St. Ides Of March

After a fairly disastrous senior year in high school, where all my proverbial chickens came home to roost, I was coerced into spending another year under my parent's care and tutelage as I was not deemed trustworthy enough to be out there on my own yet. They were in the midst of moving to Gig Harbor, Washington, which at that time was the LAST effing place I wanted to be. But be there I was.

That last cannot be a real sentence...

After a particularly dark year of the soul, I hopped in my trusted Honda Prelude for the sunnier climes of Orange County. What I found when I arrived there was that my brother in arms, Damon, had fallen in with a pretty disreputable crowd. They were ruffians and layabouts, they stole and drank and did drugs, they made it a point of pride to run afoul of societies nicer corners. What seems fairly ridiculous about the whole thing though is that these were kids that grew up in the same area I had gone to high school in, almost all of them with well educated parents far richer than mine. The scruffiest, scroungiest, laziest one in fact still lived with his parents (they all did) in the same upper most upper class housing development that Tom Cruise once owned a house in.

I began to hang out with them as well, learning things like the art of the perfect bud deal and how to break in to your parent's sail boat. But the most useful thing I took away from them was the drinking of malt liquor.

I had no idea what malt liquor was at that point except for hazy memories of something called Schlitz Malt Liquor which apparently caused a wild bull to come through and trash a bar when you busted one open. But here I was, sitting around a small, man-made lake in a subdivision in Mission Viejo (pick one, for all intents and purposes they are the same), and chugging 1-2 bottles of St. Ides. It tasted like ass, but for about 4 of my hard earned dollars, placed in the untrustworthy hands of the member of the group who had a fake ID, I could get two bottles of this ass tasting beverage.

Getting through a bottle and a half left me effing drunk, left me frunk...

I finally got fed up with the Laguna Hills version of the Crips and stopped hanging out with them. This also stopped my ingesting of Malt Liquor for a few years. In those early San Francisco days when I was so poor I was stealing toilet paper from work, Corado and I would occasionally pick up some Mickey's for a quick and super cheap drunk. Mickey's didn't taste any better than St. Ides, but it seemed marketed more towards frat boys than towards gangsta rappers and the homeless. While I didn't fit into either group, I guess I felt more at home within the Mickey's demographic.

I guess I would typically end this sort of thing with a wistfully nostalgic tag about missing my St. Ides days - but I don't. Thinking back on it actually reminds me of the free floating anxiety I felt when contemplating the sort of societal cancer that Orange County child rearing created, and the awful, rotting sweet taste of that malt liquor.


Song Stuck In My Head Right Now: "I Am The Resurrection" by The Stone Roses.