as told to me by the boy's mom
This confession, made by my beloved son, will for the rest of my life, send horrified chills down my back.
It happened during the junior high morning recess. It was quiet in the school’s boys bathroom; the stalls almost empty. Two boys sat in adjacent stalls. They chatted briefly about their school, then the topic turned to other interests.
“Hey, wanna’ a drink,” one boy asked the other.
“Hey, man, sure. Whatcha’ got?”
“Something I copped. The guy won’t even know it’s gone. Here, have a drink,” and the 14 year old slipped a skinny square bottle under the stall divider. “Go for it, man. Help yourself.”
Mike, the skinny 15 year old in the next stall, didn’t really know the other boy well, he said later. He just knew him from “around.” Nevertheless, he reached out, grabbed the bottle and quickly upended it. He took a slug of the colorless liquid. “Hey, is this vodka,” he asked.
The other boy said, “I don’t know. I swiped it from this guy who had it in his garage.”
Later, while Mike was in the rehab program, he described that afternoon on his knees in the school bathroom, throwing up all afternoon. How he had vomited up everything he had eaten for days. What had he drunk? He didn’t know. There was no label on the bottle, he told the other boys in group therapy. It had no color. “It was kind of’ sweet,” he told them.
“But I was so sick all day. I couldn’t stand up and I kept throwing up. I thought I was going to die, I felt so bad. I just couldn’t stop puking,” he added.
What was it he drank? What did the other boy give him, the young men in his therapy group asked him. He didn’t know. It was just something the other boy “found in some guy’s garage.”
The boys puzzled out loud. What stuff do men keep in their garages?
Did Mike drink methanol, an alcohol used as a gasoline additive which is poisonous to animals and people? Did he drink ethylene glycol, a chemical compound used as automotive antifreeze? It can be odorless, colorless, and has a sweet taste. The smallest amount can kill a small dog, and its accidental ingestion is considered a medical emergency.
Did this adolescent drinker unsuspectingly and unknowingly, drink any of these poisons in order to have a drink of alcohol? It could have happened. Had he been found dead on the bathroom floor, would his parents have ever learned how it happened, or why?
This kid, just 15 years young, was so enamored of alcohol and so influenced by a peer he didn’t even really know that he would drink anything handed to him that was presented as alcohol.
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