Max the 13 Year Old Drunk

I think most people's first drunken experience ends up being a good memory for them, if only eventually. Usually it involves a good story.

For me, I was 13 years old. It was a Saturday night in February.

My friend, Justin Miller, was sleeping over at my house, like most Saturday nights while growing up.

Billy Lowe, who was in our class at school, lived nearby. At school, Billy mentioned that his father had recently made homemade red wine.

Justin and I didn't hang out with Billy much outside of school, but when he suggested that we try some of his father’s wine, it sounded a lot better than playing the board game, ‘payday’ and watching Loveboat…which was basically our Friday night plan. Billy, much like us, was bored and felt like getting into some trouble that night.

There was a knock at the door around 7pm and there was Billy, carrying two large Coke bottles that were suddenly red in colour and had a particularly funny, strong odour. He had filled the bottles with his father's homemade red wine.

Billy’s plan was to head back to the forest behind his house and pass around the bottles until they were gone. Not a brilliant plan by any means, but a plan none the less. I was really eager to try it.

I do remember quite vividly that at 13, I was suddenly curious as to what all the fuss was about alcohol. Of course I had sipped it once or twice, I even had half of a beer at a recent wedding.

But this was different. I wanted to know what it felt like to get tipsy. My parents never drank much so I don’t even recall having seen a drunken person prior to that evening. Perhaps I was just oblivious to it before.

Within a few minutes, we were sitting in the cold, snow covered ground in the forest behind Billy's house. We sat underneath some trees and passed one of the bottles around.

Not being connoisseurs of wine at this stage in our lives, we drank it like we would pop; we chugged it. I remember it tasted horrible, and the after taste was even worse.

At some point we agreed that we'd had enough.

I remember the walk from the forest was an usually long one. The path in the snow seemed much more uneven and harder to navigate than I had ever remembered. We were all very quiet, probably afraid that if we opened our mouths to talk we'd throw up...so we just trudged our way along silently, each alone in our own minds, one unsure step at a time.

As Billy's older brother was hanging out at his house with his friends, the three of us made our way back to my parent's basement to watch television.

It had been a few hours by this point since I had left my house and my parents had gone to bed early. The lights were off upstairs and it was quiet as we entered and made our way downstairs to where the television was. These days it is easier to name the rooms in the house that don’t have a television, but then most people usually only one in their basement.

We started to watch the movie 'The Poseidon Adventure' with Gene Hackman. If you're not familiar with the movie, it is a story about an ocean liner that has capsized and deals with how its passengers struggle to escape.

It was only when I sat on the couch that I truly realized how much my head was spinning. I couldn't see straight, I couldn’t see in focus. I had to constantly shift my head to each side just to be able to watch the movie.

We probably could have picked a more suitable movie to watch after drinking all that red wine. Each time the boat in the movie rocked up and down in the water I felt like I was right there with them. My face was getting greener and greener with each rock of the boat.

I was sitting on one side of the couch holding on to the arm rest, as if for dear life. The other two guys were beside me, Justin had fallen asleep and was now snoring loudly. Billy’s face was completely blank of expression as he watched the television screen. I wasn’t sure if he was awake or not.

As I held onto the couch, head spinning, face starting to sweat, vision still blurry. I realized I was starting to feel a little nauseous.

Make that a lot nauseous…perhaps even sea sick.

I understood even in my blitzed state, that from the basement, the closest place for me to be sick was outside.

I managed myself up the stairs as quickly as I could with the floor moving, opened the sliding door and ran out into the cold snow in my stocking feet.

There I puked. And I mean puked.

The snow became red in colour. All I could smell was that awful red wine smell. And my head was spinning; oh god, was it spinning. The cold on my face felt good. The cold snow on my feet did not.

Hopping from one foot to the other, back and forth in an effort to keep only one foot in the snow at a time, I continued throwing up, gasping for air with each thrust of my stomach.

That's when all the lights turned on upstairs in my parent's room.

I guess my mom had heard me and woke up. She quickly got out of bed, turned on the lights, grabbed her housecoat and came downstairs to see what was going on.

When I heard her coming down the stairs, I ran and hid at the edge of the house. Still in my socks, freezing, covered in my own puke, standing in the snow, now shivering uncontrollably.

My mom turned on the light outside and opened the glass sliding door. That’s when she saw the red on the snow. Thinking it was blood, she started to scream for my father to come.

"God! Oh my God! What has happened?! God!"

You see, when it comes to mother, especially when I was that age, she would never have suspected alcohol. No, it somehow made much more sense to her that I was dying and blood poured out of me onto the fallen snow.

Perhaps this was because my mother was a nurse. Perhaps where one person would assume it was red wine or red paint on the snow my mother automatically thought blood. I don’t know.

What I did know though was she was screaming.

Loudly.

Shreaking for all to hear that there was blood all over the snow. Then she started screaming for me, to find out where I was lying, dying in the snow.

"Max! Max! Where are you?! Where are you?!"

When I saw the neighbour's light turn on I decided to cut my losses. I slowly came out from the side of the house, a big smile on my face.

I was trying to portray the message of "...you're not going to believe this mom, it's really just a funny story and a simple misunderstanding..." The message I actually portrayed was that I was a drunken idiot.

Her expression when seeing me, was instant happiness to see me alive...however, it just as quickly changed to one of dismay, as she realized what she was seeing....there was her baby boy, 13 years old and covered in his own puke, words slurring and very, very drunk.

"Ith okay mom! Ith just half a glass of red wine", was all I could muster.

To this very day, she doesn't find this story nearly as funny as I do.