Drunk By Age Nine

I was nine or ten years old the first time I got drunk.

Sometime before that I had taken a drink of beer.

I was at my daddy’s trailer at the lake. He was out on the water or gone somewhere. I was there by myself.

Nobody ever explained to me what alcohol did to a person. The only thing I knew about alcohol was that it was a sin to drink it and that when you drank it something happened to you.

So there was a can of beer that had been sitting out on the table over night. I had no idea that the alcohol evaporated. I had no idea that the component of the beverage that caused all the trouble had long since disappeared into thin air. 
I was captivated by the beer sitting there. It was an open invitation to leap down the rabbit hole. 

I was scared by the sinfulness of it. As soon as it touched my lips terrible things would surely unfold.

I approached it and picked it up before I actually took a swig but when I did I discovered this particular beer’s  dirty little secret. A soggy cigarette butt was floating in the impotent brew.

Another time I tried a swig of alcohol I was at my daddy’s shop. There was a refrigerator in the back with an open bottle of Kaluha inside.

I don’t know how I knew it was there or even how I knew that it was supposed to taste good.

I was tortured by my desire for this beverage. This was at such a young age.

I approached the refrigerator more than once before I mustered up the courage to open the door. What if someone discovered me drinking it? What trouble I’d be in for.

Finally I worked myself up to it and opened the refrigerator then opened the bottle. I took a small drink of the sweet stuff and noted the burn of alcohol present in the liqueur.

Then I panicked when I realized that I had not noted the position of the paper tabs on the top before I unscrewed it from the bottle. Someone would surely know I had been in this bottle now. I was horrified. No one ever said a word about it.

The first time I really got drunk I was with Daddy. He had taken me along with his mistress to a wedding in a neighboring town.

After the ceremony there was a fountain of pink champagne sitting out. I asked Daddy if I could have some and he said I could.

So I gulped down as much of it as I could get away with.

I don’t remember him stopping me.

We went later to a bar and I think I was allowed to have another sip of champagne there.

Later when I got home to Mama’s house she and I got in a fight because I was belligerent from the booze.

I walked halfway across town barefoot to a police officer’s house who i went to church with. I think I told him I wanted to run away from Mama.

There was the time when a boy my same age had me over to watch as he tried on his new football uniform. He said it was sexy. He had whiskey mixed with sundrop and I drank a little bit of that. I remember how I could feel the warmth of it as it travelled down my young gullet. We must have been in either elementary school or junior high school.

The same boy once suggested huffing gasoline but I was too chicken to try it. 

Once I was at a friend’s house before a junior high school dance. We were drinking his mom and dad’s liquor. I decided it would be a good idea to take a wine cooler to the school dance.

I drank it in the school bathroom and then threw the bottle into the trash can. 

Someone told on me and the bottle was retrieved from the bathroom.

As a result I was kicked out of the band, chorus and school play.

I know I did eventually get to a point when in high school I would routinely  drive to the big city stopping at a tiny country store on the way to but beer. We’d drink the beer on the way to the city. Maybe I drank most of it.

The next major time I remember getting drunk I was a teenager. I was old enough to be allowed to stay home by myself over the weekend. I think Mama took a weekend getaway somewhere.

I had a friend who was close to my same age and she dated a guy old enough to buy booze. I asked him to buy me a bottle of Captain Morgan’s spiced rum.

That Saturday night I was all by myself and I had my Captain Morgan’s spiced rum and a 2 liter bottle of Coke. I started out drinking in the evening and got good and drunk watching the Golden Girls on NBC. I can’t believe Betty White is the only one left.

There was nothing bad that happened as a result. I just stayed home and got liquored up watching sitcoms.

I know there were other times I drank during that period of time.

I remember riding along with an older boy to the big city to go to gay bars.

We got in one gay bar and had no trouble except that he was snorting coke and drinking red wine and threw up.

The next place we went wouldn’t let in me and the other girl who came along because they knew we were underage.

We ended up sitting in a car in a parking lot downtown at some late hour.

I called my sister to rescue us and she did but it caused a big stink because it was a gay bar we were at.

