Party Years
The name of the bar was O’Malleys–a faux Irish pub. The owner of the establishment converted an old 2-story mill into a place where University of Georgia students got drunk during the Spring of 1985. (The establishment existed from 1978-2008, but that is the year I went there.) The den of drunkenness was situated on a bend of the Oconee River, and they were offering Long Island Tea night. Waitresses brought big pitchers of Long Island Tea to the tables where my friends and I sucked them down. I was no novice drinker by this time in my life, and I could finish a 6 pack in a couple of hours. But still to this day, I’ve never learned how to drink hard liquor, and Long Island Tea is concocted from a variety of liquors, plus it tastes good. They say liquor is quicker, and I became bombed in no time. I had to take a leak. The bathrooms here were located on the 2nd floor. The staircase to the 2nd floor consisted of narrow steep steps, some broken and others slippery or sticky depending upon whether the spilled drinks were fresh or evaporated. This seems like it could have been a potential legal liability for the owner. Pool tables were set up on the dingy 2nd floor next to the bathrooms. Even in my inebriated state, I realized the staircase was hazardous when I successfully ascended them. Nevertheless, I didn’t make it past the top step on the descent. Both of my feet slipped from under me, and the staircase was so steep, my lower back landed on the bottom step.
A big blonde bodybuilder grabbed me by the wrist and said he was throwing me out because I was too drunk. He was the bouncer. It seems ironic the establishment would serve pitchers of Long Island Tea, then throw their patrons out because they were “too drunk.” It also shows stupid negligence. Instead of making sure I didn’t need medical attention, their bouncer was going to treat me like a broken piece of trash. I outsmarted the dumb ox. I used a trick I learned from my father when he recounted the incidents when he’d been arrested for selling contraband to Russian soldiers in post-World War II Europe. (He did this when he was a teenager to feed his family.) He pretended to go with the police, slowly lag behind, and suddenly dash away. I pretended to go with the big dumb ape until I suddenly slipped my wrist free and sprinted into the crowd where he could not find me.
I rejoined my friends, and we left, and in the parking lot Steve W., a short guy, picked a fight with a tall guy. He just walked right up to him and challenged the shocked man to a fight. I think cocaine was surging into his bloodstream and making him feel overconfident. I thought this was hilarious and laughed on the ride all the way back to our apartment, not disappointed at all that no fight occurred. In my apartment there were 2 young women looking at me, and they kept saying, “he’s about to go.” Next thing I remember, birds were singing, and I was laying on top of my bed fully clothed, and it was morning. I could not remember how I got there and thought somebody carried me to the bed, but my roommates said they didn’t. They’d gone to another apartment that night and snorted cocaine, and they said I missed out because I’d gone to bed early. Years later, when I had a chance to try cocaine I decided I did not like it, so I didn’t really miss anything. Drugs that make my heart beat fast just make me nervous. I’ve tried a lot of drugs, but I will stick with pot and alcohol. That was an atypical party night in Athens. Usually, we sat around the apartment smoking pot and drinking, and nothing crazy really happened, but I was able to stay awake longer.
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I don’t count the year I spent at the University of Georgia in 1984/1985 because I believe I socially regressed. I became too reliant on my old friends and made no effort to develop new relationships, especially with the opposite sex. My friends were like a crutch. I couldn’t get motivated to take any kind of emotional risk when I could simply hang out with my old friends and have a relaxing and rewarding experience. I didn’t date often, and I never had a good time when I did. I always felt nauseated from the uncertainty. I didn’t get over this feeling until I had an experience I will relate in the next chapter.
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I’m not including a chapter in my memoirs about my high school years. They were relatively uninteresting. I attended Evans High School when it was located on the corner of Belair and Washington Roads. At the time Evans was a sleepy little village, but it was on the way to becoming a busy suburb of Augusta. The school and the stadium have long since been bulldozed, and it is now a crowded commercial district with traffic rivaling Atlanta’s. The high school and middle school shared the same building when I was a student, but they attended at different times. The former went in the morning, and the latter in the afternoon. Evans was growing fast, and a new high school was being built while I attended the old school. I think I was in the last graduating high school class in that building. The school was surrounded with many trailers to handle the overflow of students. The Columbia County school system barely kept up with the increasing population.
I was a B+ student and played on the tennis team. I got along with everybody and had a few friends but no serious girlfriend. Unlike most young men my age, I was not eager to learn how to drive. My dad bought me an ancient Impala from 1 of his medical students for $300, and he overpaid. The brakes failed once when I pulled into the driveway, and I crashed into the garage wall. My mom traded it for a red Mustang II, probably hoping the flashy car would attract young ladies my age because it was already clear my introverted personality and short nerdy looks did not impress many women. I never consumed drugs or alcohol in high school but that changed during college.
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When I was 18 my friends introduced me to beer drinking, and it was underage drinking before long. Shortly after I started drinking, Georgia made it illegal to drink until the age of 21 but that didn’t stop us. A drive through liquor store never checked ID’s. The first time I got drunk I was in a movie theater, and I couldn’t stand up, and I couldn’t stop laughing. 3 months later, I smoked my first joint. We were having a boring time at a fraternity party, and a group of us got in Clay S.’s big black car and shared a joint. The first time, I felt nothing which is not unusual because THC is an experience enhancement kind of high, but I soon learned to love a marijuana high even more than alcohol, though this changed when I got older and became more of an alcoholic. Getting stoned was always fun and relaxing at this age, and I developed a kind of camaraderie with my pot-smoking buddies.
