Drinking

It's been a while since my last post, and I promised everyone a story when I finally posted again. Well, with only a week and a half of school left, I will be able to post a little more frequently. To tide you over until then, when I will give you a big long story to satiate your minds, I will tell you the story of the first time I got drunk, or "The Victory of the 20 oz. Bottle."

It was 2001, I was 15, and living in Victor, IA. Victor is a small town where everyone, and I mean literally everyone, knew who I was. The fun thing to do, at least when you had a license, was to drive up and down the main street of the town, back and forth, for hours on end. Such was my life in high school.

In high school, I was in Show Choir. If you don't quite know what that is, though I assume everyone does, watch the show Glee. Yeah. That's pretty much what we did. Except not as cool, not as much drama, and not as awesome of a soundtrack. We did a lot of medleys. The only song I can actually remember doing is a Grease Medley while dancing on boxes. Pretty lame. But it was kinda fun, I guess.

Anyway, I was going to a show choir... show... at a nearby school on a Saturday, so I stayed in Victor at my aunt's house on Friday night. My cousin, Gary, drove me out to my house (as I lived in the country) to get some clothes for the next day. Thank God we did that, too.

I need to backtrack and state, for the record, that I was a stupid kid. Well, not really stupid so much as... I was a dink. One day, for no reason whatsoever, I took an empty 20 oz. bottle and filled it with a rum, tequila, and vodka mixture. Even thinking about it now makes me cringe. Well, instead of drinking it, I hid it in my room. In the closet.

When Gary took me out to my house, I gave him the bottle to drink with his friends. The house he was going to drink at was up the hill from my aunt's house. Well, I sat at the house for a couple hours, watching a movie. I got bored and decided I'd go up the hill to see what was happening at the house my dad later referred to as "The house of ill repute." And, my friends, he was right.

When I got up there, I was introduced to the few people there I didn't know and we began chitchatting. At one point I asked if anyone had drank the bottle I had given Gary. One of the guys there said "Fuck no! There's no one here who could stomach that shit."

Keep in mind I had never had a drink before.

"You guys are pussies!"
"Then you fucking drink it."

And I did. I chugged it down and didn't even flinch. Everyone in the room cheered when I finished and smiled and winked at everyone in attendance. Someone yelled "That kid's got an iron stomach!" So they decided to feed me as much alcohol as they could find. I drank a small bottle of Mexican Brandy, a couple beers, a few things I can't even remember, and about a quarter bottle of Jeremiah Weed, the most foul alcoholic beverage I've ever had the horror to ingest. Out of everything I drank
that night, that was the only thing that made me flinch. It was disgusting.

Well, after a few hours of drinking very VERY heavily, I decided it was time to go home. So I started walking back to my aunt's house. When I got there, Gary's sister Elle was on the couch. So I sat on the floor at the end of the L-shaped couch. Elle was still awake, so she asked me if I had fun.

My friends, I have no idea what I actually replied. All I remember is talking and in the middle of talking... I threw up. All over myself. Elle sat up and yelled "Joel, get to the bathroom!" So I crawled... Read again, CRAWLED... down the hallway to the bathroom where I continued to throw up all over the toilet and floor. I laid down on the floor and passed out for what seemed like about 10 minutes. I think it was actually about 4 hours, because when I got up, I took off my shirt, puked a little more and crawled back to the end of the couch.

I laid down and tried to sleep. About a half hour into laying there, I heard my aunt and her boyfriend come out of their room to go to work. I heard them talking about how I puked all over the bathroom and my aunt, God bless her, cleaned up the mess AND washed the shirt I had been wearing. In the morning, when I woke up, she gave me some breakfast and told me she wouldn't tell my dad. When my dad picked me up later to take me to the Show Choir thing, he asked me if I had fun. I groaned in pain. He laughed.

"You won't be doing that again for a LONG time, will you?"
"No..."

So he took me to the 4 hour show choir concert and left me, alone. I laid on the bleachers in the gymnasium the entire time. It hurt to move, it hurt to breathe, and standing up meant fighting the urge to throw up. Finally, my dad came to get me and we went home, where I immediately went to bed and slept for about 5 hours.

I drank only one other time in high school and it was with my dad. We drank a bottle of permafrost together and called my stepdad at 3 A.M. Dad and I thought it was hilarious. My stepdad did not. It wasn't until years later, in college, when I would get drunk again at all, let alone that drunk.

Now, the only time I drink to the point of throwing up is when something is upsetting me, severely. So if I'm with you, and I'm drinking so much that I throw up or am going to throw up, there's something wrong. I've only been that bad four times in my life at this point.