Well, that’s not completely true.  I won’t fuck anything, but I have been known to fuck some people whom I would not choose to fuck if I were sober.  Which is not to say I’ve regretted it or felt I’d been coerced.  No, no, I drink of my own free will.

I drink because it’s fun.  ‘Tis true.  And sometimes I prefer to have some social lubricant.  I’m really a rather shy person.  Most people who know me do not believe such an assertion, but I swear, it’s true.

My relationship with alcohol began when I was very young.  My father was a drinker.  As far as I can remember he drank only beer, but the mind of a young child isn’t all that observant.  Rather, a child’s mind is very observant, but unable to process what it sees without experiential information.  I’m sure that for shits and giggles my father and/or his friends gave my sister and I sips of beer.  I’m sure that I didn’t like it.

Some kids really like beer, and probably not only because a parent or older sibling gives it to them.  Hell, some dogs like beer.  None of my dogs have liked beer; they take after their mama.

I recall my father going to “pass out parties.”  I can’t recall if that’s what they were called then, but that’s what I call them now.  Sometimes our father would take my sister and me along to said parties.  The party involved my father and his friends sitting around a table drinking canned beers and chatting.  So far not that big a deal, and if you replace beer with wine, I’ve done the same hundreds of times.

However, the pass out parties were competitive in nature.  The guys – and I recall them being all men – drank their beers fast, the “goal” of the game being to not pass out.  The first guy to pass out was the “loser,” though to be fair, they were all losers.

One of the parties I remember specifically.  It took place in a studio apartment, which makes it even sadder to me.  All the guys were sat around the kitchen table.  My sister and I hung out.  I recall there also being at least one girlfriend or wife there; she served as the bartender, making sure that by the time a guy had upturned his can of beer there was another waiting for him so he could keep “playing.”

My sister and I must have been little pains in the ass, but then there weren’t really a lot of activities for us at the party.  Eventually the guys got loud and boisterous.  They would make fun of a guy if he looked slightly sleepy, which if course meant he was on his way to passing out.  Finally, one guy crossed his arms on the table and rested his forehead on them:  He was the loser.

That guy was pulled out of his chair and dragged to the bed, which was a mattress and box spring on the floor (of course).  He was lain crosswise face down on the bed and a bowl placed below his face, which hung over the bed.  The bowl came in handy.

Our father passed out soon thereafter, but he still wasn’t the loser.  Oh, but he was a loser.  Because I can’t think of any way we would have gotten home except if he drove his seven-year-old and three-year-old daughters.  Drunk.  Without seat belts.  In a shitty Volkswagen bus.  It was the late 1970s, before people cared about child safety, or drunk driving, or seat belts.

Eventually my father stopped drinking, but his family has a nice history of alcoholism.  Which, of course, I have not forgotten.  It’s always there in the back of my mind.

I swear.  True story.

[To be continued …]

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