40oz.

I drank 40ozs. Sometimes they were Colt 45 22oz. Sometimes they were OE 64oz., with the handle. But I drank 40oz. Lots of them. Every weekend we’d get them. I’d walk the halls of Malden Catholic High School and hustle my classmates for quarters until I collected enough to get myself two bottles for the weekend (sometimes three if my fellow Catholics were feeling charitable). I’d get home and make sure to get the money to Dre by the deadline so he could head over to Walter’s or Kappy’s or wherever he went and get us our stash for the weekend.

Worshiping at the “church” of St. Ides. Drinking “Heffen-wrackers.” That’s what we used to call it when we slugged down bottle after bombastic bottle of that stinky malt liquor. It tasted different than beer, though at the time I didn’t have the pallet to discern a difference. I did develop a preference: I liked St. Ides over Private Stock. I think I switched after a while. One night we had some kind of Colt 45 that had a mint taste to it. Wicked ghetto, but I thought it tasted kind of nice. The worst was King Cobra. God that stuff was awful. We had limited choice in what we got us. We just got what we got… and we got hammered. But man, I made a note never to buy that stuff.

You drank it to the bottom of the bottle. The last two sips were always flat and nasty, but you swigged it. By now I was kicking a decent buzz. My friends had heavier habits and higher tolerances than I did. It’s cool. I was just more economical. Oh Jesus, I just remembered I started off drinking wine coolers. How hardcore is that?

Sometimes we’d have Southern Comfort too. Mix it with Coke, or whatever else we could find. Arcturus’s mom’s counter top would be stacked from side to side with 2 liter bottles of soda, with Bacardi rum to spike them. I even remember one time “Whitey” came around drinking Red Irish Rose, which basically is bum wine. Classy, mon friar. And sometimes I’d hear about Cisco; they used to say it was liquid crack. I didn’t know what that meant because I never had crack. I took them literally of course, so it freaked me out that they were drinking stuff with crack in it.

I have no idea why it was important for us to drink 40’s specifically. All the older kids were doing it to be sure. I’m not sure where they got the idea. Rap music? Maybe it was just more economical. Maybe that’s what the people that came before them were doing. Who knows. Just brown bag that shit and give it to me.

We drank them in Prattville Park. We drank them behind OLG. We drank them on that brown wooden wall behind the Don Guinella center. We’d have a blast, try not to get busted, and then all stumble home shitfaced together.

Do you know what it was like when we figured out that the packie delivered? (Note “Packie” = short for “package store” which, for the uninitiated, is wicked townie for “liquor store”). We thought that shit was genius.

Eventually we grew out of 40oz. We’d get cases, 30 packs, and bottles of liquor instead. Wasted, wasting time… good times. Mostly. Kind of funny now looking back on it. Still a little sad, not sure why. Anyway. Let us always remember, in the words of Young Black Teenagers: “What is a forty if I can’t take a sip?”

Indeed… indeed.