I was drinking with my friend who came to visit me at my school. We decided to pregame before going out. I had consumed about 9 shots of vodka, plus a mixed drink, in about one hour. Pretty much bad thinking on my part. I ended up throwing up in the toilet and in the shower. I was just completely gone. But, all my friends in the dorm ended up taking care of me, and making sure I was okay. To make the story short we did not end up going out that night and I am truly thankful that I have good friends.
Allison, an eighteen-year-old female, admits that one of the residual benefits of getting plowed and sick is that it means that her boyfriend will have to take care of her. Thus, her drinking crises serve as forums for revealing her partner’s love for her:
I really had no intentions of getting that drunk, but sometimes I like to make my boyfriend take care of me. I ended up throwing up in the restroom. My boyfriend literally dragged me to the car, carried me up the stairs to my room… and changed my clothes for me [after she got sick all over them].
In most cases, it appears that those who attend to their sick drinking partners are generally more than happy to assist. According to research findings generated by the College Alcohol Study, however, this is not always the case. Some nondrinkers (a substantial college subgroup), especially, have grown tired of having to walk through the human wreckage of the college drinking culture. College drinking researchers Wechsler and Wuethrich describe the general backlash against out-of-control drinking as articulated by their survey respondents:
Our surveys show that a majority of students want a change in the tenor of campus life. A growing number are fed up with having to suffer the effects of others’ out-of-control drinking. They want to sleep through the night and use a clean bathroom in the morning. They do not want to babysit roommates who pass out from excessive drinking.19
Thus, while most college students may be unwilling, or at least only grudgingly willing, to take care of ailing drunks, those college drinkers who are most heavily invested in the drinking scene appear to see assisting fellow drinkers as an important role. In fact, students sometimes took extreme measures to help their sickly friends and regarded it as their duty to provide drunk support. One common mode of support involves “holding the hair” of a vomiting, female codrinker so that her hair doesn’t hang in the toilet or in the vomit stream:
Last weekend I helped my friend by holding her, basically, for the whole night because she couldn’t stop crying over a guy. I later found out she was blacked out and didn’t remember any of it. She also threw up that night and I stayed with her while she was vomiting to rub her back and hold her hair back. (twenty-year-old female)
Sometimes those who receive drunk support will immediately return the favor. The following respondent describes vomiting as a turn-taking ceremony, with one drinker helping the other and then switching places: “I began feeling sick so my friend took me to the bathroom where I threw up several times. After I began to feel better, my friend threw up too” (twenty-one-year-old female). Furthermore, the social textures of drunk vomiting sometime take the form of a fully realized group effort to manage the sickness of a friend. In the following story, Kevin, a twenty-year-old male, works together with several codrinkers to attend to the needs of their fallen drinking partner:
My friend drank several large gulps/swigs from the bottle of moonshine and soon after we had to walk him inside the house to his room. He was completely oblivious to his surroundings on the walk back to his room and was mumbling incoherent phrases. We laid him down on his side, in case he were to puke in his bed. Each of us took turns checking on him every five to ten minutes. The first several minutes passed and my friend and his brother and I went to check on him. We had left a bucket next to his bed earlier for him to puke in, but as we walked in, we caught him puking in his bed. He then rolled in his own puke, got out of his bed and began to unzip his pants. My friend and I tried to coax him into the bathroom to piss and finish puking but he was not listening; he began to piss on his bed and managed to piss on his brother too. He then laid back in his puke and began to pee some more in his bed… we cleaned the puke from around his mouth and put down newspapers over his puke near his head. We continued to check on him periodically to make sure he was still breathing and safe. No other incidents occurred after that and he slept safely through the rest of the night.
Based on this account, Kevin’s friend appeared to be dangerously ill. Their group response to his dire situation demonstrates that vomiting together or with the support of friends can turn a universally unpleasant experience into a hopeful story about people looking out for one another. Rather than being simple survival strategies, crisis management during drinking episodes can be a part of the intrinsic rewards of the experience.
Getting Caught
Most college drinkers are under the legal drinking age. Every drinking episode, then, presents the risk of the drinker being apprehended by the police or by university personnel for underage consumption, for violating university housing regulations, or for public intoxication. As a result, a common drinking crisis involves getting caught. Getting caught can result in a variety of serious sanctions. Many universities and college towns are taking a harsher, more punitive, and more definitive stance regarding the enforcement of campus and underage drinking rules and laws. Students who are caught for drinking violations may experience a number of official responses, ranging from supportive attempts to help them find treatment for substance abuse problems to more punitive responses such as parental notification, suspension, or dismissal.
