“You may believe that relapse begins the moment one ingests a drink or drug. That is what I always believed. This is a myth. Relapse begins with a sense that you’ve got it down, this sobriety thing. This leads to complacency. Complacency leads you to stop doing the things that helped you to get sober. Then the old behaviors creep back. Over time, these old behaviors begin to grate away at your self-esteem. This is when the thought of a drink or drug comes in. Because they work. Because they soothe that sense of fear and self-loathing like no other way you ever have found.”
~A very talented, gifted, and inspiring anonymous writer
I started drinking when I was thirteen-years-old. I was hanging out with my brother and some friends at the indoor swimming pool in Windsor High School. It was almost time to go. I was sitting in the hallway where they displayed all the trophies and pictures of people I had never met, the air was warm and humid in that hallway and the smell of chlorine was strong.
I went outside to cool down and sat on the steel bike rack in front of the door while I waited for my brother to get changed so we could head home. An older boy named Jack came up to me.
He whispered, “Hey, you wanna buy a bottle of Vodka for $5.00?”
Then he slung a black backpack off from his shoulder, and opened it to reveal a clear bottle with a red label. It was a liter of Popov.
“Yeah,” I said. Of course I did, what kid wouldn’t?
I told him to wait for me and ran through the parking lot to find my grandmother sitting in her brown ‘88 Chevy Celebrity. I could just barely see the top of her large plastic framed bifocals as I got nearer, but her poofy white hair stuck up like a beacon letting me know she was in there. She was listening to AM radio, WTIC 1080. She always listened on Sunday nights. Back then they played non-stop Frank Sinatra every Sunday night. She told me once that she didn’t even like Frank Sinatra.
“Why do you listen to it then?” I asked her.
“He was your grandfather’s favorite. It reminds me of him,” she replied.
My grandfather was a short, round, mostly bald Sicilian man. He had passed away when I was about four-years-old.
I don’t recall what I said to her, but she gave me the $5.00 that I need to pay Jack.
I ran back to the bike rack worried that Jack might have left, or worse sold the bottle to someone else. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw him still standing there alone. I handed him the money and he handed me the bottle from his bag. I wrapped it up in my towel so that my grandmother wouldn’t be able to see it when I got back to the car. It was a done deal.
When I got home that night, I went straight to my room. I had to think of a place to hide that bottle and quickly. School was almost out for the year, and if my grandmother found out that I had a bottle of anything my summer would be ruined. Alcohol was absolutely and completely forbidden in our home. I dug through the junk at the floor in my closet and neatly tucked it away between some old clothes. That would do for now.
Several days later my brother, my friend Brendan, and myself were skateboarding down Pierson Lane past the tobacco fields with their torn white nets, and their old red sheds. We were heading for an abandoned warehouse that we had broken into earlier that year. There were some offices in there that we had left unexplored because they were too dark and creepy. Our imaginations had run wild thinking of the things or beings that may be hidden inside. We were headed back there armed with flashlights and knives to find out.
I was the first one in through the back door that we had previously broken open. I was scared to death of what may lay inside but my pride wouldn’t let me show it. We walked up to the first door, huddled around outside of it like a S.W.A.T. team ready to pounce, then we burst in yelling like crazy to anyone who might have been hiding to show themselves, flashlights in hand, knives drawn. We continued to go from one dark room to another in the same fashion until we came to this one room in particular.
It was one of a few unopened doors down a dark, dingy hallway that led back to the warehouse. Wires hung from the ceiling and everything smelled damp and moldy. As soon as we opened the door to that room our eyes all went wide. In the center of that room there was one old, grey metal desk. On top of that desk, piled high, were hundreds of Playboy magazines. For a bunch of thirteen-year-old boys, we had hit the jackpot!
Of course we did what anyone in that situation would do, we skated as fast as we could back to our houses and grabbed our backpacks and our bikes, met up again, and got back to the warehouse in record time. We split the magazines up three ways and headed home for the night.
When I got there, once again, I went straight up the stairs to my bedroom. I dug through the pile of stuff on my closet floor and made space for my stash of Playboys next to my bottle of Popov vodka. I had the feeling that this was going to be a great summer.
I have always been an early riser for as far back as I can remember. There is something special for me about a new, crisp, fresh day. It’s a time of day when anything seems possible, when dreams feel like they can come true. That summer, every morning, I made sure that my bedroom door was locked and I sat at my desk, with my bottle of Popov and dreamt of Pamela Anderson. I can’t express in words how I felt when I discovered that this beautiful woman whose naked body sprawled across dozens of my magazines actually starred in a television show that aired on cable.
My grandmother never questioned me every morning when I got up early, came downstairs, filled a tall glass up with orange or cranberry juice, and went back to my room. I was known to spend weeks locked away from the world reading science-fiction and fantasy books delving ever deeper into a world of elves and wizards. A world where some young man realizes that his long-lost father was some great king of lore, and that it is his mission in life, his birthright to save the world from some evil force.
At some point I had managed to sneak into the boxes of my grandfather’s stuff which my grandmother had stored in our basement. Alcohol was forbidden in our home, but inside those boxes were neatly wrapped bar glasses, shot glasses, and other bar equipment. I couldn’t figure it out at the time, but later learned that my grandfather had owned a bar on Franklin Avenue, “Little Italy” in Hartford at some point in his life. He had closed it long before even my mother was born, but he kept the bar equipment. He collected it.
I snuck a couple of shot glasses upstairs. I used them to carefully measure shots of my Popov vodka to mix with my juice in my tall glass.
Every morning that summer I sat there with my drinks and my Playboy magazines. I don’t recall much about the magazines now besides Pamela. The one thing that pops into my mind when I think back is the ads. There were lots of ads. In them were tall, dark, well-dressed men. They were always standing in front of a sparkling new sports car or an ornately decorated mansion. There was usually a beautiful model hanging by their sides. Those ads were always selling the same thing, alcohol. A bottle of Bombay Sapphire or Tanqueray was usually prominently displayed somewhere in the photo. In the corner of those ads were recipes for cocktails using whichever alcohol was being promoted, recipes which I eagerly jotted down in a notebook that I designated solely for that purpose.
That summer I came to associate drinking with growing up. I wanted to be that guy in those photos. I wanted the hot model girlfriends, the sparkling new sports car, the ornately decorated mansion, and a bar to store all of my bottles of Bombay Sapphire and Tanqueray. I wanted to impress my friends with the drink cocktails I poured.
That summer I became an alcoholic. I also became a fan of Baywatch.
