My First Beer

I've been a drinker most of my life.

I remember tasting my first beer when I was 11, on a warm summer evening in Oakland, California. I was visiting one of my sisters and she and her husband lived in an apartment complex filled with other young couples. The tenants of that building loved to cook barbeque on the weekends, and they always had beer with their steaks and potato salad.

A shy kid, I never mingled well with adults. I stayed inside the apartment and watched television as the patio parties extended into the late evening. Adult laughter filtered through the screened patio doors, becoming more pronounced, and my sister's baby daughter crawled around on the carpeted living room floor.

I was an absent-minded babysitter, half-watching the kid. I'd get up off the sofa and pick her up and move her away from the stereo and records, the potted plants, the bookshelves. Then I'd sit down again, growing bored, watching TV. My niece was playing me, a repetitive a game. I was quickly growing weary. My mother had shipped me down to Oakland for a visit. I didn't have a choice in the matter. Now I was regretting being there.

The baby gurgled and grinned and I thought about beer.

I was curious about beer. I looked at the refrigerator, opened it and stared at the bottles of beer, a brand called Blitz. Being from Oregon, where the brand was bottled, my sister and brother-in-law made sure they always had a case or two around for the weekends. The bottles were lined up in neat rows on the bottom shelf.

I worked up my nerve. I'd open the fridge, close it, sit down for a few minutes. Up again, moving the baby, I'd open the door once more. And close it. The baby had her interests, I had mine.

I walked to the patio door and peeked out. My sister and her husband were listening to one of the neighbors tell a story. They were smiling broadly, enjoying whatever he was talking about. My sister asked me if I was hungry. I said I was more thirsty than anything.

She told me to get a cola out of the fridge.

I returned to the baby, pulled her off the record pile, set her on her blanket, stuck a pacifier in her mouth, and slid over to the fridge. I saw the opener on a magnet on the door.

My sister came inside, surprising me. I was mere seconds from grabbing a beer, I was reaching for the opener. She plucked her daughter up and looked at me.

Did she know? I thought she might be reading my mind and I felt guilty.

My sister took the kid into her bedroom and put her down for the night. When she came out she asked me if I was okay.

I told her I was fine and sat down and my sister went back to the patio.

Two minutes later I got up and walked over to the fridge. I opened the door and took out a cold bottle of Blitz. I took the opener off the door and opened my first beer.

They were talking about me outside. My brother-in-law said I was kind of a strange one. He said I was shy.

A woman out there said I was a cute boy.

I opened that bottle of beer and took a swig, my first taste. On a warm night, thirsty, bored to death, risking all, I drank my first beer. I loved that first beer, loved its taste, its soothing passage down my gullet, the resulting buzz.

I drank the bottle dry and drank another one, sitting on the sofa, hoping my sister wouldn't come in again. But just rebellious enough to think, so what? She'd yell and that would be it.

I went to bed slightly intoxicated. I've gone to bed buzzed many times over the years, and outright trashed on many others.

When I saw Pete Hamill's memoir, A Drinking Life, in 1995, I snatched up a copy. Somehow I knew he had stories to tell. Drinkers always do, particularly the dry ones.


TS