Friday, April 29, 2011

Non-Fiction Friday: Drinking at an Early Age

I was 16. My parents did not drink. We never had any alcohol in the house unless it was required for cooking. All of my parent's friends knew that they didn't drink and quite comfortably brought wine over to drink for themselves at dinner parties.

One evening a couple of guys came over and brought a 12-pack of beer. They consumed 5, decided not to take the other seven home, leaving the rest for my mom and dad to store under the kitchen sink. I think my parents forgot it was even there, because it was there for like, forever. I however, did not forget.

A few months later my friend came over to spend the night. After the nail polish had dried, the boy stories ran out and the idea of driving my parent's car down to Tijuana wouldn't come until the following year, I decided it was time to crack open the beer.

We tiptoed back into my room with seven beers hidden in our pajamas and found a spot in the corner to begin our rite of passage. We cracked the cans open under my stuffed animals to prevent any excess noise, then lifted the beers to our lips.

Gross. Disgusting. Nasty.

Those were the words we used to describe what we were tasting. Yet we were determined to get drunk. Plugging our noses to avoid the taste, we split the seven warm beers, one right after the other. In 5 minutes we were done.

There are two things I remember about that night. Trying to tape record ourselves (but it was never plugged in) and passing out on the bathroom after praying to the porcelain goddess for longer than I care to remember.

Because I was a good girl, I confessed it all to my mom and dad in the morning after my friend went home. My mom just looked at me, not interested in give me one ounce of sympathy. "That's what you get," she said.

It took me 8 years to ever touch alcohol again, and 13 years to taste another beer. The moral of the story? Don't drink when you're a teenager. Don't drink three and half warm beers back to back. And for goodness sake, try not to ever drink so much that you go 8 years without it. Life's too short.

1 comment:

  1. I got stuck on the 8 more years without.
    Jen

    ReplyDelete