The Bishop's Budweiser

 

                                                               

                                                             The Bishop's Budweiser

    Most people's recovery stories include how they were first exposed to alcohol. I have heard hundreds of stories about the First Drink; usually its the odd glass of Mom's wine that was secretly sipped at Christmas, or perhaps everyone in the family was heavily drinking and so all alcohol was normalized in childhood. I find these stories fascinating and largely because I do not identify with the majority of them. Certainly, alcohol use was normalized in the overall culture in the '80's as a means to relaxation and a social lubricant for celebratory occasions. Or maybe the First Drink was in freshman year at college, or it was at a high school party like I used to see on TV where the parents were away and some drunk girl's hair gets cut off while she is incapacitated. Some parents even give their babies sips off the bottle on a whim or to get them to sleep or allow their teenagers to have a glass of champagne on special occasions because the adults want their kids to learn how to "handle" their booze early in life. Condition them for responsible use later. When I am asked how I was introduced to alcohol, the answer is not simple or typical; it often feels like a giant mammoth lurking over my shoulder than no camera can fully fit into the frame with any kind of clarity. So large, and so layered. I have difficulty summarizing how I got to prioritize alcohol over my own health for well over a decade because it has been a labyrinthic journey. Trying to figure out how a literal latter day saint, who was specially selected to be born during these times into a perfect family, whose values were strong and pure, whose temple-attending, tithe-paying parents were guided by the words of a living day prophet, could fall so far from grace and into the moral failure of alcohol use disorder.    

    Its a different vibe entirely when your culture has NOT normalized alcohol consumption. Where everyone you go to church or school with abstains. No social gatherings include any booze. If you wanted any, you had to huff it all the way over to the State Liquor Store or buy 3% alcohol at the store, which is impossible to get drunk on. At least 80% of all the people I knew were Mormons, so it was rarely seen and universally shunned in my suburban Mormon bubble. We were protected from all the worldly temptations that permeated and sickened all those sorry non-members and we collectively pitied those poor lost souls from our lofty towers.  If anyone did have alcohol, it was an indication that this person is not safe to be alone with. There was no peer pressure to drink to fit in with the crowd. Mormons avoid alcohol so hard that instead of using red wine in the sacrament as the Bible specifically says to do, they just use tap water to represent the blood of Christ. Not even grape juice to go with the Wonder bread chunks that represent the pure, white flesh of Christ? Plus, it's all blessed by a 16 year old male priesthood holder (via a chant of scripture) who also has likely never had a taste of alcohol but is actively scared his parents will ship him off to rehab if he masturbates. This is normal for Utah.

    My First Drink not an exploration into the adult world; it was a deliberate brainwashing tactic not of my choosing. It was put in front of me by the Patriarchal Head of Household- the only person that outranked Dad is the Prophet Spencer Kimball, and then Heavenly Father himself. If I had abstained, I would have usurped the lesson and defied the Priesthood. This is way worse than any peer pressure. 

    It was a typical Monday night in the Hall household, as I recall. All seven children gathered around the dinner table for the usual snipes, glares, and occasional parental admonishments over a Mormon housewife-made supper, likely consisting of come combination of ground beef, frozen vegetable and noodle of some kind. I was one of the middle children, so my station at the table was on the bench that was placed against the wrought iron guardrail of the staircase to the basement. I had learned to wait to seat myself until after the other 2 middle children had slid down towards the end of the bench into the corner so I could remain free at the end of the bench to beat a hasty retreat back to my bedroom as soon as possible so as to avoid the standard evening of Mindy and Abby's henpecking and the din of littler one's incessant needs. 

    But Mom made it clear sometime during the meal that there would be no peeling off (after of course completely cleaning your plate) because it's Monday, and Dad has a special Family Home Evening presentation prepared for us after dinner. So as our plates were cleared from the dinner table, Mom quickly transformed it into our meeting place for mandatory Family Home Evenings and took her seat on the piano bench. 

    Because I had a Soprano in the Mormon Tabernacle for a Mother, our Family Home Evenings were musical, by the book, and taken very seriously. Mom would open her hymnbook and plunk out one of her favorite hits- like "How Great Thou Art"- one that was on her list because it was easier to play and her children still weren't solid enough piano players for the level of accompaniment her vibrato deserved.  By this time, I had already been fired as a client by the piano instructor Mom hired in a misguided attempt to civilize me before the piano. I had no patience for tickling ivories; I wanted to play drums and Mother has already said that drums are definitely not allowed in Church. Thwarted!

