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Note: The Grantonian began writing and reporting this article with full permission to print the subject’s name. However, after discussing the matter with his family, he asked that his name be withheld shortly before the story went to press.
This story could begin in any number of places. But the telling of it starts 12 years ago, with the day a 6-year-old boy went snowboarding for the first time and broke his toe. His mother, a skier like the rest of the family, worried that after hurting himself, her son would never try snowboarding again. But she underestimated him. As soon as the broken toe healed, he went back to the mountain, pursuing what was to become one of his favorite activities: one that he now describes as “a natural high.”
That first day snowboarding is now the boy’s favorite memory, and there’s a lot that the story could say about him. It could say he’s tenacious, courageous, persevering. Or it could say that he’s willing to take risks. It could show how much he’s determined not to let an element of danger keep him from something he enjoys. He’s 18 now and a senior at Grant. Sober, he seems like a friendly, likable guy, described by the people who know him as “nice,” “funny,” and “easy to talk to.” He has a relaxed way of speaking and a way of downplaying his own problems that makes everything seem easy to fix—everything, that is, except for his drinking. Over the past two years, in spite of concern from his family and friends, warnings from police, and meetings with Alcoholics Anonymous, he has seen alcohol become more and more a part of his life. Now, he faces the challenging question of how to control it.
He was born in Portland in 1991, adopted at birth and brought up in the Grant neighborhood, in a house close by the school where he has lived all his life. He remembers spending most of his time with his mom as a child; his father, he says, was often busy at work. Things changed in his sophomore year, the year he was 16. That was the year he got drunk for the first time, at a party the day before Halloween. It was the year his adoptive father, worried (says the son) that the boy was going to be a failure, began trying to redirect his son’s life. But the stricter his father’s rules, the more the boy rebelled. Near the end of his sophomore year, he and a few of his friends were arrested for the vandalism of Grant High School and 52 cars. It’s his worst memory—the first time he was arrested, the only time he faced the possibility of a sentence. The first time he saw his mother cry.
Before he started getting in trouble, the boy thought he could open his own snowboard business someday. He could study business in college and turn one of his favorite pastimes into a lifelong career. Now, he says, he can’t do that anymore—at least, not the way he wanted to, and not the way he planned. His grades, which have suffered ever since he started drinking, will limit his opportunity to get into a four-year college. His first arrest, which could have been expunged on his 18th birthday if not for his alcohol-related police contact, will stay on his record for another five years. He was upset when he first learned about this, but now he’s accepted it and says he doesn’t really care. When asked what he wants to be “when he grows up,” he raises an eyebrow and answers, “I just don’t want to be in jail. Or dead.” After a moment he adds, as a kind of explanation, “I don’t really have any dreams anymore.”
He says this offhandedly, and a little apologetically, as if his listeners are the ones who might be hurt by it.
*
In the beginning, the boy didn’t think his drinking was a big deal. He figured drugs and alcohol were a normal part of high school, just something to do while hanging out with friends. Even now, the first reason he can think of for his drinking is that “drinking is fun.” “I don’t know,” he says. “You always have a good time. Everyone’s happy, there’s no drama—you don’t have to worry about anything.”
It’s a vision that contrasts markedly with some of the other scenes he describes. He can remember three occasions when he became so drunk that he passed out or stopped breathing. Once, his dad came home and found the boy lying in the street; after bringing him inside, he had to keep waking him up so he could breathe. The boy is startlingly nonchalant about his experiences; he shrugs, for example, over the memory of a night when, with vomit clogging his nose and mouth, he passed out while at a party with his friends. They carried him outside, laid him, unconscious, in the back of a truck, and went back to the party. “They got me somewhere safe,” he says now. “I didn’t want to ruin their night.”
Over the summer before his senior year, even as he started to attend AA meetings, the boy’s drinking got to the point where he expected to get drunk every weekend. In addition, he started doing drugs—“to feel better about myself,” he says. He spent all his money, lost his parents’ trust, gave himself a police record with several trips to the detox room. On August 6, two days after his 18th birthday, he was arrested for drunkenness and held in detox for five and a half hours, “listen[ing] to the bums tell their stories.” It was five o’clock in the morning by the time he was allowed to walk home. He’d had 14 shots of Everclear, a brand of liquor so strong that at 95 percent alcohol, it can’t be distilled any further. “People just kept handing me drinks,” he explains with a shrug and a shake of his head. “And I just kept drinking them.”
*
To Breanna Wise, the only one of the boy’s friends who ever tells him not to drink, this kind of behavior is alcoholism. “When he’s just hanging out with his friends, he just drinks,” she explains. “He feels he has to drink, and he doesn’t know when he’s had too much.”
