I like this piece, it's plain workaday language is it's strength. The
poem does not romanticise it's subject - Bukowski, for example - and
that's always a plus.
White Lightning really is a foul concoction.
My Father's family had a large religious streak, of a fundamentalist
kind, but that didn't stop them from having a glass of cider on
Sunday. My Mother's family, dirt-poor Welsh miners, had an enormous
capacity for drinking, fighting, arguing and less of the chapel-going.
FWIW, it's my mother who was - is - the more religious and unforgiving
of the two. She drinks occassionally, but always threw a wobbly when I
came home drunk, which I did a lot when I was younger.
I was actually shocked when I went to Scotland a couple of years ago
and *everyone drank buckets before going closing time and hoying into
the Land Rover. It was ironic that my project was linked to an
anti-drugs campaign as it seemed bloody obvious that drink was the
greater problem.
Roger
On 11/2/06, Heather Taylor <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> This is a longer one but I wanted to share, get some feedback, etc. Tried
> to send it last night but it didn't go through...
>
>
> It was absent in my house:
> red wine, white, baileys, whiskey, six packs.
> No one had beer at the end of a hot summer work week
> or snuck something in their coffee mid-afternoon.
>
> My grandpa was a mean drunk way before I met him,
> before he became the man who slipped me
> fivers for candy, played cards late into the night,
> sat me on his lap to show me how the world worked
>
> as he dieted on his new habits of coffee and cigarettes
> and KFC family bucket meals - the ones we expected
> every time he came round to visit, while my mom hovered,
> making peace by fetching and cleaning and keeping quiet.
>
> Before me, my grandpa was best at blame, the strong
> silent type that didn't talk about his army demotion,
> or why my Grandma couldn't speak "Goddamn German
> in front of his Goddamn children," or why he slipped
>
> vodka into his morning coffees and continued slipping
> until the day was done and at least one of his kids
> had a bloody nose and at least one of his kids was in a closet
> or under the bed so he wouldn't find them.
>
> So alcohol didn't exist in our family beyond that shadow
> of a past we're not never ever supposed to talk about.
> Our breed don't talk about things.
> Our breed knows how to keep things quiet.
>
> But still, I was taught what alcoholics looked like:
> red veins mapping their way across noses, the meek man
> shouting and fighting with strangers, the drinking of real
> vanilla essence or lysterine when the shops shut
>
> and you couldn't get a hit. These people were cartoon
> characters in bad America sitcoms, the ones that taught
> you an ABC after school lesson so you didn't fall
> down that path. It was no one I knew.
>
> The retired teacher who buys 2 litres of White Lighting each morning,
> my uncles that finish the 2-6s of JD at every party, funeral and wedding,
> the friend who almost broke my arm over concert tickets -
> They weren't alcoholics. Just another set of normal people.
>
> But when you're lying naked in a bed in a hotel room with strangers,
> and your doctor says you're killing yourself, and your friends
> marvel that you make it through the day after the night before,
> and your best mates are wearing grooves in bar stools - is that enough.
>
> My Grandpa was a mean drunk. He drank to cope.
> My friend to cope, my uncle to cope, me to cope.
> And forget. And forget. And forget. Until we all
> forgot and drank another. A sweet release down the throat.
>
> My Grandpa was a mean drunk. He drank to cope.
> But we don't talk about that anymore.
>
--
http://www.badstep.net/
Suspicion breeds confidence
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