Rites of Passage
How to save teenaged boys from themselves.
“Good for her,” I thought. She’s obviously endured a trying and tempestuous day in carting around a living being inside her swollen belly. Surely, one generous glug of life-affirming Rioja—straight from the bottle—won’t hurt the little sprog.
Plastered on this bottle of wine is a health warning. A red stripe strikes through the silhouette of a pregnant woman. She’s with child, as the devout say. In Council Estate English, she’s up the duff. With one hand pressed to her side, she exudes a fierce determination, like a marathon runner at the starting line. A pregnant woman lofting a bottle of wine to her lips isn’t meant to inspire admiration. Drinking in utero isn’t big nor clever.
And yet, I haven’t seen such a social pariah since my teenage years, whilst bouncing from house party to house party, on a council estate deemed ‘deprived’ by those fond of clipboards and Microsoft Excel. Such places seethe with visions one is not meant to see. You don’t see pregnant women waddle into the corner shop and appear with a bottle of blue WKD pressed to their lips these days. Nor do you see packs of sullen teenagers glomming outside the store, rehearsing their lines: “Excuse me, mate. You couldn’t get us a slab of Carling, could you? I am seventeen, like.” You don’t see that anymore. Not until last Friday evening.
The shop’s CCTV swivels ominously into view. Flashing across my eyes is the court report. My ruined career. What would my peers think?
We were once those kids outside the shop. Any man, nay—philanthropist—who obliged earned the title of ‘legend.’ Today, I suspect the term would be ‘weirdo’ or worse.
And so, with my future respectability hanging in the balance, I return to my teenaged charges with a slab of Peroni.
“They didn’t have Carling,” I say. This is a lie. Carling is the lager of the insufficiently ambitious. And white-working-class boys have nothing if not ambition.
“Not here, you silly sausage,” I yelp. “Round the corner.”
I hand off the slab of cans and bask in a glory earned only by accident of chronology and birth.
“Mate,” says the rangy one. “You’re the fucking GOAT.”
He palms a tepid can of Peroni into my hand as if it were a golden Rolex gifted after 30 years punching numbers in a cubicle.
The pack of teens scuttled towards the groves beside the river. The reedy one glanced back to dispense the coveted upward nod—a mark of respect amongst the tribe.
Those poor boys. Don’t they know that the chief medical officer recommends no more than fourteen units a week? Doctors claim so. That abstemious regimen—if you can withstand its life-dissolving rigour—adds four years to one’s life.
My humble role in their quest to sink a few beers beside the river earned me a cool two units. For their enterprise, the boys had 23 cans of premium lager between three.
That’s an ample seven each and two to barter for cigarettes or mild sexual favours amongst the girls they spend their every moment trying to impress. Or at least it was like that when I was 17.
Fourteen units. That’s around seven pints per week. The arithmetic of pure boredom. If West Ham, my perennially underachieving football team, ship two goals then I’m liable to sink fourteen units that evening. If they ship two by half-time, I’ll slake fourteen units in the fifteen-minute interval.
I suppose a mea culpa—as unfelt as it may be—is in order.
Supplying booze to underage drinkers (proxy purchasing) is a criminal offence, punishable by an on-the-spot fine of £90 or up to £5,000. Offenders, like your humble narrator, can face three months in jail.
Police can confiscate the illicitly gotten booze. And they do with gleeful abandon. The memory of spending my entire weekly wage—£27.50—on 48 cans of Carlsberg, only for the sociopathic PC Dillon to pour each and every hard-earned can down the drain, still hurts some twenty years on.
Then again, it’s a rite of passage. The penalty in seeing schools of teenaged boys scrolling on their phones—not up to no good—pains me more. Sinking a few Carling and confessing your love for your mates is a crucial landmark in growing up.
Those boys, and your admiration for them, feels indelible. In your head is the conviction that your mates at 17 will never wander nor stray far from the pack. They’ll be your mates at 21 and 37 and beyond. They’ll watch you get married and divorced and their kids will sink cans with your kids someday. They’ll be there until the end when they drop a handful of soil on your coffin. But they won’t. Best mates become awkward strangers.
They think their bond is forged in iron and hops. They don’t yet know that the upward nod of the tribe soon becomes the downward gaze of the mortgage-holder avoiding eye contact in the fresh produce aisle.
And so, I kid myself. That my little act of gratitude—illegal and foolish as it may have been—altered that well-worn path between friend and stranger, at least for a little while.
That unmistakeable triple knock on my front door didn’t happen. Despite my obsessive rumination, no policeman turned up to announce to polite society that I am a degenerate scumbag corroding the moral fibre of the nation’s youth.
They’re teenaged boys, after all. And if they have anything about them, they know that one doesn’t grass on one’s benefactor. Especially not one knighted the goat.
That’s right, I thought. I am the goat. If only for a day or two. They’ll find another good Samaritan willing to score them a slab of Carling. But he’d oblige in minimal fashion. He’d follow their instructions to the letter. He’d return with a slab of Carling—the beer of the woefully unambitious—whereas I dipped into my own pocket if only to elevate their tastes.
If I’m lucky, they’ll learn the two essential lessons of growing up. One: that the real world is vastly more hopeful than the one on their five-inch screens. And two: that life is too short to trade a cold beer today for an eternity in a nursing home tomorrow.
You, sir, are a philanthropist!
Many thanks, Mr Gage, for reminding us what messy human life is like and the need to hang on to as much of it as possible and to give the nanny state the middle finger when we can.