The drinking class

My mother in law is going through a mid-life-crisis. Instead of cool shit though like buying fast cars or collecting vinyl, shes on a tear with Boones Farm Strawberry Hill. Re-living her "glory days" of underage drinking.

Wanting to see where this goes, I added to her list with the go-tos from my childhood: Thunderbird and Kool Aid powder ("the name so nice you say it twice! What's the word? Thunderbird!!), anything that says "High Gravity" on the label, MD 20/20, Zima with jolly ranchers at the bottom and Red Dog beer.

Hey, you only live once. (And, apparently, you re-live it again, with twice the hangover power the second time around).

Focus: What was your underage drink of choice?

Alt. Focus: Any good stories come out of it for you? I mean, that you can remember?

 

The first time I was drunk was at age fifteen courtesy of my parents. It was the night before Christmas Eve, and we were celebrating early since I was flying to Arizona with my dad the next day to visit my grandparents. My mom baked a ham and loaded it up with so much liquor that I practically got drunk just from that. Apparently deciding I was amusing while intoxicated, my parents kept my glass full of booze just to see how loaded I got. I don't remember all that much more about that night, but I remember them praising me the next morning for not puking.

Speaking of the next morning, I made the worst decision ever. Not liking the experience of my first hangover, I had (mis)remembered a friend of mine telling me that when you're in detox they give you vinegar to get the alcohol out of your system. So, in my vast 15 year old wisdom I went down to the kitchen, found the bottle of red-wine vinegar and sucked down a couple of swigs.

That did not end well, to say the least. I thought my stomach was going to crawl up out of my throat and leap out of my mouth to get away from me.

 

Fun fact, I didn't get drunk until I was 18 and a freshman in college. It wasn't cause I was some goodie-goodie in HS, but rather none of my friends drank and it seemed like something the popular kids were doing at parties I wasn't invited to. A friend and I used to mix Iced Tea and vodka, thinking it was a Long Island Iced Tea, but it tasted like ass, so we never slammed enough to get shitty. Funny enough, my senior year I got involved in a couple of drama productions and those kids got AFTER it. But by that point, I figured I was just going to get my drinking experience in college and didn't get super into swigging from cheap bottles of whiskey at cast parties.

Freshman year, we had an away football game on a Sat night, 3 weeks into the school year. Up till then, I had had drinks, gotten a bit buzzed, but nothing crazy as I was still a bit unsure. That night, watching the first half at the house of an older brother of my roommate. Between drinking games and general excitement, I slammed quite a few beers in the first half, got up to go to the bathroom and had jelly legs. I enjoyed the foreign feeling of the buzz but didnt get too crazy moving forward. Much different than a week later where I had my first drink-related puking experience at the same house and was kindly put to bed in a bathtub with a pillow and comforter after passing out on a bathroom floor.

 

My first real venture into drinking was New Years Eve when I was 14. My parents went out and let me have a buddy over. We decided mixing gin and orange Hi-C would be a good idea. It was not.

Cut to three years later. M*A*S*H is still on the air, Reagan is taunting the commies at every opportunity, and Judas Priest is playing on my boom box. What sweet nectar do we quaff during such heady times?

Our beers were Bud and Michelob. There was no Sammy Adams, no Stone Brewing, no Fat Tire. But lets face it, we drank them because they were cheap, and its what dad drank.

Our hard liquor was cheap vodka (anything in a plastic bottle was fine) and Jack Daniels. Both were usually mixed with store brand cola. And both tasted infinitley worse coming back out than they did going in.

 

The legal drinking age here is lower than in the US, it's 16 for beer/wine and 18 for hard liquor.

I think I first got drunk during orchestra practice, it was someone's birthday and we got champagne during the break, so, naturally, I was wasted for the second half, but somehow made it through without any major incident.

