I graduated from St. Mary’s Grammar School June 9, 1978. I remember feeling melancholy that evening. I knew in that moment that life would become more urgent and less forgiving in the demands it would make of us. Many of my friends were headed for Catholic high schools and the parting weighed on me. Foreboding also cast its pall on me because I felt ill equipped to meet the challenges ahead.

The other grades were in session for another week after our graduation. Jimmy Dietz and I spent a lot of time that week walking around the school with a portable cassette player blasting Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Street Survivors album over and over again. Skynyrd and St. Mary’s, an odd combination of things to have trouble letting go of. (Their airplane had crashed the previous October.)

This pattern of hanging around St. Mary’s went on for a year or more. After school would let out at the Junior High, we would go hang around St. Mary’s. One afternoon Joe Ryan and I went down into Connell Hall beneath the gymnasium. Joe has many talents perhaps the greatest of which is pissing me off. That afternoon he got me going and I started chasing him around the hall.

Joe tossed a chair into my path and, when I leapt over it, I wrenched my back. He helped me over to a table and I laid down on it. Joe went and found Father Hermans who came down to see how I was. First he lectured Joe about how he had hurt his friend because “He was fooling around.” We had both heard him tell the story about a thousand times where one buddy in World War II killed the other with a grenade “Because he was fooling around.” So we already knew that “fooling around” was a source of big trouble.

Then he began to pray over me. Perhaps it was Latin but I thought I heard the word litigation once or twice. Eventually I felt well enough to make my way home. Unfortunately it stiffened up and got more painful overnight. So my Mother took me to see Dr. Zweibel.

Dr. Zweibel prescribed muscle relaxers to relieve my pain and allow things to go back in place. The treatment worked quite well as my back felt better very quickly. I couldn’t believe how much better I felt. Suddenly I was less concerned about the social hierarchy at school, my appearance, the future. It was fantastic.

Scant weeks later I would drink my first beers. That night I put a bag over my head and did my best Unknown Comic bit. Later I kissed Joe’s little sister, perhaps to show how grateful I was to her brother for giving me my first glimpse of better living through chemistry. (I wasn’t drunk enough to kiss him.)

That is how Joe Ryan got me started on the road to addiction. Fortunately he never developed a taste for the stuff himself. That is why he gets so pissed off when I say he started me on drugs. But hey, what goes around comes around.