by J. R. Helton
Dean woke up and called to his sister for help. She was a beautiful cheerleader at our high school, older than both of us. A kind person, she helped me to the bathroom to disrobe and wipe off, and she put me in a pair of her little brother’s pajamas. She also helped me clean up the couch as best I could. I was very embarrassed not only that night, but the next day when Dean’s mother and father came downstairs and the stench and stains hit them. I was expecting a serious lecture from his big, hard-ass father, Mr. Brown, major trouble. But when he asked if we had been drinking, he seemed to believe Dean when he lied and said no. Mrs. Brown was somewhat pissed that I had possibly ruined her couch so Dean helped me move the couch out of the house to clean it some more.
Beneath the calm, upper middle-class exterior of Memorial there was just as much juvenile mayhem, drug abuse, and general chaos and unhappiness as in any other neighborhood in Houston, if not more. This is no surprise and much like the middle-class or wealthy white areas of Dallas, Austin, Los Angeles, New York, St. Louis; the list is long. I was eager to associate with boys like Dean Brown from these other families that had a bit more money than my own. Because their parents were so firmly entrenched in the upper middle class of America, most of these boys were destined and expected to follow in their footsteps and would all become successful doctors, lawyers, politicians and businessmen. This veneer of confidence and privilege was impenetrable by society or even the Law. Such boys carried this sense of entitlement like a suit of armor and, never suffering any want, moved through most all their life with a poise and ease I admired. It allowed these white teenagers to get away with literal murder.
Alcohol was a constant in almost every Memorial home. Besides nicotine, beer, wine and liquor were and are the official state-sanctioned drugs to get a high or kick from in the United States. To get slobbering drunk was a rite of passage in our schools, a sign of becoming an adult. The more you could down as a boy or young teen, the more of a real man you were. Beer is an acquired taste, especially when you start with the crappy, chemical laden, watered down cans and bottles of Budweiser, Miller, Coors, the main brands. Beer tasted like shit when first tried, but the high the alcohol gave you made it more palatable over time until you were convinced you liked it. If beer tasted like grape soda, or Coca-Cola, even more people would drink it, especially young men and women—thus all the many sweet drinks like Smirnoff Ice, Mike’s Hard Lemonade, wine coolers, and others that are indeed actively “pushed” on the youth today. Beer was involved in every activity we middle-class boys engaged in, besides sports, since all of us were jocks. And our athletic prowess afforded us yet another official level of indulgence and tacit permission at school.
When I could get away from my parents and jobs and obligations, I went out regularly with this gang of athletes. Dean and I always had an older friend in the group, a defacto sponsor who bought and gave us alcohol, the drug which started every evening excursion. The more intoxicated we became, the more reckless we were, driving wildly all over west Houston and the suburbs. Dean and I had both obtained a driver’s license to drive our own cars to school and work. He had a powerful floodlight mounted on his new, white ’77 Camaro. He and I drove up and down i-10 at ninety miles an hour while intoxicated one night, shining the bright spot light into people’s faces and laughing as we forced their cars off the road or into a shallow ditch. We played chicken in our cars, racing down backcountry roads coming close to killing ourselves and others on many occasions. My car wasn’t cool like the other boys’ 1970s Firebirds, Camaros and Trans-Ams, but it was fast, a ’72 gun-metal grey Caprice Classic four door with a 454 four barrel. I would gun it to 130 mph, burying the speedometer, the lights out, trying to impress my friends.
We did all this with the older white-boy jocks, who in turn picked on us only lightly, safely initiating us into their world, where they fucked the prettiest girls on campus, were worshiped as star athletes, and were often intelligent students. We learned to get girls drunk to fuck them, and which ones to use for sex. We broke windows; we stole liquor or beer from stores. One night, to impress my friends, I threw a full 40 oz bottle of Miller from a speeding car through the gigantic plate glass window of a pricey storefront on Westheimer Blvd., shattering it in an expensive explosion of glass shards.
