Alcoholism As A Social Norm

There are many things I remember from my long 17 years of being alive, playing football, shooting guns, passing time with loved ones, my first girlfriend, but on thing that will always stand above the crowd is the smell of beer. Not the sweet smell of Bourbon, or the harsh smell of Whiskey, or the savory smell of Wine, but the rotten smell of cheap beer. It was a smell that followed me everywhere in the early years of my adolescence, so much so that I began to believe that it was the social norm. Alcoholism runs rampant through my family, on both my mom and dad’s side, but I didn’t realize there was a problem until years later, after my dad stopped drinking and I could look back and say, “what the hell was going on.” This alcoholism, paired …show more content…
Uncle Duck helped to get my dad a job at Frito on the Lay’s line, his hours were long and hard, but were made up for when he got home, at 1:30-2:00 in the morning, to me and my mother, that changed as I grew older. When I started school I could no longer stay up waiting for him to come home, I had to leave early in the morning, and he couldn’t stay up when I was up as he had to work third shift (Otherwise known as graveyard), so we began drifting apart. I think it was first grade when I first saw what was happening to my father in my absence, I was leaving for school when I noticed him asleep on the couch, snoring, drooling, surrounded by empty, and half empty, beer cans. The whole house stank of cheap booze, sometimes with a hint of Crown Whiskey, and more and more frequently the trash can would be overflowing with his vein attempt to hide from me what had transpired the night before. It reached a point where he no longer cared to hide what was going on, I would be riding shotgun as we went through the corona street liquor stores drive through, I would be in the …show more content…
With that John disappeared into the camper, he returned after about two minutes, going straight to the cooler. He reached in, grabbed a can, and put it less than an inch from his nose (he had lost his glasses), pulled the tab on top, and took a large mouthful of the foul smelling fluid. He immediately spit it out into the camp fire, gagging and spitting, Zachary and I, being younger, looked at his, eagerly awaiting his personal review. “It tastes like ass!” He exclaimed, licking the palm of his hand to be rid of the taste. Me and Zachary laughed, on of those laughs that leave you doubled over in pain, gasping for air. “It's not funny!” He shouted as the laughter died out, looking over us with scorn, “Gabe, grab me a Pepsi.” He gave me orders like this often as I was the youngest of the three, and I decided I had, had enough. I fished around in the cooler and produced another can of Bud Light (the brand he had tried first), and handed it to him, desperate for a sweet taste to alleviate his suffering he pulled the tab and took a large draft. This yielded the same reaction as before, only Zachary and I laughed even harder. He marched over to the cooler, making triple sure the can he grabbed was Pepsi, and stomped back to his chair, glaring at us over his soda as he took a