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.

The Alcohol Exile

And so, I entered the tenth grade. On my first day back from summer vacation, I approached Paul.

-I think you were right, I uttered.

Paul knew what I meant.

So here we were. The alcohol ban still in force for me and Paul. The stricter regulations had now been lifted but there was always the specter of suspicion, especially from the dorm parents on the floor below mine. As they were not my dorm parents, they very rarely had any real power over me, but they still gave me dirty looks (or so I interpreted them).

We could not drink, so Paul and I devoted our time to making movies. We had invested much of our time over the years to making short films based on biblical passages for our respective Bible courses. While other groups slapped together tiny passion plays, our group staged larger, more complex productions requiring more effort each semester. At the beginning of this semester, it was my turn to film an issue relating to the Protestant reformation. Paul planned to make my bible project his project for video productions. The subject matter was fairly violent and fairly sectarian. Basically we distilled the Protestant reformation in to a large gang-war.

As our films became more stridently Christian fundamentalist, our religion became more obviously atheistic. Deprived of our substances, we found less benign ways to rebel. It was in these days that I began openly challenging the outliers of religious belief which I found most obviously erroneous. I argued with dorm mates that swearing was much less egregious than other words spoken in malice, I said that masturbation harmed no one (especially if no lust came into it), and (after a quick foray into Marx's Communist Manifesto) I suggested that capitalism might not be the most moral system of governance. All these arguments were made with a veneer of Christian pragmatism; I was merely testing the limits of my own faith, I intoned. I gained a reputation as the Devil's advocate, but no worse (certainly not an unbeliever).

The tensions were certainly rising between me and the authorities by the day. I no longer stood or sang in chapel or church. I had also found worship songs banal, but I now found them downright loathsome. One day, a chaplain approached us as we sat and ordered us to stand for the song. We stood. A few days later, my dorm-parent lectured me on the need to be more engaged in the chapel experience. It became clear that even when I was sober there remained a great deal of tension between the authorities and myself. And I certainly was not going to stay sober forever.

The Day After

I felt fine in the morning actually. No ill effects as far as I could tell. Paul wasn't at school- I guess he wanted to do his chemistry test with his full mental capabilities about him. That evening there was a basketball game, I had little love for watching high school sports teams but there were people there at least. At half-time I wandered outside the gym to the concession stand, there stood Steve. He motioned me over excitedly.

-We're done man. Steve said. -Paul's parents found the bottles under the bathroom sink. They are coming down hard on him

Evidently, Paul's parents were suspisious of our little study session. When Derek came back they listened at the door and heard the tell-tale clink of bottles. From that point it was not hard to find the evidence. Paul may have been able to finagle his way into lesser charges but he was in no state to do that once he got home.

Very soon after that horrendous news, my mother flew in to visit me at the boarding school. the trip had not been planned. Very soon it became clear that my mother's arrival represented a kind of intervention for my soul. In a handful of long sessions my mother interviewed me on my current lifestyle. She claimed that she had not been informed of any antisocial behaviour by the dorm parents. Or by Paul's parents. No, she claimed, the Holy Ghost had let her know in that 'still small voice' that all was not well with her youngest child. So here we were. I copped to swearing ("they're just words", I argued), to not being cooperative with the school authorities, and finally to drinking.

The dorm parents were brought into the loop. Soon a partial solution was found with Paul's mom; Paul and I were not allowed to spend evenings out with Daniel, who it had been decided was a bad influence on the two of us. The terms of my parole were set in place, I could only ever spend nights over at Paul's house. I never understood that decision as I had consumed more alcohol with Paul than with any other member of our small gang.

So now Paul and I embarked on a long period of sobriety. My parents and dormparents worked hard to help us see the weight of our sins. I already knew that Paul and Steve cared little for those invocations and they were beginning to lose their resonance with me as well.