I don't completely remember the first time I got drunk. And not because of a blackout or anything -- mostly, it just didn't occur to me to make a lasting mental note, and therefore, I'm not sure which time was my first.
Here's what's definite: I was 15. That's how old I was when we moved to Calgary, and with an 18 drinking age, it's even easier for high-schoolers to get their hands on booze. The rest is all a guess. I was probably at a party at my friend Jon's house, and almost certainly drinking bottles of Molson Special Dry. It's possible my friend Leigh and I were sharing a six of green Bacardi Breezers, or a pack of bottled Long Island Iced Tea. But I'm pretty sure my first party in Canada was an MSD-fueled one. It was my beer when I was 15 (later replaced by Labatt Blue and the occasional can of Kokanee, which regrettably you can't get here). The first time I drank it, my friend Ian bought the six-pack and rationed me three, since I'd never gotten through even one before. When I cracked open my third bottle, I ran up to Ian and shouted, "I AM DRINKING MY THIRD BEER!" He was very proud of me.
I was very proud of me. It felt like a great coming-of-age thing. I had never been to an actual high-school bash with actual drinking. I'd never before needed to know whether a mickey of rum would be enough to split with Leigh, or if we'd need a larger bottle. I had definitely never needed to call poison control because my friend took a sip of floor cleaner ("It smelled like orange juice!" she slurred) before we realized what she was doing. I'd never funneled beer or done shots of tequila or yakked in a rain barrel at my PE teacher's house in the country because his daughter was throwing an outdoor kegger and I had just guzzled something called "lemon gin" that I believe was just powdered lemonade mixed into straight gin. I'd never slept in my friend's minivan after an all-nighter in a giant open field that belonged to one friend or another who lived on a farm. I'd never thrown a beer bottle onto the ground in a fury because I overheard people who were supposed to be my friends talking shit about me, because I had the gall to be upset that being the last to turn 18 meant all my supposed best pals stopped making plans that legally included me, and only under duress starting throwing me thoughtless bones: "Oh, between bars, we're going to stop off at a party at Joel's friend's house for like 15 minutes, if you want to meet us there for a bit." I had never had to stop my friend from climbing into my clothes dryer, or cover the Bar Billiards table with a tarp so we could do shots off it without ruining the felt, or learn how to gauge my gag reflex so I could make it to a toilet safely (my record is almost perfect on this, except for when I followed up the rain barrel by puking in my hand outside my gym teacher's bathroom, some of which spilled onto the floor. Fortunately, I cleaned it up).
I learned, or did, all that stuff and more when I was in high school. And I loved it. The first year I was in Calgary it was really hard for me to shake off the shackles of my own paralyzing shyness. I still tend to fall quiet when I'm nervous, or when I feel pressure to be witty and charming. But that first year, I felt a lot like I was tagging along to people, without a proper group of my own. Being at parties was the only common bond I had with anybody. It's the great equalizer. Get stuck in a lab with a cute guy who intimidates you, and saying, "Wow, I/you/your girlfriend got so trashed last weekend at Mickey's party" opens up all kinds of lines of conversation. It made me feel like I had friends. Which eventually, I did.
I never really think much about how much, or why, I drank back then. Certainly, I've always been someone who appreciates the punitive nature of the spins, because they tell me to stop. I've never had the kind of blackout where I woke up somewhere strange and had no idea how I got there, and if I've ever forgotten things from a night out, they were usually only short conversations I had amid a louder, more aimless social whirl. I'm lucky in that regard. Lucky that I'm a stickler for rules, and being so drunk I couldn't get to wherever I was supposed to sleep that night would have been a huge violation of that. Oh, sure, I got just drunk enough that I once thought it was a good idea while taking a shortcut to another bar to follow my friends -- all climbers -- over a fence topped with barbed wire, which ripped my jeans (and mercifully, somehow, not my skin) from knee to mid-thigh... and then, I thought it was a good idea to do it again several yards later, at which point I almost made it over but ripped the back and swung from there while my friend J.J. laughingly caught me and unhooked me. I still wonder how I came out of that without bleeding.
But, of course, a lot of what prompted me to reflect on those times was reading Smashed. Not because it was such a life-changing read or anything, but because it's the kind of book that's impossible to read without aligning the author's experiences and emotions with your own. It's not deliberate, or rooted in any desire to find a moral to her story that teaches you something about yourself. It's just the familiarity of some of what she says that prompts a comparison to your own life. Like, "Did I ever do that?" or "Did I ever feel that?" or "Could that have been me?" She talks about how she was seduced into it because it loosened her tongue, relaxed her, made her feel popular, made her feel fun. Those are hit close to the vest for me. And it becomes a totally selfish reading experience, because it all turns into, "There but for the grace of God go I."
She knew every detail of her first rendezvous with alcohol. She admits that she took care of and fetishized that memory more than of most her other firsts. So of course, that's when I reached my mind back to try and dig up mine, to see if I had it there in any kind of comparable detail. I don't. Which is good, I guess. But the book ultimately left me with an unsatisfied feeling, not necessarily because of the story or the writing, but because reading it made me a person who determines how messed up she is, or was, based on somebody else's problems. There's something so unsavory about saying to yourself, "Well, thank God, at least I wasn't as bad as she was."
I suppose we all have to look for parameters -- retroactively or in the present -- wherever we can find them, but it sucks to catch yourself doing it at someone else's expense.