Furthermore, on the basis of a survey of college administrators, college drinking researchers have suggested that more aggressive actions should be taken against chronic alcohol offenders and those who serve underage drinkers:20
The Harvard survey of college administrators and security chiefs suggests three actions colleges and universities can consider in order to strengthen their law enforcement efforts: 1) Identify on-campus locations where underage drinking is occurring and take meaningful disciplinary action against those who are serving alcohol to minors. 2) Establish a policy of “zero tolerance” for fake IDs that underage students use to purchase or be served alcohol. 3) Take firmer disciplinary steps (e.g., probation, fines, community service, suspension, expulsion) against students who drive or commit other infractions while under the influence.
In addition, many college students who are not embedded in the college drinking scene suggest that they would like to see more aggressive enforcement of drinking laws in order to improve their overall quality of life and of education while at college. According to Wechsler and Wuethrich,
As a reflection of this sentiment, many students say that they support stronger enforcement efforts and harsher punishments for underage drinkers. “If there were consequences, people might not drink out of control as much,” said one senior. “It might change the freshmen that come in and says it’s cool to drink. If people got arrested, got kicked out of school, it might not seem that cool. It’s going to deter people.”21
Thus, college students who are faithfully committed to the drinking scene must navigate through the various layers of social control on campus, including fellow students who are unsympathetic to the culture of binge drinking at some colleges. Avoiding detection and sanctions, then, requires a collective effort on the part of codrinkers. This involves coordinating their activities so as to avoid detection by authority figures and—like April, who saved her passed-out roommate from the resident advisor—going to heroic lengths to shield their cohorts from the agents of social control. Sometimes, however, the “long arm” of the resident advisor finds them. Emily, who had a bit of a bladder control problem, had to literally pay for her drunken misdeeds: “By the time I got to my room I don’t remember anything after that. Apparently, I peed on someone’s chair in their room and fell off my bed. All of which I didn’t remember.… I got in trouble by my RA and have to buy the girl down the hall a new chair” (Emily, nineteen-year-old female).
The arrest of a drinking partner changes the tenor of the night. This particular emergent crisis requires students to unify their efforts to help their captured friend. Like April, who helped her sick and passed-out roommate, this twenty-three-year-old female was able to disengage from her drunkenness in order to help her friend: “We went home to get the other girl’s boyfriend to bail her out. She was charged with public intoxication. He was not drinking so he went and got her.… After my friend went to jail I sobered up pretty fast because I was worried about her. We just went home and went to bed after she got out.” The respondent claims she sobered up “pretty fast” when she was concerned about her fallen drinking partner. Rapid detoxification of this sort may or may not be possible. It is a common perception of university drinkers that they can call upon this ability when a crisis emerges. Stephen, a twenty-three-year-old male, explains:
Q: When you have been drinking and a problem emerges, have you experienced sobering up?
A: Yeah, definitely.
Q: So you think that is possible, when you are really intoxicated and something happens—whatever it is, whether a cop comes around or people fighting—you get a sense of sobering up?
A: Yeah, you can call it kinda sobering up. I know physically you are really not. I think what you do is your mind kind of focuses a little bit more, like okay I have to be rational here for a little bit.
Sobering up when confronted with trouble seems to be an important part of group drinking culture and may serve to undercut the perception that heavy drinking is a risky enterprise.
Codrinkers may also help a drunk and vulnerable friend by negotiating with an authority figure for his or her release. In the following account, a codrinker, Sara, “saves the day” by persuading a police officer to let her take her friend home rather than being arrested for being drunk and “on the ground” in a public place. Here, Sara gains practice in taking on the adult role of reasoning with an officer of the law. Sara successfully changes the definition of her friend’s status from “drunken vagrant” to “unfortunate soul” with a caring and responsible friend who is willing to take control of the situation. In short, Sara behaves in a way that any concerned parent might by advocating for a child:
I was laying on the ground in a public place next to a trashcan.… A friend knew that I had been drinking too much before walking home and went to search for me in order to make sure I was OK. In the meantime, I was approached by a university police officer who wrote down my information. Luckily my friend arrived just in time and the officer permitted her to take me home due to the fact that she had not had very much to drink and the fact that I had a clean record. (twenty-year-old female)
Sara was a successful advocate for her trashed friend. This story may be an important reference point in the history of their friendship (e.g., “Remember the time you saved me from that cop?”). But drunken friends don’t always act so generously to one another. My respondents suggest, in fact, that alcohol—in certain contexts and in certain people—promotes disharmony among people who normally get along well. This brings us to our next crisis category, communication breakdown.
