There’s only a few times in my life I drank in the hopes of blistering my brain so that I could forget about the weirdness in my life. The few times I was successful, was by consuming a whole bottle of Senator’s Club. It’s probably the cheapest rot-gut you can find (in Portland, anyway), and boy does it kick you to the ground hard.
There was the time I had the blues about university. Money was tight, and only getting tighter. Every day the US dollar kept slipping, and my hard-earned cash shrunk in the eyes of the Canadian financial system. I was working regular 16 hour shifts at the mill (almost never seeing sunlight), and despite my penny-pinching could still tell that my ass was going to be handed to me. 6 bucks got you a bottle of Think-No-More, and when it got real bad, that’s what I reached for.
I recall another time when I was about to go to Calgary to start school, and I was knocking back the stuff like water. Mike and I were playing some racing video game, and after my fourth Pabst Blue Ribbon, he had become the designated video game driver by that point. The worst form of depression is the one that requires outside help just to get to the deepest depth of sadness, and that whiskey was my spelunking gear to oblivion.
Norah and I had just split a few days earlier, and the dread was seeping in. I couldn’t admit to myself (or to my parents, for that matter), that I had made a very big mistake. So what, might you ask, is the best way to fix that mistake? Put the brakes on, and head back to Mount A? Or perhaps take the semester off and take stock of my life?
Nope. The best way is to drink like a sailor. Your ability to rationalize makes you hold back, and sometimes the only way to get through the drama and craziness is to stumble through it a lumbering hulk of intoxicated flesh.
I was getting maudlin as the minute drew near when my parents would toss me into the car to get me to an airport in Boston. At that point, my gag reflex had withered and died, and my esophagus had become a mere funnel for the alcohol to get to my stomach.
Pulling away from home, we got almost exactly a mile before I had my parents pull over at the Hannaford’s supermarket. I proceeded to amble in, feeling like Mister Perfect, and then threw up all over the toilet in the handicapped stall. If not for the grip bar on the wall, surely I would have fallen in and drowned.
I walked out smelling like a Portland wharf bar. Sleeping on the floor of the van, my parents took me to Boston, for my flight to Calgary.