Part of that is that I got drunk for my first time at this age. When people get drunk for the first time their emotional development takes a hit. The more times a person gets drunk or stoned the more they’re actually subjecting their brain to a chemical brain injury. Alcohol, which had once been of no importance in my life, went from that family relative abstinence position, to being a part of most of my recreation. With a decade or so all my friends drank socially. I married women who came from alcoholic families and enjoyed drugs and alcohol as I did. Smoking a joint was taboo in my youth but by my 20’s I’d smoke pot in the hippy era, occasionally then hashish in Morocco.
30 per cent of people simply don’t use drugs or alcohol. 60 percent don’t like the effect. They are the true social drinkers, one or two glasses with meals at most. Maybe having tried a drug but not persisted. By contrast I’m part of the 10%. I’ve tried most things once and really did like the feeling that came with red wine , nicotine and marijuana. I’m thankful I never liked anything else particularly. I certainly am thankful that crack and fentanyl weren’t available when I was young because like cigarettes they’re very addictive causing physiological dependence rapidly. I’d smoke a pipe monthly then weekly then daily and switch to cigarettes and spend that last year ‘trying to quit’.
Whenever I quit, eventually I started smoking again, several times after months of being off cigarettes. I’d plan to quit drinking for a year knowing that I’d always restarted smoking when I was drinking.I’d also in my last year of smoking tried to use marijuana to quit only to be rolling ‘shake’ marijuana and Drum tobacco together in the last months. I was married to a woman with a severe cocaine and drug addiction so admit I used cocaine a half dozen times but thankfully I preferred a glass of wine or a bottle of wine and a joint.
Modern marijuana, BC Bud is almost as powerful as LSD.I’d tried that in my 20’s and like mushrooms it simply ended after a few times. Hallucinogens are like that for the vast majority of people. No major addictive capacity. Not like alcohol , nicotine or cocaine or opiates.
I was pleased to join AA eventually as an adult because a friend said as I’d stopped drinking and smoking for months I might enjoy the “club’ of folk who had also stopped drinking. All that was required for membership was a ‘desire not to drink’. I had that desire because I was sure if I drank I’d pick up a cigarette. In those days we believed that lung cancer and COPD rose exponentially after 10 years of smoking history. When I reached 10 years I quit but three months later started. I was abhorrent of smoking , the stink, the ritual, and the abuse to the body. Marijuana smoke was less bad but the combination of nicotine and marijuana was the worst. So there I was a binge drinker who’d quit nicotine several times that year, 1 to 3 months each time only to start while drinking. Cocaine was going around always at the parties and I passed. My Aboriginal alcoholic friend amused me by trading cocaine for booze. I could relate. I also felt that if my partner was ever to address her cocaine , pot, nicotine and booze addiction I’d have to set the example by quitting drinking I’d married her because I liked that she had all these addictions and her own supply and dealers at the time. I really liked her black friend who was a regular pharmacy. I’d tried ‘geographical cures’ but they’d fail because we’d just start together months later somewhere else.
At 17 that’s when this part of my life began. We’d call it fun, fun and trouble and then trouble. It was fun for a decade or two then the trouble began. I liken alcohol and drugs to an external ‘stress reduction control’ , like a ‘thermostat’. Our natural systems have amazing resilience and flexibility. The external models are unfortunately only good for minor or acute stresses and tend to worsen outcomes when there are severe or chronic stresses. As I was attracted to women with addiction their emotional thermostats were broken. It was like I was always with a 13 yo and my emotional development was 17. Under the stress of work and marriage, more alcohol made it more difficult rather than easier to function. Like driving a car, where the road gets bumpy and a drink might calm the nerves. But as the bumpiness continues and increases and the journey persists .more alcohol simply makes the driving worse. That’s what relationships are like with alcohol and pot. My last experience with a partner on cocaine was even a hundred times worse. I never want to live with someone addicted to opiates or crack. The blood level of the drug dictates the irritability and anger of the person. It’s nothing to do with external factors. I tell people, we drink at funerals or baptisms. Eventually we “flat line” and the drugs or alcohol serve to help us ‘feel’ again. These are all ‘depressives’ and ‘anxiety’ inducing. For many it becomes quite upsetting even terrifiying to have any variation from the stable depressive state so drugs and alcohol are then maintained to manage the emotional and at times physical withdrawal. What ever shows externally is merely a reflection of the amount of drugs on board. When she was on cocaine she was a sexy happy brilliant woman. Off cocaine she was a lying crazy dangerous psychopath.