The first time I got really drunk was when I was 15, I think. I was at a party with friends, and the bartender didn't really check IDs. I was completely inexperienced and got in way over my head. Best thing was, my father was supposed to pick us up at midnight, so I had to act sober.
Looking back, my performance wasn't as flawless as I thought at the time. I remember telling my dad I drank his liquor and replaced it with water afterwards. Which I never did. I still don't have a clue why I did that. Later, I had to puke, but didn't quite make it to the bathroom, so I puked in the hallway, right in front of my mom, who wanted to go to the bathroom at the same time. She just said to clean up and went to bed.
I somehow never got into trouble for that.

I didn't really have a drink of choice. Between 16 and 18 I loved vodka mixed with red bull, because it was cheap, so I just got that whenever I had the chance.

 

If I remember correctly, I was a fan of Captain Morgan Silver rum mixed with coke 'til I became a broke college freshman and switched to bottom shelf vodka. Add whatever random beers I could sneak from my dad's fridge too. I drank a LOT of Natty Ice in college.

First time I got drunk was at the age of 16 in a friend's basement after the Homecoming football game with a few buddies. My brother was a freshman in college and got bottles of Admiral Nelson rum and Karkov Dry Gin (cue dry heaving) from a guy down his dorm hall for me. We all got shitfaced and the morning after I had a very hard time running in a straight line with the cross country team. Later one friend ratted us out and to this day it is a miracle my mom didn't find out I was the one who supplied the booze and my brother helped.

 

The make both of those still, two fine varietals those.

Captain Morgan, all I drank was that sweet sweet spiced rum and a splash of coke. I still love it but I never drink it anymore because I am not to be trusted around it, I can drink a liter in no time. Dark rum and I get along a little to well, Sailor Jerry and Kraken are excellent choices as well.

I switched to beer when I was 21 and found out that paying for Captain and Coke in the bars equaled me spending 70-100 bucks while all my buddies drank draft beer for next to nothing.

I drink Coors in the summer and Busch Heavy in the winter. I love craft beer, Bells Two Hearted Ale is probably the best beer brewed in my opinion, absolute favorite.

And of course high gravity and malt liquor is just fucked, who would voluntarily drink that shit?

 

Those were the days.

I drank way too much when I was a teenager and looking back I kind of regret it now. I started going to the bars at 13, which is a bit young to be doing that.

The first place I went to had drinking cards. You'd basically pay X amount and get a punch taken out for each drink. There were 20 slots, so about 20 drinks. Me being a stupid kid I wanted to always finish the whole card in a night. As you could imagine this never ended well.

 

I drank stupid stuff like Smirnoff Ice and diet coke and Bacardi. Occasionally I would drink diet Sprite and vodka. Always diet. Because when you throw up later it's like negative negative calories!

 

Growing up out in the country, beer has always pretty much been my thing.

Since there was only a 1 screen movie theater in our nearby town, drinking is pretty much what we had on weekend nights. We were allowed to get our driver's license at 14 (So we could be more useful on the farms), but we couldn't drive at night until we were 16. No one paid any attention to that.

Unless you wanted to spend the weekend nights with your family and 1 channel of network tv, you drank. The legal drinking age at that time in Idaho was 19, but by the time I was 16 I had no problem buying beer.

Since the alcohol sales were so lax, we got to be more selective in our beer of choice then the rest of y'all. Not smarter, just more selective. We decided Schmidt was a wonderful choice. $2.99 a twelve pack. It was emblazoned with the slogan "The Brew That Grew With The Great Northwest". Each 12 pack had cans that were printed with either ducks, elks, or pikes. This, for some reason, was important to us.

They had to be ducks. We'd leave the store empty handed and go to another store if we couldn't find ducks. If we had to, we'd settle for elks, but never pikes. Never.

Usually by 2 or 3 in the afternoon, word would get around where that night's party was going to be. I have no idea who made these decisions. We had 15-20 spots that we'd rotate and they were only accessible by 4 wheel drive. This was important because the sheriff's department only had 2 4WD's and there would always be well over 100 of us there. Even if they figured out where we were, there wasn't a damn thing they could do about it.