At first I never much considered the illegality of pot-smoking, though I did hide my stash from my mom. One day, I purchased a 4-finger wide bag of pot from a co-worker at K-Mart. My friends and I had gotten friendly with Mike W., a big blonde man from Iowa with an innocent baby face, kind of like Richie Cunningham from the television series, Happy Days. He owned a hippie van decorated in tie dye colors. That night, he drove us around while we alternated smoking joints of my pot with bowls of hash somebody else in our group had obtained. There were 6 of us including Steve B., Mark C., Jack S., and Wayne Y. (I’m not going to give full names in case they might not want people to know about their youthful exploits, but people who know me well know who they are.) Mike W. didn’t want to keep burning gas due to the cost, so he parked his hippie van at the end of what he thought was a dirt road to nowhere. It was at the end of someone’s driveway. Evidently, they saw a creepy looking van parked in their driveway, got scared, and called the police. I was completely relaxed and stoned when suddenly there were blue lights flashing into the van.
“Everybody out of the vehicle,” a policeman shouted. We were surrounded by 3 cop cars, later joined by 2 unmarked police cars. My heart pounded, and I felt a sickening anxiety, fearing jail and the end of my favorite new hobby–getting stoned.
I was last to leave the van. I considered putting the bag of pot somewhere in the van and letting Mike W. take the blame. But it was a brand-new bag, and I thought I could possibly save it, so seemingly I did the honorable thing and shoved it in my crotch inside my underwear. A policeman frisked me, and I nearly pissed my pants. It took a conscious effort to stop the flow of urine. He dug his hand into my deep work pockets and asked, “these your keys?” I thought maybe he felt the plastic bags but mistook it for my ball sack. When he asked that question maybe he meant “that your cock?” Nevertheless, my ploy worked, and the new bag remained undiscovered. They busted Steve B. who happened to be holding the hash pipe we had been smoking when the police rudely interrupted us. They busted Mike W. for a big jar of marijuana seeds he saved from wild plants he found growing in Iowa fields.
An old sheriff drove me back to my Mustang in his unmarked green car. He reminded me of Sergeant Joe Friday from the television series, Dragnet–humorless and dry. To make conversation I asked what his work hours were. He said, “I work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.” When he dropped me off at my car, I was supposed to drive back and pick up my friends who had not been arrested. That didn’t happen. I was too spooked, and anyway, there was no way I could remember where the scene of the crime had been. I went straight home, and the police officers broke their policy and drove my stranded friends home.
A few weeks later Steve B. called up a secretary who worked in the sheriff’s department and sweet talked her into throwing his case file in the trash. Mike W.’s case file went missing also. This occurred in the era before everything was computerized. The day after the bust, I went cruising with Jack S., and we drove around smoking some of the pot that thanks to my decision didn’t get confiscated. I experienced anxiety when I got stoned. For about a year after this incident I suffered anxiety attacks about half the time I got stoned. The close call was a buzz kill, but I eventually got over it. The old sheriff who drove me to my car that night kept my vehicle under surveillance whenever I went to work at K-mart, but I was never arrested.
My grandmother took this photo of me when I was in my early 20s. I was probably making a drug deal using code words. When I had pot, I had lots of friends.
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During my mid-twenties I began to lose touch with most of my old friends because they moved away or became involved in their careers. I made some new party friends, but most of the time when I had the urge to have a party, I smoked pot and drank by myself. By the time I was working for the Augusta Chronicle circulation department I became expert at driving while smoking a joint. I’d pick an obscure street with a difficult to pronounce name, knowing that if someone reported me, by the time it took for the police dispatcher to contact a patrol car and for the policeman to locate the street, I’d be long gone. Then, I’d chill at the Rack and Grill Bar, drink beer, and eat a cheeseburger while listening to the jukebox. I did this after my shift which usually ended about lunchtime. Before the afternoon paper got canceled, I often got stoned on the job. The workload for the defunct Augusta Herald was really light, and I would get bored.
I stopped driving under the influence when I met Anita. I didn’t want to risk a DUI that would prevent me from seeing her. That was all the motivation I needed to stop me from driving under the influence forever.
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I didn’t drink much after Daphne was born. I made the mistake of drinking a 6 pack when she was still waking up in the middle of the night, needing the bottle. I didn’t feel so good at 2 am when I had to get up and nurse her with the formula. This was the only time in my life since the age of 18 that I gave up alcohol for more than a month. I didn’t resume drinking until I was sure she would sleep through the night.
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Now days, I binge drink once a week and look forward to 5:00 pm on Friday. I start counting down the hours 55 hours ahead of time. It is what gets me through my life. For me alcohol is a wonder drug, and it goes great with the THC gummy bears that became legal in 2018 (as long as the THC is extracted from hemp). I use alcohol to treat my anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, essential tremor disorder, insomnia, backache, stomachache, toothache, and erectile disfunction. I use THC to prevent me from drinking too much. Calculate how much it would cost me to pay for a doctor, then to pay for all the drugs he would prescribe to treat all that. Moreover, most of the drugs would likely be ineffective. A $10 bottle of wine and a $5 gummy bear are a bargain.
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