Free American on Purpose by Craig Ferguson

I’d had a bath and helped my mother clean up in the living room, though the cushions from the couch, scrubbed and leaned up against the wall outside to dry, advertised my disgrace. Before Dad arrived, my older sister, Janice, filled me in on what she knew. She’d been at home with my mother when Sergeant Elmslie rang the doorbell, about nine o’clock. Janice answered to find him standing there, holding me up by my collar. I had been picked up by two beat cops who found me lying in a gutter in the Kildrum area of Cumbernauld, near the YMCA. I had vomited on my clothes and was unconscious. When the officers woke me I was abusive and attempted to be violent, but they were local tough guys and found me hilarious as opposed to dangerous. They did, however, take me to the local station and lock me up so that they could keep an eye onme until they could find out who I was. (No one carried ID back then.) When Sergeant Elmslie came onto his shift and looked to see what he had in the cells, he recognized me and, being a good egg, decided to take me home in his car rather than put my parents and me through the official nightmare of an arrest and charge. For his kindness, Janice said, I’d taken a swing at him when we got to the house. Then I vomited a few more times before falling asleep.
    Nobody knew how or why I had the black eye or the bump on the head, but later that evening, after the tea-sodden Sergeant Elmslie had left my house, Stuart and Sandy’s mother had turned up to accuse me of getting her son drunk and leading him astray. Stuart, by then, was at his own house and apparently in a state much the same as mine. My mother was outraged by Mrs. Calhoun’s accusation and turned on her, blaming Sandy for the whole sorry fiasco. It seems that, in my stupor, I’d ratted Sandy out to my mother as the source of the booze. The two women stood there yelling at each other on the doorstep, providing gossip and entertainment for almost the entire town for weeks to come. I was in deep shit, Janice said. She still has that special flair for the obvious.
     
    My father arrived home a little late that morning, closer to eight. My mother had made a cooked breakfast to add to the dramatic tension, and the entire family had gathered in the kitchen. My father had been told all when he made his usual night-shift call home. The bacon and fried bread and flat sausage were eaten in terrible silence, and when Dad was finished my mother brought him his cup of tea. He dismissed everyone except me. He had never hit me before, and I figured this was the time. I still had a dreadful hangover, and the smell of food that was hanging in the kitchen was making me gag.
    “You feel pretty rough, eh?”
    “Yeah.”
    “You do that again I will chop yer fuckin’ heid aff, you understand?”
    “Yes, Dad. I’m sorry. I won’t ever drink again,” I said, and I meant it.
    “I know,” he said. “Okay. Go and apologize to Mr. Elmslie.”
    I went.
    And that was it.
    I thought for a few awful moments that my dad was going to forbid me to work on the milk truck in order to curtail my available funds and thus cut off any possibility of the purchase of alcohol, but he didn’t. I should have known better—work is always a virtue and a sign that there is nothing fundamentally wrong. That’s what we believed, and I think I still labor under that myth. So I kept my job.
     
    Years later, when my father came to visit me in rehab, we talked about this first episode under the watchful eye of a concerned counselor. He told me I looked so bad he couldn’t in all conscience add to my misery.
    And so I believed my drinking career was over.
    It was, for a month or two.

10
The Filth and the Fury
    W hen I did drink again it was not El-D, and I was careful, consuming just a few beers before I went to the Y disco, and I soon began to see what the fuss was about with regard to alcohol: it was fun. If you got the right buzz on, it really could make you feel like a giant