I came across this passage while reading an essay about the author and poet Charles Bukowski:
“When Bukowski was 13, one of [his friends] invited him to his father’s wine cellar and served him his first drink of alcohol: ‘It was magic,’ Bukowski would later write. ‘Why hadn’t someone told me?’”
It made me recall the first time I tried drinking alcohol. When I was eleven, I found a bottle of rye whiskey, I think it was Old Overholt, under the kitchen sink at my grandparents' house. Why it was there, I don't know; maybe it was used as a cleaner: neither of them were drinkers and otherwise there was no booze in the house and they never drank cocktails or served wine with supper.
Anyway, there it was and somehow I knew what it was -- whiskey! That notorious stuff that Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe always had a bottle of in the bottom drawer of their office desks, the stuff that cowboys were always ordering from bar keeps and singing about -- "Rye whiskey, rye whiskey, I cry! If you don't give me rye whiskey I surely will die!"
So, of course, I had to have a drink of it. Looking around to make sure nobody saw me...I knew I shouldn't be doing what I was doing...I took the bottle out from under the sink, unscrewed the cap, lifted it to my lips and took a long drink.
And immediately my throat burst into flames, I began coughing violently and I rushed to the sink and drank glass after glass of water. Oh, the stuff was horrible, horrible! Not only did I never want to drink another drop of whiskey, I never wanted to see a bottle of it, and I absolutely could not understand why anybody would want to drink it, let alone pay to drink it or keep a bottle around to sip from.
Later in life, to be sociable, I tried drinking again, notably in college, and found out that if I sipped very slowly, I could drink alcohol, but a few sips made me giddy and lowered my inhibitions and made me reckless. So I learned to avoid it in any situation where such changes in my personality would be regrettable. I'll take a drink at home among friends and family but not outside and never among strangers.
