It took me a long time, comparatively, to start drinking. I was a straight-arrow kid all through high school, not nearly cool enough to get an invite to a drinking party. Everybody knew I was incredibly square. I didn't dare raise the ire of the school administration, not to mention my tea-totaler mother.

I picked it up in the second semester of my freshman year at Colorado College, a rich kids' school, where I embraced alcohol with the zeal of a convert. There was a certain nobility to it, at least in the crowd where I learned how to desecrate myself with booze. We were wounded people, and history had deemed alcohol an appropriate method for dealing with wounds, even as it created more gaping ones. 

We were philosopher-kings in our own universes––my drinking buddies were mostly philosophy majors––and as we drank we opined on every open question. Though them I learned about Talking Heads, Lou Reed, Nietzsche, Baudelaire... a whole host of heroes who lasted me for decades. 

I remember D____, who bragged about the ulcer he gave himself with booze. M_____, his luscious girlfriend who would later become a professor. R___, who drank more than all of us and seemed, even at nineteen, like he'd been an alcoholic for twenty years. I remember B_____, who I re-befriended again years later until he threatened to stab me in a fit of drunken anger. J___, who sang great songs from the South and is now a corporate lawyer. I remember falling in love so many times and passing out regularly on a couch at a former tuberculosis hotel on Wasatch Avenue, where the gang had its headquarters. 

I drank other places, of course. In a dorm I puked up mightily after a St. Patrick's day green beer party (during which I'd chugged a mug of whiskey), and woke up in the morning asleep in the frame of an open three-story window. I puked up mightily after a girl I liked––who would later become a Colorado state representative––invited me over to her house for dinner specifically to tell me that she didn't want to date me. I got stumbling drunk all the time (sometimes when I wasn't high, and sometimes when I was) and, within a sixteen months of starting on the party train, had gained enough frequent rider mileage to gift myself with a trip to Absolute Nowhere. The smart kid with potential that I'd been when I showed up at Colorado College had run away and replaced himself with a puddle of his own weaknesses. 

Damn, it was fun. But ultimately, I couldn't handle it. When I transferred to SUNY-Binghamton to give myself a fresh start, one member of the broader Wasatch Hotel gang said he was happy I'd decided to move on. I was never one of them, he told me. Never desperate enough, always there for the ride. Better off leaving their shit behind me. I could go on and be who I was.

He was right. I had little stomach for hard liquor, and maybe that was the only necessary clue for the hard-cores. But I wish I could say that moving on was as easy as this guy said. Maybe it really was, and I decided to make things more difficult just to keep punishing myself in my father's name, with my father's chosen implement of self-destruction.