The summer of '89

The summer that I was twelve going on thirteen was one of the first wild summers of my life. That was the summer I started smoking (quit when I was 21), it was the summer I first became introduced to binge drinking, and it was the summer that I had my first boyfriend and went past first base (with more than one boy by the time summer was over. That was also the summer I started dying my hair and the first colour I chose was a shocking blue-black. Two months later, I went to a bright red/orange colour.
I haven't had my own colour since that summer. I also shaved off part of my hair that year.

My best friend's dad threw our grade eight class a party in his backyard. I guess he figured it would be safe to let us drink, so he bought us a couple of 26's of various kinds of alcohol. We invited the whole class, plus some of the kids from the grade nine class. The older boys decided they should bartend and for some reason we all agreed. To this day, I am still remembering things about that day/night/morning. I know I had at least three or four drinks within the space of an hour and then the rest is a strange series of events that slowly replays over and over in my mind. I know that at one point we all scattered around the neighborhood and it must have been surreal for all the people who saw all the teenagers drunk and wandering around the streets.
I ran through someone's sprinkler, told an older tough girl she had a weird name (it was Honey) but she didn't beat me up... instead she laughed and said she liked me.

The next weekend me and my friend filled up a plastic 600 ml coke bottle with every kind of alcohol we could find at her house. The drink was a strange brown colour and it tasted like shit, but we drank it and got wasted.
That was the beginning of a career in binge drinking for me and my friends, and by the the time we were in grade twelve, we were pretty much burned out for a while.

Later in that same summer, I had to call my mom to come and get me and a friend after we drank a couple of mickey's with some guys in our class. I threw up in the one guys sink while he and my friend had sex in his parents room. It was her first time and she bled all over the place. She told my mom all about it while my mom carried her home, through the park. Meanwhile, my dad was at home passed out himself and the next day he was none the wiser. Not like it would have mattered.

I called my mom a few times that summer and throughout grade nine. One time I was at one friend's house hanging out, then I went next door to another friend's place who was having a party. I drank about six beer in an hour, went back to my other friend's and puked on his doorstep. My mom had to drag me home that night.

Then when I was 14 turning 15 and in grade ten, I started hanging out with a tougher group of people and we loved getting into trouble. Fights, drinking, sex, skipping school and just about anything else we could think of.
That was the year I first was suspended from school for missing too many classes. I had received many warnings and had even been on a contract deal where I had to get each of my teachers to sign a paper everyday saying I had been in class. That just made school all the more unbearable, so I stopped going and became very good at pinball.
Also that year, my mom got a call from one of my friend's parents saying that we had stolen her van and hadn't been home all night. My mom freaked and my friend yelled at her mom for calling my mom.
We had spent the whole night rallying forces to come and help us beat up these guys we had been chasing in the van all night. They had thrown a slurpee and a cigarette in the van and the upholstery was wrecked, so we had to get them back.
That was a great night. There is nothing like a car chase to spice things up, especially with about five or six big teenage guys ready to fight the people in the car in front of us.
My 15th birthday, my dad gave me a cigarette making machine. I was the envy of all my friends.
Also when we were 15, we started going drinking at golf courses on the outskirts of the city. Lots of beer, lots of drugs, sort of like the party at the end of Dazed and Confused.

All I really remember about the summer I was 15 turning 16 is all the different kinds of alcohol we tried. Huge tumblers filled with butter brickle liquer, lemon gin and rum and coke by the gallons. I remember playing strip poker while drinking huge amounts of vodka, and at one party when I was 16, three of us girls drank a mickey of Polar Ice in 15 minutes and then proceeded to throw up and pass out within an hour.
That was one of many nights where I was lucky and I should have gone to the hospitable.

By the time I turned 17, I was pretty much puked out of every kind of hard alcohol there was. I couldn't smell a rum and coke without dry heaving and there was NO WAY in hell I was ever going to drink any kind of alcoholic butterscotch drink again.

So, on my 18th birthday I had a party in the backyard and we drank beer instead of hard stuff. That was a night where I could have ruined beer for myself, but thankfully I didn't.
I don't remember much except the drinking and then I peed in the backyard because I didn't want to go in the house where my mom would see me.

If I actually had to name everytime I went too far with alcohol this list would be endless. Just getting the highlights is proving to be a nightmare.

In grade twelve when I was 17 turning 18, I almost got kicked out of school for smoking on school property. The principal threatened to call my parents and I asked her who she thought bought my cigarettes. This blew her mind, she backed off and I graduated.

Needless to say, I have never learnt my lesson and there were even more drunken binges later on as well as raves and parties and making out with guys while their wives watched and making out with a girl while our friends watched...
I thought that maybe I had settled down now because there have been a few quieter years, but I can feel the old things starting up again.... I am not the leopard that can change its spots, or drinking habits.