My friends asked me if I wanted to drink with them. Normally, I would have said no. I've seen underage drinking screw up too many people. But this was just a couple guys in a basement. What the hell? I said yes. Let me introduce the participants in this fiasco:
Joe, Kaleb, Jon, and I were old friends. (Meaning we had known each other, three, maybe four years, tops.) We were a heady eighteen. The four of us were headed off to college to be the programmers of the greatest games the world had ever seen. (Less than two years later I am already laughing at how naive we were.)
The drink of choice that evening was vodka. We mixed this vodka with what had been our drink of choice every other evening since we had known each other: Mountain Dew. I took the first illegal drink of my life. (I had drank fairly often with family before.)
Mountain Dew mixes well with Vodka.
There were a couple incidents of drunken stupidity. Joe, who drank at least twice as much as everyone else, fell down the stairs. Twice. He also stood in the middle of one of those round, braided rag rugs (the ones that look like big spirals) and spun around until he got dizzy and fell over. Kaleb tried to trick pour, and instead poured precious alcohol right onto the floor. We hit him.
Mostly, though, we just shot the breeze all night. As we drank, we laughed about stupid things we had done in high school. We looked forward with joy and trepidation to college. We relaxed. We had one last fling with childhood before the realities of being responsible for ourselves punched us square in the jaw. We had a good time.
I mix well with Vodka.