How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
I looked at that bottle of cheap fake wine and saw things real clear, the way you see them just before you start to drink to get drunk: I would drink away my money and time and energy, and be a f***ed-up failure all through my twenties, probably hanging around the high school […] If I kept drinking I'd never leave Lightsburg. (2.83, 87)
Just as a friendly reminder, Karl is a teenage alcoholic, which is probably slightly worse than being a teenage werewolf. Therefore, the moment when he decides that drinking is only going to make him turn out like his parents and that he needs to quit is pretty pivotal to his story.
Quote #2
It always made Dad sick to see a boy cry. He said that all the time. He grabbed up the bottle from the table and went out to get drunk by himself on the back porch, like he did when he was really mad, muttering and swearing. (11.36)
Part of why Karl becomes an alcoholic is because, whether they mean to or not, his parents push it on him. For one thing, his dad leads a double life as the mayor by day and a raging drunkard by night. If getting drunk is his dad's defense mechanism for when the hooey hits the fan, it has to have rubbed off on his kid.
Quote #3
I didn't have much body weight then, and I'd had a bunch of drinks in less than an hour. So I was real drunk, which at least made the time pass faster; I sat on one end of the couch and watched a lady I didn't know set down her cigarette onto the carpet and grind it out with her boot heel. I wished all these people would go home and that Mom would come back from the bedroom, where she'd gone with Neil. (14.26)
Let's not blame everything on dad, though. After all, Karl's mom is the one who threw a party and invited Karl to come drink with everyone.
Quote #4
Next morning I woke up on the couch. Everyone was gone except Neil, who was in the bedroom with my mother. I felt like I had been poisoned: head aching, sick to my stomach, sore in every muscle. I puked in the toilet, which helped, except that I realized I might have been the most accurate, but I sure hadn't been first. (14.29)
Karl's mom not only hardcore broke the law by giving her kid alcohol, but his raging hangover is a result of her poor judgment. Welcome to the world of Brave New Beth, where nobody is safe.
Quote #5
St. Iggy's was pretty much the place for AA meetings, that or private homes, because the Catholics didn't have anything against smoking or coffee, and AA meetings were generally held in a blue cloud with everyone drinking a gallon of coffee. Dick always said it just showed that we were all addicts, and all we'd done was change what we were addicted to. (20.5)
This is a pretty interesting observation. Do you agree that we just switch out addictions, trading one vice for another? Either way, you have to feel bad for these guys—with no smartphones or Facebook or reruns of Lost, their addiction options are pretty limited.
Quote #6
He got up and did the "I'm Dick and I'm an alcoholic" business you start off with, and then laid it out. Fifteen years ago, over in Joffrey, Indiana, he'd drunk himself out of a good job and a family, and now he had a couple of kids who were almost grown and hated him and would never speak to him, and he cooked at Philbin's, and he wished he had a do-over on life. (20.10)
In a way, being around all of the AA guys has to fuel Karl's ambitions to not just kick the booze but get out of Lightsburg altogether. Dick, Gratz, Philbin, Browning, and all of these other old dudes he hangs with all have one thing in common—they have vices and they never left town.
Quote #7
I kept telling myself to calm down, but I was still so angry, at Harris and Tierden, of course, and at Browning for having stopped me, and most of all at Mom, for having put me in this kind of horrible position where this dirty-minded old prejudiced sack of s*** was trying to find a nice way to say Some of us noticed your mom is a crazy drunken slut. (21.31)
The thing that has to really suck about having alcoholic parents in a town like Lightsburg is that everyone knows it's going on and they'll talk about it with pretty much everybody—except you, that is. What's interesting is that even though Karl knows what these people are saying about his mom is true, he still doesn't like them talking about her.
Quote #8
"I'm going to a meeting this evening, and if I stay dry till tomorrow morning, I'm back to one day of sobriety."
"I've got eighty-two days," I said. "The first one's the hard one, and then the rest are hard, too." (22.55-56)
There's something so sad about Karl having to advise his mom's boyfriend about kicking his alcohol addiction. It kind of goes along with the fact that even though the Madmen are the ones that are deemed to need therapy, they still generally have it more together than the adults in their lives.
Quote #9
"You said you will have one day," I said, calculating, "but you met my mother on Thursday night—"
"And then got so chickenshit-scared that I got drunk after work on Friday and didn't wake up till ten A.M. Saturday. Scared she'd turn me down, scared I'd get there and she would have forgotten, mostly just scared. If there was ever a good reason to stop drinking it's having done something that stupid." (22.58-59)
Bill is a good example of what alcohol does to people—it makes you scared of facing life, which just makes you drink more. Little does Bill know that his decision to get drunk rather than go to Put-in-Bay with Beth actually causes her to get drunk as well.
Quote #10
"Coach," I said, "my parents were screwed-up people who drank together a lot […] Mom and Dad had drunk fights and drunk make-ups and drunk sex, and I was scared to death a lot of the time. They tucked me in when they were drunk, and I got myself cereal while they sat at the breakfast table holding their heads and groaning about their hangovers. They loved me and they fought each other and they did stupid things." (26.102)
So, what does all this boil down to? At the end of the day, alcohol has been a part of Karl's life since he was a little kid. Ugh, right? In this way, alcohol is the cause of all the problems Karl faces—it probably played a role in killing his dad, it's wrecked his mom, and ultimately, both of them tried to take Karl down with them, too.