Communication Breakdown: Drunken Arguments
According to the respondents quoted in chapter 3, some of the perceived benefits of being wasted are that it improves people’s social dexterity, emboldens people to shed shyness and to “be themselves,” and allows people to express affection more freely. But alcohol is not simply a love potion. And how could it be? After all, informants routinely claim that being wasted allows them to say and do whatever they want without worrying about social consequences. This sounds like a formula for trouble. As pioneering sociologist Erving Goffman argued, the maintenance of social order relies on the presence of people who actually care what others think of them. It is really quite miraculous that humans—with so many competing interests—are able to coexist with one another in such an orderly fashion on a day-to-day basis. How do they do it? Sociologists often point to the practice of role-taking to account for all of this order. George Herbert Mead, one of the founders of symbolic interactionism, argued that we learn to see the world and our actions from the perspectives of others. Taking the role of the “other” forces us to shape our behavior in ways that are consistent with general societal codes of conduct. Mead maintained that
[t]he real basis of social life is found in the capacity of individuals to take the role of others. If you have the “feel” for the other’s behavior that arises when you put yourself in his or her place, you can fashion your conduct so that it fits in with the behavior of others.… The conduct of the individual is based on the appreciation of how one is supposed to behave in a specific context.… People learn the prevalent patterns of behavior and collective understandings of the groups to which they belong. Social life is thus, in turn, made possible.22
If alcohol sabotages role-taking (as so many college drinkers claim), it might create fun and interesting—but often disagreeable—drinking partners. And just as some drinkers claim that alcohol makes them love everyone and want to hug and kiss their friends, some people become “mean drunks.” For some college drinkers, alcohol appears to make them want to argue with their friends, roommates, and partners. In the following field note, I describe an unhappy moment in the relationship of a pair of codrinkers:
There are fifteen to twenty students gathered on the lawn in front of a house party. A young woman is crying, howling almost. “He spit in my face,” she sobs. “He literally spit in my face!” She points at a young man who is standing defiantly with his arms spread wide. “I told you not to fucking touch me,” he says in explanation. The gathered crowd seems to accept his explanation. They do nothing but stare. “Who does that?” she asks aloud. “Who would spit in someone’s face?” The young man walks away unsteadily, shaking his head as if she just doesn’t get it. (Field notes, Spring 2006)
In this case, a drunken argument devolved into a fundamental incivility (i.e., the aggrieved young man spits in a young woman’s face). After this confrontation, there was no evidence that the young woman was consoled by her girlfriends—or by anyone for that matter—but my student accounts contain many examples of the delivery of emotional support for college drinkers who are upset over relational woes. But before we get to drunken emotional support, let’s return to some student accounts of the relational problems that accompany heavy drinking.
Drunken hostility towards a drinking partner is not limited to vengeful expectorating. In the following interview segment, Christine, a twenty-two-year-old female, claims that she’s flat-out mean to her boyfriend when they drink together:
Q: Have you ever… when you are drinking do you ever get in an argument with someone that you wouldn’t normally argue with?
A: Yeah, I’m mean to my boyfriend sometimes.
Q: You are?… What, for example, might you do?
A: Umm, I can give you specifics. Would that be good?
Q: Yeah.
A: Umm, Saturday, we were out, we were having so much fun, I feel so bad for him for putting up with me. We were having so much fun and then we went back to his place and I let my dog out and everything, and he kept calling his friends and his friends kept calling him ’cause they kept getting into figh
ts. So every time his friends would call him and tell him that they’re getting in a fight, he’d have to call them back a minute later, to see if it was over. And then one time we were at his apartment, which is pretty close to uptown, and walked over to the place that they were getting in a fight at. And I was, I feel, I don’t know, ’cause like… ’cause he’s always, like the phone is one reason why [he keeps getting calls, which draws him away from her], that’s what made me so mad. ’Cause I guess I felt like I wasn’t good enough, ’cause he kept calling his friends, ’cause they kept getting in fights, but really he was just looking out for his friends, I guess. I know that, like my idea of it wasn’t his, like I know I get ideas in my head and they’re not… You know what I mean, like…?
Q: Uh huh.
A:… [B]ut I think I was just annoyed then.
Q: So what did you do?
A: I was just mean to him. But I made everything a crime later… and that was definitely alcohol-induced right there.
Q: Okay, so you get upset or impatient with him or angry with him about things that you wouldn’t normally because of the condition you’re in?
Getting Wasted: Why College Students Drink Too Much and Party So Hard Page 13