Beer

Beer was always in plentiful supply around our house and Dad didn’t tinker with his choices. Over time I knew him to be a serious patron of just three brands. For years it was Hamms. Then something happened and he started buying Schlitz. Later he turned to Falstaff. He’d buy four or five cases at a time and stack them on our back porch, close to our main point of entry and exit. When they saw the inventory, guests of all ages had to react in some way. Most of them responded with a moment of awe-inspired silence.

Then one day when I was in the sixth grade, Dad brought home a case of Miller Ponys.

I had not yet acquired a taste for beer, though I’d had my chances. In those days, adults always offered small kids a swig from their can or bottle. It wasn’t done as an amusement: it was just routine. And at weddings, the minors lingered around the kegs the way the stags lingered around the prettiest bridesmaid. At one anniversary party in our church basement, the guest of honor took a few minutes from his busy schedule to explain to me the importance of properly pumping the keg.

Beer was never forbidden or out of reach, so at age twelve my attraction to these Miller Ponys was based solely on appearance. They were small bottles whose crystal-clear glass emphasized the caramel tint of this champagne of beers. In contrast, Falstaff’s malformed, hump-backed bottles and Medieval shield had always left me dry.

And therefore after school one day I drank my first beer ever—one of those Miller Ponys. Eight ounces of chilly pilsner brew. When the bottle was empty, I was glad.

Beer has always been a pain in my ass. In high school, especially, it was an undeniable force. For a while I affected an anti-beer stance that was based partly on my bent for nonconformity, but more so on self-interest. If I had any currency among my peers, it stemmed from my reputation as a guy who could say things in a certain slanted way that made others think they’d just heard something very interesting, if not amusing (and it usually was not). But beer changed the dynamics. After a few drinks, many of my peers found everything from belches to bellicose chants to be totally hilarious. In effect, my skewed and trenchant observations on high-school life took a back seat to loud farts.

So, for the longest time I denigrated beer, not in a Carrie Nation way, but more from a standpoint of superiority. It was simply beneath me, I attested.

And then at some point in my junior year—I don’t recall the moment of transformation—I ceased fighting the good fight and let it be known that I’d made my peace with beer.

But it was mostly a lie. Beer still—to borrow a phrase from my dad—“griped my butt.” There were a hundred social outings when I was enjoying things until some smart guy declared we had to score some beer. Each time, all the fun ground to a halt while we dug into our pockets for coins and argued how best to get our hands on the stuff. The most creative scheme took place when a friend went into a convenience store and pretended to be deaf. We watched from the car as he took a package of Bud to the counter and then responded to the clerk’s concerns by pantomiming, in exaggerated fashion, that he was hearing impaired.

“It almost worked,” he said as he got into the car empty handed.

One night my senior year of high school, through some unimaginable tilt of the Earth on its axis, the school’s best-looking girl and two of her cute friends were deposited into my ’71 Cutlass. And to a woman they all needed beer. I was eighteen, old enough to cross the state line and buy “Kansas three-two pisswater,” but uneasy about having such contraband in my car. I had seen the chilling documentary “Scared Straight” some years before, as well as the made-for-TV movie called “The Glass House,” starring Alan Alda as a sensitive fellow in jail. I didn’t want any of that.

But when you’re eighteen and a beautiful girl wants beer, that beautiful girl gets beer.

So I drove into Kansas and the girls joined me inside a 7-Eleven and snatched a couple sixes. Even though I was legally allowed to buy beer, I was still nervous and ended up apologizing to the clerk.

Back in the car, as I liberated the bottles from their casing, I insisted the girls keep them low at all times in case we crossed paths with a cop. If you’ve ever had open containers in a car, then you know every passing vehicle has a cherry on top.

“How we supposed to drink then?” asked a chick in the back seat.

Drink? It never occurred to me they’d be interested in drinking the beers. I had assumed it was all about the process: the mingling of dollars and coins, the surveying of the glamorous product behind the big glass doors, the debates over Busch vs Bud and bottles vs. cans, and the purchase of a communal pack of smokes—for everyone knows that pretty girls cannot hold a beer in one hand without having a cigarette in the other.

