Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [28]
“Is this the sort of thing you had in mind?” Lewis asked. “Precisely. But slow down, please. And speak up.”
My parents had cocktails every night, and when I was very young, they threw cocktail parties. The specialty glassware came out of its closet. The parents of my nursery school classmates arrived, the men in starched white dress shirts unbuttoned at the neck, the women in floral prints and spaghetti straps. My father was loud and jolly in a way he never was with us. My mother bared her shoulders, drank martinis, and kissed her way through the room, leaving a wake of smeary red lipstick.
In the morning, my older brother Woody and I drank all the unfinished drinks.
Red was smiling.
“What?” Lewis said.
“I’d say you wrote the hell out of it.”
My father drank bourbon. Gin, my mother’s drink, disagreed with him, although he never did refuse a martini. A short time before he moved out—I must have been nine or ten—I woke up in the middle of the night and went into the kitchen for a glass of water and he was drinking straight from a bottle in big long chugs, like he was dying of thirst. He’d take the bottle away from his lips and pant until he caught his breath, then drink more.
Years later, his second wife told me he had to stop drinking—doctor’s orders. She said he had drunk so much that not only his liver but his eyes and his bone marrow were damaged.
“That’s it for ‘Family Drinking Patterns,’ ” Lewis said.
Red leaned forward. “What about your brother? Does he drink?”
“Woody?” Lewis squinted at the fireplace. “Maybe. He’s in the merchant marines, I hardly ever see him. He’s more into pot, always has some gourmet bud or opiated hash.”
“Okay,” said Red. “Go on.”
“Let’s see. ‘My first drink’?
Sips from my parents’ glasses. Wine. Beer. Liqueur. And those party leftovers Woody and I drank—I still remember how they made me feel rubbery, hot, bursting with energy.
I smoked pot for the first time when I was twelve. A neighbor kid stole a joint from the stash hidden in his stepfather’s shoulder holster. Woody and I also filched pills—white crosses, Dexedrine, Seconal—from my mom.
I went to my first kegger at fifteen. I remember rolling on the grass, laughing like crazy, then throwing up in someone’s car. My friends dropped me off down the street from my house. I slept for two days.
I had my first bourbon at sixteen. We were on a rooftop smoking pot when an older guy showed up with a quart of Bourbon Deluxe. Even at the time it seemed one of those signifiers of adulthood, like a first cigarette, a first pair of dark glasses. In the mercury vapor streetlight, I looked at the clear, shiny brown and thought, Here it is, here it is.
Drinking was never the focus in high school. Only jocks and parents drank seriously. We took drugs to have visions, push through the cracks. Pot was weaker then, more fun. It arrived from Mexico in sugary bricks the size of shoeboxes; you could smoke a whole joint and all you’d do is laugh and eat everything in the fridge.
I got busted once, with friends, for smoking a joint in somebody’s front yard. When my mom’s boyfriend came down to get me, the cops arrested him for all the unpaid parking tickets I’d accumulated on a car registered in his name.
“I laugh about it now.” Lewis glanced up. “But when he got me alone, he broke two of my ribs.”
I dropped acid and mescaline in college until I had a bad trip on some so-called psilocybin. Psilocybin’s supposed to be so benign, but on this stuff, dark, glittering chasms opened up between blades of grass, along rooftops, around people’s faces. The civilized world seemed the flimsiest construct, frantically devised to shore up against the pure terror of existence. It was hours before I came down and years before I went a whole day without seeing dark chasms in the edges of my eyesight.
No more psychedelics after that. I couldn’t even smoke pot without rekindling terror. Booze was okay. Booze was all I did, until I discovered cocaine.
My ex-wife Clare and I discovered cocaine