    After the opening hymn of course is the opening prayer, which I would volunteer for since it was the easiest thing to bullshit through and I could just quickly get it over with so I am not selected for participation later. Mormons like to make a big deal about how they pray differently from the others. There's a specific way to do it. Mormons like to brag about how they don't do a bunch of chanting or repetitive ceremonial rituals like Catholics do, but don't believe them! They do the weird stuff secretly in the temple where prying Worldly eyes do not venture. 

But the Mormon prayer goes like this:

1. Fold your arms like you are an Indian brave.

2. Bow your head and close your eyes.

3.  Take the basic Mormon template and fill in the blanks as necessary: "Heavenly Father, we are gathered here today at XXXXX to XXXXX  the XXXXXX.  We thank Thee, Dear Father, for XXXX, the XXXX and XXXXX (Good Mormons have at least 3 things to be grateful for) and pray that Thou shalt guide and protect us from XXXXX during XXXXX (adlib a little, its fine). We say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen." 

4. Everyone else in attendance repeats "Amen".

There you go- it's the same every time and it its easy peasy. I can sit at the table and invisibly take in a lesson from the Family Home Evening Guidebook, or maybe there's a fun activity with some moral lesson imbedded, or maybe I can just dissociate for an hour until I am freed from the table. But for now, I am committed to this lesson which, by the way, will be concluded with another hymn at the piano and a closing prayer, which was often used as a coaching opportunity for one of the younger kids to learn the required prayer ritual that is TOOOOOTALLY not a ritual.

    On this night, as Mom stated, there was a special presentation to be delivered by Dad, who had just completed his stint in the ward as Bishop; something only the really worthy Mormon priesthood holders can esteem towards, and a role that will garner respect and deference for years after the position is passed to the next sucker. My father was a bit of a radical as far as social politics in the Church were concerned- he was a Democrat back then, which must have been uncomfortable for my Mother who had very prominent fascist leanings, evidenced most readily by how she ran the house. 

    Dad had been diagnosed with depression clear back in the early eighties and prescribed Prozac around the time he served as Bishop. Impressive, considering how few men in 1981 would ever submit to any mental health treatment; I still don't know the background circumstances that brought about this diagnosis and prescription, but it's probably a juicy story. This role of Bishop is basically a full-time uncompensated job, acting with two others in a "Bishopric" of a ward, The Bishop and his two counselors oversee the moral, spiritual, clerical and administrative needs of approximately 75-150 latter day saints, in addition to being the sole breadwinners of absurdly large families, as the wives are not supposed to work outside the home. I imagine the stress for Dad was massive. He attributed his depression to our Swedish heritage, being suddenly paralyzed with apathy and then explosive and antagonistic. It was difficult to predict which version of Dad would come home from work. Sometimes he was merry and silly, and sometimes he was just mean for no reason, and sometimes he would gloomily barricade himself in his bedroom and we would fear walking past the door on the way to our bedrooms lest we hear something upsetting. Bishop Hall was a complicated man with radical methods in disseminating the true gospel to his offspring.  

    Tonight was a prime example of my father's out-of-the-Mormon-box thinking. While we sat at the table, Dad went out to the garage and retrieved something from the trunk of the Vega. Yes, a Chevy Vega, and unbelievably, this was his 2nd Chevrolet Vega because the first one (that was handed down from his in-laws) was not enough of a garbage car for him- he needed to own another mostly dysfunctional Chevrolet Vega to be sure. Upon his return from the garage, Bishop Hall took his seat at the table with something very scandalous in his hands. We were all hushed into silence at the mere sight of this forbidden item being placed on the freshly wiped down, sacred dinner table because even though it was cloaked in a small brown paper bag, it's shape was unmistakable. It's something that people in the World would have on their tables out in the open, but not ever ours. It was one of the earthly sins Mormons specifically forbade and Dad has brought it right here into the home.

    It was a 40 oz. brown bottle of Budweiser!

    It was against the Word of Wisdom, which was a literal commandment from God! Revealed to Joseph Smith in 1833, not coincidentally when the Temperance movement was popular, though not even he followed it. But don't tell Mormons that! Mormons today would have you believe they were always teetotalers but it took decades for The Word of Wisdom to take hold in Mormon households and at this point in history, it was taken very, very, very seriously in the Hall household. 