A few years later when she dropped me off at art college I walked to the liquor store at the end of the block and bought myself a bottle of Bacardi 151. I drank that with Coca-Cola in the swimming pool that night watching airplanes fly between me and the moon.

I drank every week if not every day from that point on until May 23, 2005.

I also experimented with drugs. Pot, acid, cocaine. Never any heroin or crystal meth that I know of. Yet. I guess anything is possible but I’ve been sober now over five years and I don’t have the desire to drink. The obsession has been removed.

I remember that first day when I quit drinking I just knew I wasn’t going to be able to avoid driving past a gas station and going inside to buy beer.

I also quit smoking cigarettes when I quit drinking and using drugs.

First Times In Drag

Mama always wears very natural colors of lipstick, never anything loud. The most out there lip color I think she has ever worn is called Gaga by MAC.  Everything else she wears is about the color of a white person’s unpolished fingernail.

She had some cool jewelry and lots of gloves I guess from the 1950s. I used to put on her lipstick, gloves and jewelry and do self portraits. I had thick blond hair, blondish brown. It was different colors.

The first time I did drag in public I think was at church camp. It was summer and I don’t know how I knew it would be needed but I brought a caftan of Mama’s with me or somehow it made its way to the camp with us. The women fixed the hair of the men-the boys. We were teenage boys and the women and girls fixed our hair and did our makeup then we paraded out in front of the whole group. There were pictures. I think I had a mullet at the time. 

I don’t think we lip synced to music or anything. It was just about making an appearance.

The first time I really went out in drag was my first year in college.

I was in art school and there was a girl who let me borrow her clothes and somehow I got my feet into her boots.

There was an admissions officer at the school who had a very distinct way of speaking and a high voice.

She was very charming when she was trying to get me admitted and then as soon as I was admitted she forgot my name.

She had a funky little name tag with geometric shapes that a student had made for her.

I got somebody to do my makeup and I dressed up in this girl’s clothes and I had my own hair that was longish I think with bangs and so I didn’t wear a wig or maybe I did wear a wig. I can’t remember but I remember getting lipstick all over everything. I carried it in a pocket and so it was on my hands and clothes.

I made myself a funky little name tag just like the director of admission name tag with her name on it. I went to the school’s Halloween party introducing myself to people as the director of admissions. I was doing my best impression of her manner of speaking and it seems like I heard that later she met people for the first time who had met me masquerading as her at the party that night.

There’s no way you could really confuse the two of us because I’m nearly six feet tall and I don’t think she was nearly as tall as I am.

I went as her and stayed in character all night long introducing myself as her over and over even going to a second party at a faculty member’s house. I serenaded a straight man who was wowed by my charm.

The Facebook Let Down

It’s disappointing to find an old friend on Facebook, send a friend request and then not receive a response.

Why not? What did I do? Is it because I never contacted you again after your wedding? DId I get drunk and make a fool of myself at the wedding reception?

It makes me feel lonely. And unfriendly.

I wonder if you had any children or were you not able or willing to have offspring?

I may never know. 

Then there’s the other one on Facebook, a Facebook “friend” who won’t respond after asking about working in her field in town.

No response. Not a something just a nothing.

This is another really depressing post. I wish I had some really good and funny posts that someone might enjoy reading.

I’m having grape juice with my writing instead of tea because I think the caffeine keeps me up at night. The grape juice is good but there’s something about a tea that is just better.

A man came to look at the barn and the granary to give me an estimate on the cost of repairing the roofs. He was cute. And he kept putting his hand on my elbow. He’s married but he sure was friendly. I wish he was single and interested. It would be nice to have  friend out here.

I live out in the country now and it gets lonesome. That’s why I write so much.

Writing makes me feel good. I like writing. I only wish everything I wrote was something that someone cared to read.

There’s one Facebook friend who wants to read the things I’ve written but I can’t tell anybody about what I’ve written because I have to remain anonymous.

I wouldn’t want anyone to know I wrote these things. It would hurt people’s feelings.

What to do? Keep this stuff bottled up or write it down?

I have a cheap dictionary. $2.93 from Wal-Mart. Pretty much every word I’ve wanted to look up has been in there. Except for hutzpah. I guess they left out all the Yiddish words. I guess I need a Yiddish dictionary.