The parties themselves were something straight out of a country video. 50+ 4x4's gathered around a huge bonfire. Spring, Summer, Fall, or Winter, it didn't matter. I've been standing there holding a beer in a fucking blizzard by the bonfire. Many of the guy's fathers were loggers, so they'd have chainsaws and gas in the back of their truck. Many trees were drunkenly felled and sacrificed to our fires.

We also quickly learned that most girls didn't like beer, so I'd always grab a few bottles of Annie Green Springs or Boone's Farm to entertain them with.

One of my buddies summed it up perfectly back then when he cracked his first beer while we were huddled around a fire on a 10 degree night: "I like beer, it reminds me of Summer. And Spring. And Fall. And Winter."

Growing up out in the sticks was awesome.

 

Sort of Alt Focus: Anybody save the text of Tucker, Bunny and I forgot which other dude's bum wine tasting on New Year's 07-08?

Focus: Zima came out when I was in high school, tried it, and um... I was not exactly a party animal, let's just leave it at that.

 

When I first drank beer, my father, a man who has never been one for good decisions, selected a Budweiser 40 oz for us to split, and some wine coolers. (I don't know how a loud-mouthed fat redneck like him likes wine coolers, but eh, breaking stereotypes and such) I was fifteen. I drank most of the 40 oz myself and he complimented me for keeping it down. The buzz made me really giggly and energetic, like almost becoming a clumsy kid with a caffeine rush or something. Anyway, at my current age of twenty four I'm mostly a beer, mead and the odd bourbon drinker, but when I began, Coors was a favorite. Easily accessible, every dumbass brings a case to a party in the ID sticks, bonfire drinking Number One. I also recall enjoying Mike's Hard stuff, some of it is seriously tasty shit. I never did the Slushee or Coke mixers.

 

My first real beer was a warm heinekin in the back of my parents van. We were drinking out in the high school parking lot during a basketball game. We were all stupid and had absolutely no idea someone could've got a DUI for that shit.

 

Edward 40-hands: With a group of friends duct tape forties of colt 45, King Cobra or Old E to each others hands. You have to finish both forties before you can use the bathroom so you have to pound them. A great teenager game.

 

Our Mike's is 6.9%, I was in one state and it was 4% or something like that.

 

My first drink was a misplaced handle of Jack Daniel's. From the ages of 14-22, my drink of choice was Johnnie Walker, because I knew exactly how much it cost, would get my dad blamed if someone found it in the hiding spot I had in the garage (golf bags when no one plays golf? Sold!), and would reliably fuck me up like little else. When I started driving and had classmates who would work as cashiers at a supermarket, I would stick with Fatweiser cases, because again...if caught, it was Dad's. When I got adventurous and bought Sam Adams and Newcastle, I thought I had found the nectar of a loving God.

Interestingly, the last drink I bought with a fake id was Johnnie Walker black, with a Bud chaser, even though I hadn't lived at home for 4 years.

 

The very first thing I drank was a Heineken that I swiped from my dad and my best friend and I split when we were 13. For a while, we spent Friday nights at my house (alone) and Saturday nights at her house, and every Friday we'd take a little something from the liquor cabinet or the garage but never really got drunk. Then we got caught and stopped. The first time I actually got drunk was with Crystal Palace vodka straight from the plastic bottle in the woods after school when I was 14, and that's what I continued to get trashed on for the next couple of years because it was easy to get (don't know how it came to be the go-to kind for people to buy for underaged kids in my town), cheap, and easy to hide. I think we had graduated to vodka that came in glass bottles by the time I was 16 and at a party, and filled a tall glass up with vodka like it was water and drank all of it. I probably should've gone to the hospital that night. But I haven't been able to drink vodka ever since. Once we had cars when we were 16 (and therefore had places to hide things) that's when we started drinking beer. We had a weirdly sophisticated taste in beer - I don't remember ever drinking any of the standard cans. Speaking of sophisticated, I was also a big fan of having boxes of wine at the parties I'd throw at my house (white, so it wouldn't stain the rugs if it was spilled, because I'm a genius). That stuff tasted like juice after drinking straight vodka for years.