An Experience With Alcohol - 02.16.98

As I mentioned in an entry a long while back, I used to go biking all the time when I was a kid (as if it's changed any). During the summer, I would spend a majority of my time either at the swimming pool or pedaling my bicycle around with friends of mine.

One Saturday afternoon during the summer of my 6th grade year, I called up a friend to see what he was doing. He rode his bike down to my house and we decided that we would head off the pavement of the city streets and out onto the rock country roads. I lived just over a block from the edge of town, so it really wasn't too much work for us.

We rode single-file off to the right of the road and made our way out into the countryside. It was a warm, sunny day and we decided to ride until we were tired, then we would turn around an come back home. After having gone only about a half a mile from my house, I noticed something strange down in the ditch. Something rather large and shiny was sitting down in the shade of the weeds and the trees, so I said something to my friend and we stopped to check it out.

Cautiously, I got off my bike and wandered down into the waist-deep weeds. When I got closer to the object, I saw that it was a 24 pack of beer. Thinking that it would be empty anyway, I walked up to it and gave it a small tap with my right foot. When it barely budged, I decided that I had found something really cool. I pulled it up out of the ditch and showed my friend.

Without hesitation, he ripped open the box and pulled one of the cans out. At first, I thought he was going to drink it, but then saw that he had other things in mind. After shaking the can vigorously, he threw it down on the ground just beyond our bikes. The rocks punctured the pressurized can and it spun all over the road and sprayed beer everywhere. It was so cool that I imitated him and busted a can of my own.

Before I knew it, we were shaking up the cans and breaking them almost as fast as we could. Beer was spraying all over the road and there were small pools of suds everywhere. When he was on about our 20th one, my friend threw down a can a little bit too close to us and it sprayed us in the faces and got on our clothes. Until that point, we had been laughing joyously in our fun, but it was suddenly spoiled.

Beer was dripping down the front of us and we both suddenly knew that our good time had ended. Leaving the cans in the road and the box on the shoulder, we hopped on our bikes and pedaled back to my house almost as fast as humanly possible. I pulled my lawn sprinkler out into the yard and turned it on high. We quickly shedded our shoes and socks, then jumped into the cold spray of water and soaked ourselves down.

After repeating the process of soaking ourselves and wringing out our clothes several times, we decided that we finally had gotten the beer smell out of our clothes. We hopped back onto our bikes (in soaking clothes) and rode around town aimlessly until the sun and slight breeze had dried us off almost completely. Neither of our parents ever found out about it, but I'm sure that some high-schoolers were pissed that their stash was missing. To this day, that was my best experience with alcohol.


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