Alcohol releases inhibitions, but when taken in excess, you lose many commonsense inhibitions. Unlike marijuana, the drug can also lead more often to violent behavior. As the younger jock group, we mostly watched the older boys meet rival middle-class white jock gangs from schools like our own in empty pastures or parking lots around Houston. The nights often started as big tailgate parties with everyone getting drunk on Everclear trash can punch and then devolved into huge, free-ranging brawls, with the boys using mostly their fists with only the occasional stick or a bat. Rarely did anyone bring out a knife or a pistol at these gang rivalry fights between schools though we all had easy access to a rifle or pistol if we needed one.
I was on the varsity track team then as a freshman as was Dean as a sophomore. On one of the last nights of our track season, we went out with this group of older boys, our teammates, after drinking a lot of beer. We stopped at the large Town and Country Mall south of i-10 that was surrounded by retail stores, film houses, and restaurants. There were about ten of us roaming the busy area on a mild spring night in 1977 when three of our older leaders began to molest a series of women. I was following the gang as they descended upon the women, usually one woman at a time, whom they could isolate. I watched as they ripped off her shirt or yanked down her tube top and began to mash and squeeze her breasts while shouting out obscenities to everyone’s laughter as the woman struggled to get away. I watched as they keyed expensive cars, and I saw our leader, the tall, blow-dried, and tanned senior football star and salutatorian, Jay Thornsbury, smashing a passing, frightened, teenaged boy in the face so hard that he broke many of the boy’s teeth. They were covered in braces, and his mouth, lips, and cheeks were shredded. Jay hurt his hand in the process and everyone laughed. All of this finally culminated in the gang pinning two young women against their car in an isolated parking lot, covering the girl’s mouths, and shoving their faces down to the hood of their own car. They positioned one girl on each side of the hood so they could look at one another as Jay and another boy yanked down the girls’ pants and underwear.
Dean and I were the youngest of the gang and had been mostly swept along save for minor vandalism. Dean keyed one car, a small scratch into the paint on an expensive Mercedes, but I knew he did this reluctantly, only after being razzed and pressured by the older boys. Dean and I were the only ones out there who had jobs. We worked to pay for our own vehicles which perhaps let us see the injustice of ruining someone else’s car. We both had sisters as well that we cared for, which may have stopped us from touching any of the women who were being accosted. Dean was a year and a half older than me and closer to this group than I was. They all knew and lusted after his big sister or they were afraid of his father Mr. Brown. Dean was how I got in, but he was always smarter and different from the rest of the jocks. Like me, he was a critical thinker, suspicious already of the hollow hypocrisy of the American Dream. We stood there only briefly, stunned at the sight of the girl’s white round asses bent over the hood of the car, glowing in the night. As the boys began to take turns raping them, the screaming and the crying, the violence, replaced any potential sexual feelings with a wave of nausea and Dean and I ran away.
-9-
After high school, I continued to drink alcohol from time to time, but my system was a virgin one with this drug. I also had an ulcerous stomach as a teen with constant heartburn, a physical manifestation of my inner turmoil. Alcohol coupled with dipping tobacco created even more acid in my stomach that bubbled up into my esophagus. For this reason, I preferred marijuana as not only did it provide more of an escape from reality while genuinely easing anxiety, there was no heartburn or the nausea-inducing side effects like th
e ones I got from alcohol and nicotine. Cannabis is a legitimate, medical cure for nausea. The actual THC high itself is different as well from alcohol; it’s a better high with pot. That said, I still drank.
I had yet to build up a tolerance to alcohol and so became intoxicated fairly easily. I once bought a bottle of red wine at nineteen years old and wandered around the UT campus in Austin one night taking slugs from it. I met up with a friend and fellow student who was working on one of her big paintings in the art department building. I had only drunk barely half of the bottle of wine but was very drunk. She and I finished the rest and ended up back on the other side of campus at the student union bar, drinking kamikazes until two a.m. By the time I got back to my dorm room in Jester, I was stumbling and nauseous and threw up in the communal showers for the rest of the night.
