Hello, my name is Brian Shelly. I am writing this short book because every time I bring up one of my drunken escapades , someone says “ hey , you should write a book “ . So here it goes.
I will start by explaining the true definition of drunkenese. It is a language spoken by drunks, at the time they are drunk, close to being drunk, or completely shit faced. I’m pretty sure that we have all heard it spoken, and some of us have actually spoken the language ourselves, way too many times. You know those incomplete sentences or ramblings spoken using slurring words that make no sense. We sometimes use them at the local bar, or those late night phone calls. Some are made by us, some are heard by us, or we see them on TV, or in the movies. But I’m pretty sure that if you are reading this, then you know exactly what I’m talking about.
I am going to briefly give you a short history of my life. I started to drink at the age of 13, by the age of 16; I was a full blown alcoholic. My mother, who tried to raise three decent kids, was then, and is still to this day an alcoholic. I was raised, if that’s what you would call it, in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. This area was known for its share of drunks, mostly blue collar, Irish, and other misfits. Google Gary Heidnik. My mother tried to raise us I suppose to best of her ability, we all fall short sometimes.
It was in 1980 when the Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series that my mother started to drink. She is still celebrating that last series win today.
Mom, was never home, she was either at one of the neighborhood bars or out with a drunken date. She would go on benders and sometimes we wouldn’t see her for a few days.
We were poor, really poor. Oh, I’m sorry, the we, that would be my younger brother and older sister. We were the three musketeers, we raised each other. I had to help them both with their homework, chores, cooking, cleaning, because if I didn’t, it meant ass whooping. Did I mention that mom loved to throw her hands at us? In drunken fits of anger and anything would have set her off, we paid the consequences.
I am the middle child. I was always treated differently, and I acted differently than my siblings. I don’t want to brag, but I was smarter than my brother and sister; I knew things that they simply could not comprehend. They hated school, and cut all the time. I liked to go to school. I didn’t look like them. I was even treated differently from the grandparents, both sets. I was treated like shit. Then one day it happened, shot out of my mothers drunkenese mouth “you’re Charlie’s kid! “ I was like who the fuck is Charlie and how am I his kid?
I knew that I was different but damn, that hit like an arrow.
The only Charlie I knew was a friend of my mothers who seemed to have more money than God. He drove a Rolls Royce; he lived in a high rise penthouse, in Center City, Philadelphia.
That Charlie?
Yes! That Charlie. It made sense. I knew Charlie, and I knew his kids. Come to think of it, I looked more like them, than I looked like Patrick and Barbara. I thought damn I’m rich, not really. I knew Charlie’s kids; he had 2 sets from 2 different marriages. The only set I knew were his spoiled bratty kids, Eddie and Colleen. They went to school in Europe, were sent to my mothers for a year , because Charlie wanted to show these spoiled kids what it was really like to grow up on the streets with nothing . And yes we were on welfare; I thought that we were lifers on it and that the family photo would someday appear on the 10 dollar food stamp.
My mother took in Eddie and Colleen, and abused them, just like she did her own kids. Charlie’s driver, would drop off cash to my mother to take care of Eddie and Colleen. But, I’m sure that she drank it up. It was as we say every man for himself, in that house.
No job, no food. We had to work, we were kids, but we had to work. We also had to pay board, no moolah, no bed. Eddie and I hit it off pretty well. I didn’t say anything to either Eddie or Colleen about what mom told me earlier. I was one of them, and not a Shelly. I was Shelly by name only. Everything eventually came out in the wash. Another one of mom’s drunken fits brought it out into the open. Eddie and Coleen now knew. I confronted Charlie about it one day, when Eddie and I went downtown to swim in his penthouse pool. It was no big deal to him. To me it meant the world, I thought I was now rich ,I wasnt, it meant nothing .
At 13 I had to work, so I got a job on top of my other job. I became a paperboy, and I worked sometimes for the World Wrestling Federation as a ring boy, until I found out that the ring announcer friend of mine molested another friend of mine. And that there was a lot of sick shit going on there, I was smart enough to get out of that.
