Warm Beer

Essays

Oct 5

My stepbrother, Nick, threw a warm can of Busch beer into the backseat to each of us. We were probably fifteen, and he was twenty. It was the first summer we were big enough to have fun with outside of sports. We were in Henry Flynn’s car and Erik and I, unbelted, were flying from side to side as he navigated the Hamptons’ back roads with the virtuosity of an old Formula 1 driver. The beer was disgusting.

In boarding school, the trick was to all sign out as if we were going home and then somehow all get rides to one person’s house, whose parents were out of town, and have a complete rager on a Saturday night. We had the fridge stocked with beer, and a photo exists somewhere in the world with us in front of it. At the time, it would have been our Facebook header if the Internet had existed then. My God, all of the things I would have posted and regretted if that existed in my youth.

If you were lucky, you got a bed, but most of the time we were all sprawled out on the floor. I remember kissing a friend of a friend who didn't go to our school on the living room floor in the dark AM hours of a hungover Sunday morning, and when I opened my eyes, the best player on our basketball team was looking at me with a smirk. We won the State Prep Championship together that year.

I did a lot of dumb stuff as an unbridled youth, but I don’t regret it. Even the more dangerous stuff was some of the most fun I’ve ever had in my life. I would never do any of it again, but things were different back then. We had nothing to post. No one knew where we were and when we were coming home. No one could track us outside of a LoJack. We were free, and sometimes we did extremely dumb shit with our freedom. No ragrets.

The thing that was different about how I drank when I was younger is that I never drank for pleasure. What I mean is that I never drank unless I was going out. I didn’t just come home and have a beer; I never did. I don’t like beer that much. I don’t like wine that much. I definitely don’t like hard liquor that much. I don’t know if that makes it better or worse, but it was never a thing in my life.

We used to take real photographs of our nights. This is another reminder to be thankful that there was no social media. Videos exist of our shenanigans. When someone has a video of you somewhere singing La di da Di in only a jockstrap and clown mask, you wish them a Happy Birthday and go along with your day.