Some time ago I wrote about the social phenomenon sweeping the country among Spanish youths and their friends, the Bring your own Bottle party. I also wrote a follow-up column that I called “The Telephone Call in the still small hours of the Morning.” This dealt with what can go horribly wrong when your son or daughter is out all night attending one of these parties. We almost lost our son to alcohol poisoning.
A reader e-mailed to ask me whether I had actually attended one of events. The answer was no, of course not. I am the enemy; I would be about as out of place as Waldo the Circus Clown in the boardroom of Telefonica. (Maybe not!) I was aware that things really get going after midnight, and that sometimes people attend from far away. Text messages get sent as invitations, and young people are drawn like moths to a flame.
These parties are hugely popular, with both sexes well represented. When I wrote the first article there were certain things that I had taken on good faith. I had passed by the congregation in the parking lot at just after midnight, and already the crowd was quite thick. I could see the boxes with bottles of liquor and the litre bottles of mixers. Already there was some serious drinking going on, but then, I went home where I was well past my bedtime.
My reader challenged me to write the whole story. I had apparently only scratched the surface. In order to get the full picture, I had to do as he had done. I had to get out of my bed at 4am and go see for myself. In his case, he actually went looking for his daughter and was so horrified by what he saw that he felt you should know too.
I don’t think that either he or I wish to spoil the fun for young people. We simply want them to survive this period in their lives, and if your teenager is one to hang out at these parties, there is something that you can do.
I arrived at Heron City in Paterna, Valencia at 3am, and I drove my car practically right inside the party zone and parked it. I stayed put for exactly two minutes, because that’s all the time it took for a very young looking girl with a green face to come lunging toward me with a look of abject panic. She then proceeded to upchuck the contents of her stomach over the car parked next to mine. I quickly reversed to a position of relative safety farther afield. Hopefully I was now out of the barf zone.
I felt like the latecomer to the party. Everybody else had a real big head start and there was a lot of laughing, camaraderie, and slurring of words. If you have difficulty understanding the Spanish language as it is spoke normally, you haven’t lived until you’ve heard it spoken by people who are totally out of their minds with booze.
To be perfectly honest, I really don’t mind if people drink a bit too much, the sort of thing that will result in a splitting head the next day. After all, it’s not my head that will hurt. But I watched a young lad take a bottle with a little coco-cola in the bottle and add what I think was vodka, so that the liquid in the bottle was about half full. He was already well wasted, his clothes were sticking to his body with what appeared to be sweat.
He then put that bottle to his lips, and to the cheers of his friends he proceeded to knock it back in one go. That is precisely the sort of challenge that ends in the person collapsed on the ground, dead as a doornail. In Russia, every year more than 42,000 persons die from alcohol poisoning from just this sort of binge drinking.
This is what we as parents can do. We can ensure that our children respect alcohol and the deadly effects of abuse. I am convinced that most of those young people on that night were blissfully unaware of what they were doing. Of course, once the party gets going it’s all too easy to throw caution to the winds anyway, but at least if you have done the research and you have sat your young person down at home and had them understand the dangers, that’s all that you can do. The rest is up to them.
I wrote in “The telephone call in the still small hours of the morning” about how my son ended up at a bottle party, even after I had a discussion with him three days earlier about the inappropriateness of doing just that. To be fair to him he thought he was attending a party in the disco.
Once he found himself in the midst of El Bottellón he accepted the first drink that was offered and then went on to drink himself into a stupor. He was eventually transported to the emergency department of a nearby hospital where I expect the staff have a lot of experience with this sort of patient.
We made certain that he was aware of just how close he came to losing his young life to alcohol abuse. He now understands that alcohol can kill, even without getting behind the wheel of a car. So far, he has demonstrated a very healthy respect for that demon drug, and long may it last.
I now see what the reader meant for me to see. The whole story of what goes on at one of these parties is wretched excess, too graphic for me to even attempt to describe on these pages. Even if I did or could be so explicit I can’t think of a good reason to do so. There has to be some compelling reason to tell the story, other than for the sake of content. I mean, these are young people going through their own rites of passage. I have been there and done that. Yes, it was a long time ago, but I still remember the sheer lunacy of it. That I get to remember and tell the tale is more due to good luck and a very worried and active guardian angel than my own knowledge and good judgement.
I just want your son and daughter to be a survivor. Give them a chance through education. Make sure that they know what they are doing. Research Alcohol Poisoning on the internet then share your findings with them. And Good Luck!
Drink, Drugs, Drive equals Suicide!
Copyright (c) 2007 Eugene Carmichael
