By John Grantner
Having your first real drink is one of those firsts you remember. Like your first non-solo orgasm, it’s a milestone on life’s road. My first drink was on an early spring day in 1966, when I was in seventh grade. My buddy Terry approached me before school began.
“Hey, you’ll never guess what I got: booze!”
Of course, I was intrigued.
“No shit?”
“Yup. It’s sloe gin.”
“How’d you get that?”
“Found it. Next to the railroad tracks. Almost half a bottle left. I stashed it in a safe place. We can drink it after school.”
“Cool. I stole a couple of my old man’s cigarettes.” Cigarettes, when we could scrounge them, were already part of our routine.
I’d never heard of sloe gin, which to the ear seemed like gin that is in no particular hurry. I’d heard of gin, of course, but not its lackadaisical variant. But that didn’t matter. Here was an opportunity to drink like a man—the dribble of wine my parents permitted on very special occasions didn’t count—to pass a bottle and swig from it.
Neither of us knew that sloe gin isn’t meant to be drunk straight up, that it’s a cheap, cloying liqueur intended for mixing into the sort of froo-froo cocktails one of our aunts might have ordered. Or, as with this particular bottle, to be tossed aside unfinished by a discerning bum, to be finished by undiscerning thirteen year old boys. And for all we knew the guy who threw the bottle away may have pissed in it before he did so, but who thinks of that, right?
After school we headed toward the C&EI spur that ran a few blocks from school. Terry led the way to a gully parallel to the right of way. There, among the weeds, brush, junk and debris accumulated over decades, hidden behind a chunk of broken concrete, lay the precious bottle. He held it up to me, smiling proudly. We sat on a nearby stack of old railroad ties, and Terry opened the bottle and passed it to me.
“Have a taste.”
I raised the bottle to my lips and took a long pull of the sticky, sweet liquid. I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but it wasn’t this. It was like drinking candy, except for the warmth I felt growing in my core as the syrupy liquid passed down my gullet.
“Ah… Good!”
I passed the bottle to Terry and from my breast pocket produced the protective tube of notebook paper that held the cigarettes. We lit our cigarettes, and smoked and drank contentedly.
I was basking in self satisfaction and pride; I wasn’t a kid anymore. I had convinced myself that I now stood in the ranks of the sixteen and seventeen-year-old local hooligans who were so sophisticated in my mind, who dismissed me as a snotty nosed kid. Snotty nosed, yeah, but not a kid anymore, dammit. Here’s the bottle of booze to prove it.
We finished the bottle and tossed it into the weeds. Time to go home. I was slightly woozy as we made our way up the muddy embankment to the roadbed, and I slipped and fell and slid down to the bottom of the gully, grinding mud deep into the weave of one side of my pants, from the waist to the ankle. This wasn’t any kind of mud, mind you, but a particular mud. Where I lived at the time, just ten inches below the topsoil, was yellow ochre-colored clay: the residue of limestone dissolved eons ago, before any human beings ever lived anywhere, let alone in America. In my neighborhood, this clay laid on the surface wherever humans scraped through the topsoil to construct such things as railroad lines.
Terry laughed, of course, as friends are permitted to laugh at other friends’ minor misfortunes. I laughed too, as required, but thought to myself, oh, shit, this is trouble.
When I arrived at home, my mother stared at me wide-eyed.
“What happened?”
“Uh…I slipped and fell.”
“What? Where?”
“Just, you know, on the way home.”
Mom was enraged—not unusual for my mom, but in retrospect understandable in this case: These were dress pants, mind you, which, with a dress shirt and necktie, was part of the uniform required of Catholic school boys at the time. Not easy to clean.
“What do you mean ‘on the way home’? Where were you?”
“You know. Nowhere. Just on the way home.”
“You were hanging out with Terry. That kid is nothing but trouble, I’ve told you a million times. I want you to come straight home after school. No detours.”
True enough that Terry was trouble to some degree, but he never pressured me to do anything I didn’t really want to do. But Mom didn’t see it that way: Any divergence of mine from the straight and narrow path could, of course, have only been caused by a bad influence she couldn’t control.
“Take off your pants. This is going to take me hours to clean, if I can clean them at all. There’s going to be hell to pay when your father gets home.”
I felt like a kid again.
* * *
John Grantner is a lifelong visual artist and designer who has been crafting narratives and character studies his entire life. He has been a painter in oil and acrylic since his early teens. He’s also a fine art photographer and an abstract digital artist with a penchant for manipulating imagery to tell a story. Grantner is an observer of human behavior with a love of literature. When he escaped the workaday corporate treadmill, these traits came together to help him explore the written word as a creative medium.