunk became every time getting drunk. Never actually craving a drink, but when I did drink there was only one purpose…pass out cold. Turn off all the noise in my head.
No matter if I became a clown or a monster, it served a purpose.
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