If too much alcohol enters my system, I begin to feel nauseous and this is usually enough to make me stop drinking. It’s a fine line though, not to have already put too much alcohol in your bloodstream to use respiration to get it out of your body in time to counteract the nausea. When nausea sets in, it is usually too late and your body will vomit up this poison to get it out of your system. Even then, lying on my bed or on a couch after throwing up, too much alcohol remains in my blood and the room spins, or I feel like I am on a tossing boat at sea and continue to be nauseous and vomit for hours though I have nothing left in my stomach. I’ve always ended up just lying by the toilet then to vomit, curling up on the cold white tiles of the bathroom floor between violent regurgitations, the hard slick surface helping as anything that can take your mind off the spinning constant nausea is a relief.
Most times when I am vomiting after drinking too much I think to myself: I will never do this again. . . . Why did I do this? Or I’ll make some big promise to never drink again as long as I can just stop being sick right now. Immediately. “Stop this vomiting and I will never drink again.” And for a few days, this works. I don’t drink or have any desire to drink. After a day or two, I begin to feel good again. My health and color come back. My appetite returns. And one night, I am alone and bored or out with others, and I begin to drink again.
Alcohol is the cheapest and easiest drug to get in America. If you’re young, under the drinking age, alcohol is harder to get than marijuana because the former is regulated by the state. But if you’re of legal drinking age, then for the majority of Americans who are continually seeking some sort of escape, a brief daily respite from their mundane reality, often enough nothing is available and alcohol has to suffice. Off and on, I drank alcohol throughout my twenties and did eventually begin to develop a tolerance. I never enjoyed getting completely drunk to the point of losing control and, usually, I’m able to avoid this.
My second wife Karen was an attractive and intelligent woman who drank alcohol every day when I met her. Her father was a severe alcoholic who drank half a quart of Wild Turkey or more every day until he died in his late sixties. Her siblings also drank regularly though only one brother did so to a debilitating degree. He had been arrested for driving while intoxicated so many times that he had a special breathalyzer alcohol tester attached to the ignition of his truck. If you were intoxicated, the car wouldn’t start. He found others to blow into it and still drove without a license the last time I saw him, wrecking his truck often. The other younger brother, Tommy, the one I was friends with, was a former heroin addict who’d served time for robbing pharmacies in Austin to get opiates.
I’d met Tommy when Karen and I were first dating. I’d brought him a chocolate shake and cheeseburger at the Austin rehab facility where he was locked up. It was his third and last chance to get clean or go back to the joint. They’d flashed Tommy’s mug shot all over the local ten o’clock Austin news one night as a parole violator and everybody was after him. We hid him out at the farm for one night in a trailer in the back pasture but he fled the next morning. I had given him the heads up that some of his family friends had stopped by the house asking for him, encouraging him to turn himself in. His old redneck father still loved his oldest son deeply and he was the one who had driven all over town for weeks, then finally found Tommy holed up in some shitty motel on South Congress, surrounded by garbage, his six foot three frame emaciated down to maybe 140 pounds. Tommy was getting his health back now in rehab. He didn’t want to go back to prison but told me he did get better heroin in Huntsville than on the outside in Austin. Stuck in this high dollar facility for months, whenever Karen and I visited, he talked to me longingly of his days as an outlaw in Austin in the early seventies.
“Man, Jake, I was a pimp,” Tommy said. “I walked around with a fucking three-inch-thick roll of bills in my pocket and a .38 on my hip. I was selling heroin, Tuenols, Nembutals and Dilaudid all over town to everybody man, rich people, working people. I had all these bitches. There was this doctor who used to have me over to his house in Westlake, this old rich pervert and he’d pay me to bring over two hookers and we’d shoot speedballs all night while he watched me fucking both of those girls. I can still see him, wearing this silk robe, jacking off his old wrinkled white dick, walking up next to me on the bed an’ sayin’ ‘Yeah Tommy, that’s it man, fuck her in the ass, stick that cock up her ass.’ I’m tellin’ ya, I was a pimp.”
