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Drunkenness is simply voluntary insanity.
_______Seneca

Better sleep with a sober cannibal that a drunken Christian.
_______Herman Melville

The liquid in the glass is ice cold, moving on its own around the frozen cubes, threatening, promising, seducing. It is amber or clear and when you swallow, it takes your breath away. It is Vodka, Gin, Rum, Scotch, Irish whiskey, Tequila, Brandy and, Bourbon. It makes brothers of strangers and strangers of brothers.

I was initiated early.

My first experience with alcohol was when I was three of four years old. Standing in the small kitchen in my parent’s home I watched intently as my mother made one of her delicious fruit cakes. If the idea of fruit cakes turns you off it is because you have never had one like my mother made. Baked early in the holidays it was filled with the freshest candied fruits including red and green cherries, currants and Pineapple. It contained Brazil nuts, Pecans, Walnuts and all this packed in and surrounded by the most delicious amber colored sweet cake, moist and aromatic. The cake, if a word like “cake” can describe what the incredible concoction really is, was put away wrapped in foil after baking and daily splashed with Bourbon, succulent and melting. It was a treasure, coveted, thinly sliced and parceled out only to special guests with steamy hot coffee and heavy cream. It was not a simple thing to be shared with children and those who could not appreciate the exotic flavors. It was for the connoisseur’s pallet and was not wasted on the uninitiated. The white porcelain topped table in the middle of the small kitchen was covered with sacks of flour, bowls of nuts, beautiful candied fruit, assorted bottles of amber colored liquid, half filled bowls and vials of exotic herbs and spices. It was December and the room was steamy and warm, smelling of oranges, apples, cloves, Anise, cinnamon, vanilla and other aromatic cooking things. It swept over you like a tsunami. Mother was a wonderful cook, having learned most of her skills at the hip of my grandmother who was phenomenal in the kitchen. She must have been pretty Phenomenal in the bed room as well, since she and grandpa had ten children. Of course, to be fair there was no television at the time. The wonderful odors thickening the kitchen air made my mouth fill with saliva and run over. It all seemed so incredibly enticing I could not resist helping myself to the food scraps, raisins and sugar leavings around the edges of the table that I could reach. It all fell prey to my sticky grasping fingers especially the dusting of granulated sugar. I got it by first sticking my finger into the saliva adhesive in my mouth and pressing it into the sugar, then back on to my tongue. It was delicious! Standing on my tip toes I then reached up onto the small table and grabbed one bottle by the neck and turned it up to my lips, much as a seasoned alcoholic might do. The warm fluid streamed down my throat and hit my stomach with a small explosion. The stomach did not cooperate and promptly sent the explosive liquid back up to the point it had entered into my small body. There in its rush to evacuate, it shot out of my mouth and split between my nostrils and spewed out with unexpected force. Ninety proof Bourbon racing through the nasal passage way was less than pleasant. There was no mirror in the kitchen but had there been I am sure I would have seen a small mushroom shaped cloud forming directly above and attached to the top of my head. The screams that came out of my mouth were scary in pitch and volume and although I was a child who screamed frequently, it alerted the entire house that something was terribly wrong. Having expelled the alcohol with such force I had surely dirtied my pants in the process. My screams were punctuated with coughing, gagging, spluttering and more screams. The family members that were home, mainly my older brothers raced into the kitchen to see what had happened. After the crisis passed they all bent double laughing and slapping their knees. They thought the whole scenario was very funny and talked about it for many days. My first experience with this volatile liquid left me determined to avoid it at all costs, forever.

Forever however, is a long time.

As a child I experimented with alcohol extensively whenever I got the chance. Fortunately the fascinating liquid was usually unavailable; otherwise I might have become a serious drinker early on. Years later when we had visitors come to our beach cabin there would always be a fair amount of drinking by some of the adults. Frequently a pint bottle of Bourbon or Vodka would be left out on the chest near the card table, accidentally. When the adults had finished all their talking, drinking and card games and had gone to their respective bed rooms I would turn their bottles up and drink what I could stand from them. It was always painful at first but eventually the pleasure would outweigh the pain. That feeling of well being would set in and everything would seem better. Usually I remembered to fill the bottle back up with water to the level it had been before I drank from it. The parents and guests never suspected anything.

They couldn't imagine such a thing.

