Teenage Wasteland

Names have been changed in this article to protect identities.

In the cruiser, two sounds stand out: the wind blowing across the side of the car and the periodic squawk of the dispatcher, his voice chirping laconically out of the radio. We’ve left the tiny downtown area of Northfield, Minnesota, and now we’re driving through a far-flung housing development out by the cornfields. Officer Kevin Tussing’s been dispatched to something that’s been identified as an “underage drinking party”.

Pulling off the main highway, we drive through a sprawling development into another, slightly different one. The cul-de-sac is quiet. In front of us, illuminated by streetlights, sits a simple house in the middle, vinyl-sided with an attached garage. As it happens, the “underage drinking party” to which we’ve been called has little resemblance to other, more cinematic high school parties. It’s small, and I wonder why we’re even here. The block seems completely serene.

As much as the myth of the idyllic Midwestern town might persist, Tussing has worked in law enforcement long enough to know it’s untrue. Towns now have drug task forces to combat meth labs, and even in Northfield—a town of less than 20,000, many of which are college students—gang-related crime arrived long ago. For many residents, though, rowdy parties of all kinds are the most problematic “crimes”. To them, students violate a kind of mandate laid out for rural living. It’s simple. As Tussing says, “People want a quiet town, and people want a clean town.”

A car in the driveway begins to back up but stops when the driver spots Tussing’s imposing figure. Teenagers leave the car and bolt from the house in every direction. Tussing apprehends one of the boys from the car, a wiry kid named Mike, and tells another to find the teenagers who’d made it to the house. Tussing walks with Mike to the cruiser and empties his pockets of cigarettes and a lighter before putting him in the backseat. A few more police cruisers have pulled up and a bunch of officers stand by their vehicles, watching the scene. Mike has the air of universal teenage anomie, all sulking and skulking. Baggy chinos swallow the lower half of his body, long hair covers his eyes. He denies that he’s had a drop to drink.

“Are the parents home?” Tussing asks. Mike shrugs—negative—and slinks into the plastic backseat of the cruiser.

This was what Tussing had suspected, but it doesn’t surprise him. “It’s tough to be a parent these days,” he says. “Kids have changed, and the whole mentality of things have changed. Kids are bored more easily, and they want to find things that’ll entertain them.” Those things, invariably, are alcohol, marijuana (which Tussing has never tried, he makes clear), and whatever else they can get their hands on. Parents work more, and kids find themselves alone, unsupervised in a numbing suburban landscape. For his part, Mike’s pretty sure the party’s host passed out long ago.

Five minutes have passed since we’ve arrived, and it’s time to breathalyze Mike. Unsurprisingly, Mike blows a .10, well over the .02 limit. “I don’t know how that happened,” he says.

Sociologists Barbara Schneider and David Stevenson argue that typically parents and children have “aligned ambitions”—that is, they share ideas about appropriate career and life paths. However, a lack of a parental support can leave teenagers aimless, possessing “misaligned ambitions”. In this situation, teenagers miscalculate how much work they will need to do to accomplish a given goal. Combined with the traditional teenage conception of invincibility, it becomes easy for kids to slip into bad habits without worrying about, or even noticing, negative effects.

Tussing begins to write Mike a ticket while lecturing him on lying. “Why’d you lie to me, Mike?” he asks. Mike assumes it’s rhetorical, but Tussing asks again. Another officer prepares to enter the house, and Tussing asks that he find the other kid, the one who said he would come back with the rest of the runaways. Fifteen minutes later, “Nate” arrives. He’s got the same baggy pants and slack jaw as Mike, but there’s an edge that’s hard to place but definitely palpable. He has no respect for Tussing, and after some small talk refuses to speak any more. At one point, a “Big Poppa” ringtone explodes from his pants—it’s his mother, telling her son not to take a breathalyzer.

The rest of the evening plays out like an unedited episode of Cops. Short bursts of excitement break long stretches of tedium—all the ticket writing, the calling of parents, the mundane radio correspondence with a dispatcher who sounds like he’s been smoking weed but probably is just bored or tired. Mike and Nate sit in the police car’s backseat and mutter to one another about how badly they need cigarettes. (Incidentally, there’s no fabric upholstery in the back of a cruiser for two reasons: to make it difficult to conceal drugs and to make bodily fluids easier to clean.) At one point, Mike begins a refrain that will help to define the evening: he asks to use the bathroom, and Tussing immediately says no. In the next half hour, Mike will ask to use the bathroom about 50 more times.