Now he was a skilled heavy machine operator, addicted to alcohol and nicotine, two drugs that would kill him less quickly than heroin and coke might have as he had no willpower with the latter. “I couldn’t stop,” he told me. “I keep shootin’ til I run out of money, and then keep stealing shit and pawnin’ it until I got caught. What can I say, man? There is nothing better in the world than a speedball . . . you can either nod out or just get up an’ go. But . . .” He shook his head wistfully. Whenever he and I spoke, I could tell there always seemed to be something missing from his life now, this empty space left when he stopped using heroin and cocaine. It was like the loss of a loved one; an eternal dulling of the consciousness of daily experience, of life, a feeling I wouldn’t understand myself for years.
Tommy’s little sister, Karen, easily slipped into my recently divorced, solitary life in Austin mainly due to loneliness, vodka, and sex, in that order. Alcohol can also stimulate the libido, or loosen a person up more to a perception or reality of want. The first night I ever fucked Karen, before we were married, she came to my apartment, a tree-house loft in Clarksville, with a half a quart of Absolut. My apartment had a good view of downtown Austin and she burst in with the bottle while I sat typing at my desk. We opened the vodka and mixed it with a splash of cranberry juice. Karen had taste and was elegantly dressed, her thick blond hair up on her head, her full lips wet and pink. She downed her drink in three seconds.
“I’m sick of being a prostitute,” she said.
“How so?” I made her another big vodka cranberry.
“I just had to have dinner with that piece of shit spoiled brat husband of mine. I pretended that we could maybe have sex or get back together if he would write me a check for my credit card bills.”
“How’d it go?”
“I got the check but promised to go have dinner with him again soon. No sex though.”
“Too bad.”
“I can’t imagine that hairy monkey on me now. The things he used to make me do . . .”
“Oh yeah?” I had another vodka, poured some into her glass.
“Well,” she said and smiled, “he liked to tie me up and slap me. Or I tied him up and shoved a dildo up his ass, or he’d force me to suck on his balls or lick his asshole or something like that. I mean, I like being tied up but I don’t want some hairy assed man sitting on my face . . .”
“Who does?”
We were just drinking the vodka straight now and both getting drunk. She walked over to my bed with the bottle and sat down, hiking up her dress enough for me to see she had no underwear on from my desk chair. Karen and I had been dating for weeks, but I was afraid that if I had s
ex with her and enjoyed it, I would immediately get sucked into her chaotic and expensive life. Even her current lovelorn, well-heeled architect husband couldn’t support her. But the alcohol, her legs, and that tight light-blue knit dress she was pulling up made me stand up and walk over to her on the bed. She set down the bottle, scooted back on the bed, propped herself up with a pillow, and pulled her dress up the rest of the way. She had a small labia with barely a tuft of light blondish brown hair. I went down on her for only a few minutes, sticking my finger up her vagina and working her clitoris with my tongue. At one point she asked me to put a finger inside her ass also, and soon she was screaming so loud I thought it was an act. She also severely scratched my back and neck.
When she was done I asked: “Jesus, Karen, was that real? Do you always come like that?”
She shrugged. “Pretty much. I just have really strong multiple orgasms when someone goes down on me; I can’t come though from penetration.”
She jumped me then and yanked off my belt, tying my wrists up with it. She took a slug of vodka and then poured some of the bottle onto my erect cock. I jumped at the cold liquid.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked, trying to get my hands free.
“I’m just disinfecting that thing,” she said, laughing, and took a long pull from the bottle, then poured some into my mouth and all over my face. “Goddammit, Karen—”
“Just relax,” she said. She began to perform fellatio on me but was so drunk she kept biting me.
“Untie me,” I said.
“I’m sorry this angle is difficult.”
