tell a story about a time you got drunk before you were legally old enough to do so.

You know how the teenage stereotype is that you go out there in high school and sneak out to parties and push boundaries and smoke pot and drink beer in some liberal minded parent’s basement?

Yeah… I didn’t do none of that shit.

I was the kid that the DARE propaganda actually sort of stuck for.

The threat of arrest was pretty much the worst thing I could ever think of and from the way my parents alluded to things, I got the impression that making a misstep in this department was probably going to result in them handing me over to the cops.

Drinking wasn’t exactly a taboo thing in our family. It didn’t happen often… But when I was hitting my late teens, my parents occasionally would make me a small White Russian or Piña Colada, so it was never a huge deal to me that I didn’t drink because on the occasions my family did, I was allowed.

The first time I got drunk, I was at a friend’s family cabin in Maine… I was seventeen and my friend’s boyfriend was 21, so we sent him to go through the checkout line alone with a couple of bottles of wine with labels we thought were cute so we wouldn’t be carded.

The wine was awful.

Or maybe our appreciation of wine was lacking.

We mixed it with cranberry juice to make it taste better while we listened to Dave Matthews Band and they sat on the back porch smoking cigarettes.

We hid the wine bottles underneath the sofa because we were worried her parents might show up unannounced, but they never came.

I went to bed on the couch I’d been sleeping on for a month and a half prior, while I spent the summer with her brother on his last hurrah before going to basic training.

I listened to them fuck in the next room.

I’d been lying on that couch for a month wondering if her brother wanted to make a move on me and now I was laying there fantasizing about eating her cream pie.

And the shame washed over me.