Mark Judge - Wasted: Tales of a Young Drunk

GO MAN, GO! RONNIE SHOUTED. YOU GOT IT! YOURE SWINGIN!

The bartender didnt know how to dance very well so I gave her a strong lead, twirling her under my arm and pulling her back to my side. I lowered her into a dip right as the song - One Oclock Jump by Count Basie - came to a close.

Man, that was amazing! Shane, my best friend, said as I sat back down at our table. That deserves a shot. He waved for the waiter.

No, I said, catching his arm. Im off the sauce.

He looked confused and lowered his arm. Youre not becoming a recovery junkie on me, are you?

Lets just say that Im not having any today, I said, glancing at Ronnie. He smiled and winked at me.

Wonderful, Shane said. Next thing you know youll be telling me about how your dysfunctional childhood turned you into a drunk.

Dysfunctional childhood doesnt cause alcoholism, I said. Biology does.

After ten years of drinking and a lifetime of misinformation about alcohol, I was ready to face the truth of my addiction. And the truth was that while my childhood and community may have increased my exposure to the drug alcohol, a genetic disposition to alcoholism was what had triggered my addiction.

My childhood, in fact, had been fairly normal. I was raised in Potomac, Maryland, a small town about twenty miles outside of Washington, DC. My father worked in Washington for the Labor Department under President Eisenhower, but being a nature lover, he wanted to live in the country. In the late fifties, when my family moved there, Potomac was mostly hills, horses, and trees.

The son of Joe Judge, a famous first-baseman for the Washington Senators, my father, also named Joe, was the antithesis of the typical jock. Quiet, fiercely intellectual, highly educated and artistic, he had excelled aesthetically and academically where his father had athletically.

My mother, Phyllis, was a pretty Irish-Catholic brunette from Massachusetts. She had lost her own mother to cancer when she was sixteen and had grown up with a hard-drinking father. The oldest of three, she had worked to support her family since she was a teenager. She had been a telephone operator, a teacher, and a nurse in the Korean war, and was teaching in Washington when she met my father in a bar in Chevy Chase.

After getting married, she and my father shunned the city in favor of the small town of Potomac. There they had four kids - Joe, Michael, Alyson, and, in 1964, me. All of us were two years apart. We lived in a pseudo-colonial house surrounded by dirt roads, trees, and very few other houses. Indeed, we were so isolated that when my sister was a toddler, she accidentally got out of the house during a snowstorm, crawled across the street, and appeared, unharmed, at our neighbors front porch. There were no streetlights, and we could let our dog, Christopher Robin, out unleashed and unfenced for hours - even days - at a time.

For most of my adolescence, Potomac was a small town rather than the sprawling, anonymous, congested suburb it has since become. Our few neighbors and the collection of stores a few miles away in the village were like characters out of mythic small-town America. George, the local owner of the District General Store, was a bald, skinny old man who personified the rural atmosphere of old Potomac. He delivered groceries to my mother when she was pregnant, and had a sense of humor full of biting sarcasm. One of my mothers favorite stories about George was the time a wealthy woman who had just moved to Potomac came into the DGS with a friend and claimed to be appalled at the high price of lettuce. Ninety-nine cents for a head of lettuce, she sniveled to her friend. The owner can take that and shove it up his ass.

As it happened, George was just a few feet away pricing some fruit. Id love to lady, he rejoined, but Ive already got a 79-cent cucumber up there.

Because it was the country, my mother let us roam free. My earliest memories are of feeling overwhelmed in the presence of nature. One of my most vivid memories is of walking down Rock Run on Halloween, clutching the hands of my older brother Michael and older sister Alyson on either side of me and feeling almost paralyzed with fear and excitement at the complete darkness surrounding us. This was before electric pollution drove the night from Potomac, and you could take a walk and feel the powerful magic of the night.

As more and more people moved into Potomac, that magic became more elusive. Potomac lost any sense of place, identity, and local color. Suburban sprawl of postwar America has had a disastrous effect on the civic life of America, and Potomac is a prime example. Where once there was a little league field that doubled as a fairground there is now a shopping center, although one without corner shops, bars, a main street, or any other spaces of civic and communal life. It became just like every other suburb in America: a bunch of unconnected houses with people who never see each other and need their cars to get a pint of milk.

Indeed, because of the growing blandness of Potomac, Washington had a special appeal to me as a child. Although DC wasnt much more than a southern town at the time, I always felt a breathless excitement when my father would take us downtown. By the time I was born, he had left the Labor Department and had moved on to a job in journalism with the National Geographic, whose offices are just a couple blocks from the White House. Our visits to him gave me a small taste of urban life. In neighborhoods like Chevy Chase, Cleveland Park, and Georgetown there was activity, street life, and stores you could walk to. From the time I was young, I knew that it was how I wanted to live.

Still, for a child, Potomac in the 1960s could be a wonderful place. Our house was surrounded by trees and farms, and my brothers and sister were allowed to explore the countryside uninhibited. We all got along, and aside from the occasional skinned knee, most of life was pleasant.

There was, however, a dark undercurrent to the rustic tranquility: alcohol. My father was a daily drinker. Every evening he would arrive home in his black Volkswagen Beetle and my mother would fix him a drink, usually a martini or vodka tonic, and he would spend the rest of the evening drinking. Some of my earliest memories are from Halloween, when my father would take us trick-or-treating. He always wore a devil costume and carried a large glass filled with a vodka tonic, and whenever it was empty, he would offer it to the neighbor behind the door and sing the Doors song Come on Baby, Light My Fire.