Free Bare Bones by Bobby Bones

abstinence was a reaction to my mom. From early on, I saw the effect of alcohol not only on her but also on a lot of other adults around me. From that I took away a few lessons. When my mom came home drunk, I was scared—not for myself, never for myself, but for her. I never wanted to put others in that situation. If you have a certain genetic or psychological makeup like my mother, you can’t control your alcohol intake. Any amount, no matter how little, is poison. And I suspected that if I tested it, I would find out that my mom and I were more alike than we were different.
    Even in high school, when a lot of kids get into alcohol as a way to navigate the troubled waters of adolescent social life, I was never tempted. It should come as no surprise that as the kid with the nickname who had ketchup dumped on his head in the cafeteria, I did not get invited to a lot of parties. So that limited the amount of peer pressure I was exposed to. But even if I had gone to parties, I wouldn’t have ever taken a beer. Peer pressure doesn’t affect me. For me, pressure comes from within. Some guy shouting at me, “Drink! Drink! Drink!” is not pressure. That’s just some idiot shouting. Pressure comes to me when I’m about to walk onto a stage where a crowd has paid good money to be entertained.
    However, my choice not to drink made me an anomaly at Henderson. At college in the rural South, there isn’t so much to do. So, there’s generally a lot of time to drink and party. But for me it was never an option. To this day, I’ve never touched alcohol, an illegal drug, cigarettes. Nothing. I’ve never even tried coffee. I’m not morally against alcohol. No judgments at all. Matter of fact, if my friends aren’t drinking, they’re not fun. But I saw what my mom went through and can feel that demon inside of me.
    Don’t get me wrong. Despite my unwavering conviction, being a teetotaler wasn’t easy. There was a part of me that was jealous when I watched people around me get drunk. I was envious at the way they could let loose and have fun. I knew I wouldn’t be able to drink in any sort of moderation—that if I started it’s all I would want to do, all the time. I didn’t want alcohol to become a bigger influence on my life than it already was, and I knew that if I made drinking an issue (meaning not wanting to be around others while they drank), it would divide me from others.
    It was (and is) my biggest fear that people would change their behavior on my account. I never wanted anyone to feel uncomfortable drinking around me, so one of my strategies was to fake-drink. I would order Coke or club soda with a lime in a small glass. There are many ways to make it look like you’re drinking. I also made myself useful by being the designated driver.
    I was also quite happy to hang out in bars on the weekend until the wee hours of the morning, as my friends got progressively more drunk and incoherent, for one reason and one reason only: I wanted to meet girls.
    Spending countless hours at nightclubs (we’d show up to the Electric Cowboy in Little Rock at 11 P . M . and I’d dance until the sun came up), I did meet a lot of girls—it was just that none of them wanted to meet me. I was familiar with that situation from my high school days, as evidenced by my first kiss.
    It was during the summer after my sophomore year of high school and I was working as a roofer in Kansas City, Missouri. My mom’s brother, Don Hurt, got me the job. Uncle Bub (what we called him) had been in a lot of trouble in his life. He’d been in jail; he’d been all over. (An alcoholic, he was eventually found dead in his trailer. He was only in his forties.) I really liked Uncle Bub, but even more important, I had to make money for school clothes. So I went up to Kansas City for the summer to help him roof houses. My job required the least amount of skill. I did