You’re Pretty When I Drink: The Beginning
Every tragedy has its roots and the troubled beginnings of my getting far too drunk with my group of friends can be traced back to what was a time of innocence; the early years of high school. Or maybe it was nightmarish torture and absolute hell, depending on the kind of high school crowds paid attention to you. We floated in the middle. Not the most popular crowd and not the ones being picked on. Or maybe we were. How the fuck should I remember, my memory has taken a savage beating since that fateful night where it all began.
It was the end of grade 8, the final year of being classed as juniors in high school. Next year we would re-enter high school with the older kids and become champions of the schoolyard, or be beaten into submission by the older, puberty powered seniors.
Either way, The Real Deal, Horseboy, Scotland, Samu and myself all understood this transition needed to be celebrated by getting drunk for the first time. As 13 and 14 year old kids, we weren’t really sure how to go about this. I knew all about that mincing pedophile Pythagoras and his fucking formula, but how do I get myself completely hammered?
Thinking back now, I have forgotten the painful ordeals we had to go through to buy alcohol. It was fucking impossible. No older siblings, none of us looked old enough to trim our pubes, let alone buy a six pack; it was a troubling time. But there was one who we knew wielded the ability to deceive these alcohol merchants. His name was Ralph and for reasons that cannot be explained, he grew tall and had facial hair before any 13/14 year-old. He would be our savior.
There was a place called Ed’s and for some reason Ralph was able to buy whatever the hell he pleased from there. We placed our order, which shames me to say, was 3 or 4 six packs of Tornado fruit flavored beer. Fuck you. We were kids.
Ralph brought them back to school and we stashed them in The Real Deal’s locker until it was time to take the school bus back to my house. I think extreme paranoia is an understatement to how we all felt while our beers were in the locker. In my mind, I was going to prison if caught by the teachers.
After getting to my house, we quickly located a cooler in my garage and loaded it up with our beer. At that point I had fields behind my house that stretched back about 100 yards to the highway. We stashed our cooler full of booze in those fields while Scotland would retrieve his tent from his house up the street. We had decided that we would camp out in my backyard and get drunk.
The hours passed, Scotland had brought his tent and we set it up right in front of the fields so we could access the beer with ease. Scotland surprised us with a bunch of Sleeman’s he stole from his father. I had also grabbed a bottle of whiskey out of my mother’s liquor cabinet. We were all set.
For reasons I do not understand or remember, I told off Samu and he didn’t end up coming. As you can see, it’s nothing new. I was a prick long ago. This is also unclear but somehow we got a large box of Timbits and were threatened by Scotland not to leave crumbs in the tent. We would make him pay for this request.
So, here were four young teenagers with more than enough alcohol between them to get ripped, patiently waiting for my mother’s light to flip off so we could start boozing. I guess it was around 10 pm that she shut it down, since the depanneur across the street from my house was still open for awhile afterwards, when we finally had our window of opportunity to begin drinking.
As you may have guessed, it rapidly deteriorated to complete nonsense and stupidity.
The four of us grabbed a Tornado each and took a sip. For as long as I live, I will always remember Horseboy taking a big swig and shouting with pure, unfiltered joy “Holy Shit! It tastes like fruit punch!” He proceeded to drink it in very little time. The rest of us were relatively tame, not nursing the beers but definitely not pounding them.
Within an hour, Horseboy was fucked in half drunk. He was being loud, sloppy and stumbling around. His tally? 3 ½ brewskies and a few swigs of whiskey, which we all took shots of at first but then threw into the fields because my mother poked her head out the window and told us to shut up.
Horseboy was wandering around my lawn, stumbling into the street and then stumbling back, babbling to himself like an idiot. At one point he crossed the street and collapsed in a ditch. We had to retrieve him after it became clear he would stay in the ditch if left alone.
Scotland had somehow managed to depress himself and decided he needed to go for a walk. Even at the tender age of 13 and somewhat drunk, I knew that was fucked up. That left The Real Deal and I with Horseboy.
I didn’t feel drunk but I was and I was doing some pretty stupid shit. At one point I was running up and down my lawn dribbling a soccer ball, with a beer in my hand and “scoring goals” by blasting the ball against the side of my house. By the end, I kicked the ball and passed out on my lawn, only for The Real Deal to drag me back to the tent where I awoke to a one-sided wrestling match.
The Real Deal was performing wrestling moves on a despondent Horseboy. I saw The Real Deal administer a Rock Bottom and a few DDT’s while Horseboy did nothing. I found this hilarious so I joined in and tried tag team moves for awhile. It didn’t last much longer and we eventually took refuge in the tent.
Horseboy was passed out, Scotland was still discovering the meaning of life somewhere in suburban Kirkland and The Real Deal and I were left alone with the beer and the Timbits. An epic Timbit battle ensued with the eventual victor being immaturity and the loser, Scotland’s tent and Horseboy, who absorbed several close range head shots, administered without mercy by both of us.
I don’t know what time it was when Scotland came back but we were still awake, pretty drunk but no longer drinking. Scotland was visibly upset with the Timbit genocide in his tent so we whipped him with a few before eventually nodding off to sleep.
The next morning we were all, except Scotland, introduced to a hangover. Horseboy had it the worst but we were all visibly fucked. The tent was in turmoil, the cooler was sitting on top of the fields like it was on a throne, there were paths in the fields from each of us trying to find the bottle of whiskey at various point in the night and there were Timbits spread across the lawn.
Scotland was pissed about his tent and later on was even more angry when I threw (again I don’t know why) a large toy fire truck at his head. His parents figured out what we’d done thanks to the stench of alcohol in the tent. No one said it came out your pores when you slept! Our bodies betrayed us. He had to hose the bastard down and air it out, not to mention the splintered Timbits scattered around and stuck in it.
And that was the first time we all got hammered. 13 years later, The Real Deal and I are still doing it with nearly identical results. Scotland moved away a year after that. Horseboy would still be doing it if the sick bastard could. This would‘ve been Stand By Me if Stephen King would have made those kids drunks.