How it progressed, II

By sixteen I was drinking at home whenever I lacked my drug of choice, which was cannibis. At seventeen I started going out with some friends and drinking beer on occasion, on a few occasions to excess.

I had my first blackout driving with friends in a custom van we called the "Fuck Truck". It had belonged to a professional football player of some repute and was painted to look like his jersey, number and all. (As for the number it is a natural prime, a proth prime, and a Fermat number whose first decimal place N is one less than the number's index in the series of natural primes. Go figure.) Anyway I remember one part of the blackout -- puking through the sliding door right next to a gas pump, while the FuckTruck refueled. My next day I had a driving lesson at eight A.M., and had to stop the car to puke my breakfast canteloupe. I was still a bit drunk and with a terrible headache but somehow I survived driving the beltway and got a B for the lesson.

The next big drunk I remember occurred at Columbia Country Club where the class valedictorian's parents threw an unlimited-booze party for us. I drove my parents' station wagon home (why wasn't I in my Firebird? Can't remember.) My vision was doubled so I aimed for the place just to the right of where the two double yellow lines crossed. I drove half the length of McArthur Boulevard in that state and made it home alive with no DUI. Unfuckingbelievable. Still I preferred herb but by this point the social "value" of drinking was becoming more apparent. It was goddamn fun.

On prom night I got distracted on Connecticut Avenue and rear-ended some guy's VW Rabbit on Connecticut Avenue. I had to explain my falsified driver's licence that I had altered using India ink to the officer, who amazingly let it go. I was seventeen anyway, not visibly intoxicated and went to a good prep school. So I got off. The insurance company covered me when the guy I rear-ended sued for personal damages (he claimed "whiplash"). I'd had only three beers that night so I wrote the accident up to being distracted, looking for a cross street to turn onto.

Before college I did art school for two months, which involved residency in another town and therefore, a lot of unsupervised drinking and drug use. I got busted for smoking pot, got off with a slap and an embarrassing phone conversation with my parents. Most of us were minors still. Discovered Southern Comfort then, but rarely got drunk. Mostly I smoked pot, when I could obtain it, and tripped acid once. At the end of art classes I once tried Meth, which I snorted (OUCH!). Great stuff but fortunately I didn't get hooked on speed then -- that happened much later in life, with a shrinks' blessing. Then I went to college and started tripping my brains out and smoking weed with a vengeance.

One night I went to keg party and took a Quaalude I'd copped from another student. I blacked out and woke up the next morning fully clothed on my bed, face down, my feet still in their shoes, which were on the floor next to the mattress. I have no idea how I got home but I did, unharmed. I didn't do a lot of drinking then, but I did do a lot of drugs, including a bunch of speed that I somehow obtained for free from a local girl, not a college student, whose parents were "massage therapists" that kept three-thousand count plastic jars of Methedrine, Dexedrine and Dexedrine Spansules in their kitchen cabinets. Handy for exam time, they were.

At this point I knew (as I'd long known) that I had a problem with pot addiction. I didn't see a big problem with some of the more outrageous usage I engaged in, like the night I drank acid punch at party with grain alcohol in it, smoked herb and also did a few lines of coke. I felt terrible when I got back to my dorm and the next day regretted it all, as I had the quaalude.

So I didn't do that kind of shit again, after those experiences. What I did do spring of my freshman year was MDA, a trippy relative of speed and Ecstasy that I quite enjoyed. Subsequently I also snorted mescaline (that's right, real mescaline. Had three degrees of separation from some shady CIA types back in those days). The usual fare -- daily herb, occasional drink -- typified the rest of my college career. After my junior year, though, I took a year off and lived with friends who drank a lot. That was when I got my first real glimpse of progressed alcoholism -- the raging drunks, the manipulation and lies that alcoholics tell themselves and others.