Wise has five uncles who have died as a result of substance abuse, and helping her friend stop drinking is very important to her. Knowing the outcomes of alcoholism, she says it’s hard to see him going through what her uncles did. It worries her. It scares her to see him acting unpredictable and unable to control himself. She tells a story of one night when the boy got drunk, when she had to “sit there and make sure he didn’t, like, jump out of the car.” Bluntly, she states the severity of his situation: “If someone wasn’t there to help him and watch him, he’d probably die.”
“She thinks I’m ruining my life,” the boy says of Wise. He, on the other hand, thinks she’s sure to be successful in life, and he admits that her advice about his drinking is probably right. She’s helped him with it in the past. Sitting near her at the computers during their shared sixth-period study hall, he swears he didn’t drink during the time last May when the two of them were a couple. “She wouldn’t let me,” he says, and then he offers another explanation. “At that point I didn’t really need anything else to make me happy.”
That happiness ended, however, with a story the boy lists along with his police record as one of the things he regrets: One night, he went out with Wise, got drunk, and started messing around with another girl. After that, he and Wise broke up.
That summer, the boy started drinking more than ever.
*
It’s hard to tell how the boy really feels about his drinking. With all the contradictory statements he makes, it sounds sometimes like even he doesn’t really know. He recognizes that his drinking is a problem, but seems in no hurry to stop. He worries about friends passing out and getting into drugs, but doesn’t extend the concern to himself, or respect the concern of the friends who try to help him. More than once he’s made promises—to Wise, or to his teacher that he won’t drink over a particular weekend. More than once, he has broken his promise.
For four months now, he’s been going to group meetings sponsored by Alcoholics Anonymous, which he describes as “fun…just a bunch of kids with the same situation.” But he doesn’t think the meetings, which his parole officer recommended and his dad made him attend under threat of being sent to live in California, are helping him much. For one thing, unless he’s going to be given a drug test, he lies when they ask him how long he’s been sober—it’s what everyone told him to do on his first day. Besides, “All it did was get me more friends that help me do the things I do.” Though he has made some friends who he knows are clean—friends he can call up any time he doesn’t feel like drinking—he hasn’t hung out with any of them in a while. The other friends he’s made are people to go out drinking with. It’s as if getting help has made the problem worse.
He doesn’t say for sure whether he wants the AA meetings to help him, but he thinks they probably should—as long as he’s going there, they should be doing something. It isn’t hard to imagine how the meeting leaders might counter: if AA isn’t curing this young man, it’s because he isn’t trying to cure himself.
Still, the situation is more complicated than that. Drinking remains a big part of the boy’s social life, and he feels that “if I stop, I won’t have any friends, ’cause that’s what they’ll do.” If he didn’t drink, he says he’d have to hang around his house all the time; meanwhile, there seem to be drugs and alcohol everywhere he goes. Last Halloween, having promised to stay sober, he went to a party where there wasn’t going to be any alcohol. But there was, and he drank it. The next weekend, he found himself at another party with people doing speed in the back room. He told his friends to leave, because hard drugs would ruin the fun, but at the next party they went to, there were people doing cocaine. He finally ended up at a third party, playing “beer pong” with cups of beer lined up on a ping-pong table.
*
The boy claims he never feels any physical effects from not having alcohol. He insists he doesn’t need it—and maybe he doesn’t. Instead, what he seems to need more than anything is connection—the connection he has with the people around him, the connection he feels whenever he drinks. It’s a way of having fun with the people he knows. It’s a history he shares with his “tight and funny” birth dad, who the boy says used to be just like him in high school, and who he now says he wants to be like when he’s older. Even more, it’s a way of trying to forget about the people and things that he’s lost: friends who have gone out of his life or given up on him, and football, which is out of the question after a knee injury sustained in an accident while he was drunk. Now, he says, he often drinks “just to make myself feel better.” He’s never tried any other way.
Even being told not to drink can prove that people care about him—like the girl, who says that “a lot of his friends have just given up on him. I don’t want to be just like everyone else.”
“I just want someone to show me that they’re there for me,” the boy says.
And although he reproaches the girl for not talking to him or texting him, she says that the fact that he does have someone “there for him” is exactly what she wants him to remember. She says people need support to stop drinking, and she promises that he has hers. She thinks he’s beginning to think about his actions more. He might be on his way to getting his life back under control.
Meanwhile, the boy says he wants to stop drinking. But he also says he can stop whenever he wants to, and he hasn’t done it yet. He still has to choose his loyalties and the risks he’ll be willing to take. If he lets his drinking go further, he risks his grades, his reputation, his future, even his life. If he stops, he risks losing his friends—and though some might say they don’t sound like much to lose, they represent the only life he knows.
So go back 12 years to the boy’s favorite memory. Go back to the day he decided, at 6, that the fear of another broken bone couldn’t stop him. What kind of pain is he willing to risk now? What, today, is he willing to be brave about?
“If I’m with my friends and they’re [drinking],” he says, “I’m not going to say no.”
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