Whiskey - Part I

Like some sort of ethereal fire, it descends into my body, leaving behind it a trail of warmth and pain as delicate and brutal as an angry woman's toungue.

I first decided that I would like whiskey when I was 17.  My mom and I went school shopping or something.  We sat after dinner in the Marble Slab creamery and talked about life.  We went over, of course, her wild young days when she conceived me with Ben Nichols and had to return to her family with shame and failure.  She wanted me to understand that her life had been so empty when she tried to find bottom;  she thought if only she could show me a glimpse of the carnage that she had found at the bottom of her despair perhaps I would avoid such a pitfall.  So, she told me about the bad old days.  She talked of the dank inside of dimly lit hick bars in Cheney Washington where she served rednecks and white-trash the answer to the limitless despair of their marginal lives.  She told me about the viscousness of angry men, and she told me of her love for whiskey.

My mother likes to drink beer.  She will even enjoy a nice glass of wine every now and then.  But, for her, the key that turns the tumbler of her body is a cold, clean glass of straight up Bourbon.

She told me this when I was 17.  She meant for me to understand that at the bottom of emptiness you can find solace in a bottomless bottle.

Instead, I noted that serious drinkers don't fuck around.  They go straight for the straight whiskey.

I started drinking when I was 20.  I had been brought up in a very fundamentalist sect of Baptists.  In fact, we called ourselves Fundamental Independent Baptists.  That meant that we didn't trust any sort of central organization to tell us how to translate and interpret the scriptures.  Instead, each one of us was expected to mull over the Word of God daily and understand it as a personal and very literal directive for our lives.

I knew more details of Fundamentalist Christian dogma by the time I was 16 than most normal kids know about their favorite musical group.  We took this shit very, very seriously.  For three consecutive years at the Christian School that I attended, I won the award for memorizing scripture.  Typically we would memorize somewhere between 3 and 5 chapters of the Bible over the course of a year.  At the end, we would recite it for the principal and a teacher, and they would grade who recalled it the best.  This was a k-12 3 room school.  When I was 8, 9, and 10 years old I mastered the scripture better than every single kid.  Even the high school kids couldn't touch me.  This is the sort of serious we are talking about.

So, when it came to the "big" issues of morality, I did not waver much as a kid.  I did not drink, try drugs, or have sex.  Of course, like most young boys, I rebelled by using as harsh and colorful language as I could imagine.  But when it came to the big three I obeyed.

I even went to a Christian University after graduating from High School.  This was a bonafied, certified, real-deal engineering university.  However, it was certainly centered on the Bible.  Drinking, smoking, drugs, and sex were expellable offenses.  So, for the first two years of my college experience I sewed my wild oats by pulling pranks on the school's security guards and rough housing with other guys in my all-male dorm.

Then, something happened.  As I considered the world and compared it against the dogma that I had been living and breathing by since just a small child, I realized that the hard-line positions taken by my church really had no basis in the doctrine.  The fetters were unlocked.

The school I attended was in Longview, TX.  This was about 200 miles east of Dallas and very close to the Loisiana border.  Most people from my area flew down to the college, but I had just bought a new car over the vacation with my summer's earnings, and I decided to drive down to school.

I have a dear friend, Holly Thorsen.  At the time, she was attending Stanford University.  Her life's path could not possibly deviate farther from my own!  She was attending one of the most liberal schools in the nation, and she was pursuing a degree in the arts.  Well, I decided that I wanted to go visit her and see what her college was like.  Little did I realize that this journey would fundamentally change things for me.  It was this 4 day trip half-way across the united states that would completely change my outlook on life, crumple my faith like a cheap aluminum can, and open my eyes to a wider and more colorful world than I could have ever imagined.