This is an excerpt from my memoir, Officer Banfield — the honest story of my years as a corrections and police officer, hitting bottom in alcoholism, and the long road to recovery.
In college, one night forgetting all of my father's alcoholic experience firsthand, I just suddenly decided that maybe I should get a six pack when a girl I already knew my friend had hooked up with was coming over, and I
believed she wanted to hook up with me as well.
Ironically, after two and a half beers, my sex drive was almost nothing and I felt like everything was just perfect. I got that sense of euphoria that at least an alcoholic gets when you have a couple of beers for the first time and I didn't even care about having sex anymore.
In fact, I probably would have lost my virginity that night if it hadn't been for having that alcohol. After having those first few drinks, things slowly started to unwind. I didn't immediately start drinking and go crazy, but I did start making continually worse and worse decisions.
What I've noticed in life is a trend.
Usually, you don't just all of a sudden make one horrible decision. It tends to be one little wrong decision after another until all of a sudden you have made so many little wrong decisions in a row that what originally would have looked like a huge wrong decision, like drunk driving, now just seems like a little bit worse than what's normal.
When you are in the habit of making a little bit worse than normal decisions, then you would be amazed what you can get into. Yes, after initially drinking, swearing I had never driven drunk, one day my friend had a girl over when we were sharing a room about a year after I had started drinking, and well, I was lonely and I was mad at the world, and I thought, "Fine, I'm just going to get drunk and go buy a shotgun at Walmart right now."
I didn't have any plans as to what I was going to do with it. I just wanted to go buy my first gun at one in the morning.
Fortunately, Walmart was on to me. Not me specifically, but people like me in the same situation as I was in. Walmart does not sell guns at one in
the morning. It took me a couple more years to buy my first gun, fortunately.
After a year of drinking, I'm amazed at how far downhill I had gone.
While I didn't get into much deviance until I started drinking, after I had that first drink of alcohol, it started to be one worse decision after another. The second time I drank, I got drunk, I had a whole bunch of shots and beers.
"Hey, if two and a half is fun the first time, why not have eight or more the second time?"
You see, it didn't seem like a big deal. A little bit of illegality and deviance to go get a six pack. Sure, enough to get a little misdemeanor arrest.
Still, probably in the whole of my life, one of the biggest wrong decisions was to take that first drink. But once you have made that decision, getting drugs is not too far from there, and then getting drunk again, is not too far from there.
All of a sudden, a year after taking my first drink, I was starting to depend on alcohol to get through my entire life. I was getting drunk several nights a week and I had had a bunch of silly and stupid drunk episodes with my friends, including starting some fires, throwing burning rugs off of our dorm room, pissing everywhere you can imagine while drunk, smashing things, and lying about it.
One night, we ran around and smashed a window, and then made up a complete lie and got called out on it, and even then needed to give that report again as well in an official capacity on a complete lie.
Yes, in just one year I have gone to a place of, now I had to have alcohol, from "I'll just go drink at parties" to "Well, I need to have a gallon or so of vodka round all the time."
"I mean, this stuff is so fun, wouldn't I want to make sure to have it at home? Wouldn't it be insane to run out of alcohol?"
Every time I could find someone who was 21 years old to go to the liquor store with me, I went. Even if I already had two gallons of liquor at home, I figured that you never knew when you could reliably find or lose someone you would find to go to the liquor store for you. I always went to the liquor store whenever I could, usually stocking up three to six handles of liquor at home by the time I went into senior year and could drink on my own.
After two years of drinking, I had started to get into some really sick habits. While I had hardly ever watched any porn before going to college, especially getting drunk and using illegal file downloading services, I got a curiosity about everything and I got a shame of feeling like I was disgusting for what I had seen.
I would get drunk and just look at all kinds of porn, then feel like shit, and then I would gamble online and be drinking, wake up having looked at a bunch of nasty porn, and lost my money with a miserable hangover.
Just two years after my first drink all the sudden I knew what feeling like a disgusting piece of shit was, where I now had so many things I just wasn't comfortable talking to people about. I had so many reasons to feel like I wasn't a good person, that I would need to drink just to forget about the previous night.
You would wake up, feel so miserable, desperately survive the day with a hangover. Then, the next day, wake up feeling good, all the thoughts would start coming around about who you are, and why is the world so messed up?
Well, we'd better drink today and just quiet all that stuff down.
By senior year, I was the resident hall advisor, which means there were like 20 freshman guys that I lived with and I was the senior who was supposed to take care of all the boys. I had deteriorated at that point to the idea that I drank a bunch underage when I was 21. I paid a bunch of people money to go to the liquor store to buy me liquor.
Now was my chance to get payback.
"I will buy everyone liquor and I will make the profit," and that's exactly what I did.
I would make huge trips to the liquor store and buy handles of alcohol, bring it back in, mark the bottles up anywhere from $5 to $20 each and sell it to the freshmen that we were living in the dorm.
