Page 10 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • May 15, 2013 about reports of problems at a local high school. The executive found that, while problems with drugs, bullying, and smoking were grotesquely exaggerated by student rumors, the problem with drinking was actually quite serious. He publicized his findings. He is no longer employed. Even those parents who are not permissive can be victimized by cult drinking. When I was in high school -- this goes back about half a century -- some of my buddies used to get together every Friday night to smoke and play cards. They also drank, but without parental permission or knowledge. One guy’s father kept a bottle of gin stowed away in the liquor cabinet, and his son located it. He doled out a sip of gin to each of his buddies and had one himself. The next week, he found that the bottle had been marked with a penciled line at the present level of the gin to make sure no more of it disappeared. He cleverly doled out the gin -- an ample amount this time -- and then resentfully went to the bathroom and re-filled the gin bottle with water up to the pencil mark. This happened a few more times. Then, one dreadful night, he dropped the bottle and it broke. “My father’s going to kill me,” he sobbed. His friends compounded the terror by slamming the door on him. He roared to be let out. They laughed. Suddenly the door flew back and there he was. When his socalled buddies saw the look in his eyes they screamed and fled. He pursued them, roaring with a sound not heard since Theseus confronted the Minotaur -- or so I was told. The house party was on the top of a hill, and gravity took them down to the fields outside a commercial greenhouse where the 4-H kids grew their vegetables so they could add one more credit to their college applications. The bellowing Minotaur tripped over one of the fences, saw the 4-H sign with the name of someone he disliked, and began to stomp the 4-H tomatoes into tomato paste. The police chief, a tough Franco-American who has served with the U.S. Marines in World War I, slipped up behind the Minotaur and uttered the words that ushered many a young man into a permanent draft deferment unless the judge said otherwise: “COME WITH ME, BOY!” The chief clapped a hard hand on the Minotaur’s shoulder. In those days of rampant homophobia, adults did not seize young men from behind with impunity. The bleary Minotaur whirled and drove his knee into the lower middle of the police chief’s body. The stricken chief buckled, but two younger police officers obtained the Minotaur’s compliance with methods outlawed by the Geneva Convention. The Minotaur woke up in the police wing of the county hospital with a tube down his throat, wondering if he had killed anyone. At a certain age, most people are prisoners of peer pressure. They feel compelled to do what others do, either because they are desperate to be that awful thing called “popular” or because they lack the background or the imagination to strike out on their own. The kids in the top decile sometimes study themselves into nervous breakdowns and, even more tragically, sometimes take their own lives when they fail to get into their “reach” colleges. Those who are not academic competitors and vector into sports competition sometimes achieve team solidarity with competitive drinking. This is a mistake simply because distilled alcohol is much too strong to be ingested on a competitive basis -but the kids do not know this and are more afraid of being called “chicken” or whatever word they use today. The ideal way to cope with this is to make the kid feel that he or she is part of a family first, and only then of a peer group that seems eternal but is actually quite temporary. The problem with this is that a great many families need two salaries to support the mortgage and the property taxes and the kids are dropped on the school and the peer group by default because Mom and Dad are both busy at work and have not much time for them. Left to peer pressure, most kids knuckle under, and some peer groups encourage immoderate and illegal drinking as the only behavior that can deflect isolation or ridicule. There is a stopgap measure. Parents with teenage kids simply have to stop taking extended vacations, especially toward the last quadrant or junior or senior year, and stay home to protect the houses they have worked so hard to purchase and maintain. Parents may assume they can trust the kids. The kids may assume they can trust their friends not to smash windows or break furniture or get into fistfights on the front lawn. Sometimes this trust works. Sometimes it does not. One of the worst things about having kids is that they force their parents to act like adults. Leaving them to mind the house during the last half of senior or junior year is not a grown-up thing. Ask the police when they show up with the flashing lights and the wailing sirens. The red and blue lights flash, the sirens wail, and middleclass kids exit suburban houses through the back doors and windows the way the circus clowns used to clamber out of compact cars at Madison Square Garden when I was a kid. It’s the last quarter of the school year, and the noise of the illegal house party is heard throughout the land -- followed by the sirens, flashing lights, and often a slew of arrests. This stuff happens so much that it hardly qualifies as news. The stories differ as to how many kids were arrested and how many went to the hospital to have their stomachs pumped or be placed under observation for possible alcohol poisoning. The outline is always the same: Proud parents assume their teenage kids can be trusted, so they take a second honeymoon during the last two months of the school year. The kids call a few friends, and those friends call other friends. Before you know it, you’ve got wall-towall kids doing potentially fatal or brain-damaging stuff like competitive drinking to see who can knock off the most shots of straight vodka before they pass out. Being a drunkard, as opposed to an alcoholic, is a status symbol in some places. Whenever my wife and I visited our daughter at Princeton, I was always surprised to turn the tap in the dorm and see water come out of the spigot. I expected something golden with a head on it. Expensive liquor bottles were stacked up like pyramids in windows and courses in bartending -- not for credit -- were offered routinely. As an executive of Tower Club, my daughter helped organize a reunion. She told me they needed three 18-wheelers haul away the empties. Many other universities seem to have similar festivities. Kids will be kids -- until they black out and wake up in an emergency room, plow into somebody else’s car, end up in a closed casket, or cost their family the house in subsequent litigation. The fact that a lot of people do this sort of thing does not make it any less of a problem. Denial is not analysis. Some people claim kids always appoint designated drivers and get home safely through the responsible kindness of friends. Maybe that happens. My son has been a designated driver and has never yet lost a drunk. I suspect that not every case ends like this. I remember writing about a party some dozen years ago in which football players from two local towns were enjoying a quiet house party behind some parents’ backs when football players and friends from a third town showed up and tried to crash the party. They were rebuffed. The grudge game that followed took place behind a school. There were, as I recall, more than 100 participants and 17 arrests, mostly of people who were too soused or battered to escape the police. Obviously, everybody who drove to this replay of “The Iliad” was cold sober at the time. Just a few years ago -- or am I imagining this? – some very young adults made so much noise outside a downtown restaurant during a holiday weekend that the police told them to disperse. They did not. Am I dreaming, or did the police have to call in brother officers from four or five other towns to clear the streets? Once upon a time, a school executive from somewhere in America’s heartland came here and conducted a survey It’s house party season Village police seek information The Ridgewood Police Department is seeking two males in connection with a reported shoplifting incident at Stop & Shop on Franklin Avenue. The men reportedly walked out of the store’s second floor without paying for over $600 of liquor, and then fled the scene in a late model sedan at approximately 6:50 p.m. on Sunday, May 5. The police department forwarded these photographs of the suspects and their vehicles, which were provided by Stop & Shop Loss Prevention. Anyone who is able to identify these individuals, or witnessed the incident, is asked to call the Ridgewood Police Department at (201) 652-3900. Police note that all are presumed innocent until proven guilty in court proceedings.