[Continued from "Alcohol (Part 6)."]

I didn’t drink for two years, which I know isn’t all that big a deal when one is underage and not legally able to drink anyway.

After living with my mom and DJ for just a few months, I moved back in with my dad and step-mother.  My mother chose a really shitty time to pretty much not bother to parent me in any way, and to cheat on DJ with DJ’s best friend.  I could have been drunk daily and my mother would not have had a clue.  As it was, I was going through a shoplifting phase and she didn’t once ask me where I got the money to pay for any of the new stuff I had.

Moving back in with my father and step-mother meant I was never trusted.  For years my parents checked in on me in an obsessive manner.  I had to post my work schedule on the refrigerator so they knew why I was out of the house.  When I wanted to do something that wasn’t work, I was usually denied because they thought I would be out drinking, which is why I stopped asking.

Another fun thing my parents did was to garnish my wages.  When I overdosed on alcohol they didn’t have insurance for me.  So an ambulance trip to the emergency room and a stint in the intensive care unit had to be paid out of my parents’ pockets.  The pockets that were not deep due to my father’s job issues.  They put the bills on a credit card.

My step-mother is crazy-obsessed with money.  She’s cheap.  My dad and step-mother were cheap enough to not bother getting me health insurance when I was 14, which is why they had to put my health care bill on a credit card.  Two years later, when I was 16 and had to get a job (they made me), my parents still had not paid off the credit card bill that was incurred when I overdosed.  So they started making me fork over a portion of my paychecks from working a minimum wage job at Taco Bell, and later Round Table Pizza.

They were teaching me a lesson.  My lesson to them would have been to get me some fucking health insurance for their minor child.

I moved out when I was 16 for a number of reasons, including the garnishment of my wages, the fact that they let my step-sister, but not me (we’re the same age), get a a driver’s license, the fact that my step-mother didn’t respect the privacy of a sealed envelope, the fact that my step-mother was a condescending bitch when it came to my relationship with a girl (but not so regarding her daughter’s relationships with boys), and the fact that my pussy of a father did nothing but kowtow to his wife.  When I moved out, my father told me that when I get arrested he would tell the police that I had run away from home, thereby absolving him of responsibility since I was under 18.

He assumed I’d be arrested.  I never was.  I never have been.

Right around the time I moved out, my sister got married.  Since she was going to change her name, she didn’t need her driver’s license with her old name on it.  She gave it to me.  Conveniently, she was four years older than me, so just before I turned 17, I had a driver’s license that said I was 21.  Conveniently, my sister and I look enough alike that I had no trouble at all buying alcohol.

I didn’t have a car, but I did have the ID.  Funnily enough, I used my sister’s ID to buy alcohol and to get into bars, but I never used it to drive illegally.  When I was still in high school, my friends who did have cars would sneak a small group of us off campus so we could go to liquor stores where I’d buy us alcohol.  This didn’t last long, because my sister’s ID said I was 21 for less than two months before I graduated from high school.

Having that ID meant buying booze and getting into bars was not a big deal.  My friend Laura and I went to an 18-and-over club, 1970s, which played, you guessed it, all 70s music, but I always used my sister’s ID so I could get the wristband that indicated I could drink.

I swear.  True story.

[To be continued.]

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