“Isn’t it all just an affectation?” I said.

“What?” said one of them.

“You’re kind of weird,” said another.

“All right. But just keep ‘em low when you’re not taking a drink, please.”

You can guess what happened next. I was puttering below the speed limit, southbound on Wornall Road, just south of Red Bridge, when the prettiest girl and another began wondering if beer made you fat. Suddenly the prettiest girl flicked on my dome light and held her bottle up to it to read the caloric content. Her friend did the same. Before I could scold them, a patrol car approached in the opposite lane.

“The fuzz!” shouted the third girl, and they all squealed in laughter.

The brake lights reddened on the cop car. I goosed the gas and got the Cutlass up to forty in no time and took the first turn, into a flush neighborhood where I wended through side streets until I was at State Line Road and then into the safety of Kansas. The girls responded with Dixie shouts of triumph, and for a couple minutes there I was pretty cool. I lifted my chin and puffed my lower lip, like Barney Fife when he took the gang out for a Sunday drive in that lemon that Grandma Walton sold him.

Not long after that, I survived another close scrape with the law, one a bit more dramatic. A couple of friends and I made plans to carpool to a party at a classmate’s home down deep in the city. When my friend E. picked me up, I came armed with a twelve-pack. E. was able to match my twelve-pack, bottle for bottle. Our other friend, T., soon added twelve more soldiers to the equation.

At a Milgrim’s grocery store we bought a bag of ice, and then in the parking lot we transported the beer into coolers. Just looking at thirty-six bottles of beer was intoxicating, and so we got very giggly and slobbery as we deposited them into our coolers.

The party was a blast. By all accounts, the class of 1981 blew the roof off that mother. The three of us managed to conquer those thirty-six beers, which was quite a feat since collectively we weighed about two-hundred and were not at all seasoned drinkers. It was the first time I was ever drunk and therefore I recall only a few snapshots from that party: the smartest girl in class rolling down a grassy incline over and over, as if she were trying to perfect the act; the basketball hero drinking a tall boy, which made sense because he was a tall boy; the intrusion of a freshman girl who toted a flask of whiskey as if it were her ticket to the proceedings—and indeed it sort of was.

After one a.m., the three of us returned to E.’s Chevelle for the long ride home. T. immediately fell asleep in the back seat, curled in a fetal position. I rode shotgun. My only memory of the journey is when we approached the busy intersection of 39th street and Southwest Trafficway. I looked at the driver and noted his eyes were Magoo-like. The lids were puffy and about 90-percent shut as he whizzed through the traffic light, which may or may not have been green. I laughed and laughed. It was straight out of a Harold Ramis movie.

Some time later, near 82nd and The Paseo, which was just a few blocks from my home, the car struck a curb and popped a tire. The three of us awakened and clambered out to take a look. We circled the Chevelle like wobbly fighters taking standing-eight counts. Then to the north I saw a police car approaching. Even in my state of dissipation, I realized what would happen next. We’d be booked, jailed, and summarily scared straight.

The patrol car inched along until it reached us. From the far lane of traffic, the officer eyeballed us and then accelerated like a madman. He made a sharp turn west, into a neighborhood.

We could not speak, but through crude gestures and grunts we demonstrated relief, and through similar gestures and grunts we agreed to leave the car and walk to my house.

After relieving ourselves in my back yard, we lingered at the top of the driveway for about five minutes, until I decided I was sober enough to transport them home, which is what I somehow did.

That weekend, a small article in The Kansas City Star reported on a murder that had occurred just a couple blocks west of 82nd and The Paseo, at 1:45 in the morning—concurrent with our tire mishap. A woman had come out to her front porch, perhaps to investigate a prowler or perhaps to sleuth out the popping sound of a blown tire, and was shot to death. Gripping that newspaper, I felt shivers down my spine as I recalled how the cop had bypassed us that night.

Later, when I reported the creepy news to T. and E., I concluded with this skewed observation: “That poor woman died for our sins.” T. and E. were of course sober by then, and so I can only hope they received the remark as something insightful, if not profound.