Of Peppermints and White Knights

Of peppermints and white knights

I took my first drink at age 9. It was the 4th of July and a neighbor in the apartment complex where I was currently living had invited me to watch the fireworks with him. We were in a park with hundreds of other people. Most people were doing the same as we were. We had brought a blanket and a cooler and found a spot to sit and watch the night sky as brilliant colors streaked across it. In the cooler were subs and beer. I had eaten half a turkey sub and was sucking on an ice cube from the cooler. Mr. Williams had forgotten to bring any kid drinks. I didn’t really care. I was actually watching fireworks for real and not on a black and white TV screen as I always had. My parents were too busy to take me anywhere and everything was always “so far.” They rarely went a few miles from the apartment. My father said we had to keep the mileage on the car down and gas was expensive. Mr. Williams never seemed to care about the price of gas.

My neck was starting to hurt from looking straight up, but I didn’t want to miss a single flash of light. The boom of the explosion felt like it was passing through me. This was not something that could be experienced on television.

Mr. Williams was looking at me and smiling. He asked if I was enjoying the show and I said I was. It certainly beat sitting at home alone. Then he went to the cooler, pulled out an ice cold beer and handed it to me. He said it was the 4th of July and we should celebrate. I told him I wasn’t allowed to drink beer, but Mr. Williams just shook his head and laughed. There were no rules to follow on the 4th. He told me to look around. I did look around quickly and everyone was having a good time. Lots of people were smoking and drinking. Besides, the beers were small. They were called pony beers and were half the size of a real beer. Mr. Williams told me not to worry. He was always telling me not to worry.

I took the bottle of beer and held it in my hands for awhile. I wasn’t too excited about the idea of drinking beer. Mr. Williams drank it constantly and his breath always smelled terrible. It also made him pee a lot. But it was a warm night and the bottle was so cold it was starting to make my hands numb. Realizing I hadn’t opened the beer, Mr. Williams smiled again and motioned for me to drink up. His bottle was almost empty. I twisted off the top and tossed it towards the cooler as Mr. Williams had done. I took a sip of the beer which seemed to make Mr. Williams happy. I didn’t want to do anything to disappoint him. He was the only adult in my life who seemed to like me.

The beer tasted terrible, but I managed to drink it all before the fireworks ended. While we waited for the crowd to thin out, Mr. Willams pulled me close and put his arms around me. He held me tight enough where I could feel his heart beating in his chest. His arms were warm against my cool skin. As people walked by, I wondered what they thought of us. Did they think he was my father? Some people smiled at the two of us. I sometimes pretended he was my father.

Lots of families had come to the park. I watched mothers hold the hands of their small children. Even older kids walked hand in hand with their parents. Everyone was having a good time.

Mr. Williams would often hold my hand if we were in a crowded place. He always had warm hands. He worked with glass and often had band aids on his fingers. I was always careful not to squeeze a finger with a band aid on it.

I didn’t know what time it was, but the sun had been down for awhile. My mother would be mad when I got home. I hadn’t done the laundry like I was supposed to. I hated the laundry room. It was hot and dark and always smelled like mildew. Mold grew on the walls. I had done the dishes, taken out the garbage and swept the floor and the back porch. Perhaps that would be enough to make her happy. I had decided I would tell her the laundry room was busy when I had gone to check. It often was. It was the only laundry room for 20 apartments. Mr. Williams said I worked too hard for a kid.

There were only a few people left in the park, but Mr. Williams said he was in no hurry to sit in traffic on such a wonderful night. An occasional firework from someone’s back yard kept the night alive with the sounds of the 4th. Mr. Williams reached into the cooler and pulled out two more pony beers. He twisted off the tops and pushed one into my hands. I sipped it slowly and tried to ignore the bitter taste. Ice from the bag in the cooler would have been much better, but I was trapped in Mr. Williams’s bear hug and he was showing no signs of letting go. Mostly, it was a good feeling. My parents never hugged me this way. I had little physical contact with them at all except for spankings. Occasionally my mother would kiss my forehead before I went to bed.

I don’t know how many little bottles Mr. Williams had that night. When I look back on this time in my life, I don’t ever remember him being really drunk. He would get silly sometimes and laugh a lot. Other times he would get very quiet and we would just sit and talk about serious things. I had one more beer that night before we left the park. In the car, Mr. Williams handed me a peppermint and said to crunch it up so the beer smell would go away. Mr. Williams always had peppermints with him. Even today when someone hands me a peppermint, I think of Mr. Williams.

