In my mind, it was not a drinking problem. For we were Irish.
It began those summer nights when I was 15 and would sneak two gulps of my father’s Irish whiskey that he kept under the sink or else some gin if he was out of the Jameson. I hated the taste, but it gave me the courage I needed to sit on the front porch with Marilyn and Janice down the block.
Or the first basement party the old man let us have, for which we took twist-off quart bottles of Canfield’s cola and spiked them with Bacardi rum while he was at work, and he was never the wiser.
And when Marianne and I, on a double date, sneaked a toboggan with the other couple through a hole in the chain-link fence at the Evergreen Park country club with two bottles of Hiram Walker blackberry brandy so we could keep warm between sled rides.
As far as I knew, bonding with your best mate on special occasions was a revered Irish tradition, as when Joe and I trudged through the snow to the top of Piggy Toe Mountain, a hilly alley in Evergreen Park, with three half pints of Old Kentucky bourbon that old Nick purchased for us at Walgreens to toast the start of the Christmas season before we staggered back down.
Or the night we had to chip in for trashing a motel room at the Algiers in Oak Lawn, while chugging $5 fifths of Ten High, Philadelphia and Seagram’s 7 whiskeys, chasing it all down with a kegger of Pabst Blue Ribbon, since we were celebrating graduation.
It was all in good fun, and more like a sport, since we were Irish lads who everyone knows are the life of the party, and prodigious drinkers, and good storytellers, and relentless brawlers, though I wasn’t much with my fists, unlike the South Side Irish off of Western Avenue.
Real alcoholics were the old men in the West Loop chugging from bottles hidden in brown bags. Or the financiers and lawyers downtown who kept a bottle in their desk drawer at the office for when they were desperate for a belt in the middle of the afternoon.
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Whereas, for us, the only time I recall getting wasted in the daytime was when our parents went to Florida and we invited friends every day for cards and music and arm-wrestling on the workbench in the garage, and staying up all night, then taking showers outside under the garden hose at dawn and running naked down the sidewalk to dry off before the neighbors woke up. Which, everyone agreed, was hilarious, while we thought alcoholism meant lives that were sad and desperate and headed for ruin.
Even as we grew older, we remained Irish kids at heart, with energy and humor and futures — and the challenge to drink for pleasure and still go to work and be able to drive or wake up without a hangover.
Which, admittedly, I had trouble with. I knew that whenever the hour grew late and I started to feel dizzy, that no matter how many aspirin I took, I’d wake up too early the next morning with weakness and fatigue and what felt like someone digging in my brain with a jackhammer. And I’d have balloons of nausea in my gut that would ordinarily send someone to the emergency room, but which I’d always have to abide till 4 or 5 p.m., when my head and stomach finally settled down. I would sit at the edge of the bed like in the “Wolfman” movies, with my eyes, tongue, teeth and skin slowly turning human again.
But Joe said a hangover didn’t mean “jack squat” and that he knew we weren’t “alkies” since we never blacked out or forgot where we were.
Which is why, into our 20s, we took pride in being able to drink gallons of beer through the night and function pretty normally, while smiling at the amateurs who lost their wits.
Mainly because we were Irish, and it was an Irish town, and even the cops knew the score, pulling us over to give a warning or maybe confiscating our beer, or at most, writing a speeding ticket, though they never wrote up a DUI.
It was the luck of the Irish, we said, until the luck ran out for gentle Willie who was killed driving the wrong way on the Dan Ryan Expressway. And Timmy, always funny, out till 4 a.m. on a school night, but not making it home alive. And my oldest friend, Joe, dying after a party on New Year’s Eve.
Chastened, grief-stricken, older, wiser, we didn’t say it but realized deep down that this was no damned sport, no care-free, red-blooded American “Animal House” boys-will-be-boys lifestyle, no ethnic peculiarity, no cultural phenomenon.
It was a deadly disease.
Either you chose to do something about it or let your days spin like the cylinder of a revolver in a game of Russian roulette.
Two years ago, the joke was on us when DNA showed that my family was never even Irish. Though it had stopped being funny long, long before.
David McGrath is an emeritus English professor at the College of DuPage and author of the newly released book “Far Enough Away,” a collection of Chicagoland stories. He can be reached at [email protected].
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