Imbibing and Underage

I'm currently watching MTV's newest backdoor pilot, "True Life Presents: The Theriot Family: The Riot on the Bayou: My Mother Hates My Boyfriend." That's really the title. It's that long.*

The Theriots consist of Mama Tiff, the long-suffering matriarch, Papa Billy Bob Thornton, and their six or eight or twelve teenage children and their friends. They take liberal advantage of a Louisiana law that they claim allows minors to drink as long as it's OK with their parents.

I am guessing that some TiBbers and TiBettes might have snuck a nip or two before they reached the age at which doing so was strictly legal. This adds to the excitement of the actual drinking and being inebriated with an undercurrent of defiance and anti-authoritarianism.

FOCUS: Share your experiences with underage drinking. Was it awesome? Did you get caught? Did you have to work up elaborate, Mission: Impossible-style plans to obtain the hooch?

RULE: If you don't have a drinking age in your country, then just lurk.

Spoiler

* That's what she said.

 

I was lucky enough to luck out with a roommate who somehow had a photoshop-ish file that was a template for a New York ID. Those things are like playing cards, print out the images, laminate them, then some sandpaper, worked like a charm. After that a friend of mine had a Texas ID that scanned and had his picture/info, made it fun. As far as high school goes, USC is in my city so there was always a steady network of people who had gone on to college who just kept it going. My worst underage story is simply the cops showing up to the aftermath of a party and taking down names. I do believe that drinking before it was legal was way more fun than it is now.

 

Focus: I grew up in small town USA. Where the men were men, the sheep were scared, and there was always someone around to buy you beer/liquor. Literally, my hometown had a population of 1806 for quite a while (or, until the next census). Age 16, my own car (had to have one, because I worked), it was a freaking 1983 Plymouth Horizon hatchback. So could put cooler in the hatch, lift the hatch open from the backseat, grab whatever. BFE = lots of gravel roads with barns, bins, etc., grassy area with no houses. ROAD PARTY! Had such stellar names as I-69, snake road, lake road, X's farm road, etc...

Well, after several "road parties" busted, my mom decided we could drink at the house, as long as A. She didn't buy anything. B. No one who was drinking drove. Since we were state champs in football at the time with 0 tolerance rules for drinking, worked for me! I could invite the football players (believe it or not, mom stocked up on Coke, Dr. Pepper, Mt. Dew, etc.) to come party with us, and they'd just drive people. There was more than one parent who called my house to ask to talk to my mother (come on, it was the 80's) to ensure she was there. I was known for the longest time as the "chick who threw parties with her mom home, yet good grades, yadayadayada.".

Getting caught.. I came back for homecoming my freshman year in college. Yeah, don't we all? Pfft. Anyway, out at the actual lake, where there are cabins, cops busted it. I was standing at one end of the deck drinking a beer (18 still!), and the cop is trying to get by & grab people, asks for my ID. So I asked him to wait while I look for it, started going through my coat. He's yelling at me to hurry up, as people RUN off the other end of the deck, so I ask him to hold my beer while so I can search with two hands. He yells something at me, so I continue drinking my beer, looking for my ID, as people get away.

Yep, busted. Got a friend to come bail me out, but out of 50+ people there, they caught.. six. The rest ran away into the woods. I thought I could hide it from my mom, but I kinda forgot that whole they publish that stuff in the paper thing. *shrug* I was back at college by the time she found out.

 

I had my first beer at 14. I was with my cousins and we stole a few out of my uncle's cooler. We were less than impressed by our first sips of Keystone Light. Over the years we stole countless cans of beer from my uncle's cooler and refrigerator. My parents don't drink so when I stayed at my aunt and uncle's house with my cousins, it was like being on a booze cruise. They had coolers in their garage filled with beer and a stocked liquor cabinet. If they noticed anything missing they never said anything.
In high school I had friends who had fake IDs and were more than willing to buy me booze. The most notable of these fakes featured the most unoriginal of names, the name of our high school chemistry teacher.

