America the land of happy hours and hangovers. In Eastport Maine ,in a bar called Wacko's, there is a sign stating: Happy Hour 2to 5pm daily. When my wife remarked that this was a long happy hour the barkeep stated:"ayeyuh and at 5 till 8 there is a happy hour next door at the Happy Crab".
I was brought up in an abstemious household.I remember my mother in a moment of despair going to the linen closet in the hall across from the bathroom,reaching to the top shelf on tip toes and tipping a pint bottle of 4 roses to her lips and letting out an anguished cry immediately thereafter. I was maybe 11 or 12 and I wrestled the bottle from her. I remember how rigid her arms were and how difficult it would have been to get the bottle out of her hands if my sister had not been grasping mother's legs from the other side...
When I was approaching twelve,I started sipping sacramental wine in the deserted sacristy, dust moats catching the sunlight. It tasted sour sweet, not at all pleasant. But the rush came from doing something that was forbidden. It was probably four years later when I sampled beer. Tom Toomey had a Hudson hornet and I can remember taking a trip to the Connecticut shore with him and a few other seminarians. The beer was warm and harsh,again the act of scoffing at the caveats was the reason for the rush. We did crazy things;among them I can see myself pushing an apple into the tail pipe of a parked car.
In my sixth year in the seminary, I started tripping to New York City. Ostensibly we were going there to see Broadway shows and to listen to Jazz. We were also downing Rob Roys, wine with dinner at Luchows and Cognac and cigars thereafter. To prepare for the trip I would go to Charlie's house in Waterbury for a wonderful Italian feast complete with Grandpa's dago red. One morning I remember shoveling the sidewalks and driveway before breakfast,and the old man gave us Anisette with our coffee to express his thanks. These trips to Charlie's and to the city continued for a year or so especially around Christmas. It was a few years later that I graduated to more serious drinking.
At the Rock on 2260 Lake Avenue I was among the last wave of truly naive seminarians to endure the horarium and victorian jansenistic rules that were in place before the fresh air of Vatican reform under the peasant Pope. We sat together alphabetically in the classrooms;we kneeled together alphabetically in the Chapel;our rooms were arranged in the same manner,as were our places at the table for meals. A tradition of walkdays,originally intended for Seminarians to walk to parishes within range in Rochester-indeed some of my more scrupulous classmated did walk to local churches-
presented an opportunity for some of the less rulebound among us to venture off on our own, to bowl and to drink beer, to play basketball inside away from the shoveling of outdoor courts,to walk to the house of a townie where we would drink the afternoon away. Sometimes we would ride the bus to the city dressed somberly in clerical garb where we would feast on wonderful Italian food at, a reduced rate of course, and where we would consume vats of good Chianti before we jubilantly returned to to our holy dwelling. Invariably I would return jocular, red faced, boisterous and slightly unsteady as I mounted the marble staircase under the vigilant eye of Emmit Murphy.
My last year in the Seminary,I stopped going to some classes, and I began to take advantage of the dusty sections of the library which housed profane,secular philosophical texts. I also discovered the Russians and, as an example, I read the Idiot without leaving my room or eating the meals that piled up for two days outside the door. Friends of mine disppeared quietly into the night. Budihas,who lifted weights in the storage room where Caswell and I used to listen to My Fair Lady. Both of them left before me. In fact I liberated a rug from Budihas' room after I had buried mine in a snow drift behind the handball courts after I had puked on it after a walkday adventure.In May I informed the Rector Wilfred that I was leaving. He was somber and caring and ,I believe, somewhat relieved.
Within weeks I had changed my mind,and with my friend Charlie who was in a more liberated seminary I borrowed my Mother's car and drove to Rochester. Along the way we stopped at a summer camp for Albany seminarians and I recall drinking so much beer that I broad jumped the hedge surrounding the cabins, only to discover the next groggy morning that there was a cyclone fence within that had ripped my pants and muscle. I bear the scar until today. The Monsignor accepted me back to the fold graciously;yet I changed my mind again within a month,and I informed the draft board of my decision. I went from 4D to draftbait in an instant.Shortly thereafter I became a serious drinker.
