Lucy Samuels

"My Brother and Other Ridiculous People"

Problem: Mom and Dad sit down for a talk with their college-age son. “Son,” they say, “we think your behavior might be getting you into dangerous territory.” The son quickly does a mental review of the past few weeks of his life and comes up with little for a mother and father to disapprove of. He’s been watching the first four seasons of Friends on DVD and writing a thesis paper for his bachelor’s in Philosophy. He’s crafted a number of fantastic vegan stir-frys and gone walking around Washington Square Park almost every night. He thinks to himself that perhaps he is running a bit low on sleep, but then again, hasn’t that always been the case? Still, Mom looks worried.

My brother, who’s 21 now, has been straight-edge since he was fourteen. He’s never touched alcohol or any drugs, and neither have his closest friends. This is their personal constitution. No mind-altering substances- they’re socially constructed to be the normal way of life and the cool way to be, and it’s become an exclusive and hurtful lifestyle for a lot of young people. No promiscuous sex- it’s disrespectful, both to oneself and to the other party involved. They don’t preach about it, they just design their own lifestyle and then live in it.

Despite his biologically ideal lifestyle, my older brother may be one of the most
dissatisfied, unhappy people I know. He’s gone through self-mutilation phases and stays up all night suffering panic attacks. He worries my mother sick. Even my dad has made comments, only partially in jest, along the lines of, “he should really just get high.” My father may or may not have been a hippie.

One night, while sharing a beat-up sofa bed in a three-room Manhattan apartment, my brother confessed to me that no matter what he’s doing or who he’s with, he is constantly feeling nagged by the poverty and starvation occurring in other parts of the world. It was 3am and I was unwilling to let myself fall asleep until I had at least begun to understand my brother, and this is what I ended up with. One of the saddest, and most difficult to believe, confessions I’d ever been privy to. We are an upper-middle-class family living in an extremely liberal community; we were well-provided-for and accepted no matter who we chose to be. Despite this, my brother felt (and, for all I know, although we haven’t had many heart-to-hearts since he moved out, still feels) palpable guilt for the plight of third-world nations.
My older brother will probably live a lot longer than most of the people we know. He’s vegan and also a bike messenger in New York City, which means not only is he getting ten times the exercise I am but he’s eating the bare minimum to fuel that lifestyle. Is it really worth it, though, if he’s going to feel heavy and trapped inside his head for the rest of his long life? Haven’t there been a number of nights in his life that he didn’t really need to be 100% aware of? I’m not saying a few shots of Captain or lighting up a joint would cure my brother of the nagging philosopher in his head that sometimes just won’t let him smile. I just think that maybe if he were willing to shut that voice up for a few hours here and there, he might find himself feeling much lighter. Maybe if he had experimented here and there in high school he wouldn’t have so many burns on his ankles from the lighter he keeps in his dresser. Maybe he wouldn’t be addicted to tattoos, or maybe he would be by now anyway. Maybe he’d sleep at night. Maybe when he laughed it would seem genuine. Maybe not. I just like to imagine.

I have a picture of my brother pinned to the magnetic strip on my desk in my room. It was taken a few years ago on a trip with some of his friends to the shore. He’s lying in the sand on his stomach, propped up on his elbows, and something is making him laugh. I can tell it’s for real because his face is all wrinkled up. You can practically watch the laughter dancing in his throat. It’s an old picture and I have a ton of more recent ones saved on my computer, but I don’t want another picture. I can count on my fingers the number of times I’ve seen him look like that in real life. It’s absolutely beautiful.

I’m 3 ½ years younger than my brother, and though his beliefs have had some effect on me, I am not at all the same. While my brother is a huge part of the reason why I’m highly conscious of the harmful nature and the stupidity of my behavior, the fact of the matter is, I like to party. To me, it’s not the end of the world if I just check out for a few hours on the weekends. High school life in particular is confusing and stressful- except when you’re drunk. There are nights I can’t remember, and this does not bother me. I’m not sorry and I’m not unique. The fact that I know I’m not unique is the exact reason why I’ve never had any qualms about admitting this kind of thing to my parents or my teachers. Sure, I could waste my nervous energy lying about what I do on the weekends, but I think it’d be a hell of a lot more believable if I just told the truth. I have never passed out, thrown up, kissed anyone I wouldn’t want to have kissed, or been taken to the hospital.
And yet, all along I’m aware that, unconscious or not, drinking is pretty much unarguably bad for me. The evidence is exhausting: stories in the news every day about young people who died in alcohol-related car accidents, neurological research about the effect of alcohol on the brain, even examples in my every day life of close friends who made ridiculous and harmful decisions while under the influence.
I sat here in Illinois and watched as most of my friends got too involved in their stereotypical “college” lives and ruined themselves. My best friend calls me the other day, and when I ask her how her weekend was, she says “I went to the hospital.” I went…to the hospital. She doesn’t sound concerned. She sees a doctor every few months because this acne medication she’s on tends to be a little rough on the liver, and between visits she’s getting fucked up and throwing up multiple times every weekend. Talk about rough on the liver.

Another one of my good friends serves as a great example for why young, attractive girls should stay away from excessive drinking. She was a little out of control in high school so I guess I could’ve seen this one coming, but every time I talk to her it’s another drunk unprotected sex story. The most recent one involved some other friend telling her that the best thing to do, considering the hassle of picking up a Plan-B pill, would be to take six or seven of her birth control pills from the pack. To me, this was almost as absurd and irrational as a coat hanger home abortion. What made this friend of hers a reliable source at all? How did she know taking all those hormones at once wouldn’t be seriously detrimental to her tiny body and constantly-ailing system? To my girlfriend in North Carolina, it sounded like the proper thing to do. So she takes seven birth control pills and spends the rest of the day sick and in pain. Who knows if those seven pills have anything to do with the fact that she is not pregnant.

