By high school, I managed to score a few dates, but they never developed into relationships. I yearned for what Ron had with Cheryl, but no such luck. So pot became my girlfriend. That’s how I looked at it.
It was easier to score pot than booze in high school. Weed was in widespread circulation among Burroughs students, whereas alcohol still required trickery and subterfuge: a fake ID or an older person willing to buy on your behalf. So, at the beginning, I was more often stoned than blitzed.
But the lure of drinking was too hard to resist for long. When I was little, I became fascinated by the very idea of drinking. It was so ritualized in the 1960s and early 1970s. Mom and Dad always had martinis when we went out to a nice restaurant like the Smoke House. And what did Ron and I drink? Shirley Temples. A Shirley Temple offers everything but the alcohol: sugar for a high, crushed ice, a swizzle stick, and a tiny parasol. This drink is, I believe, society’s way of training kids to participate in cocktail hour. Named for a child actor, no less.
So I became curious about what it must be like to drink a real cocktail. I resolved to find out. It started with me in my midteens going into our parents’ liquor cabinet when they weren’t around and having a few pops of brandy, straight out of the bottle. To a kid, that stuff tastes putrid. Funny how that didn’t dampen my curiosity.
Pretty soon thereafter, I started having friends come over to drink beers in the rec room out back of our house when Mom and Dad weren’t home. Yes, the very same rec room that Mom didn’t want Ron and Cheryl canoodling in. We paid an older kid who worked in a liquor store to sneak us six-packs of tallboys out the back door. We didn’t sip these beers as we played a game or two of pool. No, we liked to shotgun them. That’s where you poke a church key in the side of the can, crack open the flip-top, and guzzle the beer through the keyhole in one go. Right away, this was my approach to drinking beer. Is that normal? Is that somebody socially enjoying a beverage? I don’t think so.
My belief is that I came preloaded with alcoholism and drug addiction. I don’t think I “developed” a problem—I was born with the disease, like my granddad Butch. All I was waiting for was access and opportunity.
We never spoke of Butch’s condition as a sickness when Ron and I were kids; society didn’t use that kind of vocabulary back then. But we saw him act strangely, stubbing out his cigarettes on the sides of Mom and Dad’s cars, leaving burn holes in the paint. We heard Dad’s stories about him downing a pint in the supermarket parking lot. And we knew that Butch’s sister, Aunt Julia with the pinned-up blue hair, ran the family’s business affairs in Duncan because her brother was not up to the task.
My parents became aware of my new habit when Mom picked me up from a ninth-grade party at a classmate’s house where there had been no parental supervision. I had consumed ridiculous amounts of cheap wine and vodka, and it wasn’t sitting well. In the car ride home, I puked all over the interior of Mom’s yellow Plymouth. Rainbow colors. The next morning, Dad gave me a talking-to, though it was more firm than ferocious. He simply laid out the dangers of overindulging in drink. Honestly, I don’t remember much of what he said because I was too hungover.
Mom spoke to me, too, in measured tones. She never specifically mentioned her father, but something about her vibe—the worry in her voice, the fear in her eyes—suggested to me that she was making the connection. After all, I looked like young Butch.
Neither Dad’s warnings nor getting sick from binge-drinking scared me straight, though. Perversely, even as I was still clammy and wobbly from hurling, I couldn’t wait to drink again. A person who has an allergic reaction to something he has eaten isn’t eager to try that food again. A person who burns his hand on a hot stove isn’t eager to touch a burner again.
But an alcoholic is different. I thought to myself, Wow, I feel terrible—but when can we do this again?
THIS EXPERIMENTATION COINCIDED with a professional downturn, the same shitty wake-up call that Ron experienced after Andy Griffith. At the time that I completed The Red Pony, I regarded that film as a beginning: the kickoff of my next, more mature phase as an actor. But it turned out to be an ending: the last hurrah of my juvenile performing career. Soon after, my fortunes changed for the worse.