I made thousands of dollars doing that, and then drank for free because I just didn't care what people thought. I did the most I felt I could get away with, including one day bringing in about 20 handles of liquor in a blue laundry bin all at once one day. Another day, bringing a whole keg in right through the front desk.
I was amazingly careful and had this sense about what I could get away with almost my whole life.
It is weird, like a sixth sense, like some people just don't have it.
I have always had a good idea of what I could do with consequences and even back to first grade, I learned that if I could just watch the teacher, I could do whatever I wanted as long as the teacher wasn't looking, and then as soon as the teacher started to possibly look, all I needed to do was behave.
Even if there was chaos around me, I would not get into any trouble until my dad ratted me out and said that I watched the teacher, and the teacher
needed to watch me when she didn't think anything was going on.
The teacher needed to look at what I was doing before there was any trouble and keep a special eye on me, and then she could catch me starting trouble with the other kids before it was enough to catch her attention. After that, I could not do whatever I wanted to in first grade. I was not happy my father had ratted me out that way.
When I started out in senior year, I was single and I very quickly got a girl friend, which up until that point I had assumed many of my frustrations and troubles in life were sexual, that if I just had a girl that I could be with, everything would be better. Fortunately, having a girlfriend helped me out a lot, but it did not fix all my troubles and by the end of senior year I was to a really screwed up place in my life.
Let's rewind real quick a couple of years back.
How did I change from engineering and ROTC into criminal justice?
After a couple of years doing ROTC and especially once I started drinking and trying to do things like do physical training with a hangover at 5:30 in the morning, I really started to not be that excited about going into the army and especially once the Iraq War started and thinking about my father going to Vietnam.
I realized that I was not drafted, I did not have to go to war and I sure as hell did not want to go over to someone else's country and try to rule or conquer, or be the conquering army there.
No, I did not want to get into any of that shit that my father had been into in Vietnam and I didn't even want a portion of it in Iraq.
It's an awful irony that we think going over and conquering someone else's country is how we have freedom, by going over and occupying,
having guns and dropping bombs on other people, this is how we get our freedom.
That seems just a little bit hypocritical when I'm thinking of it because what if the guns and the bombs are getting dropped on you?
Does that feel like free?
I knew I didn't want any part of going over to Iraq and thankfully that motivated me to get out of Army ROTC. They also noticed my deteriorating performance while I started out freshman year, really enthusiastic, showing up for PT all the time doing the most I could. They promised me a scholarship sophomore year.
Once I started drinking and staying up really late to play video games every night, then I started not going to PT, not being as motivated. They said that scholarship just managed to go to someone else, and then it managed to go to someone else again after a year, more of my performance deteriorating.
I decided I wasn't willing to take less than an offer and they were happy to do without me. At that point, I had a conversation with my mother where we talked about my future and I realized I was thinking about crime and criminality a lot and I wanted to understand myself.
I wanted to see what was wrong with me because after a year of drinking, and getting into all kinds of new deviant behavior, like porn watching, vandalism, and just not even taking good care of myself, not respecting my body anymore with the way I ate, I wanted to know what was wrong with me.
I felt like I belonged in a prison. I felt like I belonged in a mental institution. I felt like I belonged in jail.
I figured since I knew where I belonged, if I could just get a jump on the action, if I could just work for the jail, work for the prison, then I might not have to go as an inmate.
Yes, that was seriously my thinking that I belonged in jail or prison, and therefore, if I just wanted to work there, I could figure it out. I could get to learn the game and maybe I could avoid my fate.
Having a talk with my mother one night about all of these things, I told her I was going to change my major and go into criminal justice and that's what I did. I also did criminal justice because the more I got into drinking and partying, and playing video games, the harder the engineering classes were getting, especially the junior level ones at 8:30 am, which I missed consistently.
The engineering classes were starting to demand more attention in order to get an A and while freshman year I had barely managed to keep my scholarship from my lack of going to class especially, sophomore year, I was not doing much better and I realized if I changed my major also to criminal justice, it would probably be easier.
And wow, it was.
I got all A's junior year after I switched to criminal justice, even though I was drinking more than ever and staying up late. I scheduled my classes later in the day and I was amazed how easy the criminal justice classes were, demanding a little more than reading the book and pretty much spitting back out exactly what you heard in class.
Ironically, the engineering ones were the same way. It's just I enjoyed going to the criminal justice classes because of hearing about all the deviant shit people did. I thought it was great to read court cases and hear about crimes people committed because these were the same things going
on in my head.
I wasn't trying to design bridges in my head or build a new building. My own mind was a dark, troubled place back then, so it was strangely easy to relate to the criminal cases we studied. It was easy to understand the law as someone who was obsessed and thought about crime a lot himself, as someone who would get drunk and be out late at night smashing up windows or burning things, or whatever dumb stuff I was into at the time.
If I managed not to leave the safety of my own apartment, I still would be burning shit and smashing things, gambling online and playing video games, and feeling like a disgusting person.
By the end of college, I had one thing that had guided me going into college and I lost that. I had the idea that somehow everything would change when I graduated from college, that I would miraculously grow up without having to do anything.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.