The First Time I Drank Tequila

I'm 13 and it's very late and I'm at the Keystone on University Avenue in Berkeley with my 'mean girl' pal, Julia. We're at a Laaz Rockit show and somehow, some way, afterwards we end up at this small bungalow behind a Burger King on San Pablo Avenue in El Cerrito. The house belongs to the guys in Metallica, long before they broke, and there's a whole bunch of longhairs in leggings and leather jackets posted up in a cloud of cigarette smoke. Kirk Hammett was wearing a particularly fetching pair of black and white striped spandex pants to go with his flowing black perm - which I did not remind him of when I ran into him a party in the Lower Haight fifteen years later, after he'd taken to wearing hats to mask his receding hairline (ah, it's great to be an aging GenXer) and had developed a bit of reputation as a skeezy pickup artist.

Julia and I had to have been the youngest girls in the place - jailbait on a platter. Someone handed us a bottle of Cuervo and then vanished...I took a couple of pulls on it, blanched at the horrible peppery burn, and handed it over to Julia, who was already a far more accomplished drinker than I ever was (or would be; I would remain forever a lightweight). After that I don't remember much - what we did or how we got home, and I think she might have ended up sleeping in someone's car. The good thing is, back in 1983 in Berkeley and its surrounds, two stupid 13- and 14-year-old girls getting drunk at some metalhead party were safe - no one molested us or hurt us in any way. The worst we suffered was probably a bad headache, though whether from the tequila or the shitty music I cannot rightly say.