Hey all, Ernesto here with the weekly installment of my Addiction Testimonials. If you’re interested in reading the previous few parts click on the following links: Addiction Testimonials 1, Addiction Testimonials 2, and Addiction Testimonials 3 . Otherwise, without further ado, I present the fourth segment. Until next week…Enjoy…E
Pt.4 Addiction Testimonials: The Culmination
After that event in the ball park, there were many more like it throughout my elementary school years. For example, I remember that by 11 years-old, I could make a “Cuba Libre” (Rum & Coke), because my father had taught me, so when we went to gatherings, like New Year’s Eve parties with family and friends, he could sit on the couch wasted and have his own personal butler prepare him his drinks, ME. Around that time, booze seemed the trend that dominated the family’s consummation history. Coke had lost its allure, other drugs were much too risky to dabble with for young professionals like my parents that were climbing the limbs of the ever-shrinking, middle-class tree; so, naturally, booze seemed the most suitable, as it was still socially acceptable, due to its legality, up to a certain point.
Nonetheless, the reckless style of parenting continued. I recall that before Florida passed laws requiring kids to be constrained by seatbelts in the backseat (ONLY), my dad used to sit me on his lap during a Sunday afternoon stroll in the Honda station wagon and have me change the gears of the shift stick while he steered, or sometimes just applied the gas and brake. I also remember the lack of parental presence as me and my brother shot compound drawn arrows at each other from our bow and arrow sets, or played on the rusted ruins of our ten-year-old swing set that surely threatened to contaminate us with tetanus every time we gashed ourselves on it. Oh, the reckless memories…my college-aged uncle throwing us into the shallow pool from the overhang of the roof, or the way we would wrestle by the pools edge, our heads missing the sharp concrete edge by centimeters every time we’d fall in. Yeah, our parents were too busy, working steady on 12-packs of Coors light and watching the ceremonial weekly sporting event; in those days, the young studly Dan Marino.
Well, the culmination of my reckless youth exploded one summer afternoon when me and my friends were brought home by the police, when we were only 12-years-old, for burning down the nearby woods. To this day, I don’t know why we did it. Perhaps it was a form of some chest-beating rites of passage that boys felt when empowered by the control of fire’s the mythical power, or maybe we were just bored and had way too many illegal firecrackers in our possession. I can still remember how quickly the flames spread, the columns of thick grey smoke covering the sun—the abysmal feeling as control melted away somewhere in that chaos and heat. I had crossed a threshold I wouldn’t be able to come back from, and I knew it.
Well, my parents freaked out and subsequently took a 180 degree approach to their lackadaisical parenting, deciding to lock me in the tower I would come to know as private school. Mind you, the first six years of my school experience were spent in public school. This was a tragedy for me and probably the single event that would fill my sails and direct me on the course towards my future addiction…
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