Which is one of the issues with drugs and alcohol. In psychiatry they are the ‘great chameleons’. A chronic cocaine abuse can not be distinguished from a borderline personality disorder, narcissist ,or even psychopath. All drug and alcohol addicts with rare exception appear as Bipolar II. Some schizoaffefctives and a whole lot of manic depressives and social phobia are simply drug or alcohol addiction or withdrawal. Of drugs the psychiatric conditions reduce dramatically.
I’m an addiction psychiatrist now. So well 17 was a sweet year with so much positive happening I’ve spent a lot of time individually and in therapy reflecting on that first drunk..
A friend whose name I forget had his license and got his father’s car. We were all over 16 but I’d not learn to drive or get my drivers license until I was into my 20’s. My second wife where the male members of the family mostly died of alcoholism taught me to drive but I will ever be thankful to her and her father who taught her, on how to park. I can park any vehicle in the tiniest space thanks to her dad’s professional formula. She was a great teacher as well as being beautiful. My father was a great driver but not a good teacher. I tried to teach one fellow to drive and that was my life time limit on teaching someone to drive. My mother caused two driver instructors to quit their employment and choose another career.
My friend had this Mercury convertible with lots of fin. Baby blue and white. We’d found a bottle of navy rum and planned this weekend. Four guys who I don’t remember were a part of this fiasco. We’d never drunk and we were all virgins and we’d never dated. I now realize that this had to have happened when I was 16 and a half before I met Nina.
17 may well have been so significant because I met Nina.
This memory lane exercise is revealing that way. I know I was still in the gym club because Keith is around. I really wonder who else was with us that night. 4 guys. The leader from Wildwood had the dad’s car and parents not home. . He knew me when I was seeing Kathy because he was always asking if I’d got laid and I’d say no and ‘itls none of your business’. “She’s going go be wearing panties on her honeymoon with a hole in them”.. I remember him saying that. He was definitely an Iago. Crude too. But a virgin like the rest of us. He had that false bravado and sex experienced talk that the least competent often feigned to put the group off the scent of fear.
This night we planned to pick up some girls and take them back to his place where the parents had left him foolishly with the house and car.
I truly remember honestly believing that as we had a car and a bottle of rum and a private place to go girls would be chasing after us to have sex with us. Really. It was a fairly universal belief of boys my age at that time. Women could not resist booze and cars and the shagging pad. Really. I know it sounds crazy but adolescents is an acceptable age of frank insaniety.
We were quite shocked that this fundamental belief about man hood and women and dating was rapidly shot down that day.
We drove all over the city pulling up beside pretty girls, single and in pairs, 4 guys in a cnovertible and we’d try a wide variety of ‘Hey beautiful, want to ride’....’hey gorgeous, come join us we have a bottle of rum” . “Hop in we’ve got booze and we’re having a party”.
This did not prove a winning formula. We as guys were definitely shocked. Really shocked. We even showed them the bottle of unopened Navy Rum and the driver revved the car but nothing happened.
It was worse. I remember this well. Most of the girls ran away some giggling others not. . The worst of the runners was the girl who ran through the hedge falling down and picking herself up pulling her white sweater out of the branches and looking back over her shoulder as she gained earth departure momentum and trajectory.
We really couldn’t figure out what was our problem. Really, dozens of girls ran. All turned their back on us. We really were just trying every pick up line we’d heard in the media. I pity the young men today raised on rap.
Finally after hours of failure we met success. We pulled up beside two sisters at a bus stop and offered them a ride. We showed them the rum and their eyes lit up.
Years later I would learn that they both had hyperthyroidism which explained their bug eye look. They were also already alcoholics because the sight of the bottle had them climbing over the convertible door into the back seat.
Now we were ready.
Back at the friends place the girls opened the bottle and passed out drinks, mega shots for themselves. They ‘d eventually drink half the bottle. One of the guys began to puke. More kids showed up with beer and someone had gin. Another kid was puking in the back.
Keith Carter was there and did a back handspring. I remember that because I tried it and didn’t make it. Years later I’d see a movie with Denzel Washington as a pilot who drank and remembered Keith, the gymnast who could perform flawlessly in any state. I wasn’t an Olympic athlete or Denzil Washington. I simply cannot do back handsprings drunk. I actually tried it twice in the living room breaking the lamp the second time. I really thought with the advantage I gained on Navy Rum, I would do them better than Keith. This was truly not the case. The guy whose house it was called a halt to this important lesson before more furniture was broken.
