On Juicing, Part I

A few days ago, while doing some reading on the movie The Hurt Locker, I stumbled upon an excellent blog, Army of Dude. The blogger, Alex Horton, started his writings just prior to being deployed to Iraq, where he saw combat, and he managed to capture the humor, horror and honor that's experienced during wartime and in the military. He made it through the gauntlet soul and body intact, though he lost friends and comrades in action, and has gone on to college. Excellent and eye-opening stuff.

Anyway, as I was reading the blog, it occurred to me that Horton could describe the sound of a bullet flying by his head before he experienced a pub crawl. He did his first bar hopping while on leave in Europe and I recall him writing something like, "I've never been much of a drinker," in that entry. If memory serves, he was 21 at the time. This got me thinking about my relationship and history with alcohol.

Pondering my relationship with booze

By the time I was 21, booze had been with me for a third of my life. I got drunk for the first time with my stepbrother, Bruce, precisely a month before my 14th birthday: 20 February 1979. Bruce was 26 at the time and had been a widower for over a year. Many entries could and may be devoted to him; he's been dead for just over 20 years now, largely a result of substance abuse. The substance that February night was very cheap Andre champagne. My stepfather always had a case of that super sweet stuff around at the time. I think it was, like, $2 a bottle, and I drank about $3 worth.

So, that first outing with the koo-koo juice had me puking in the sink the next morning. My sister, Meg, does a pretty nice impression of me hunched over the sink, "Oh, no! Not again! Buuuuiccck!"

Mum and Harry were pretty liberal about alcohol, and during those early teen years they'd allow us to have a bit of bubbly during celebrations, but I avoided that particular poison for a couple of years. In the meantime, Bruce would often give me a little bottle of Jack Daniels so that I could play the tough guy in front of my buddies. And, as misguided and pathetic that it is, I did feel tough. The early high school years found the gang and I in the woods or behind the cemetery on Route 53 drinking a case of beer, most likely procured by someone else's older brother, if not the mighty Bruce himself.

During my last year or so in high school I was borderline serious about exercise and worked in a health club, so I drank much less than many of my buddies, though I still had the occasional beer on a Friday evening as we were closing the club. Similarly, I didn't drink that much early in my enlistment. In fact, I had nothing to drink the weekend I graduated from bootcamp, traditionally a time for a monstrous piss-up.

In 1986, when I was first assigned to my ship, USS Dahlgren (DDG-43), I went through a wine cooler phase... which put me at the opposite end of the Testicular Scale from my Jack Daniels days. Caught plenty of shit for that, trust me. Anyway, I started ascending ("descending" might be more apt) the slippery slopes of Mount Hooch during my own military-funded adventures in Europe during my first Med Cruise. From that point on, I was a pretty typical young GI boozer. Nothing too serious and all in good fun. Anyway, I had no real responsibilities or worries and nothing to escape.

One could argue that the drinking I did while at college was pretty typical for a 20-something-year-old man. While studying full time, I always worked two—and often three—jobs, and every Friday night, which I made sure I had off, I made a point of getting nice and fecal featured. That's not that big a problem. When I took a semester off for lack of motivation, though, and started upping the efforts after I broke up with a girlfriend... well, that wasn't good.

Waking up in an emergency room with a broken nose, really wasn't good. Time for reflection.