Liquor Bottles Everywhere
For some reason there were liquor bottles all over the place on Greenpoint Avenue when I was there on New Years Day, 2016. I might not have noticed or thought anything of it had the bottles been empty but many of them were full or half full. New Years is a booze-fueled holiday. My interpretation of this conspicuous cluster of discarded spirits is that people who were not supposed to be drinking felt compelled to get rid of the contraband before going home to their parents.
I will never forget that day in grade school. It was the 8th grade, and the school year was winding down. We were boys turning into young men and the class’s collective anticipation of moving on from grade school to high school was palpable. We were not the tightest class. Cliques and mutually exclusive braintrusts existed as they might in any school, but with only 25 kids our class was so small that it couldn’t help but feel cohesive. If anyone felt left out of the social pecking order it might have been myself, but that’s a matter for another story.
The story I remember now is that of the day we found beer in a ditch at the far end of the schoolyard. Past the fence which enclosed the baseball diamond’s outfield was a shallow ditch where water typically accumulated. The ditch abutted a long wood fence, behind which residential houses hid. Those houses, with all their trappings of adulthood, were mysterious to me. So were the cars I watched drive past on the highway that sat outside the other end of the schoolyard. Those were adults going to work. They had places to go and were valued in some grown up way. I wanted to be like that, with places to go and people to see.
Two friends and I found ourselves milling around the area of the ditch for no reason other than the fact that it was the farthest spot one could go on the campus. 4 or 5 bottles of beer appeared like treasure before us. I do not recall the brand. Where did they come from? I do not remember anyone asking that question but today I would surmise that someone in one of the houses behind the wood fence had tossed them here to get rid of them. It was contraband.
One kid among us was a cub scout, and he somehow knew how to open a bottle without a bottle opener. We drank beer. It was my first time since I was a little kid. In the basement of our house on Summers Drive in Alexandria, Virginia, our dad let my sister and me drink Budweiser from little Dixie Cups. I learned later that this activity was more common than I would have thought. It seemed like every kid I knew in grade school had a similar experience with their dad letting them drink small amounts of beer while they were very young.
As I guzzled this warm beer on that hot Florida day I unexpectedly remembered how beer tasted in that Virginia basement all those years ago. I wouldn’t say I had missed it much but it was a sharp memory.
Like conquerors my friends and I walked toward the rest of the kids in the class. We acted drunk, even though neither of us had consumed more than a couple of sips. We wanted to save the rest for the other kids.
Holding the bottles up like a hunter holds his prey we were greeted with a mix of confusion and braggadocio. No one even hesitated. Someone had a bottle opener and quickly opened the rest of them, passing them around for all to see like this was a frat party of 13- and 14-year-olds. Everyone started acting drunk, even though as with we who found the bottles there was just no way anyone consumed enough to get more than a little buzzed. I know we were kids and all, with no experience in drinking, but as the afternoon wore on I found it ludicrous that the kids who imbibed such small amounts grew concerned it would somehow be obvious they had been drinking. I guess my years of watching my dad drink to little visible effect made me wiser than the others in knowing that it makes more than a couple of sips to get you loaded.
Now if we had found this ½-full bottle of Hennessy, well, that would have been different.
I wonder now if the differing behaviors of us kids was some kind of litmus test for who would become alcoholics later in life and who would not.
Liquor Bottles Everywhere