Across the street from our home lived a boy with whom I was very close. He was a year or two younger than me but we were still great friends. His mother was a serious alcoholic and one of the sweetest women I have ever met. The father drank as well but never developed the addictive problems that the mother had. Bob and I always did what we could get away with and that was plenty. Since there was always liquor in their house that no one kept track of, we had a constant supply of alcohol. Behind their large two story Dutch Colonial house was a garage apartment where we had a sort of club house. More things went on there than anyone could imagine or want to know about. The drinking was formidable and Bob was always way ahead of anyone else participating. I never thought there was anything much wrong with what we were doing until one night Bob went over the edge, even for me. It involved a speeding ticket he had gotten from a local police officer. Early one afternoon Bob and I started drinking and he became obsessed with the policeman that had given him a speeding ticket. He wanted revenge. Since we, in no way could do anything to the actual policeman we kidnapped one of those metal figures that was painted to resemble a traffic guard used at intersections and school crossings. The standing faux policeman (about five or six feet tall) had a white painted sash across his chest and held an hexagonal sign that said, slow. He had an obnoxious smile with very white painted teeth. There was something about the teeth Bob could not tolerate. He had decided that when he got drunk enough, later that night he was going to knock the crossing guard’s teeth out. It seemed to make sense to me at the time. At one point during the evening Bob had drunk so much he threw up into a large brandy snifter he was drinking from. Very nonchalantly he took his finger and pushed the vomit to one side in the glass and proceeded to drink more from the liquid beneath. I said, "Bob, you are so sick, that's the grossest thing I have ever seen!" Bob replied, "Fuck you!" In fact it was the grossest thing I had ever seen. I got up and stumbled out of the garage apartment. Bob was too far gone to know or care. This was when I realized he was a world class drinker. I was an amateur. I did not see Bob for a few days and when I did his right hand was in a cast from the elbow down to his finger tips. He had indeed knocked the teeth out of the policeman's face but in doing so had fractured almost all the bones in his right hand and wrist.


Bob was not the kind of person who would lie to or betray a friend, even an unworthy one.

Much later Bob was married and had two children but like his mother, was plagued by a serious drinking problem all his life. After his divorce his life spiraled downwards with many pointless jobs and relationships. He even spent time in the local jail for writing bad checks. While he was incarcerated he volunteered to work on the sides of the road, as a way to get out of jail for a few hours each day. On one of his outings he caught a large corn stake on the side of the road, secreted it into a paper bag and smuggled it back to his jail cell. That evening as one of the guards brought him his dinner he threw the snake into the man's face. The guard beat him with a night stick until he had to be hospitalized. The details of what actually happened were sketchy and never fully explained. If all this were even true or not, I never discovered. Bob and I had lost touch and everything about the incident was passed around through many mouths and ears. Years later I learned that Bob had been killed while riding a motorcycle out on the four lane when he pulled out in front of an oncoming truck. There is no doubt I was partially responsible for Bob's death. Why did any of it have to happen in that way? Why did we head down that destructive path at such an early age? What were we trying to prove? Why did I turn away to save myself and abandon him for the rest of his life, to alcoholism and eventual destruction?

Could anyone have saved him and did he want to be saved?

During my stint at military school access to alcohol was impossible until my final year. I had become an officer in the cadet corps and consequently had more freedom that most of the other students. My room was located in the junior barracks and was a block or so from the actual campus. Out in the woods behind the barracks where I stayed was a ravine of sorts and deep woods. There I secreted alcohol, smuggled back from rare trips away from campus. One of my roommates would go out back at the break following the three hours long study period. We would swill down enough of the forbidden liquid to get a good buzz going and then return to our room, extremely jubilant. Having alcohol in any form was an honor council offence and expulsion was the penalty. No one ever suspected anything and we continued our dangerous exploits for the rest of the academic year. I now attribute our foolish ways to total boredom. Frequently on the Saturday nights we were allowed to go to town we obtained beer from an elderly black man who worked at the local service station and was more than willing to buy us alcohol for a small tip. We drank the beer as fast as we could to promote a quick high and then went to the movie theater and watched whatever movie was playing. We laughed hysterically at the movie no matter what it was, a brief respite from the military routine that bored most of us to tears.

My first year at the University of Alabama, alcohol was surprisingly available and since I rarely went to class (being totally lost and unprepared for the pre-Med classes I was enrolled in) much of my time was spent in the search for fun. Living away from campus in a rented room in with other guys, there was little to focus on except unhealthy pursuits. I sought them out as though it were a virtue. The second year at the University I started taking art classes and loved it. The students in these classes were very interesting as were the professors. It was in the first art class I met the girl I would eventually marry. Getting to know these truly interesting people was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. I attended class with great anticipation, worked hard, made excellent grades and became close to many of the students and faculty in that department.

Frequently there were parties.

