Tempestuously Acquiescent

I could barely wait to begin drinking again. Of course, they were always watching now. Strict curfews, transparent itineraries, lists of acceptable friends. In my more courageous moods I lit a cigarette on my walks to yet another chaperoned event- inhaling fleeting freedom.

Unfortunately, the favourable consumption of alcohol requires time, it requires space. I remained constrained. So I did wait. Awaited a break-down of vigilance, a resumption of apathy, a recreation of distraction. But the downstairs dorm authority retained his justified suspicion- he had once been a dorm kid (a disaffected one at that) and knew that I was beyond their cheap platitudes. I would drink again if he looked away, so he looked on.

Other authorities picked up on his paranoia. One day the inestimable Mr. Garland approached me. "I heard you talking to a dorm mate the other day and you mentioned that you had done something that would get you in trouble."

"Uh... I think that I might have been kidding"

"Just be careful, you know that you have signed that contract."

So we've gotten to the circumscription of my teenage posturing.

Now we were really getting down to it. My mind shook with fury at my vicarious father's surveillance; if I hadn't needed a drink before I needed one now. Yet he stood at the bottom of the stairs "where are you off to?" at the threshold of my room "who are you seeing this weekend?"

The next step was always inevitable. Although at the time.

The Contract

In the early days of my eleventh year of schooling, the dorm authorities called me in.

"I have recently talked to someone who claims that you are drinking again" Mr. Garland, the dorm supervisor began.

A rat- I thought and immediately winnowed the list of suspects. While I pondered my Brutus, I mumbled platitudes about not-really-possibly-recalling-in-a-way-with-some-caveats-under-the-auspices-of-a-social-engagement-only-over-dinner-and-only-ever-wine (Christ that was unconvincing).

"Well since we know you drank we are going to have to lay out some sort of consequences for if you do this again" he intoned and produced a sheet of paper "we'll need you to sign this."

Ten points, no drinking, no smoking, no drugs etc.

"And if I do not?" I asked.

"We'll have to ask you to leave the dorm and the school."

I guess I could have seen that coming. I looked over the paper again. Boilerplate except for number six, which read that I could no longer discuss controversial topics with my dorm mates.

"What is this proscription?" I asked

"Well, it has come to our attention that you have talked with some of the other kids about whether some things are actually sinful, like swearing, and we consider those conversations a bad influence."

Well fuck, thats interesting. I knew I had to sign this totalitarian screed but I had to express some discontent. It was about an hour before dinner and because I had nowhere to be, I decided to reread the one page for the full hour before signing just to slightly inconvenience my dorm parent. It was a totally pointless protest which bored me as much as it did him, but we all need our share of empty acts.

That evening, after dinner, I sat in my dorm room at the beginning of another grounding.

In my mind, I had another drink.

The Battle Lines are Drawn

At first, we drank late at night in locked bathrooms, behind a wall of impenetrable caution. We smoked in nylon coats that never held the stench of stolen drags. We huddled by fans cribbed from old computers that pushed our fumes outside. At first. But now that I had regained the marginal trust of the dorm parents, I began abusing that trust with aplomb. We drank in the bars of the forbidden parts of town, we smoked over-sized cheap Cuban cigars on streets that the authorities used, we played the nickel-slots in the casino right next to the most popular mall in town.

My dorm was split into two floors, I had duped the authorities on my floor but those on the other floor increasingly questioned my continued good behaviour. They made their feelings known more and more, giving me looks of suspicion, probing questions, circumscribed allowances. Here we had it, adults two levels removed from biological imperatives who still lorded paternal authority over me. They suspected I was drinking, I knew they suspected, the danger was there, their glances and aspersions were justified. Christ, I hated that.

But even so, we ate our meals; smiles and cordialities. I inclined my head in prayer's repose. My Potemkin Village, my self-conscious hypocrisy.

So we reached an impasse, a detente which stood as I ended the tenth grade. I had enrolled early in AP Lang (a college-level English class) and picked up a group of books to take back to Peru to get ahead. My personal revolution, fueled by hidden cigarettes, stolen swigs of cheap liqour, and whispered blasphemies now found its heroes in my youthful misapprehensions of French existentialists, Russian radicals, and German social theorists. God, and the dorm parents who were his representatives, now had an ideological enemy.