Fans have pretty much been enough to keep me cool lately. I haven’t even slept with the fan on because it’s too cool. I’m sure it will come in handy when it gets later in the summer. I’ve had the air conditioner on some but it seems like I eventually turn it off because it’s just a little bit too cool. The fan and the air conditioner together really cool me down if I get hot.

I want to got to the grocery store and get bananas.

I can’t believe I can’t think of anything better to write about than fans and bananas.

I could write about things I remember from childhood but it gets old dredging up all that old stuff. 

I wish I could just write really good stuff that people would clamor for.

I used to be able to get people excited in an audience. I wish I could do it again with words like I used to be able to do it on stage.

“Born Again”

How depressing. I just watched a documentary by and about a lesbian named Markie called “Born Again.”

She was raised by a strict religious mother and father who now don’t accept her because she’s a lesbian.

The first part of it is her whispering passages from her diary during the time she was living a strictly Christian life.

It just is depressing because although my mother and sister aren’t as hard core religious as this woman’s parents and one sibling are they are still pretty dyed in the wool so to speak and when i saw how her family reacted to her as a lesbian I could only see my mother and sister reacting similarly.

They’ll never accept me. They’ll never come around. Religion has such a tight grasp on them that just like I’ll never be straight they’ll never be willing to accept me as gay.

I’m so discouraged I don’t want to think about it anymore.

So just like I’ll never be straight my family, my mother and my sister will never be able to accept me as gay.

Neither will my nieces, my sister’s daughters. They drank the koolaid. They buy the whole religion thing hook, line and sinker. How could they not? It’s been drilled into their heads everyday their entire lives.

But the lesbian in “Born Again” and her brother both turned away from religion when they grew up. They said they felt like being brought up in religion had damaged them.

I don’t know that I want to turn away from God but religion sucks. I dislike going to churches because they’re made up of people who hate gay people. That’s no good.

I sucks to think that my sister’s daughters will reject me because they’ve been sweet little children their whole lives and now they’re becoming young adults with a strict Christian background. Indoctrinated. And they wouldn’t dare question anything their parents told them which is weird because they are always grounded or punished in some way. Well one of them is.

It just sucks. They’re never going to accept me once they know I’m gay even though I’ve been gay the whole time I’ve known them. 

It will be a definite end to our relationship.

I didn’t realize it fully until I saw this film. I guess there’s a possibility it won’t end up that way but I think it’s a lot more likely to happen that way than not. Or maybe they’ll grow up and evolve past the point of just being brainwashed Christian spawn.

What if they turned out to be lesbians? Then they’d have some questions not answered by their upbringing.

I don’t really hope they turn into lesbians but I do wonder what it would be like if that happened.

A Christian mother and father raise Christian children and get lesbians.

Their parents would never accept it. Their mother would never accept it.

She’d be furious. She’d goo insane. She’d fight like a monster. I can just imagine it.

I can see the spittle seething out from between her clenched teeth.

Girl Friend Wanted More

Everybody needs a friend. Having friends of the opposite sex is complicated. There’s always a question of is this strictly friendship or is there a romance element here. Well, for that reason it could be the same with friends of the same sex. There’s a fine line between friendship and romance. Maybe there has been.

When I was in high school I wasn’t very popular. I wasn’t a jock. I wasn’t particularly brainy. I definitely had a nerdy side. I didn’t have lots of friends mostly because I have always been sissified. More feminine than masculine.

I’ve always wanted to be popular and have lots of friends but it just wasn’t in the cards for me in high school.

Now there was a period of time that I was involved in the church youth group and that became the closest thing I ever had to being popular. I was friends with most of the other kids in the youth group and there was a red headed girl  with a funny personality and a quick smile from school who started coming to our youth group and she and I hit it off and became buddies. I needed a friend. Someone I could come out to. The only problem was that she wasn’t strictly having friendship feelings about me. When I told her I thought I was gay she asked me if I was sure because she liked me as in more than just friends.

I went to her wedding. She got a good husband. Handsome and funny.