The girls were sitting drinking and chain smoking and we guys were suddenly competing doing strange antics. Some guy had gone out to puke and fallen into the hedge getting himself trapped till some one rescued me. The music got louder and louder.
I had never been drunk. I was drunk. I was fascinated by the lack of coordination. This became readily apparently when Keith walked on his hands down the stairs maneuvering around the corner without difficulty and continuing to the bottom. That’s when the major train wreck occurred. I walked down on my hands to the first landing but rolled down the next set of stairs.. Some kid who wasn’t a gymnast had followed me and rolled down two flights of stairs crashing into the guy who like me only made it to the first landing. A bunch of bodies tangled together at the bottom caused weird laughter and required more rum.
The police sirens sounded and the house was exited. I don’t know what happened to the girls. Maybe a taxi sometime. My friend was passed out on the kitchen floor. The Rolling Stones “I can’t get no Satisfaction’ was playing loud on the parents stereo . More guys with more booze had arrived when someone said there were girls. I vaguely remember the girls wanting to go when the rum was finished. There’d been some dancing.
My vague recollection is doing that staggering run across a city street to the huge dike around the golf course. There were two guys with me. We looked across at the house where there were two or three police cars and kids being dragged and being put in the back seats. Everyone was under age. No one was hurt. Maybe the police took the girls home. Some kids were taken to the police station. I have no idea. I was puking on the dike and falling down standing up and falling down. Eventually I just stayed down. The two guys with me were trying to hurry me. That’s when a police car headed onto the dike.
“Billy’s too drunk to run. He’s going to get us all caught. Let’s throw him down the dike. He’ll be safe. We can run then.”
So next thing I know I’m being picked up from where I’ve chosen to sleep and one guys got my legs and one guys got my arms. Then I’m rolling down the side of the dike and ending up in bushes on the side of the golf course.
The police car went by following my friends who out ran it and would never be associated with that night.
I woke up sometime in the wee hours and staggered home. It would not be the first time I had this experience of ‘returning to the barn’ on Autopilot. I recall zombie lurching drunken staggering falling progress maneuver well, not without shame.
It was a relief when I got to my yard. Like Robert Peary finally reaching the North Pole. The dog didn’t recognize me or didn’t like the reek of puke and navy rum. He began barking ferociously while I shushed him as he backed up before me to the back door. He eventually greeted me tail wagging and stopped barking. I opened the unlocked back door and got into the the inside vestibule.
My father opened the door to the kitchen which must have surprised me because I’d been using that as a prop and fell face forward on the kitchen floor my stomach hitting the top stair. I’m convinced that helped the next event. My puke spewing out of me to cover the whole kitchen floor soiling my parents slippers.
Dad shouted, “You’re drunk!”
And I replied, “Who squealed?”
I pity my poor mom cleaning up after the drunk. I would do this for many a woman and man in years to come. I’d not be a puker after that night except rarely. Other than that first occasion I was sufficiently aware that I’d stop the car or head off to hug the porcelain.
Mom put me in the bath tub and I remember my father saying,
“It must be drugs, Jean. With all my time in the military I’ve never seen a man this drunk.”
Navy Rum will do it every time. Tequila is worse. I’d never touch Navy Rum again but I saw it do this gastronomical trick on many a novice drinker in years to come.
In the morning I had cotton mouth and the worst headache known to man. I remember going out side in white shorts and tshirt to do a head stand hoping that blood to my brain would stop the pain that was utterly untouched by the aspirin my parents gave me. I was doing the headstand when the police arrived. I couldn’t stand but sat as they asked me if there’d been any drugs. I said no. They asked me who brought the rum and I frankly didn’t know. That was it.
I didn’t drink again for a couple of years after that and when I finally stopped for good I’d do an exercise listing all events I’d thought were ‘bad’ in my life and wow , the vast majority of them had happened under the influence of alcohol or worse when I was hung over and didn’t give a damn what I said.
I was grounded for weeks and no longer hung out with the friends from Wildwood. I’d continue at the YMCA Gym Club but I think my parents thought less of that. I truly believed that Mom thought Keith Carter was an angel and was disappointed when she and his mom talked. She learned then that he was mortal. My mother was convinced that if I had just stayed in the church group I wouldn’t have come under the influence of drunks. Truthfully looking back I think the girls were the only ones who had experience with alcohol and they truly liked it. But they had no intention of doing anything more than drinking with us. We were certainly not a sexy lot of guys .
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