Mad Dogs

          The first time I remember getting drunk I was eight. It was at a largish family Passover seder, which is the one time Jews are supposed to get a buzz on: four glasses of ritual sacramental wine, which meant in that time and place and social milieu a syrupy sweet augmented red called Mogen David Concord.

          I don’t think kids as small as I was were supposed to drink four full glasses of the stuff, but I was keen. Snuck a bit more when nobody was counting, as I recall.

          I got the giggles.

          I suppose an eight-year-old with the giggles can be a pain in the ass at a largish family get-together, but my daddy was debating something with one of my uncles and my mother just didn’t want to take time off from the party to deliver me to bed. I’m also sure that the idea of calming me down with a big warm hug and cuddle never entered her head. Knowing full well that he bullied me as a matter of course, she told my 10-year-old brother Paul to take me upstairs.

          Upstairs, I plopped giggling onto my favourite spot on the floor of the walk-in wardrobe under the eaves. Paul stood over me and told me that he didn’t think I was really drunk and was just faking it.

          I just giggled uncontrollably in response.

          He didn’t seem to like that. I’ve read since that such research as the Dunedin Longitudinal Study has concluded that people’s basic personalities form for good by the time we’re toddlers, and my brother’s tendencies toward malicious psychopathic narcissism were already well developed. He asserted authoritatively with total certainty that people who are really drunk sober up immediately if someone slaps them in the face.

          I kept on giggling.

          He then proceeded to start slapping my face hard, but I was so far gone I couldn’t stop giggling, which he announced was proof that I was faking it, but he slapped me around a bit more anyway.

          All I can remember was that despite the somewhat alcohol-benumbed pain of his beating I couldn’t stop giggling.

          I don’t recall how the whole scene ended. I suppose he eventually got bored with slapping me without getting a rise out of me and returned to the seder, leaving me to giggle myself to boozy sleep for the first time in my life.

          It was about 18 years later, I reckon, when I first became aware that the makers of Mogen David had expanded their market greatly by taking a big slice out of the demographic of taste-all-in-the-ass young drunks – those who would now go for RTDs – by calling themselves just ‘MD’ instead, and marketing their syrupy-sweet headache liquid – now in several sickening flavours – as MD 20-20. Their genteel clientele called it ‘Mad Dog’.

          As the wine’s original name is the Yiddish term for the six-pointed star on the Israeli flag, Mad Dog now seems, another 45 years later still, to have been a somewhat apt nickname, considering the strategy of the Israeli government and the tactics of the Israeli Defense Force against the Palestinian people under that flag.

          The name Mad Dog also reverberates inside me in regard to Paul and the arrogance with which he beat his little brother that MD-soaked Passover, as well as the trauma he inflicted on me almost daily for years. Mad Dog, indeed.