Saturday night has a gut-punch feeling of déjà vu attached to it. Maybe it’s because every Saturday night ends the same way for me. Domino’s pizza, the lingering smell of beer on my clothes from the sloshing cups of far gone frat boys, that song “Closer” that I swear plays six or seven times a night, the smell of sweat, and the all too familiar feeling of dread.
That same feeling I had, curled up in a ball, listening to my father rant and rave in a drunken stupor, wandering aimlessly around the house—vodka hidden in iced tea. The eyes—sad, drunken, red eyes, clouded staring blankly at me.
That’s always what gets me on nights like these. It’s the eyes—the eyes that wander and roll back into the head. Like shark’s eyes. Black, dangerous, dilated. Every drunk person has the same eyes.
My first impression of college came from watching Animal House with my dad. Jon Belushi swigs a whole bottle of whiskey, crushes cans of beer on his head, etc, etc. College, to me, seemed synonymous with drinking. After all, it’s the age of bouncing back fast. Had a bad week? Gloss over it with a little rum and coke. Can’t talk to the girl in the corner you’ve been eyeing for three weeks? Knock back a little liquid courage and go for it.
I was sitting on a couch in one of the frat apartments in F, watching this whole cliché, drunken college play unfold around me. All I wanted to do was drink. I wanted so badly to get up, shotgun a beer, down a cup of punch, take a shot–do anything but sit in a corner, sober and terrified. Terrified that I had that genetic predisposition—that old Irish curse—alcoholism.
I remember the first time I drank champagne. Half a glass, on a New Year’s Eve, made me vomit, not from the taste, but from the fear.
For kids like me, kids who grew up in households where alcohol was a dirty word, where the latest nights we had were putting our inebriated parents to bed, where alcohol wasn’t this thing to be glorified, but was the source of unending shame, ridicule, fear, hatred, and destruction—these carefree college parties are more complicated than just “loosen up and have fun!”
Every birthday party missed, every late night, every violent argument, every disappointed dinner spent waiting for a man chained up by his own disease in some dive bar—they come raging back with the simple smell of vodka forced forward from the breath of some whacked out college boy trying to make conversation over loudspeakers.
I’m saying this for those kids who know. I see you laugh nervously at these parties. I see you drinking soda out of solo cups to look like you belong. I see you trying your best to fit in. I see you.
But I don’t know how to help you. I can’t quite help myself. I want to participate in the collegiate life. I want to do this thing that so many people can do without even a second thought. I know half of college students drink because they feel obligated too, because they feel like it’s the norm.
All I can say is that it’s ok not to drink. It’s ok to be uncomfortable. But if you do decide to drink, I want to tell you that you aren’t them. You aren’t your mother or your father. You may make the same mistakes. We’re all fallible people, us more than anyone. We’ve been broken, made to grow up fast. Some of us have been forgotten, neglected, abused, and abandoned. But you aren’t them. You are you.
No past life lived in shame, no bottle of beer on the wall—nothing will take that away from you.
As I sit here, in the middle of that valley between the eating houses and the frats, and I hear that siren song echo of the music, and the voices, and that smell of alcohol that calls me forward, I’m comforted by the fact that I survived that previous life, and that I can survive this one too.
My father has been sober for three years now. He made it to the other side of a chasm, and now I know that I did too. And so did you.
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