You’re not sick, you’re drunk god damnit

 


You’re not sick, you’re drunk god damnit


     This was my story but Greg loved it and repeated the line many times in the perfectly imitated voice of my father. It was late in the year of 1970 and I had taken a job as an inside salesman for VWR Scientific that paid a whopping $150 a week. With that cash I was able to rent a small house in Lynwood. It was my first week in the pad and I did not even have a phone but it did provide a place for my pals to visit and celebrate such freedom from parental observance. I was 23, Greg was a freshman at Loyola U. and ready to spread his wings and learn bad habits from the older boys. Timo, Greg and I gathered on Sunday night to toast freedom in that small house with nothing more than a clock radio and some thrift-store chairs. One drink lead to another and by about midnight we had finished off a jug of vodka and moved on to the cheaper stuff. Schnockered beyond normal restraints we gushed about our precious friendships and continued a drunken evening even dancing about to the playing of Wilson Pickett's "Engine Number 9" on the clock radio. No one remembered the final drops of liquor but the following morning was one of the most brutal hangovers of my young life. When my alarm went off for me to start my second week on the new job I was still drunk and hardly able to walk a few feet. I forced myself to drive to a local phone booth where I both called in sick and vomited some very foul remnants of the previous night's debauch. I drove home with a pounding headache and deep depression at my low-life behavior. I got back into bed and within minutes there was a banging at my front door. It was BC who drove by my new place to check on my responsibility to work and saw my volkswagen parked out front. He came in the front door and I moaned "I'm sick" to which he shouted accurately "you're not sick, you're drunk god damnit!"  My shame was so deep that I worked at VWR for almost two more years and never called in sick one more time. 





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