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Drinking A Truncated History But for one wild night on the river a couple of miles from the house, I never had so much as a sip of any kind of alcoholic beverage until I got to basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where I was introduced to beer. As a boy I had four ways of making money: At school I would write poems and stories for pay for kids who had such assignments due and win money rolling nickels (a game not played much anymore, I suspect). At home I killed rats in the chicken yard for Daddy and gathered drink bottles for the refunds I could get at Dowdle’s Store. The poems usually brought a dime or a quarter, depending on length, and essays and stories were always worth at least a quarter, sometimes fifty cents. Daddy gave me a nickel for every headshot rat and three cents for every one hit someplace other than the head. I was, then, a professional writer and hunter before the age of twelve. But writing poetry and fiction for pay was seasonal, and often I would have long stretches of lying of the roof of the chicken house waiting for rats that never showed. Nickel rolling, a game in which a group of us boys would roll or slide nickels in the hallway to see who could get closest to the wall (a leaner always doubled the take), was fairly erratic income, and sometimes I walked away with nothing. Picking up co-cola bottles, though. Well, that was steady revenue. Doc or J. H. Dowdle would pay me a penny (or two—I don’t recall) for every bottle I brought in, so I scoured the ditches weekly along Sand Road and Highway 50, sometimes walking and collecting the bottles in a bag, sometimes riding my bike, on which I mounted a front basket expressly for hauling bottles . In a good week I could gather forty or fifty. I admit with some small degree of shame that a few times I stole bottles from cases outside the store and sold them back. It was easy enough to do. 84 On Likker and Guns They kept the empties right at the corner of the store, and a windowless wall ran up to that corner. I would slip along the wall from the back of the store and reach blind around the corner and ease empties out of the wooden flats. I got caught only once, when some old man standing near the bottles saw a hand inching around to grab one. In a couple of strides he was standing over me. “My God, boy, I thought that was some kinda big-ass snake comin’ around that corner. What the hell you doin’?” I was caught, sure as shit, so I just told him what I was up to. He threw his head back and bellowed, then wiped his eyes and looked down at me. “Damn, you a real bidnessman. Hell, let me help you out, boy.” He stepped around the corner and came back with two flats of bottles, both almost full. “Help yerself. This’ll save you a little time. It’s payment for the laugh you give me.” I thanked him and hauled off the bottles—forty-one of them—on my bike. I stashed them for a couple of days and then cashed in. That was an easy week for me. In time, as the pickings got leaner and leaner along Sand Road and the ditches across from the store, largely because other kids got in on the action, I began ranging farther from home, generally east out 50 toward the Alabama line, some weekends riding ten miles or more to load my basket. It was during those long excursions that I began to notice how many liquor bottles there were strewn along the highway: everything you can name, from whiskey to wine. Mississippi was dry in those days, of course, being largely under the control of Southern Baptists and other Protestant groups, who at least on the surface vehemently opposed strong drink, dancing, and premarital sex, which might lead to dancing and drinking. They fought the legalization of liquor until some shrewd legislators got their heads together and issued a declaration that every penny collected from the taxation of alcohol would go to education , a concept that held up just long enough for booze to be legalized, at which time it was decided that it...

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