When I got home that night, my mother was mad. My parents were always mad at me. Even when I was good, it wasn’t good enough. “Why can’t you just stay out of trouble,” my father often bellowed. I didn’t have to be told to go to my room, I just went. No one would be in to see if I had eaten or if I had clean clothes for school the next day. No one would be in to tuck me in to bed or read me a story. Mr. Williams was a great story teller. Sometimes he read from books and sometimes he made up stories from his head. My favorites were the stories of kings and queens and gallant knights and fiery dragons. People lived in fancy castles and held huge parties where everyone was welcome. Children were loved and cherished and grew up to be princes and princesses. Never was there want or worry as long as the knights were allowed to roam the land. The knights kept everyone safe.

I often thought of Mr. Williams as my knight in shining armor. I felt safe, for the most part, when I was with him. But he always took me back home and delivered me into the hands of my parents. “Run along home, kiddo,” he would say.

Drinking beer with Mr. Williams became a regular occurrence. I would run over to see him after school. My father left for work just before I got home and my mother often worked late until the sun was down. She was a waitress and sometimes brought delicious food home. Sometimes I went to bed without dinner. If she wasn’t home by the time Star Trek was over, I made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I usually didn’t care what I ate. One time when my mother was in the hospital for a few days, my father bought me a container of cottage cheese and a bag of pretzels. That was lunch and dinner for three days. My father didn’t know how to pack a lunch for school so I put pretzels and bread in my lunchbox. I bought milk with my allowance money. I was glad when my mother came back home. She had been in the hospital so she could never have any more kids. I had no idea what that meant back then, but it made me feel bad.

Mr. Williams left for work at the plate glass factory 15 minutes into the evening news. In the summer, the TV sat on the back porch and we would sit and drink beer and watch TV. When the news came on, Mr. Williams would get ready for work and then I would go home to an empty apartment. In the winter, we often watched TV in bed. He had a waterbed that was always warm and comfortable. Mr. Williams was married, but I don’t remember much about his wife. She was a nurse and worked all kinds of crazy hours. Everyone in my life worked crazy hours. It was impossible to make plans. I was the only one who had a set schedule.

By age 10 I was drinking on a daily basis. Alcohol had become my escape from life. Alcohol took me to the castle guarded by strong obedient knights. I had it stashed in my closet, under my bed, in my desk and in the storage area under the apartments. Mr. Williams had no idea how much he drank and never seemed to notice it missing. When we sat on the back porch, I would toss bottles into the weeds below when he wasn’t looking, then later go back and get them.

When the whole world got to be too much, alcohol took the pain away. It gave me the comfort that no one else seemed able to give. I had few friends because I had to come straight home after school to do laundry and make dinner and clean the house. I often took great pride in being such a grown up little girl. Other kids didn’t know how to do laundry or cook hamburgers. They didn’t know how to change the bag on a vacuum or unclog the garbage disposal without getting their fingers cut off. They didn’t know the many uses of WD40 or how to fix a broken chain on a bicycle. Their parents still did all these things for them.

These same kids also didn’t know what it was like to be so lonely and different that the only thought that got me through the day was knowing a cold beer awaited me in Mr. Williams’s refrigerator. Or if Mr. Williams wasn’t home, a warm beer from the back of my closet would do. I was 10 years old, but I never had trouble finding beer. Once I started looking, it was everywhere. People left it in the back of their trucks, they often tossed it in the garbage with the all the empties. They left it sitting on porches and picnic tables and along the side of the road. I couldn’t make it through a day without a drink, but no one knew. Even Mr. Williams didn’t know how bad it was. Although I enjoyed his company, I grew to enjoy his beer even more.

Looking back on my life now, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had never taken that first sip that wonderful 4th of July night. Would I have been able to avoid being the youngest kid in alcohol rehab at age 12? Would I have avoided the nightmare of heroine withdrawal in a drug rehab center at age 16? No one came to visit. No one called or sent cards. And when I got out, nothing had changed so I saw little reason to change except I vowed never to touch heroine again. Could I have avoided the countless blackouts and lost days that happened regularly for the next 30 years? Could I have avoided causing pain and misery to everyone around me?

It’s easy to blame others. It’s easy to blame Mr. Williams for taking great delight in getting a little girl drunk. It’s easy to blame parents who had no idea their daughter was even drinking for two years. Who ever heard of a 10 year old alcoholic? It’s easy to blame a society for allowing alcohol to be so available and so tempting. And I do blame all these people. But mostly, I blame a little girl for believing in the notion of white knights and castles. I blame her for believing that some day her world will be safe and comforting and for accepting what a bottle of beer cold offer as a substitute and that peppermints could make everything right again. To this day, I blame no one but that little girl.