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.

Little Moments with the Big Screen

I had a wonderful weekend with my older son, Callum, whom I see two weekends a month. Sometimes Cal is accompanied by his younger brother, Mac. Lately, though, almost-six-year-old Mac often doesn't feel like coming over. I can't blame the little guy for this; he was only 14 months old when his mother and I divorced and he started calling another guy "Papa" not too long after that. My guess is he's a little confused. I'll leave it at that.

Upon arrival, Cal said something about almost seeing Avatar earlier but the idea had been nixed in the other household because it was felt that the aliens in the movie might scare Mac. Fair enough. Since Mac wasn't with us, Cal and I had our opening to see what's being likened to a similar cinematic experience many of us had in 1977.

A great many people are going to catch the reference to '77 without any explanation—and I tend to get along with those people very well—but for the rest of you, I'm talking about Star Wars. Star Wars before there was anything about episodes or "A New Hope." Magic that's been talked about and referenced so much in pop culture in recent years as being magical that a lot of the magic has been washed out. I was 12 years old in '77 and I was one of the target audiences. Another member of another target audience would have been my 50-year-old stepfather-to-be Harry G. Nicoll. Harry read tons of science fiction, worked on some of the early space projects and could remember the Flash Gordon serials of the 1930s.

I'm almost certain that we saw the movie in early September of that year. Either that or late August. At the time the flick was just becoming a phenomenon and no one knew enough to keep and frame the ticket stub, but I can pretty much nail my initial viewing of Star Wars to the three-week window of late August to the first half of September. As a kid who spent a lot of time drawing and zero time playing baseball or other such sports, the movie hit me hard. I was Darth Vader for Halloween that year, collected the cards and kept a Star Wars scrap book.

That was the superficial stuff.

Three years later and the Empire Strikes Back comes out. When I discovered that Vader was Luke's father, the mythology knocked me for a loop and I found myself in a subset target audience of the original target audience: I had not seen my wheezing (he died of emphysema years later), villified and absent father in many years... and I would not see him ever again. All I can say is that I felt Luke's cry of "Noooooooo!" when he discovered his parentage. To put it simply, no one wants to be of bad stock; you feel damaged from the git-go. With that flaw, bullies and empires are hard to defeat.

Okay, let's get back on track. Harry didn't take my sister, Meg, and I to too many movies, but we saw the three original Star Wars movies together. I was not athletic like Harry and I'm sure I was generally pretty pesky, but we shared those movies. For me, they were honest-to-goodness father-and-son experiences (or, more correctly, stepfather-and-stepson experiences).

Every now and again I will try to kick the Aussie Rules footy around with my sons, but talk about feeling like an imposter. That's a sport that's indulged in the other household. I tried tennis with Cal yesterday because he had just finished a tennis camp and my amazing Katie thought it would be a fun thing for all of us to do. Still, my kid isn't coming away from our hour on the court knowing something about what his Dad does or likes.

Dad takes him to the movies and draws with him. A lot of the time we draw stuff from the movies. I'm sure to many it's not as worthy or authentic an experience as playing catch, experiencing the great outdoors or riding a bike. I can see the merit in those viewpoints. But it's also nice to see a kid's imagination fired: after the movie, Cal was wondering about the lives of Pandora's animals, the cryosleep required to travel from Earth to Pandora, having an Avatar, imagining a sequel.

When the house lights came up Cal said, "Thanks, Dad." I don't have a snappy and tidy way to end this entry. I just felt great when my boy said that, that's all.