I got a job at a factory that made disco lights. It paid 6 bucks an hour, and my best friend’s mother was my supervisor. God rest her soul. She put up with a lot of shit , from me and my friends , but she knew my mother , shit everybody knew my mother , and she treated me as her own . It seemed that we were all pretty much poor, my friends were in the same boat, except for the drunken disappearing mother part.
We all stuck together, we were a part of a bigger crew of older teens who called themselves H n O. That stood for Howard and Ontario streets. The intersection in Kensington, where it all started. My drinking career took off at that spot. I remember it like it was yesterday. It’s a wonder that I can remember anything, but I remember that day. It was steaming hot and humid, the crew was there my crew and the old heads. It was completely normal for 30 people to be hanging there , on the Cramp Elementary School wall at any given day in the summer , winter too , but after school let out .
My crew consisted of my friends, rarely did my brother Patrick hang with us, and Barbara hung with a different crowd too. They were more into drugs then. I wasn’t into anything but trying to fit the hell in somewhere. My friends were still in school like me, they were into the same things that I was. They all knew my mother was the town drunk and by now, she was doing a lot of sleeping around. She obviously did that previously, or I would be a Shelly .
Let me see, there was T.J. Wiley, his mother was my supervisor at that factory. Tommy Wiley T.J.’s cousin, Jimmy, Jimmy B, Gary C, Gary D, Sean Mc C, Steve and Chopper M. Jimmy C, Joey S, John T, Joe W Moe M, Bobby T, Tony and Johnny D, Tony D. And so many more.
It wasn’t just guys either; we would have followers the girls. The girls would hang out, get drunk with us, and make out with us. It was one big party there on a daily basis. We would drink then go roaming the neighborhood, like pirates. It was crazy; the cops knew all of us. The police station was two streets away, they knew us, and they especially knew my mother.
I was 13, I met a girl named Dina, and she was pretty much my steady girlfriend at the time. You could have two or three girlfriends, and the girls were mostly from the crew, we would rarely let outsiders in. That was until junior high, most of us went to Harding JR High. That’s where we met everyone from Devereaux, another clique like us. The Devereaux crew liked to party like us. So on weekends we would go up there into that neighborhood, which was much nicer than ours, or they would venture into Kensington. We all seemed to get along pretty well, Then other guys were finding out that our spot was the party spot, and before long we had three or four different neighborhoods represented at the wall.
H n O didn’t care for any other people except for whites. Me and my crew, had plenty of Spanish and black friends. We were actually bussed into their school, and I made friends fast, so did my friends from Kensington. So the wall some nights looked like the United Nations.
It didn’t take long to piss off the old heads from H n O, and they would start all kinds of fights with our new found friends. So we decided to move the party spot to the corner of Lee and Ontario, convenient, I lived on Lee Street. Or we would hang in a decrepit old abandoned lot; we called it the back lot. And word spread fast that the party spot was now moved a few blocks away from H n O, and that we accepted everyone. white, black, Spanish, guys, girls, drunks, druggies , Jocks whom we referred to as the soccer ball heads, graffiti writers , break dancers who would pull out their linoleum dance floors and set up on the corner as if it were a Broadway stage .
Oh, did I forget to tell you that this was in the 80â€s, between 1983 and 1987? There we were, on the corner property of good old lady Lillian. Lillian owned and lived in the property whose steps we claimed as ours. We did in fact tell Lillian that we are protecting her, we got to know her really well, and she knew us, and yes she knew my mother.
At this point in life, I went from a nerdy, kid with several hobbies; trains, coins, stamps, even Beatle memorabilia, to a corner boy. My mom was the neighborhood drunk, who slept around, and everyone knew it. After while everyone would be drinking at my house, because they knew mom wasn’t home. After while, mom was drinking with us. She would drink, get fall down drunk, my friends would laugh and she would toss them a beating. A real one, that’s one thing she knew how to do, throw her hands. If she couldn’t get to you that way, she would use anything in the house, ashtrays, plates, cups, pots n pans, hangers; she would beat the living shit out of us. My friends loved it, because they weren’t beat at home like we were, they would come over just to get mom pissed so she would beat the shit out of them. We would play Quarters with her, that drinking game where you would have to bounce a quarter into a shot glass then choose someone to drink when you made it. It was partyville, mostly every night. Most of the time though, mom wasn’t home, and didn’t have a clue that eventually; I was using and selling cocaine out of the house. That’s right; the drinking progressed into drug dealing, then using.