    "I brought this home for you kids to show you what all this alcohol business is about." he said, with his face scrunching up in an exaggerated scowl of sternness, blue eyes scanning each of his 7 children's faces to register their levels of suspense. Except the baby's of course. And Kelsey- he's only 2. Dad liked to build the tension with silent pauses and horse-eyed stares.

    "When I was a kid, your Grandpa and Grandma had not been baptized into the Church yet, so sometimes Grampa had this in the fridge." Dad twisted off the aluminum cap, allowing the entrapped gas within the beer bottle to escape with a menacing hiss. 

    "One day I reached for it, and he grabbed my arm and told me, 'Don't drink any of that or else the floor will come up and hit you in the head!'" Deedee's eyes got wide and that's because she was only 8 and clearly took him literally. Dad let the imagery sit in our very creative imaginations, never clouding the emotional effect by including any kind of facts or useful information about alcohol, since it was expected that none of us would ever need to know more about alcohol except not to have any.

    I was a little older- wise enough to know that the floor cannot possibly rise up and use violence on you for imbibing the forbidden, but it was a scary enough way of describing what it was like to get drunk. I had seen it on TV though I had not ever seen a drunk person up close in real life before. The message of danger and harm was received. With that picture painted, Bishop Hall upped the ante by reaching for the first empty plastic Tupperware glass left uncleared from dinner at the table and carefully poured about 1-2 tablespoons into the glass, setting it before Abby, the eldest. 

    "Go ahead," Dad said to her, ominously. "Take a whiff and pass it down." Abby complied, "Ew!" she said, and grimaced and turned her face away from the cup, pushing the warm, flat Budweiser towards Mindy, the Perfect One. She already knew how to perform, so she repeated the exercise, piously sniffing, then sneering and then calmly passing it to me with knowingness that she already knew. 

    "This is filth." Dad says emphatically, gesturing towards the bottle and the glass. "Doesn't it smell like filth?" Abby and Mindy nodded with such newfound knowledge! It was my turn now. I took a sniff of the beer in the bottom of the glass and was absolutely horrified by the stench. Dad smiled at my revulsion. It did not smell nice liked I had assumed it would. I was in shock over just how awful this beverage smelled in the cup. How do people drink this?

    "It smells like strained garbage, doesn't it? Like the juice that leaks out of a garbage bag!" Dad intoned like he was describing a crime scene. "Go ahead, take a taste of it, if you dare." He said, plodding perilously into the uncharted territory of encouraging minors to consume a controlled substance in order to build an aversion to it. Very clever, Bishop Hall, very clever, and I still cannot believe Mom sanctioned this idea. I did not ever conceive of a scenario where a Head of the Priesthood would be pushing innocent children into breaking the Word of Wisdom. Wasn't he afraid we would become drunks? Would we have to confess this exposure to our current Bishop? I was perplexed by the conundrum Dad artificially created for us this situation. He really said I could taste it. 

    So I did! Just a small little sip and Dad was not lying to us. It was worse than the smell.  How could people drink this on purpose? It was not like pop, not like Kool-Aid, not sweet, not salty, not like anything I ever tasted before. Not that this meant anything, I mean, I never even tasted sour cream until I was 17 and never ate a pork chop until I was 34, so I had a pretty limited palate at 12, and I had no reference material for this substance until Dad said 'strained garbage'.

    "People who drink this ruin the temple of their bodies. People who drink this cannot go with their families to the Celestial Kingdom. They cannot make covenants with the Lord if they are not following the Word of Wisdom. They cannot have the keys to the kingdom. You would think that something worth throwing your eternity away for would at least taste good. But it doesn't, does it?"

    I shook my head and passed the remnants of evil fluid of Lucifer to Deedee and on on down to Anna, all registering their pure disgust and newfound hatred for this wicked water. 

    "So now when you hear people talking about how great alcohol is, you now know for a fact that alcohol is like strained garbage juice." 

    The lesson was learned that day: alcohol is a sinful liquid Satan wants you to ingest that robs you of your future life as a deity of your own planet. Well for me, a deity's wife. Women don't get their own planets, only their husbands do. But anyways, my soul was in danger wherever alcohol was. Dad, in his infinite wisdom, had given us all the information and the exposure necessary so that I could make an educated choice to honor the Word of Wisdom for the rest of my time on this Earth and say no to booze. 

    One thing Dad never did explain is why the bottle, when presented at the table, straight out of the trunk of the car was already 2/3 empty at the time of his lesson. I never did find out where the rest of that beer went, and that mystery stuck with me longer than my revulsion for alcohol.