But she and I got to be friends mostly through the church youth group and I don’t know why i felt like I could tell her I was gay. I guess she was just accepting. Maybe she was the first person who accepted me as I was. She knew me and that I was kind of goofy and funny not ha ha funny but like what’s going on (?) funny.

I always wish we were still friends. I guess I could contact her. Maybe she’s on facebook.

I know she has other gay friends but I feel weird because of the way she reacted when I came out to her. She asked if I was sure because she had already decided we were more than friends or that was the direction our relationship was pointed in.

I just wanted a buddy who accepted me as I was and she was a good one. Why can’t people just be friends and not get linked up romantically? Well I mean sometimes I guess it’s okay when two people start out as friends and then end up  romantically involved but not when one’s a female and the other is a gay guy.

Ambien and The Alcoholic

I got it on good authority that like xanax and valium ambien is not safe for alcoholics to take. So even though I paid for it and I am having trouble sleeping I am not going to take the ambien. It’s in the garbage can.

Is It The Music Or Me?

I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I guess I’m just getting old. I’m 38. Almost 39.

New music just seems like garbage. Most of it’s nothing that I’d ever want to listen to again.

I want to like it. I want to have the experience of listening to music and enjoying it, having it be a pleasurable experience but anymore most music just sounds bad.

Maybe it’s the prozac. The prozac definitely has an effect on me. It makes me shake my legs. The good thing about prozac is it just makes me feel a little bit more energetic. I can’t just lie in bed all day and sleep. I get up and am not drowsy. Sometimes I yawn but I guess that’s normal.

I’ve been having trouble sleeping the past four nights and there are only two things I can think of that might be keeping me awake. I know I’m about to go to Norway and I’m not sure I’m going to be able to sleep when I get there. I’m having anxiety about that and that might be keeping me awake. If not that then it’s that I’ve been drinking two more cups of tea than normal. Normally I just have two cups but I’ve been having four lately. All this writing I’ve been doing. I make myself more tea to get me in the mood. I guess I’ll just have to get in the mood without the extra cups of tea. I’m writing without tea now.

I do listen to music though. It’s always Chanticleer. I guess I should get some more Chanticleer cds to listen to because I listen to this one at least once a day and with all this writing I’ve been doing I listen to it more than once a day.

If anyone made the mistake of reading this I guess they’d feel like I’d stolen moments from their life.

Writing about writing? This is getting out of hand.

Last night I went to bed and lay awake for the better part of an hour then got up and moved to the sofa where I watched the tonight show and late night with Jimmy Fallon. At least he had good guests and I’d never seen it before. It was Sarah Silverman and Joan Rivers. I couldn’t even understand  lot of what Joan Rivers said.

Sometime after that I closed my eyes and was able to go to sleep with the tv on and slept till I don’t know what time maybe four in the morning some national news broadcast was on. Then I got up and went back to bed and was able to fall asleep and slept till the morning.

Now recently I did find a few cds to listen to. I got all the B-52s old cds and their latest one. Those have been good to listen to mostly. I also found Air’s Love 2 which is good and I got a 2 disc compilation by Karl Lagerfeld that I’ve enjoyed listening to a lot. He should put a new one out monthly. Those are good. I also got a Jason and de Marco cd called Safe. They’re the out gay Christian couple. I like that pretty well.

Most of the other stuff I hear just on tv or on the radio I don’t really have much of an emotional response to.

I have an old friend with great taste in music who recently told me that he’s making me some new cds so those will probably have some goodies on them. He made me a bunch a couple of years ago and I’ve worn out some of them. I can’t wait to get the new ones. I wish I had a cup of tea. But I’m just going to cut back to 2 cups a day and see if I sleep better. Also I got a prescription for ambien. The nurse practitioner said it’s okay for alcoholics to take ambien. I hope she’s right and I hope it helps me sleep.

Gay In A Southern High School

When I was in high school I was too scared to be gay. 

There was always going to be this group of boys who relentlessly bullied me in the hallways during school so I was constantly on the lookout for them anticipating being called a faggot and a queer.

I tried to be gay and I tried to stand out at certain points and say, “hey, look at me I’m gay and I don’t care who knows it” but I was just aping more confident kids than myself who had the ability to make standing out look cool.

