The first time I ever got drunk.

Was with my brother on Christmas. I was fifteen, which would put the year at 1984. We were in the living room, watching TV and my brother was describing what it's like to be drunk. "It's not like you lose your mind or anything. You know what you're doing, you just feel different."

"Like what?"

"Like drunk."

I kept laughing. I was curious. "Just try a drink," he said. "One drink. I'll mix it weak. You'll hardly taste anything."

My parents were downstairs, watching TV. It was freezing outside, and the falling snow was small and hard, scratching against the windows. It was the middle of wrestling season. I probably weighed 126 pounds.

He mixed me a vodka and some kind of juice, maybe Kool-Aid. It tasted sweet, but with a hardness right down the center.

I'd tried wine and beer before that, but those were odd, alien tastes. A few years later, I would learn to transfer beer from the front of my mouth to the back of my throat, bypassing my tongue as quickly as possible. But at fifteen I drank everything like it was soda, swishing it around in my mouth, over my teeth and tongue. Finishing a whole beer was a challenge back then, and it was usually warm and flat by the time I drained the last bit. But this wasn't too bad. This was familiar.

The buzz crept up on me. I couldn't really pinpoint when I was drunk, simply because I never had been drunk and had no experience to go on. So I just kept sipping them back until my brother, in his eighteen year-old wisdom, had me switch to wine coolers.

"Am I drunk?"

"I don't know. How do you feel?"

"I don't know."

"You look a little drunk."

"Yeah?"

I took a gulp and stood up, laughing. I was muttering something to my brother like: "I think I could take you." And then I put my hands up in a wrestler's takedown stance and started pawing at him. "Hey, tough guy," I said.

He pushed back. "You got beer muscles!" He was chuckling, amused and probably a little relieved to see his little brother finally take a step out of adolescence.

We heard the basement door open. My brother hid the bottles behind the couch just as my dad came in. He sat down on the couch next to my brother. I stood there, unsure of what to do. How does a sober person act? Should I sit? Should I leave the room? I was trying to figure out what to do that wouldn't tip my dad off to the fact that I was spinning drunk.

So I stood there and talked. Fast. I don't remember what it was about, but I talked and talked, figuring this was the best way to hide my drunkeness. My dad said nothing, but had this look of surprise that grew with each sentence I sputtered out. I could see my brother watching me out of the corner of my eye. I don't think my dad knew I was drunk, but maybe he did. He finally got up and went to bed.

I asked my brother:

"How did I act?"

"You were OK. A little loud, though."

"I was loud?"

"You were yelling a little."

I went to bed a while later and awoke the next morning with no hangover. The hangovers would come later.