 

Says I'm not allowed to edit for some reason, hope this is worth the 2nd post.
I forgot a decent underage drunk story. When I was 19 a group of 7 of us lived in a huge house in downtown Charleston. One night my friend managed to lose a fight with the vacuum, he got all tangled up in the cords trying to "wrestle" it. Obviously we would not take such an offense from an inanimate object. I threw the thing off of the porch (porches in Charleston tent to face the driveway which is to the side of the house) as my buddy followed with his loaded shotgun, only to see the cops outside for a noise violation. I sprint back inside to yell about putting the gun lock back on the gun and playing dead. They didn't even write us a ticket.

 

I posted it before, but I accidentally got drunk at age 2, not much thrill factor there, since I didn't know it was happening, but apparently I was having fun until they started pumping my stomach.

Other than that, I waited until college to drink, and amazingly so did all my friends. We all went into college with the "we don't need alcohol to have fun" mentality. Cue to the first weekend we are all home and we're desperately scrambling to raid our parents' liquor cabinets and going to sketchy convenience stores that don't ID. Yeah.

Funny thing is I still feel like I'm doing something wrong/getting away with something whenever I buy something at the liquor store... I'm 27.

 

I didn't turn 21 until my senior year in college, so just about every story I have prior to that involves underage drinking, using fake ID's, making fake ID's, running from cops at convenience stores, chatting up guys in the liquore store parking lot to convince them to buy for minors, and the like. One that still strikes me as hilarious:

My freshman year in college, I was 17, and among my roommate and the other 4 guys near me in the dorm, I was the only one with a car. It's our first night there, and all of us pile into my car and drive up to the convenience store. I was also the only one with a fake ID (and it was AWFUL), so they tell me to buy the beer. I slapped a 12 pack on the counter, and the dude never carded me. I paid with this sort of stunned look in my eyes, walked out grinning from ear-to-ear and got back in the car. My roommate said, "That ID worked?" I said, "College is AWESOME!" Which it was, but it was never that easy again, and another clerk took that ID and threw it in the trash a couple nights later.

 

I had one of those friends in high school whose parents didn't care if you drank as long as you stayed at their house. They would supply the alcohol and then hang out in the backyard while everyone our age would hang out in the house. These parties almost always turned into drunken sex parties until the day that her older brother (I think he was 24 when I was 18) tried to sleep with me. I have no idea what was said, because it was just a lot of arguing in Spanish, but my friend and her brother started fighting over that fact that I was walking to his bedroom with him. After that night, we all had to start drinking a little less.

 

I've been drinking since I was 14, and drinking in bars since I was 16. I've never in my life owned a fake ID or passed off someone else's ID as my own.

I don't know how many minors we have on this board, if any, but I'll offer this one piece of advice my dad offered to me when I was younger and I took it to heart.

The only thing you are going to find out about bars/clubs when you turn 21 is how many you could have gotten into when you were younger.

The key as it is in most things in life is confidence. You finally turn 21 and you march up to the bouncer/doorman and damn near dare him to ID you so you can whip it out and get in. If you'd had the same attitude and tried the exact same thing when you were 17, you'd have gotten in just as easily. Granted this won't work every time, but you'd be amazed how often it does.

 

I didn't realize how weird it was that I drank every weekend when I was in high school until I got to college, when people were impressed with my tolerance level.

I worked at the golf course from the time I was 15 until I was 18. One of my morning duties was to stock the beer cart. The boss always told me to put 18 cases in it. It only held 17. One always went home with me. Then from working at the golf course I met many of the local beer store proprietors. I would sometimes slip them a free cart rental or drink and from that point on I never had to worry about where my beer was coming from. I would go buy $200 worth of booze every weekend and redistribute it at a slight mark up. Just enough to make my drinking free.

Drinking back in the day was different than it is now. The main issue was finding a spot to party. If nobodies parent's were out of town we would just get into the biggest vehicle one of my friends had and back road. What is back roading? Basically we would just drive around and drink beer in the car. I often wonder how we never got a DUI and how we never killed anyone. I guess I should just be thankful, and write it off as a lesson learned.

 

I never drank before college, if "to drink" means "to get sloshed on any and all available alcohol." It was mostly because I was widely known for being a goody two-shoes, people were scared I would tell on them if I got invited to parties with booze, and thus I never even had a chance. (I wouldn't have told. For the record. I got to college and started boozing it up like it was my job.)

