Sometimes being motherless is awesome

I was actually seven years old once.

My uncle was good at art, riding bicycles, picking up women, and being nice to kids. But what he was really great at was drugs. I swear, he had to be the best junkie that ever lived. And don’t ever believe anybody who tries to tell you that it isn’t a skill. Hell, you spend all night getting wasted, but are always ready to go roofing at five the next morning in the hot ass Louisiana summer sun? Yeah, if you can pull that off, you’re just cool. And if you can’t, then maybe you’re the fucking drug addict. No way man, drugging’s a skill, like a strong will to live life completely. Sure, you pay for it in the end, but we all pay for something in the end.

I couldn’t have been more than seven the first time I got drunk. It was a fucking blast. It started off as an accident and then turned into a thing on purpose. See, when I was a kid, my dad, my uncle and me used to go go-kart racing. These go-karts were fast, like eighty miles an hour fast, and people took the shit seriously. We would usually get to the track on Saturday, the day before a race, and then drive back home on Sunday night. Those drives were amazing, about three hours long in my dad’s orange van, music blasting, and he and my uncle drinking like crazy. Sometimes one of them would ask me to hold their drink, or grab them another beer or something like that. Well, this one night, I think it was my uncle that asked me to hold his screwdriver — a fucking giant cup of half orange juice and half vodka. And I guess I was just curious, so I took a sip. And then it was just like “Damn, this is good.” By the time he asked for his drink back, I’d finished it, and he said to my dad “Oh shit old man, it looks like he drank my screwdriver.” After that, I’m singing every song that comes on at the top of my lungs, everybody’s drunk, we’re going down the interstate at almost ninety miles an hour. I think it was the first time in my life I ever remember feeling free.

And believe it or not, I handled that screwdriver. Then I convinced my uncle, who convinced my dad, to let me have a beer. And I drank that motherfucker too. By the time we got home that night, I was just super hyper, like really crazy, and the second I got out of the van, I climbed the fence along the side of the house, jumped up on the roof, and then started pissing on anything that was beneath me. My dad saw and kind of laughed and said to my uncle “Jesus, get the kid off the roof.” I’m telling you, people talk a lot about how much it sucks not having a mom, but do you really think any of that shit would have happened if I’d had one waiting for me back at home? Hell no. Sometimes being motherless is awesome.

But one of the craziest times with my uncle was this morning I heard a commotion outside. I look out the window and see my father and my uncle fighting with some other dudes in what was probably a road rage incident gone bad. They’d been out all night “carrying on” which was a synonym for “fucking and drinking”. A guy hits my dad and knocks him down. I panic, run to the bedroom, grab his twelve gauge, and break the one rule he always made me promise I wouldn’t break: never open the door when you’re home alone, not to go outside, not if someone knocks, never. Well, I run outside with the trigger cocked. My finger is shaking like a motherfucker, and I’m a little worried, you know, like, “Fuck I hope I don’t accidentally pull this trigger.” Now, the way I remember it, I yelled out “You leave my daddy alone!” But to hear my uncle tell it, he says that what I actually said was “I’ll shoot every damned one of you if you don’t get off my fucking property right now.” Well, if it’s all the same to you — and I’m guessing that it probably is — I say we go with my uncle’s version, because I sound a lot cooler in it.

Anyway, you talk about breaking up a fucking party, I never seen guys sober up so quick. My dad rushed me inside and told me to go hide in my room and not to make a sound. When the cops showed up, they said they got a report about a small child with a shotgun. At this point I was eavesdropping on the other side of the door. I’ll never forget what my father said to them: “Whoever told you that is mistaken, there are no children here.” Back then, I just thought it was some cool shit to say, you know, ’cause lying to the police was just really badass. But now, looking back on it, I realize he was right — there really were no children there. The other thing is, while all my friends were watching movies with cops and robbers and gunfights and shit like that, I was living the dream: a hard-drinking, gun-toting, seven-year-old with an attitude problem.