It was the Pabst!

 It was the Pabst

      It may not have been a wise choice looking at the big picture but I was part of the introduction of alcoholic beverages to Greg. The lad was starting to sprout his prized sideburns and looked up to we older guys who somehow linked beer drinking to adulthood. The first bad mistake was to take up smoking which reduced our life spans by a decade but beer was part of the rites of manhood in South Gate and Greg's role models lead him astray on this path. It was an uneventful Saturday night around the Azalea city and Jack, Billy Hogan and I had been able to get our hands on a good quantity of brewskies. We had different methods to get beer that ranged from Jack just walking into Brad's little store at down on Bullis road and putting a sixer on the counter to driving out to WLA where my brother would contribute to the dellinquency of minors happily or in desperation drive over to Watts and park outside the Rocket Liquor store and try to find a drunk to buy us the goods. It is also possible that we had reached the age of consent and bought way more than we needed of cans of Coors or  Oly or Bud in a pinch. Jack and I were buzzed and Billy was totally sozzled. The guy was slurring his words and not slowing down at all as we stopped in on McNerney where young Greg was watching some TV. We poured him a beer into his cocoa mug and he felt the first high gained from some suds. Billy had downed all of his purchase which was way more than a sixer of Coors banquet beer. John and Grace were out for the evening so we had the run of the place, and Billy helped himself to a totally unecessary Budweiser he found in the back of the fridge that Maureen had left behind. That Bud was just the one to push past the limit of Hogan's belly and he got up from the chair and tried to get outside but his navigation was askew and he just staggered sideways toward the bay window of the Sheehy's front room. Greg and I jumped to our feet and managed to block his passage through a wall of glass and steered him instead out the front door now held open by Jack. Billy took a couple of long steps, bent and puked out an ungodly amount of slightly digested foamy beer. It was like priming a pump as he spasmed a few times and quarts and quarts of the liquid gushed out onto the front lawn. Billy explained his nausea through watery eyes as "it was the Pabst! that did it" While there had been two brands of cold beer taken by the young fellow, there was no Pabst drank at all. After an intermission of about ten minutes Billy began slurring out the lyrics of James Brown's "I feel good!" It would not be the last cold beer drank by the man from Bowman avenue.