Wild and Free — Prompt #48
A Creative Cafe Prompt
“All Good Things Are Wild and Free” — Henry David Thoreau
I love Thorough. He was a significant part of my first real intellectual awakening. In the last months of my senior year of high school, I found myself in a new high school, in a new land, the last place I wanted to be — but I was there because my wild and free ways had gotten a little too wild and free. At age 15, I had discovered the wonders of drinking, and at 16, discovered how great getting high and tripping were. They made me feel so wild and free, like nothing before had. Drinking made me feel uninhibited, socially, and helped me to feel connected to others, something I had never felt before drinking my first beer. I had been hopelessly bashful, and always felt lonely, even when I was with others. Drinking made me feel more bold, and gave me more of a sense that “we’re all in this together.” I loved that feeling.
It did other things to me — I experienced an hours-long blackout the very first time I drank, at age 14, at an older brother’s bachelor party. Even that seemed kind of cool to me — there would always be stories the next day about the things I did in a blackout. I didn’t know who that person was who did those things, but I wanted to be that guy — and I was!
Getting high brought things to a whole different level. It made me feel so relaxed, and feel like everything was going to be cool. Everything was cool. Before getting high, I soon learned, I was simply too uptight about everything. Where was the fire? Life was meant to be experienced, not rushed through. Smoking dope made me feel “chill”. It made me feel incredibly wise. I could talk for hours on intellectual subjects I’d previously known nothing about. Others getting stoned with me would just listen and stare, rapt with attention, and say, “wow, man. That’s heavy.”
Tripping — another dimension altogether. Aldous Huxley wrote “Doors of Perception” about his experience tripping. I experienced my first trip, on “Strawberry Fields”, while riding a bike around a lake, something that the guy who invented LSD did on his very first acid trip — rode a bike, that is. Talk about really seeing things for the first time! I never realized cows could be so spiritual!
For two years, from ages 15 to 17, I was, indeed, wild and free. My life knew no limits, there was nothing I felt like I couldn’t do, and I did many interesting things. I danced with Tina Turner. I rapped with Neil Young at the backstage buffet after a concert. It seemed to open doors of reception, and I was never shy about walking through them.
But, I found that regular, everyday life became too boring to bear. I needed excitement, something interesting going on, and if I had to, I would create that. It was early February of my senior year, and me and my friends were in the doldrums. In the fall and early winter, we’d had keg parties in the woods to liven things up on the weekends, or I could hitchhike down to Steubenville, Ohio, where my friend Darrell was going, and party with the college crowd there all weekend. Darrell’s dorm was not unlike the wild fraternity in Animal House. They partied like banshees, there. It was so wild and free.
But it had become far too cold for those pursuits. I learned that my parents would be going across town to an aunt and uncle’s to play bridge on a Saturday night. They usually didn’t get back from those things until well past midnight. I hatched a plan with a few friends — I’d host a kegger in my house. My parents would leave by 8, so we’d set the party times to go from 8:30 to 11:00, charge $5 a head for the guys, $3 for girls, and spread the word at school — Party at Pete’s, Saturday night, girls get a discount. We expected/hoped for 35–40 kids, about what we’d see at our keg parties in the woods.
However, there were a few hitches in the plan. First hitch — 8:00 came and went, but my parents were still home. What’s going on? Turns out Aunt Laulie was sick, so they were going to play at their friend’s house, three blocks away. They didn’t leave until after 8:30. I had friends down on the street holding off the hordes until I gave them the all-clear. We would have to break the party up by 10:30 in order to have time to clean the place up before my parents got back.
That worked. Once they left, kids started streaming up my front steps and into the house. They just kept coming! I met them at the door, took their cash, directed them to the keg in the kitchen, and told them not to break anything. We lost count of the number of partiers somewhere between 125 and 150. It was a wild party. I was the toast of the school. Nobody had the cajones to do what I’d done. I was riding on a wave of newfound popularity.