The Drunk

I had cleared the last hurdle, the final vestige of my own moral limitations. I had been gloriously, unabashedly, totally drunk and I no longer cared. They had caught me and dragged me back into the confines of their stunted world-view but only corporally; I would never again agree with their reasons for not drinking and now even their strictly enforced sobriety had fallen under the weight of my sheer will to drink. And it had fallen hard.

We would have to be a bit more cautious now, of course, but I would never not drink. My manifesto was clear:

1. God does not exist

2. His rules are void

3. The authorities that enforce that enforce that petty code are illegitimate

4. I will drink

Chivas Regal

Paul and I went to the market down the block from our school. The shop owner did not mind at all that we were buying a bottle of alcohol when we were clearly underage. We stowed our bottle far in the bottom of Paul's backpack making sure that it did not hit anything hard (the clink of glass would have alerted the ever vigilant authorities). Then we were off to my dorm where Paul would be spending the night.Since our last drinks we had rejected the faith of our forefathers. We had equated Christianity with repressive authoritarianism. We had fetishized alcohol as pure pleasure, an experience so all-encompassing as to have the power to upset religous hierarchies. Drinking was to us the embodiment of rebellion and the individual. So after months of quiet philosohpical recalibrations we finally had liqour within our grasps again, and it felt so fucking right.

As we were not about to take any chances, our drinking started after everyone had gone to bed. In my room, we poured our libations into a ceramic coffee mug that we shared between the two of us. At first the drink burned (it had been quite a while) so we took our time. We sat reveling in this historic moment and reading Far Side collections. As the night went on we sipped the whisky with more abondon. At some point it became obvious that even by our ridiculous standards this was drunkenness- not a sin anymore. We stood and punched each other to test theories of alcohol and pain. We laughed. We rejoiced. Mugfulls of Chivas flew down throats like single ounce shots. The bottle exhausted itself.

Paul fell asleep the wrong way on my spare bed on top of the covers. I vomitted in the sink.

And I have never been happier.

Filming

In the second semester of my tenth grade, my film project for bible class was a modernized version of the whole book of Acts. For the project, we provided several narrative changes that we though would provide more cohesion. We added demon characters to be nemeses that would also provide much of the exposition on the central action. Of course, these demons drank and smoked. In our one of our over-the-top celebrations of alcohol consumption we filmed the party that demons had upon hearing the news that Jesus was dead. Swigging tinted water from our favourite liqour bottles while cheering the death of Christ provided its own unique thrill.

Even more exciting was our depiction of Paul (the bible character, played by me) praying during his incarceration. My hearfelt prayers with my cellmate dripped with barely concealed contempt for the whole institution. We even raised our hands in that utterely evangelical motion of praise. If our chiding sarcasm was not detected, the viewer could always pause the film to see single frames of us raising our middle fingers to their religion.

In one of the build ups to filming, we grabbed some wine coolers from friend's house. These were real alcohol and they were tempting. Paul suggested we flip to decide if we should just drink them despite the risks. We flipped about ten times- all but one said we should drink. We did not have the courage to drink on that day but our resolve for sobriety was clearly crumbling.

The Party

After a certain amount of time, authorities could not help but forget the pariculars of my crimes. So it was without too much trouble that I gained permission to go to a party at someone's house. This party was different from the others that I had been to. No one drank, everyone was fairly calm, a low-key affair. Several others from the dorm were there too, so the dorm parents figured I could not get myself into too much trouble.

I spent a great deal of my time outside with Paul, Steve, and Jeff. Jeff had never been a big member of our group but we had began to hang out a little bit after he was suspended from the school. As my dad was on the school board, and Jeff's ex had been in my dorm I had a handle on what he had done. After his girlfriend dumped him, Jeff called her and threatened to kill himself. I had been in the kitchen at the time and I remember her running around trying to get a hold of some authority to prevent him from following through. My dad claimed that the board had no choice but to suspend him for the rest of the school year and he added that they had considered suspending the girl too because of the suggestions that the two were physically intimate. Jeff considered the punishment a terrible overreaction to simple miscommunication.

Oh well.

After a while, a girl named Ashley came out and began talking to us, the self-styled outcasts of the gathering. We stepped outside the property walls to smoke a couple cigarettes (which I had begun abusing on the roof of Steve's house a few weeks earlier). Ashley asked turned down the cigarrettes but seemed to revel in being around people who so clearly cared so little for the strict limits of school policy. She asked us what we believed in.

-Not Christianity. Someone intoned.

-Probably something like deism. Someone else helpfully added.

Ashley bathed in the novelty of vicarious unbelief.

I felt a strange sense of belonging.