From the Mouth of Jim Beam

                                            From the Mouth of Jim Beam





        I was standing there, surrounded by multiple kegs of beer. A line was forming behind me, full of angry drunk people eagerly waiting for their chance to fill their cups with a beer of their choice. They were waiting for me. The only thing is, though, that I had no idea what of beer I wanted to drink. My choices were Molson Canadian, a light lager form the neighboring country north of us; Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, a beer that I haven’t drank enough to judge; and Rolling Rock, the lighter beer of the three and the one least likely to jolt me into drunken compulsion. Was I in the mood for a beer to coat my stomach, thus not allowing me to eat that much, meaning I would get drunk quicker? I decided no and went away from the Molson. I wanted to drink for a while and not worry about passing out too early so I shied away from the Sierra Nevada, not sure of the effects that would’ve had on me. So I was left with Rolling Rock, a beer that I was familiar with because its brewing home is Latrobe, Pennsylvania, right down the road from my home, the University of Pittsburgh. 

         It was noon on a beautifully lit Monday in April, opening day for the Pirates baseball. My boss offered me a ticket to tailgate—all you can eat and drink—for only $35. I jumped at the opportunity. It involved me missing two classes but I decided a way that. One class was a philosophy lecture with 300 students in t so the professor had no way of knowing if it I was there or not. The was a writing class that at 6 pm. The game started at 1:30 and was going to be over around 4:30, plenty of time for me to get on campus and go to class. No one would know if I was drunk or not. So the invitation seemed like a no-brainer.

         I don’t even like baseball. I can honestly say that I had no idea who played for the Pirates, who pitched for them, or who coached them. I saw the day as a chance to skip school and drink beers with my buddies. I knew they weren’t going to win, we all knew, but we still packed up the car, drove down to PNC Park, and tailgated for four hours before the game started. There were about thirty to forty of us standing around a grill the size of a ping pong table, laughing, joking, and drinking our day away. A smorgasbord of food was prepared for us; it looked like a feeding trough for a school of pigs that hadn’t eaten forever. The only thing we were missing was one of those dead pigs on a stick being rotated over an open flame. We ate and we drank, and acted like children in an amusement park. Joey stumbled into oncoming traffic, laughed for a few minutes, and flipped off any car that honked the horn at him, screaming to get his drunken ass of the street. “Fuck you! I’m a Pirates fan!” he replied to them. I’m not sure what that meant, but it didn’t bother me. I was drinking so I was happy.

         It was at that moment that I realized we were standing in the middle of a gas station drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. One too-far flick of someone’s unfiltered Marlboro and we would have been tailgating in front of the gates of heaven.

         Then it dawned on me. We were nothing but a bunch of alcoholics, sitting in a gas station, waiting to watch a baseball team that was worse than the Little League team I played for when I was a child. I questioned myself and who I was in the process. There I was, a senior at the University of Pittsburgh, probably not going to graduate in April, and I skipped class to drink my face off. I looked around and noticed that I was the youngest person at the tailgate. Everyone else was either a grad student, people in their thirties with a decent paying job, or family men with kids running around their feet. What is to become of me? I thought. It was then I knew that I had no idea what I was doing with my life.



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         It’s a scary thing being an alcoholic; it’s even scarier to admit being one when I’m only 21 years-old. I don’t know how this all started, how I became so accustomed to alcohol. I understand depression is apart of it, but I don’t think I’m that depressed. I look at my father as an excuse. He drinks four or five cocktails an hour, filling his glass ¾ vodka, and the rest with Diet Coke. He drinks Diet Coke because he’s a diabetic. You would think he would stop drinking altogether because of his illness, but that would just make him angry. I once saw him break a couch because the Jets—his favorite football team—lost a playoff game; imagine what would happen if I cut off his alcohol. It’s not that he’s a bad father. He’s actually the best. He just happens to love alcohol as much as I do, which lays the problem.

         Some people think baldness is hereditary; well, in my case, alcoholism runs in my family. I can remember the stories my dad used to tell me of him as a kid, when my grandfather would give him glasses of wine when he was 6 years-old  and ordered him to drink it. My grandfather told my dad that it would make him a man if he got drunk at a young age.

         When I was 13 I used to make screwdrivers out of my dad’s vodka and my mom’s orange juice after they went to sleep. I was barely able to reach my dad’s liquor cabinet. I remember trying to grasp the bottle of Popov with my outstretched hands, desperately attempting to not make a sound. After my success with retrieving the bottle, I always made the drink strong, not by choice, but because I had no idea what I was doing. When I was done with the bottle I filled it with water until the amount in it was the same as before I took it. I figured I was doing both of us some good, treating myself to a drink and getting rid of some of the burden on my dad. The less he drank the better. After all, I was 13; I had my whole life ahead of me. Sometimes my dad would come downstairs to get a drink of water and I would have my screwdriver in my hand. I told him it was Minute Maid and he left me alone. He was mostly hung over anyway, so he wouldn’t have known the difference. To me, I felt like I could get away with anything because I knew my parents wouldn’t know the difference between if I was drunk or being healthy.