The first I heard about one particular party was on Thursday. It was the middle of August and an acquaintance from art class announced a Halloween party at his apartment for the upcoming Saturday night. At first I thought it was a pretty stupid idea to have a Halloween party in the middle of August, but the more I thought about it, the better I liked it. It kind of went along with the “Dadaist” art movement that I had recently learned about in art history class. Found objects, weird performances and nonsensical kinds of artistic efforts, typified the Dada movement. Doing something that did not really make any sense appealed to me on several different levels, so why not a Halloween party in the middle of August? The problem was that it was going to be a costume party. Having spent all my high school years in a military school, that sort of frivolity had escaped me almost all together. The only party that ever happened at the Military school was a formal dance which was little to no fun. A lot of beautiful girls came with their cadet dates but all were totally untouchable. They wore large pastel colored ball gowns with hair piled high and frozen with hair spray. They moved about the dance floor like upturned camellia blossoms floating in water. These girls were breath taking and exotic beyond description to all of us cadets in the military school. Like wonderful soft, delicious aliens that could be gazed upon, smelled and desired after but only at a distance. There was a girl that frequented our lunch hall on Sundays and other rare occasions, daughter of a faculty member. She was incredibly beautiful, blond, olive skin, poised and when she walked into that basement lunch hall the whole place became as silent as a tomb. It was as though she had stolen our breath. The cadets couldn't talk until she was seated and even then they craned their necks just to get a brief glimpse of her. We looked intently as if memorizing what we could of her in those brief moments she was in site. When she moved I could imagine her body parts moving against her silent, silken under garments, what she smelled like and above all what she must have felt like, the goose bumps on her thighs, the indentation where her bra strap cut into her shoulder and back. Every Sunday night at lights out the entire cadet corps was registering a seven on the Richter scale, vibrating under the covers of our beds from the masturbating, most I am sure thinking about the tan, sensuous, voluptuous, beautiful Gail. It took forever to get used to having girls sitting next to me in class when I finally went to a coed school. Sitting next to a one was a whole different experience. Like being seated next to something radioactive!

And many of them certainly were!

Having decided to go to the costume party there was one big problem, the costume. Absolutely nothing came to mind. I had always been fascinated by the old horror movies I watched as a little boy in the flickering darkness at the Ritz Theater in Dothan Alabama. Boris Karloff made up as Frankenstein staring malevolently into the camera saying, “Arugggg!” and scaring the living crap out of me. James Arness as “The Thing” was one of the all time scary movies, or so it seemed at that age. In the arctic a group of scientists inadvertently thaw a creature from outer space and all hell breaks loose. When the creature broke through the greenhouse door my friend Charles and I actually leaped from our seats, raced up the aisles and exited the theater at a full run. The movie was released in 1951 and I was seven or eight years old. To this day I cannot imagine what my parents were thinking by letting me go to a horror movie that was so intense when I was in the second grade, if they even knew. It was, by the way the first movie that had featured a space monster on film and was directed by Howard Hawks. I totally bought it! The old monster magazines fascinated me when I was a small child and I had quite a collection of them. David, my brother always said that it was because I had so much in common with them. There was a coat hanger that I had with the face and head of the mummy on it. The shoulders of the creature were where the article of clothing hung, the head loomed menacingly above. It stayed in my closet with a robe hanging on it. Every time I opened the closet door there was the mummy standing there staring out. It always gave me a terrible start upon seeing this apparition no matter how often I opened the door. One of our maids claimed that particular coat hanger caused her to have an attack of delirium tremens. This was the same maid, cook and house keeper that drank up all of mother's vanilla extract. She fell out in the kitchen one Saturday morning screaming about spiders and hurled herself under the table kicking chairs away, frantically trying to escape the hairy nasty black things she claimed were all over the ceiling.

Now, being in college, most of my ideas seemed a little too farfetched and immature to actually implement, however….

The Saturday afternoon of the party I still had not figured out what my costume would be. John, a friend from class dropped by and brought two cold six packs of beer. We sat, watched my little black and white television set (that the volume didn't even work on anymore), drank the cold beer and discussed whether or not we would go and what we would wear to the party if we did go. This went on for much of the afternoon. John never decided on anything definite and consequently wore only jeans and a t-shirt with paint on it. After a number of his beers I had what seemed like a fantastic idea. I would walk across the street and buy gauze at the drug store and wrap myself up as the mummy. Having long ago seen Boris Karloff in “The Mummy” and knowing that it had scared the bejesus out of me, I thought, “This would be a perfect costume for a Halloween party in the middle of July.” I walked over and bought the rolls of gauze. Returning to my apartment I removed all my clothes except my underwear, tighty whities they were. John watched through an alcohol haze as I proceeded to wrap myself in the flimsy gauze. Occasionally he would observe, “You’re crazy as Hell, Tommy! I hope you know that.” To insure that I would not lose my costume during the party I used small safety pins every few inches to pin the gauze to itself and to my underwear. This was pretty ingenious considering by this time I had had more than a few beers. The wrapping was extensive and included my entire body and head, with enough of a peep hole left that I could see to drive. When I went into the bathroom to see what my efforts looked like I was amazed at how authentic I looked. As a final touch I rubbed an assortment of green and brown acrylic paint stains into the gauze covering me. Before the party John and I drove to the house of a friend in my little 65 Mustang, where we continued to drink. Everyone there agreed that my costume was awesome.