I trust myself not to end up like North Carolina girl. I know that even when I’m drunk, I have a measure of control over my actions and desires. I have the ability to step outside of a situation for a moment and say to myself, if sober Lucy were watching right now, would she be ashamed? Regardless, I’m not immune or invincible. I’m losing brain cells just as quickly as she is, even if I’m not throwing up in a stranger’s front yard or getting it on without protection.

For the most part, I love my life. I want it to last as long as possible. Like pretty much everyone else in my age group, I wish I could be eighteen forever. It’s corny and unoriginal, but there’s no better way to say it. I’ll never have this body again, or this energy. So I have to ask myself, if I want to feel like this and look like this forever, why am I inviting my own death to step a little bit closer? It is an age-old question; with programs like D.A.R.E. and ad campaigns telling us to by all means avoid anything that feels too good to be true, why do we continuously subject ourselves to chemicals that gnaw at our nervous systems? Why do we, night after night, enthusiastically take part in behaviors that could kill us in a split second? With staggering rates of obesity and movies like Supersize Me in theaters, what makes us inhale those gigantic Chipotle burritos and Dairy Queen milkshakes? What a truly unfair paradox: the very activities that make us want to stay young forever, make us grow old faster.

The general consensus on stuff like this seems to be that we do things that feel good because we are drawn to immediate satiation, damn the consequences. The English vernacular includes all sorts of clichés, things like “you only live once,” and even Ben Franklin let us know, “there will be sleeping enough in the grave.” Every cigarette ad tells us it’s not safe to smoke them if you’re pregnant; same with drinking and pretty much everything else teenagers like to do on the weekends. Essentially, because of the way we’re built, if we want to have a family and a prosperous future, we’d better quit acting stupid sometime not too long after college. Squeeze in the madness before our biological clocks get done ticking.
But why squeeze it in at all? I’m not saying in an ideal world we’d be acting like good little homeowners by the time we were twelve, saving up for car insurance when we were old enough to start getting allowance, reading anthologies and spending Saturdays in art galleries during our teenage years. But when there’s other fun stuff to do, when we have the option to go out dancing or to the movies even just drive around with the music turned up, why do we so often choose to get drunk first and then hop in the car?

I suppose it’s all about time. When your seventeen or eighteen years old, looking into your future is like staring into the sky on a cloudless night and trying to picture yourself standing on a star. Not only are there a million different outcomes for you by the time you’re about done with life, but that time seems intangibly far away. So you say to yourself, there are lightyears between me and death, lightyears left to worry about calories and brain cells. It’s those lightyears that allow you one more tequila shot. It’s that infinite invisible space that makes you feel okay about climbing behind the wheel of your dad’s car when you can barely see the speedometer. It feels good and right and I have no idea when, exactly, it’s going to have any noticeable affect. Besides, perhaps, tomorrow’s hangover, and I’ll be fine if I drink enough water before I go to sleep.

The primary conflict here is the management of desire. Unfortunately, we are programmed to feel drawn to things that hurt us. Every young girl has had the experience of having a crush on a boy who was “out of her league” and I know I’ve found myself wishing glazed donuts had nutritional value. We know about consequences, we just happen to have the ability to disregard it. One day in high school, I wore a thin-strap tank top and my bra straps were fully visible. My english teacher sent me out of her class to go change into one of the ratty old t-shirts she kept in her office for this purpose and I had to wear that nasty thing around for the rest of the day. The next day I came into school wearing an even smaller top.

Alcoholism is one of the most alarming consequences of drinking at a young age, when you’re still impressionable. My mom informed me, when I was only about 13, that her father is an alcoholic. My mom’s side of the family boasts Cherokee ancestors, so this information has always made sense. Telling me this was her way of cautioning me. Alcoholism, like breast cancer and psoriasis, runs in my family. She nearly had me convinced that if I touched the stuff at all, I’d be instantly hooked. I could just picture myself ten years down the road, with a belly like my grandfather’s, speaking with his confused drawl and nodding, completely out to lunch, through most conversations.

Nevertheless, at a basement party in eighth grade, I had my first alcoholic drink: generic vodka mixed with Giant brand “orange drink.” It was terrible and I felt very grown up. I did not get drunk, but I did get in a shitload of trouble when my parents found out I wasn’t watching movies at my friend’s house. I did not become addicted that night, or the next time I chose to drink, or the next. I still have yet to feel any physiological need for alcohol. It’s just something in the background of my existence.

When it comes down to it, we just have to find a balance between being entirely cognizant of every detail of your existence, and throwing your life away for an addiction. About a month ago, I stood in the back of a liquor store reading the label on a bottle of Kahlua. It was my last night in town before heading back to Illinois for Spring Term, and I wanted to drown myself in White Russians (what can I say, I’m a classy girl). Mike spent $20 on some brand of coffee liqueur, a few mixer bottles of Smirnoff, and a cheap handle of vodka. We drove back to my house, stopping at a 7-11 for the milk we’d need, and threw together a few drinks. At that time, I was feeling like maybe taking a little break from the weight of the conscious world would be a fine thing. Leaving my drink on the kitchen table, I went upstairs to start packing. By the time I came back downstairs, it was almost 3 am and I was getting sleepy. I sat down about a foot away from Mike, and when my knees brushed his I realized all of the sudden that I wanted to be there that night. I wanted to feel every little tiny moment of contact because in a matter of hours I’d be on a plane and I’d be missing that contact a hell of a lot.

I guess my microexpressions gave me away, because Mike said, “penny,” which is short for “penny for your thoughts.” I told him I didn’t really feel like getting drunk. He seemed relieved and we poured our glasses down the sink. Any other night, things might have been different. That night, we just wanted to be around.