         But now I can sit down and say that I haven’t seen a sober day in almost a month. An excuse for that can be that I’m in college and that’s what every college kid says, bragging to their buddies of how high their tolerance is. “I can drink a case of beer and not be wasted,” is a phrase that my friends live by. It’s a sad thing to be proud of: how fast once can finish a case of beer. This is not what I went to college for. It was fun the first two years, being away from home, partying in some random person’s house, and not worrying about waking my parents when I got home. I took 25 shots and still managed to drive home on my 21st birthday.



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         Alcohol is everywhere I look. I wake up in the morning and grab a fresh Budweiser instead of pouring a bowl of cereal. My refrigerator is completely empty except for a thirty-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon, the cheapest case of beer I can afford. I have mirrors hung in my living room sporting the logos of my two favorite beers, Amstel Light and Labatt Blue. I can throw a rock from my front porch and hit two bars and a beer distributor. The library is ten blocks away.

If I run out of beer in the middle of the night, all I have to do is walk 3 blocks, make a left and I’m at a 24 hour beer distributor, fully equipped with every beer from Pittsburgh to Europe. It calls to me. As soon as I finish this paper, I’ll probably end up at a bar with a shot of Yagermeister and a bottle of Yuengling in front of me. 

         I hate this addiction. I want to beat it, I want to get rid of it, and I want to be able to go to sleep without having a buzz. But I can’t do that. I can’t win. It keeps beating me. I drank a bottle of Jim Beam, really cheap whisky, and ended up in jail because I told a cop to go fuck himself. After 16 hours in a holding cell, I was released. I immediately turned off my cell phone and bought a six-pack of Killian’s Red. When my parents found out, I told them I was arrested for disorderly conduct. My dad laughed and told me to stop being like him while my mom told me to never do it again. I gave them a heartfelt apology while I cracked open another beer.

         It’s not easy trying to kick this habit when I’m surrounded by limitless possibilities of how to get drunk. I can join a keg race between two groups of people where the object of the game is to see who can drink a keg of beer the fastest. If I get bored with that I can play a game of beer pong, an endless game where four people play 2-on-2 ring toss, except the ring is a ping pong ball and the object is to shoot the ball at a triangle of six cups, each half-filled with beer. The team who makes the ball into each six cups wins, and the losing team has to drink the remaining cups. If I don’t want to do that I can do a keg stand, or shotgun a beer, or play flip-cup, or a card game, or duct tape a 40 oz. bottle of malt liquor to both my hands and not take them off until both are finished. How to play these games is not important because the only thing that matters is being drunk at the end. You don’t even need a reason to drink beer anymore. I once stayed up until 7 am because I didn’t want to go to sleep knowing there was a case of beer in my fridge.



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         I watch older people at the bar. It scares me to think that I might be like that one day. I’m talking about the ones that sit at the end of the bar, paying no attention to anyone except their drinks. They sit with their heads down and a glass of whatever liquor, on the rocks, in front of them. They don’t talk to the bartender. Instead they put their money down, stacked nicely, and wait until they finally have their drink in their hands. When it’s time for another one, a simple flick from their index finger and the problem is solved. I wonder what they think about when they’re sitting there. Do they contemplate life? Do they ask themselves what went wrong? Then I ask myself the same questions and I realize the answers are hard to come by. Maybe I just drink because I enjoy it; it’s an escape from everything wrong in my life, which is ironic. Maybe this is phase and I’ll be able to get out if it when I come to my senses. Maybe that’s why I was drinking at a gas station with thirty to forty people that I only know through mutual love of alcohol. When I told them I had to be back on campus by 5 o’clock they laughed at me and told me we were going to another bar after the game. I didn’t say no, I had no choice. They were the ones giving me the ride.



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         Rolling Rock, Molson, Sierra Nevada, it doesn’t matter. It’s all alcohol. We could have been drinking urine out of those kegs and I would’ve have known the difference, as long as that urine was making me goofy and light-headed. As long as it made me forget that I had a five-page paper due the next day in my film class.

         I’ve heard the first step of alcoholism is admitting you have the problem. Well, I admit it and I still don’t see a solution. Now everyone knows that I drink a lot, that’s the only thing that’s come out of my admittance. I don’t know where my life is heading and not sure if any good is going to come out of it so I’ve decided to take it one day at a time and hope for the best outcome. I’m going to graduate from college next year. I just hope I’m not drunk when I walk for my diploma.