Tony Cesare: Drinking, Driving and other Bad Ideas

My neighbor and I were both staring at the pile of empty beer cans flung on my front lawn and the few dozen more scattered on the driveway. I’m assuming the car from which they were dumped was moving along at a pretty good clip considering I could see a few poking out from under the hedges near the front door.

"Yea, well, my daughter had a friend for a sleep over last night so whenever she does we like to load them up in the minivan, pick up a 30 pack of Keystone Light and chug them while speeding around the neighborhood. We like crushing the empties against our skulls and chucking them at the Ash trees on the parkway, we keep score. My daughter is really good.”

My neighbor smiled. I was teasing and she knew it. She knows I never drink light beer, much less Keystone.

Still, it was after 10 a.m. by the time I spotted the mess so all I could think about was how many of my neighbors had been out early this morning and wondered if I had turned the place into a frat house ala Vince Vaughn in Old School. I’m sure a few of those same neighbors were wondering why I didn’t ask them to join.

Living near a high school I’ve grown accustomed to the whole “youthful indiscretions/bad decisions without fear of retribution because I’m a teenager” syndrome. I’ve broken up a few fights (between girls no less) seen a lot of “barely there” fashion decisions on frigid winter mornings and “gently” discouraged loitering on my front lawn during nicotine breaks. I’ve swept up every conceivable snack food package in the Doritos portfolio and once backed into a Mom’s car that was parked right across my driveway. Apparently parents picking up their kids after school have eminent domain over my property. Who knew? 

But this was the first time I’d had to clean up after a party I didn’t throw.

How did I guess this dump-and-run was perpetrated by teenagers? Simple. Grown-ups who throw parties often put the empties in the trash, or, if they aren’t too hung-over, the recycle bin. Sometimes the train station dwellers stumble down the street on their way to purchase the morning buzz and I’ve discovered quite a few of those empties in my front yard, but it’s almost always Vodka pints and the occasional MD 20/20. It would be highly impractical to carry a 30 pack around (requires two hands and you need one to drink) so that rules them out. So whom does that leave?

If I were underage, drinking and driving and bringing the empties home to show off to the parents would NOT be an option (“check it out Mom, I slammed 12 of these babies in an hour!”), so I might be tempted to hit the eject button along the first dark stretch of parkway I could find. Actually, I would be smarter about it and dump the evidence in a construction site dumpster or maybe behind a grocery store but hey that’s just (the younger version of) me.

It’s easy for me to fantasize about having caught these boneheads in the act, especially when I’m standing barefoot on the lawn collecting someone else’s backwash on my hands while I clean up the mess. As a borderline insomniac, last night easily could have been one of the evenings when I was up working late, and maybe I would have seen the headlights slow to a crawl out front, and maybe I could have been sprinting down the driveway with my trusty red handled Louisville Slugger clutched in my hands while the trash was in mid air, and then maybe...

But I wasn’t, and truth-be-told I wouldn’t. Bring a bat that is.

Instead I found myself reflecting back on every cringe-inducing poor decision I ever made when I was a teenager. The petty arguments I had with my parents that I allowed to escalate (even when I knew they were right), the girls I overlooked while I was pursuing the girls that overlooked me, and that time I threw up in the back of Chris Bock’s car. It was his Mom’s; he convinced her I had the flu.

But none of them makes me shudder as much as the times I drove drunk.

Before you point your finger and sneer take a glance in the mirror—I guarantee most of you did the same when you were young. Coming home from a house party or maybe a bar you managed to sneak into, or maybe you convinced an older sibling to buy for you. You know you did. At that age you never think about getting home, you’re just hoping the party never ends. When you get a little older you come to learn that it does end, and when it does and you're 19 cans into a 30-pack and can barely turn the keys in the ignition while your buddies jostle for room in the back seat, you have no concept, no clue of how much your putting your future at risk. When you’re 18(ish) the future is next Saturday and you can’t visualize your kid’s faces, can’t imagine how you couldn’t possibly live without them. You have no clue.

That brutal lesson is one I’ve never been forced to learn first-hand and I’m thankful. No, I’m lucky, because that’s all it was: luck. I have a friend who was not so lucky, and his life will never be the same. Nor will the person he killed, his life is gone.

So let me share a little advice with the original owners of all these empty beer cans, a little advice I wish someone had shared with me:

You’re obviously young and stupid. You're taking chances without any concept of the repercussions. I get it, I did it, I know. I was you, but now I’m 20 years older and I’ve seen first-hand the consequences of bad decisions. They echo again and again over the span of your entire f***g life and all the counseling in the world will not allow you to forget. You will change, but the mistake you made never will. As the years pass you will wish you could go back in time as adult you and grab the teenage you by the ear and belt him in the jaw, yank his face close to yours and scream THINK! Don’t be that guy, please. Heck, you can call me, I’ll drive you home before I let you drive drunk, no questions asked. Just don’t be that guy. Please.

Oh, and how do I know you're not very smart? How do I know you're eventually going to screw up?

You left the receipt in the empty case.