However, on a snobbier note, my parents enjoyed playing the "will the waiter pour?" game with me and my sister whenever we went out to dinner. This started when I was probably 10 on trips to Europe, because in Italy and France they'll pour kids half wine, half water. I have a distinct memory of tottering out of a restaurant in Florence after a multi course meal with wine pairings, age maybe 11, yelling and singing with my 9 year old sister, both of us clearly tipsy. When I turned 18 or so, this game started to work in the US. My dad would never say anything, and if the waiter poured me wine, my mom would just say, "Happy 21st birthday, honey!" and clink glasses.

Then, they decided when I was going off to college that I needed to know what various drinks were in order to fit in with the cool kids. A sweet sentiment, and I got to drink a lot of cocktails that summer, but the details were a bit off. While, as I discovered, freshman girls drink screwdrivers, sex on the beach, jello shots, and Smirnoff Ice, my parents were feeding me gin/tonics, Old Fashioneds, whisky/sodas, martinis etc. All the old man stuff. I shut the hell up and drank the crap in college, but my favorite drink to this day is a high quality Old Fashioned.

 

My dad started letting me try beer when I was in middle school. I would get a six-pack for my birthday every year in high school. Threw a banger a few times in high school, and would drink at a friend's house with a few friends occasionally when we would have our version of fight club.

Now in college I hardly feel underage at all. Everyone I know owns a fake, so we drink at restaurants, bars, and buy liquor on the regular. The hardest part is borrowing a car to go to the drive-thru liquor store.

That being said, the classiest thing I drink is unmixed Southern Comfort.

Also, I have talked to police and security on several occasions, very drunk and very much underage, cracked a few jokes and went on my way. If you don't try to run and aren't causing trouble they usually don't care.

 

The good 'ole days. It was that much more fun since it was illegal I guess. I had someone elses ID who had a passing resemblance to me when I was about 17 so I could get into bars or buy for myself and close friends. I didn't generally go to bars though since the guys ID I had was pretty well known around town. The liquor store I'd always go to was a few miles out of town. I remember myself and everyone else getting giddy in high school when we knew on Monday that there was a party somewhere on Friday. Usually for me it was lake cabin parties or out on a friends land we would have huge bonfires.

There were the occasional house parties and I remember shit getting broke. One time a hole got put in some sheetrock but we had it patched up and painted before the parents got home. A girls house I was at one time literally had everything in it destroyed, a couple people got in trouble there. If my group of friends ended up at some random house we'd sometimes swipe a little trinket from the house. Little ornaments, I got a TV remote one time...that kinda stuff. I always wanted to give someones toilet an upper decker but never got the chance.

Like Frebis, sometimes we'd also cruise the back roads shitfaced. One of my friends had an old Blazer and we put it on it's side once, there was like 6 or 7 of us and we just tipped it back over and kept going.

I received 3 underage consumption tickets, 2 at house parties and one on Daytona Beach. The damn beach patrol down there think they are some Texas Rangers or something. The next day we learned to put our alcohol in a fast food cup.

Now, being close to 26, going to a party feels more like a chore than anything. Hangovers fucking suck, it's like they get worse every year.

 

We did some stuff, but looking back, I can't for the life of me figure out why we got away with it. Most of the time it was just this one really tall friend of ours who got a whole bunch of shit and hoped he wouldn't get carded. We also had fake "IDs". And by that I mean photoshopped black and white printouts of passports on A4 paper. I guess scanners and image manipulation weren't as common back then. Bums, older friends etc worked as well.

Drinking was fucking important too. Wether it was freezing cold or 1am on a school-night, if there was booze then it had to go.

It's also really fucking weird that you can't drink in the States till 21. That just sounds fucking insane.

 

When I was 19 I took my brothers birth certificate (he was 21) to the DMV and a piece of his mail to the DMV and informed them my wallet had been stolen and I needed a new license. A week later in the mail I was the proud owner of a drivers license with my picture on it that said I was 21.
Aside from the fact that I had committed a felony in the state of Arizona I was very proud of myself, I was not so proud later that night when I was forcibly thrown out of a night club for running into a waitress and spilling her tray full of drinks.