This book isn’t just about alcohol; it’s also about being under the influence of cocaine. A little pot use, not much though, me and the crew went right for the gusto, cocaine. She eventually did find out, but by then, everything at home was out of control, and it was way beyond repair at that time. Pat and Barb, were also drinking, and drugging, but with their own people, Pat would eventually start hanging out with me and my guys, especially after the “Borelli Burrito“ incident: More will be revealed for this entire memoir, or book, or whatever you want to call it.
I can’t stand babbling, and I certainly do enough of it, to make myself sick. I have decided to tell these stories exactly how they happened, or at least what I could remember. Some of them came from family and friends, after the blackout drunk I was on. You know, the ones who say, do you know what the fuck you did last night? And you haven’t a clue, but you say yeah, I know what the fuck I did, with your tail between your legs. That was me, Mr. Fucking Blackout Drinker.
I had to hear of all of the escapades second or third hand, sometimes not all, but I do I remember some, quite a few actually. I drank every night like it was New Years Eve. I drank to the good times and to the bad. I drank to the sunrise or sunset, I drank for any reason I could drink. After awhile, I didn’t really need an excuse, even though I used them all. I am truly surprised that I am alive today. It didn’t matter where or who I drank with either. At the Four Seasons, or in crack houses in north Philly. And no matter where, with whom, or when. I always felt like pure shit afterward.
It started out as fun with friends, and then it ended up as misery that could not be refunded. I am an alcoholic, I am a drug addict, I am bi polar, and I have a severe personality disorder. I am fucked up from the neck up.
I was told to write a book with these stories, all of which are 100 % true. I definitely do not need to make this shit up. I am also the smartest dummy that I know, because if I knew then, what I know now, I would have never, ever picked up that first drink.
It is going to take me some time to write this, there are so many fucked up things, some funny, some not so funny, and some just sick . I am also on psych meds, so I can think straight. But I babble anyway. I am going to try to keep things in order, but that’s not going to happen, that I can assure you. I have to talk to some family and friends to get some of what I remember about some things straight. I want to give you honest stories, of a fucked up individual, who for all intents and purposes, definitely should be dead. Not sitting at the dining room desk writing memoirs down, or dredging up his drunken past. I leave that up to A.A. meetings, yes I am in A.A., and have just now broken my anonymity. I will only break mine; some names will be changed, in order to leave them anonymous.
I will to try to keep you entertained as well. I am not proud of any of this, I’m not even proud of the life that I live today, but I need to get this off my chest and out of my head, part of the recovery process I guess. (Something like that)
I did manage to marry my childhood sweetheart Dina, and have 3 beautiful children, one whom passed on. And I attribute a lot of my insanity to the death of my daughter Devon. I am truly grateful that I have been blessed with 2 healthy beautiful children, my son Brian, and my daughter Nicole. Without them I truly believe that I would be drunk right at this very moment, or at 6th and Green, 6 feet under, with green grass growing over top.
I just returned from a cookout, where booze was flowing plentiful. And a lot of people whom I haven’t seen in years were astonished that I wasn’t pouring shots and beer into me like it was medication, saving my life. And it started, there like everywhere I seem to go, my past catching up to in warp speed. The old remember you did this and remember when you did that. Ha, I try telling them I’m not that guy anymore, sure I am still an asshole, but not that asshole. I managed to get home from the cookout, unscathed from the booze that was flowing freely there. I was sober, still needed a ride home, but thank God I wasn’t drunk.
I remember every bit of the day. It was a great one. Not to say that my drinking was never fun, because in the beginning it was fun. Then after a while it became unfun, sometimes dangerous, sometimes sickening, mostly lonely, and suicidal.
Yeah, I tried to end it all, but somehow, I kept on waking up. Only to sit they’re wishing that I was dead, cold, and callous, (you already are … spiritually bankrupt, morally bankrupt, and financially bankrupt. Wondering where my next drink was coming from; the one that was going to skyrocket me into another dimension. Today I am a proud friend of Bill W .Hey , buy great things at great prices , check out my buddys site .....tropicalenterprising.com