Around 9:15, two of my older brothers walked in and said, “Pete — what the hell’s going on?” “It’s a party — ain’t it great?” “The party’s over — get them the hell out of here, now. Mom and Dad will be back soon, and this place is a disaster!” They were obviously not on the same wild and free wavelength that I was on — Brian needed a joint to chill, and Ken — well, he was simply beside himself. But, Brian was cool enough to calmly walk into each room and announce, “The cops are on their way — if any of you are underage, I strongly suggest you get out before they get here.” They left in waves, several dragging the keg with them, as the party moved up to a local school’s playground, a couple blocks away. You could hear the party noise like an ocean wave, washing over all the houses and through the streets between.
Nobody broke anything, but the place smelled like a brewery. Mom was so pissed, she couldn’t say a word, just shook her head and went upstairs. Dad followed her. I’d rendered them both speechless. The next day, Mom sat me down, and said that I had a decision to make. She laid it all out for me. The family was moving, in a few weeks, to Connecticut, where Dad had been transferred to the home office in Hartford. I had planned to stay behind to finish up school, but they no longer thought that was a good idea. They didn’t feel I was mature enough to be on my own, even if just for a few months.
But, they weren’t going to make that call. Mom put it on me to decide what I was going to do. “If you stay here, though, we won’t be able to help you. You’ll be on your own. We won’t sign for you to join the Navy (I wouldn’t turn 18 until November, and needed their signature in order to go in before that.) We won’t give you any financial support. If you get into trouble, you’ll be on your own.” Then she added, “However, we would really like you to come with us. This is going to be a big move for all of us, we’ll be going to a whole new area, it will be new, and it will be an adventure. If you come, it would be a big help to us. I would like you to consider doing this, and giving up the alcohol and drugs, while you’re at it. It would be a chance to make a fresh start.”
I bought in to the whole challenge. As wild and free as I’d been, here seemed to be an opportunity to truly feel like a part of the family I hadn’t felt like a part of in a long time. I was even willing to try the “going straight” part. Like Mom said, it could be an adventure. I was up for an adventure.
If I’d stayed in Pittsburgh, I certainly wouldn’t have graduated in June with my class. I had cut too many classes, was failing too many subjects. I would have had to take summer school in order to graduate. In Connecticut, I buckled down, actually went to my classes, and found it so different that it held my attention long enough to pay attention. The teachers all seemed really nice — I wasn’t used to that. One of them, an English teacher, really fired my imagination. They were doing “The Man of LaMancha” when I arrived. He made that book come alive. Next, they did a one-act play, “The Night Thorough Spent in Jail”. That’s how I was introduced to Henry David Thorough. I liked him.
My family visited Walden’s Pond — we were making little day-long jaunts to all the historical places around New England and that was on one of our trips. We went to Walden, and to the house where Ralph Waldo Emerson lived and Thorough was his gardener and tutor to his kids. My imagination became fired with Thorough’s ideas and vision. I became a serious student, education finally had a purpose.
I stayed clean and sober for a couple months, then I slipped back to old ways. I hadn’t wanted to — I had my first sense of being trapped by it. It was a terrible feeling. I went into a depression that turned suicidal, and spent months wanting to drive my car off a cliff in a nearby Massachusetts forest. It would be years before I felt truly wild and free again. That would happen after I got clean and sober and found recovery through the 12 Steps of AA.
It took another 8 years to stop drinking and doing drugs, altogether. Once clean and sober, it took 4 more years before I found recovery. As I grew in recovery, I learned that I could achieve that sense of adventure, that feeling of being connected, that wild and free-ness, through a disciplined adherence to a set of spiritual principles. I didn’t have to go to meetings to get that — in fact, I didn’t go to a meeting for over 22 years of my recovery. I do now, but only because it’s my best opportunity to share what I’ve found with others, and that makes it that much more real, for me.
I am now 38 ½ years free from all substances, and I have done everything I ever wanted to do in life, and then some. Each day, I can feel wild and free, if I choose to. There is nothing in life that I cannot do. It’s all a matter of what I choose to do. It is wild, and it is incredibly free.