One of the interesting results of misaligned ambitions is a general parental inability to react appropriately to whatever situation a child is in. Throughout the night, Mike and Nate afford ample proof of this: Toward the beginning of the party bust, a camouflage-clad man in his 40s approaches the car. Tussing rolls down his window and the man, slurring his words slightly, demands to know if his daughter is in the house. Who is this man?, I can’t help but think. Where did he come from?

Mike pipes in and says he didn’t see his daughter in the house, but the man isn’t convinced. “I’m going to sit in my truck and wait,” he declares. No one stops him, and he just sits there, waiting to scream at his daughter if and when she emerges from the house (she never does).
Nate’s mother, who eventually arrives to pick up her belligerent son, surprises Tussing with her general recalcitrance. She’s pissed off not only at Nate but at everyone else nearby. “I’ve asked your son to take a breathalyzer test,” Tussing explains, “and he told me that you said he shouldn’t.” The woman nods. “The thing is,” Tussing says, “I’m going to give him a ticket if he doesn’t take the test, because he smells like booze. If he blows a 0.0, I won’t write him the ticket. As it stands, he’s going to court.” She looks at her son, sarcastically thanks the police officer, and again refuses the breathalyzer. “I’m not giving him a ticket for punishment,” Tussing says, “but because I honestly believe he’s been drinking.” Nate’s mother looks away, and it seems as though she can’t handle that fact—she doesn’t want to see her son’s delinquency rendered concrete.

Delinquency, underage drinking—studies say they’re increasing, and politicians give wildly varying replies as to why that is. For one thing, kids see a lot more booze on television than they used to. A 2006 survey from Georgetown University’s Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth found that in 2004, those aged 12 to 20 were on average exposed to 276 advertisements for alcoholic beverages, a 32 percent increase from 2001. The number of television advertisements for distilled spirits increased from 1,973 ads in 2001 to 46,854 in 2005. And children are watching more and more television—an average of four hours a day in 2005.

This is hardly surprising: They’re watching more television in part because they live in areas with minimal pedestrian access and diffuse neighborhoods. There’s nowhere to hang out, no places to go. Consequently, teenagers are drinking more and more. Approximately one fifth of all alcohol in America is consumed by underage drinkers, and by 10th grade, 63 percent of teenagers have had a drink, and the average teenage drinker will binge drink five times a month.

It could have been any teenager in the backseat of the cop car. A few years ago, it could have been me. A better way to think about this all too typical Saturday night is to acknowledge that adolescents aren’t falling into a deep slump—kids these days, and so on—but that they aren’t sure how to balance their ambition with the displaced ambition of their parents. Surely some teenagers, at the age of 17, have no desire to lay the groundwork for a life of material comfort and upholding the status quo that brought them all their boredom.

And as much as they’re fleeing from their own upbringings, they also seem deeply troubled by what society expects of them at an age when all they want to do is party.  Two criminologists, John Hagan and Bill McCarthy, interviewed street children who’d fled their homes to live on the streets in inner-city Vancouver. Most of them hated their parents, who by and large were abusive and negligent. But despite the hardships of homelessness, “many youth described pleasurable aspects of life on the street…including freedom from parents, siblings, and schools.”

Being in an abusive situation might make a teenager run away, but it doesn’t mean that less dissatisfied kids don’t harbor escapist fantasies of their own. Mike or Nate weren’t bad kids, but no one was telling them otherwise.

Mike never got picked up by his mother—a single parent. His baby sister was ill, and his mother, alone with the child, couldn’t leave the house. We waited until the scene had cleared, and Tussing and I drove Mike to his home, a little house sitting adjacent to the train tracks and a trailer court. On the way, Mike broke—he stopped playing the delinquent and started acting like the nervous teenager he was. He tearfully told the cop that he was a good kid, that he was on the student government, and was on pace to graduate on time. He even mentioned that he had been considering a career in law enforcement and now was worried if he’d ever be able to achieve that.

He squealed on his friends. He gave name after name of the people at the party, mentioning specifically those who’d brought the beer. Tussing typed each name in the computer, and for every name there was a face, recent snapshots from recent driver’s licenses. And for every face, there was a teenager who’d receive a telephone call from the police station, a teenager with ambitions—aligned or misaligned—of their own, who probably had homework due the following Monday. A teenager who wasn’t running anywhere, but still worried about school, about their potential, about the future. A teenager who was probably wondering what to do next.