 

I grew up in a small town in Virginia. There wasn't much to do except drink, drug, and have sex. We used to have large parties in fields or smaller meetups at random locations along rural streets. When we got really fancy, we would just get a group and rent a motel room to party. I used to walk into the local store (aptly with charming names such as Ma and Pa's Country Mall) at all of 17 years old and buy Boones Farm by the case. Ahhh, Tickle Pink, good times. I was also an honor student. I bet my mother had no idea I was out getting stoned, drunk, and fucked on the regular.

In college where rules were a little tighter, I had a fake ID. I worked at a restaurant and one of my co-workers found an ID. Rather than try to find it's rightful owner, he decided it looked somewhat like me and gave it to me as a fake id. That thing never failed me, despite the fact that Estelle was 5'9" (I'm 5'5") and brown eyed (I'm blue). I came to the conclusion that the people checking just don't give a damn how old you are as long as you make at least a half hearted effort to prove you are of age.

 

I stole beers as a toddler and remember being around 12 when my dad handed me a beer and told me if I could open it, I could drink it. Because we live in the country, have a huge yard and my parents didn't give a shit (as long as no one drove), I had huge parties in high school. I never needed a fake id, I could walk into the liquor store at 16 and purchase whatever I wanted with no problem and since my brother is disabled, even if people knew I wasn't of age, they would sell it to me as long as they could see him outside the store in the car.

dumb fake id fail story:
When I was in getting my esthetician's license, we raised money to go to a convention in Vegas that summer. As it turned out, out of 15 of us, only two (myself included) could go. The other girl has a twin (not identical but damn close) sister that went as well. They were 20 at the time but each had a fake id. What I didn't know at that point is that their id's had different fucking birthdays. Like 5 months apart. Sisters wasn't even possible with these. (After they crashed and burned on their own with them at the Wynn, I took over and separated them at the Mirage and they got in no problem.)

 

For some reason it took me about 5 years to learn to control my drinking (with a year's break from 19-20 where I stopped entirely), and my parents traveled frequently, so there were a lot of misadventures.

The first time I got really, seriously, alcohol-poisoning type drunk, I had thrown a party at my house the night my parents flew to Hong Kong. We bought vodka, midori, rum, pineapple juice and lemonade, intending to make - shit, I can't remember, but it was a terrible excuse for a cocktail I drank for about 2 years around age 16 because I didn't like the taste of hard liquor. (Drinking age is 18 here in Aus and most of us had older brothers, access was never a problem.) Anyway, we had 1 guy staying sober to take care of shit, and he turned out to be a fuckwit. He started mixing the cocktails for us once we were hammered, and just not putting in any mixer.

Long story short, one of my friends got so drunk that he threw his wallet over my back fence in a fit of rage, then passed out in my shower alternating scalding and freezing himself. Another was rolling around in my dog's kennel with a lemon in his mouth (no idea what this was about, he was from Sri Lanka and their customs are strange and wondrous things). A couple of others were fighting with packets of spaghetti in the kitchen - this makes a SERIOUS mess, not recommended. Where was I while all this was happening? Slumped against my pantry, unable to stand or do anything but vomit.

Cue my parents calling. The guy that was sober actually passed me the goddamn phone. I have no idea what I slurred to them, but I doubt it was reassuring. They were not amused when they returned, and for a while I went to stay at Grandma's when they traveled.

Honorable mention: breaking the glass centre of our front door at 3am by body checking someone into it, turns out emergency glaziers will come out on a Sunday and charge you a ridiculous fuckton of money. The pattern wasn't exactly the same, but my parents never knew until I told them - about 8 years later.

 

When I was 13 my sister got married in Mexico. I ended up getting wasted at the hotel bar with some random Mexicans who didn't speak a word of english. It was my first time being drunk and I was extremely hung over the next day.

Also, when I was 16 my family and I were in San Diego visiting my bro who just got back from overseas. My uncle ended up taking me to Tijuana on a tuesday night. We got so black out drunk that I don't remember much, except for going to Dominos and having them try to charge us 30 bucks for a medium, and also the Mcdonalds that is on the US side of the border and is open 24hrs. Best sight ever after a long night in a shit hole.