What a fool I was, especially on alcohol.

The three of us arrived at the party just as it was beginning to get cranked up. There was loud music, available liquor; many snacks and several of the people were actually in costumes. None were quite as unusual as mine. The night wore on with a lot of drinking and dancing, as best I remember. At some point during the party as I was dancing and noticed that the bulk of my gauzy costume was down around my wrists and ankles. Luckily my tighty whities had remained in place so that I was not totally exposed to the crowd there. That was about the time that one of the art professors from the college came up to me and said “We’re seeing a whole lot more of you than we are used to tonight, Tommy!” I took that as a complement. After imbibing way too much alcohol for one evening I went to the bathroom, threw up into the host’s toilet and staggered out to my car. Several friends tried to drive me home insisting that I was way too drunk to drive myself. Like I would let a bunch of alcoholics drive my car! They had no idea how often I drove myself around totally inebriated and that night would be no different. I headed for my apartment. When I was almost half way home I noticed in the rear view mirror that there were red lights flashing from the top of a police car. Lucky for me, it was the campus police. They made me get out of the car and after a couple of minutes determined that although I was totally blasted I was only a block or two from my apartment. They said, “Go straight home and not get back out tonight. If you do we will be watching and take you directly to jail.” I promised that I would do exactly as they said. When they turned to get back into their police car I heard one of them say, “Goddamn if I have ever saw anything like that before!” Returning home I began the ritualistic post party, over drinking, throwing up thing in earnest. I was as sick as I have ever been. My swearing off of alcohol in any form actually lasted for almost two weeks. The night consisted of more puking, some fitful sleep, noises, confusion and the damnable bed spinning around like a runaway carousel. Being so intoxicated I fell directly in to bed, which was only a foot or two from the front door and never even locked the door to my apartment or pulled the strips of tangled gauze from around my body. This turned out to be a lucky thing, depending on how you looked at it. The usual trick of putting one foot on the floor did not work to slow the insane spinning bed down. The night was punctuated with my staggering from the bed to the toilet, where I held on for dear life evacuating the contents of my stomach, over and over even when there was nothing left inside.

What an exceptionally miserable night it was.

Later, I know not how much time passed; I was roused to semi conscientiousness by someone pulling at my wrists and feet. There were two people, both tugging the now rope like gauze and cutting it away from my neck, wrists and ankles. At first it scared me and I did not understand what was happening although I still could not and did not resist. After a couple of minutes I recognized the voice of one of the girls cutting away the detritus that was entangling me. It was someone from school I had dated earlier in the semester. She and a friend who were at the party were cutting the circuitous gauze strips from my alcohol sodden body. They finally left and I never asked them later in the semester why they had come or if indeed it was actually them. Being so out of it, the only way I knew this had actually happened was that the next morning when I awoke, completely naked with a tumor size, pounding headache, still dry heaving I saw the shredded pieces of gauze and my cut up underwear (safety pins still attached) on the floor around my bed.
Did this bother me? Modesty was never one of my virtues after military school, where you bathed daily in a communal shower. It was open, no walls, no privacy, with from twenty to thirty naked boys all at the same time.
Someone woke me up again later that same night and was gently sucking my penis. I could not figure how anybody could do that, considering the state I was in. The smell of regurgitation must have been awful not to mention all the dancing, and sweating. Feeling so miserable and sick it seemed totally unreasonable and ironic that my penis would even respond to stimuli at all. Although I could not even move to see who it was in the darkness and was not sure I even wanted to know, or if indeed this was actually happening or if it was it just a bizarre, particularly realistic dream. And, why in the Hell didn't this happen when I was sober! At that point however, I really did not give a shit one way or another. All I could do was lay there passing in and out of consciousness, swearing off alcohol forever and desperately try not to puke anymore.

I never learned who it was that assaulted me that night and it matters even less now even that it did then.

When I woke up around four o'clock the next day I took two of three hundred aspirin and then walked out to my car. Someone had thrown up all across the dashboard and in the front seat. What sort of idiot would do something like that?


The End