I remember once going from room to room for yearbook sales. We went into the classroom or this female teacher I never knew if she was a big diesel dyke for sure or if she only looked like one but she wore her hair like a man, wore manly glasses and clothes and she was very big and her name wasn’t definitely female it was the androgynous B.J. It was in her classroom that I decided to try to shake my shit in front of the group. I probably took on a very queenly stance and facial affect and moved my arm back and forth in an upright position like a metronome as I snapped my fingers. I did this to display my coolness. “Hey, look at me! I’m cool!”

It took a lot of courage to do that and I must have looked so silly.

And that was 1989 or somewhere near that, maybe earlier.

I was too afraid of judgement to come all the way out but I wanted to. Some things may never change.

I saw others living more out loud and it appealed to me. I didn’t have the umph to back it up. Only the desire.

One year I had a mullet and a peach fuzz mustache. I flipped the ends of the mullet up a little bit with mousse and a brush and a hair dryer.

I think I can still imagine what that brush looked like. The part that all the teeth came out of was rubber and it was white.

I wore swatch tee shirts and fake swatch watches with big faces and bold designs on them and brightly colored wrist straps with khaki shorts and high top sneakers. I think I wore those shorts until there was a hole in the crotch.

At one point in time I got access to a bank account that had a considerable amount of money in it and I spent a lot of the money on pizzas and clothes from J. Crew.

I had a good friend who was a girl. We shared a lot of the same sense of humor and went to church together. I told her about the boys picking on me for being a fag and she tried to reassure me by saying, “Oh, no, you’re not that way,” insinuating that it would be a bad thing if I was.

She was a Christian too. She had sex with her boyfriends in high school. In her opinion thats acceptable but being gay is intolerable.

Not too many years ago I sought her out and told her about being gay and showed her some photos of me in drag . She said they were hilarious but then she couldn’t wait to get me out of her house.

She suggested we go out for Chinese then when we walked outside and I was getting into my car she said she wasn’t going to go after all  that we would have to go another time and effectively brushed me off never to be heard from again.

The Very Unhappy Woman

There was a woman who raged at her children. She just raged in anger at them whenever she felt like it.

The children grew accustomed to this and defended the practice if it ever came up.

She’s so angry.

She used to smoke pot and cigarettes and dance at gay bars and she still wants to but she doesn’t do these things because she doesn’t want the children to do them so she doesn’t do them either.

She lives her life by the good book. The bible. The B-I-B-L-E.

She has a gay brother and she has rejection in her heart for him. She says to him, “I love you.” She doesn’t mean it. She doesn’t love fags.

She’d probably go with Brother Fred Phelps and his wicked ways.

She calls herself a Christian but she’s just fooling herself.

She doesn’t follow Christ all the way. Christ said not to judge other people and she can’t get her hateful heart to stop judging for one second. But she says she follows Christ. All except for the not judging others and suffering the little children.

If being gay is a sin and I’m not so sure it is but if it is it’s not greater sin than any other. Jesus didn’t say one word about gay people unless you count the soldier whose male servant Jesus healed. Some people say the male servant was among other things the soldier’s sex slave and Jesus remarked that the soldier had such strong faith. But Jesus did say don’t judge other people.

She used to be fun and less close minded but once she got those children she set out trying to create an unachievable perfection.

So she toils her life away raging because she resents trying to live the way she’s been trying to live.

She can’t say a kind word about her in-laws. Every word out of her mouth about them is chock full of hateful judgements.

She won’t let her youngest daughter wear black nail polish for fear that people would think she was in a cult. Black fingernail polish is chic.

Those children never have a moment’s peace.

She is constantly at them to toil away at the house full of mess she’s created over the years. The list of chores goes on and on and she’s never satisfied.

The only time anyone in that household is granted any compassion is when they’re sick so the children bask in illness.

“Yay! I’m sick. I don’t have to do all the normal chores and Mama will love me!”

So the older child has the run of the house and she was probably the first one to feign sickness to get out of the constant onslaught of household toil.

Whichever one put the plan into action first it’s now a constant game of who’s sick? Whomever is sick gets granted temporary freedom from toil and much needed motherly affection and care.

She’s never been one for affection. I never see her hug or kiss her children.

