Starting in the fall of 2005; my Grade Eleven year, there seemed to be a shift in many people's view of life at school. Everyone was getting serious, and everyone was in more of a scramble to figure out what would be happening in their lives after High School. I was so comfortable thinking that life was all about robotically moving from class to class, socializing, and playing sports, that I knowingly repressed any thoughts of what the future might bring. The lack of any real responsibility was something I reveled in, and the thought of "real life" punching me square in the jaw in two years was a frightening reality to come to terms with.
Naturally, like any adolescent kid, I was afraid of the future and the choices and challenges I'd be forced to confront. The idea of working forty hours a week for the rest of my life wasn't exactly an invigorating thought. Maybe I was looking for an escape, maybe the escape found me; it was probably inevitable that I'd end up trying alcohol for the first time, guess the fall of 2005 was as good a time as any.
Up until this point in my life I had only witnessed people drinking, or being drunk. I found them to be annoying, obnoxious and whilst pondering a night of experimentation; where I would drink myself into oblivion for the first time, I'd often think about a traumatic memory of a couple people chucking up the contents of their stomachs in front of me at a party a couple years back (mmm chunky soup). With that idea in mind, drinking wasn't overly appealing, but anyway, needless to say, I "went for it".
It's hard to remember who I had convinced to purchase the six Labatt Blue beers that I had wrapped in socks and stuffed into my backpack, I'm sure I was more than grateful for their sacrifice and selfless service.
I brought the beer filled backpack to a local park along with a few of my friends. Once my friends and I arrived at McAdam Avenue School, it was time to ingest some fermented poison.
My frame of mind going in was that I was going to find out once and for all what all the craze was about when adults consumed a large amount of alcohol. Adults seemed to enjoy it well enough, and as I pressed the bottle to my lips I thought, "god I hate the taste of beer" before chugging the yeast infested concoction as briskly as possible (which wasn't that brisk at the time) in order to avoid the grossness.
My good friend Geoff was present during this particular escapade, along with a couple girls named Becky and Whitney and a random friend named Mike.
My buds and I made our way behind the School and onto the playground that ended at the edge of a Soccer field. We were all preoccupied with ingesting some poison, climbing the metal jungle gym, sneaking in some flirtatious words of innocence, and then intermittently swallowing our alcoholic beverages of choice. "Is this shit going to hit me or not", then boom; a feeling and a warmth swept over me and I was transported into an instantaneous state of pure ecstasy and freedom; an energy and an infinite abundance jolted me into movement and I began to run circles around the soccer field with a big stupid grin across my face.
The internal self-doubt/self-loathing dialogue was muted and what took its place was a feeling of contentedness, excitability and confidence; I had morphed into a state of transcendental transfiguration of epic proportions.
Being okay with myself for the first time in many years felt like a spiritual awakening of sorts, and I knew from that moment on that alcohol and I would become EXCEPTIONALLY close. I'd access that feeling as often as possible, while still doing my best to appear somewhat normal to the outside world. What I didn't know was that I had ignited an obsession that would saturate my every waking hour. I would become a slave to alcohol; from that first drunk onward I did everything in my power to conduct myself in a certain way in order to keep other people in the dark concerning my issue. The efforts to convince those around me that I was a functional human soon had the added benefit of rubbing off on me. I became willingly ignorant regarding my selfish intentions; and before I could discern what had actually taken place within me, ignorance married itself to a murky perception, which ensured that my relationship with alcohol would successfully be sustained through justification, ignorance and an innocent adolescence; "partying was the norm right?"I was just a "party boy", and to make this persona acceptable I'd consume anything society threw at me to strengthen the belief that this was just an admirable and acceptable part of the maturing process, it was a phase in the development of a functioning adult human being.
For the first few years blacking out from alcohol intake was not much of a problem. Usually I'd vomit before that happened, plus I had the added safety net of only having access to so much liquor. The great part about being underage and drinking is that not only are you getting intoxicated, but you're doing something that is against the law; and that unto itself was exciting. You never knew where the next batch of booze would come from.
Early on we would take a gamble and order alcohol from a delivery service, and more often than not the cab driver would just hand the liquor over to us because they didn't want to have to return the order to NB Liquor and get zero income for their efforts.
We'd get them to meet us at random apartment buildings, gas stations, or our houses if our parents were gone. Whoever was bold enough to confront the cab driver was generally considered the hero of the night. I'd usually order a 2-liter bottle of Canada Cooler or a Colt 45. Colt 45 was usually likened to skunk piss, but we didn't care; it was higher in alcohol concentration and it was dirt cheap, so we adapted.