So, there is a funny story about me and whiskey and how I developed my fear for it. The year was 1986 or 1987, the place was Ft. Myers, FL. My family had moved there in 1985. I was attending Ft. Myers High School.
My parents had bought a Hallmark Greeting Cards store when we moved down there. It was a cute little store in a strip mall in Ft. Myers. Next to the Hallmark store was "Sal's Deli" Salvatore "Sal" Falcone proprietor. I'd been eating at his deli ever since we moved there. He and his wife ran the shop. He had two gorgeous daughters. One was a senior at the same school I went to and the other one was in college. He actually introduced me to cheese steaks. I came in one day after school and he offered me a job washing dishes and cleaning up the shop. I jumped on it. It was a minimum wage job but it was convenient and the Falcones were good people. Sal was a HUGE guy, easily 6'3" and over 300lbs and he was not someone you wanted to piss off, but he was also fair man. We'll get back to Sal and "Sal's Deli."
There was a teacher in-service day or it may have been Memorial day but for some reason there was a day that we didn't have school. One of the girls I ran around with named Sue decided to have a party at her house while her mom was at work. Sue lived in a typical middle class neighborhood in a ranch style house with a swimming pool (not all that uncommon in Ft. Myers). Well all of the punk rock kids took this as an opportunity to descend upon her house with booze and cigarettes. I was fifteen and had my learners permit, which in Florida also affored me the chance to ride my moped. My parents had bought me a moped from my uncle Ken when I was 14 as an 8th grade graduation/birthday present right before we moved to Florida. It was a green 1978 Puch Maxi-Luxe. It's a 1HP 2-stroke engine and I loved that thing. I rode it everywhere and I still have it setting in my garage waiting patiently for a rebuild which I'm afraid is never going to happen. So I hopped on my moped that morning and rode over to Sue's house. There were already about 15 or so kids there and a couple of cases of some cheap beer, probably Old Milwaukee or something worse. I don't recall. Anyway when I got there I grabbed a beer just like all of the other kids and started drinking. It was a typical teenage party, loud music, kids doing things they weren't supposed to be doing. I was two beers in when my friend Doug Boone showed up. He was a year older than me and worked at the Publix grocery store. He had managed to swipe a bottle of Old Grandad Whiskey and brought it to the party with him.
So, we're all standing in the kitchen when Old Grandad gets opened up. I had never touched booze up to this point, only beer. So when the bottle was passed to me I just tilted it back and started chugging a for six swallows. To borrow a phrase from Ralph Wiggum: "It tastes like burning." It was the worst thing I had ever put in my mouth (besides chocolate rice krispy treats) but I wasn't going to not drink it with all of those people watching me. I passed it to the next person and it went around a few times but it wasn't long before the bottle was gone. So I grabbed another beer and started to mingle. It wasn't long before I wasn't feeling right.
I was on Sue's mom's brand new white couch when I started to get "the spins." Being young and stupid, I thought it would be a good idea lay down and rest my eyes. I thought wrong. A few short moments later, I was wretching all over the couch and the wall. Sue was PISSED OFF and was screaming at me but I was unable to move. She had some of the other guys drag me out of the living room and layed me out back by the swimming pool while they cleaned up the couch. I proceeded to start wretching into the pool as well. They heard the noises I was making, came and grabbed me and dragged me out to the back yard right next to an ant pile which I proceeded to get sick into.
I was facing the house. At some point during all of this moving around, either my keys fell out of my pocket or someone reached in grabbed them but I no longer had the keys to my moped fork lock. Skinhead Cody had either taken them from me or found them but the next thing I heard was the sound of my moped starting up. I knew it was mine because no one else had one, but I was still in no shape to move. The next thing that I see was Cody mounted on top of my moped riding through the back door of the house. Yes, you read that right through the back door of the house. He taken it through the front door rode it through the house and out the back door. This went on several times.
Sue was finally able to have some of the other guys restore order and decided that it was time for everyone to go. This was about 4:30 and I had to be at work at Sal's deli at 5:00. I managed to pull my wrecked self together enough to be able hop on the moped and ride to the deli which was about two miles away. I don't know how I managed to do that.
I walked through the front door and Sal KNEW just by looking at me what kind of state that I was in. He went to the back grabbed a broom walked right over to me and put it in my hand. He told me, "I don't know what kind of bullshit you are trying to pull but you are going to clean my restaurant." I physically felt horrible and was even more scared that he was going to go next door and tell my parents. I managed to get the floor swept and mopped and proceeded to go into the back for dish washing duty. I'm standing there by the three chambered stainless steel dish washing basin, propped up by both of my hands, and was smelling the remnants of all of the Italian food and it happened. I just started vomiting right onto the dirty dishes and into the dish water. I don't even know how I had anything left to puke up but I did. I was making horrible gutteral noises but it finally stopped.
I turned around and looked over at the doorway and saw Sal standing there with his arms folded over his chest shaking his head at me and said "Now get to it and clean all of your shit and my shit and get it done now." I felt about two inches tall. I was so nervous and scared that I was shaking like a puppy in a pound but I managed to get my work completed.
As I was getting ready to leave I walked over to Sal who was staring me down with the most disappointed scowl on his face that I've ever seen. With tears streaming down my cheeks, I begged and pleaded with him not to tell my parents what had happened that day and he looked at me and said: "I'm not going to tell anybody anything about this. I think that you've learned a valuable lesson today, but don't you EVER set foot into my deli drunk again." With that he let me leave. To the best of my knowledge he never did say anything.
I was never able to so much as smell whiskey from that day forward. I had one glass in Las Vegas with my bros when we were there a couple of years ago and I had to choke that down and almost got sick. That was not the case this past Tuesday night. I had a several shots of Jameson which went down nicely, but I'll never get wrecked on whiskey like I did in 1986. I don't know what ever happened to Sal, but I'd like to be able to tell him thank you for making me finish my job and teaching me a valuable lesson about personal responsibility.