Occasionally she’ll fawn over her husband but only when the entire family is gathered and it seems a little like a display rather than an authentic expression of affection.

She’s not happy. Christians should be joyful not dreary and she’s anything but joyful. She’s glum and her children are too. Almost everyone in that family seems to be constantly bummed out.

She has a brother three years older. He always got the upper hand. He always had a three year head start on her.

They always fought. He won mostly. This was when they were kids.

Now that they’re grown they don’t fight anymore but he still tickles her sometimes maybe only about once a year. She hates it but she always smiles like there’s no tomorrow. That’s about the only time she smiles.

She’s so wrapped up in trying to be a Christian and setting an example for her children she doesn’t have any fun. Her life is drudgery.

Slaving over a house that’s never clean. Slaving over a kitchen that’s always open.

She’s not teaching her children to be good Christians. She’s teaching her children how to be uptight and unhappy.

She has a brother nine years younger. She always had to take care of him because their parents got divorced and their mom had to take a job to support them.

Sister always resented having to take care of her little brother. He was always there needing something and stealing her spotlight.

When she was little she liked to play with Barbies. So did her little brother. She took away her daughters’ Barbies because they are sinful. 

She mostly always had long thick dark hair except when she was very little and cut her own hair nearly to the roots. Now that she’s nearly fifty she has a lot of gray in her hair.

She doesn’t use blow dryers or straightening irons she just lets it dry naturally wavy. She uses no products in her hair. She just keeps it natural the way she thinks Jesus would want it.

When her little brother went to boarding school and told her he was getting picked on for being a sissy she told him that he did act like one.

Once when she was recognized in front of the student body after a high school talent show performance her little brother ran up to congratulate her and she was furious.

She always had a terrible temper. Now she rages. She rages at her children. She rages at her grown brother. She just unleashes these fits of unbridled rage.

She won’t speak to people because she dislikes them so much.

She can’t stand her mother. In her eyes her mother can’t do anything right.

She can’t stand her grandmother. She won’t talk to her unless she’s forced to.

She likes her older brother pretty well. I guess she’ll always want his approval.

The same dynamic is set up between her two daughters. The older one is always coming out smelling like a rose and the younger one is left standing in her older sister’s shadow.

What Children Remember

I was little. Four or five years old with a mop of blond hair. Maybe it was a Saturday or a Sunday afternoon.

Mama had given me a bath and put me in clean underwear.

I asked to play in the back yard. She allowed it.

One minute I’m there in the back yard playing with flowers and the next I’m in a big field behind our back yard.

I’m surrounded by older neighborhood boys.

I was scared and they wouldn’t let me get away.

The next thing I remember is being back in the garage naked and muddy.

Mama was in the kitchen talking to a neighbor lady at the table.

I climbed up the steps and knocked on the door.

Mama came down into the stairwell and then into the garage. 

I’ve asked about her recollection of these events and she says I was not naked.

A man I know always says about children that they remember accurately but interpret inaccurately.

The next thing I remember is I’m in the back yard of the next door neighbors’ house. One of the boys who had taken me out of the back yard was the next door neighbor’s kid.

I remember looking up at the boy’s father standing there with his arms crossed shaking his head saying, “I’m so sorry this happened.”

It seems like there were other people congregated in his back yard, perhaps parents of other boys involved in the incident.

I can’t remember how I got naked or what was done to me while I was naked but I do know I was very scared during that time.

There was a lady who lived a couple of house down from us. She was named Mildred. Mildred was super sweet. I often visited her and saw her cuckoo clock chime.

Mildred once set out a bunch of flowering plants in her front yard along her sidewalk. 

I don’t exactly remember doing this but I went behind her and pulled them all up and left them on the sidewalk. 

Later Mildred showed up at our front door. I remember being in my room and Mama bringing Mildred in. 

Mildred explained that all her flowers had been pulled up and wanted to know if I knew anything about it.

I told her I thought my sister had probably done that. My sister was probably thirteen or fourteen years old at that time. 

I don’t remember how the story turned out just that somehow she had come straight to my door when she discovered her flowers all pulled up.

Maybe she saw me do it.

Maybe she just put two and two together.