Drinking Diaries

IT’S ONE OF THE FIRST things they tell you on the admissions tour. Right on the leafy sidewalk between the administration building and the student union, it pops out: “We’re a dry campus!” The nicely dressed, backward-walking tour guide smiles and makes eye contact with the parents in the group, while the prospective students shift uneasily. A dry campus? How do you have fun on the weekends? Doesn’t everybody go to college to drink?

Sometimes it did seem like everybody went to college to drink, even on a campus that had supposedly banned alcohol from its premises. St. Olaf College, a small liberal arts school in Minnesota, has been dry since it was founded by Lutheran, Norwegian immigrants in 1874. Despite this conservative heritage, my “dry” college was no different from a state university in many respects—house parties, beer pong tournaments, and recycling bins overflowing with liquor bottles were the norm on most weekends.

The difference was the amount of effort we had to exert to hide our alcohol use. At St. Olaf, you had to be clever. One guy famously tried to sneak a case of beer into the dorm by claiming that the square bulge under his sweatshirt was a tumor; water bottles often turned out to hold straight vodka; and I once saw a girl use a syringe to inject rum into a juice box.

While I never actively agreed with the alcohol policy, it didn’t affect my life much during my first two years at college. My friends didn’t drink, and I didn’t have much experience with alcohol, so I mostly ignored the issue. By my junior year, however, things had changed. Most of my friends drank regularly, I turned twenty-one, and I also became an RA. This meant that I was expected to enforce the alcohol policy, potentially getting my friends and classmates in trouble if I caught them with booze. All of a sudden, the dry campus became a bigger deal than I ever expected.

“Sure,” the football player said. He swung the door wide open. Nine or ten sophomores stood around a folding card table loaded with red plastic cups. They were all taller than I was and obviously drunk. “We’re playing water pong,” he said. He shoved a cup under my nose. “Want to smell it?”

There was water in the cup, but the room reeked of beer. I put on my best one-of-the-guys face. “Okay,” I said. “Seriously. I heard bottles clinking when you turned off the music, and I can smell booze. I know there’s alcohol in the room. Could you just make this easier and bring it out?” I hoped my tone was friendly but firm, like they had taught us in RA training. It was probably more wobbly and weak.

The problem was that I didn’t follow the alcohol policy myself. The St. Olaf student handbook states: “The possession, distribution or consumption of alcoholic beverages is prohibited on the St. Olaf campus, on land owned by the college, and in college-owned honor and language houses.” Once I turned twenty-one, I had a hard time accepting that my school had the right to tell me not to drink. I tried to imbibe mostly off campus, but on a few memorable occasions, a friend hosted a dorm room party that was too good to resist, so I broke the rules.

The consequence for an RA’s getting caught with alcohol on campus was loss of position, which carried with it a whole host of larger consequences, such as housing reassignment, reduction of scholarship money, and death by parental rage. So, naturally, the first thing I did at any party was scope out the nearest closet into which I could climb if we happened to get busted.

The second thing I did was to warn everybody in the room that I couldn’t get caught and that I would leave if things got too loud. I would then pour a drink into a camouflaged container and spend the rest of the night whipping my head around to look over my shoulder as people went in and out of the room. Buzzkill? Yes. But I was too busy being paranoid to worry about my social standing.

During my junior year, some friends hosted a fall festival in their room. It was a great theme party and included activities like pumpkin carving and bobbing for apples—both of which are way more fun when you’re intoxicated. I drank too much vodka and grapefruit juice, accused my best friend’s boyfriend of not liking me, and took some truly hideous pictures, which of course ended up on Facebook, before stumbling home. It was the first time I had come back to the dorm drunk, and figuring out how to use the elevator took some time. So did finding my room and unlocking my door. Luckily, I didn’t run into any of my residents. Even three sheets to the wind, I knew that a drunken RA is not a reliable RA—the last thing I wanted to do was start making sloppy declarations of eternal friendship to my residents. Half an hour later, when I needed to throw up, I was too scared to go to the bathroom for fear I would be seen or heard. And that’s how I ended up on the floor in my underwear, puking into a trash can and tearing up over the fact that I was such a bad role model. I never came home that drunk again.

Halloween rolled around two weeks later. Everyone was more excited than usual because Halloween fell on the night daylight saving time ended, allowing an extra hour for drunken debauchery and an entire Sunday for hangover recovery. It was also the first weekend after fall break, so the campus was ready for a big welcome-back party. Students began drinking early in the day and wore their costumes to “drinner” (drunk dinner) in the cafeteria. My RA staff had decided to put three people on duty that night to deal with the shenanigans that would inevitably go down. I wasn’t on duty but came home early from a party that had gotten too loud. So I was able to watch the ambulances drive past, lights flashing, as more and more students went too far. We had nine people transported to the hospital for alcohol poisoning that night. One of them was abandoned, unconscious, and lying on the dorm room floor incapacitated until the RAs found him. The college across the river, which is not a dry campus, sent only three students to the hospital that night.

That night really made me see how futile a dry campus is. The administration seemed to enjoy pretending that alcohol wasn’t a problem at our small Christian school, but it was. Students obviously still drink on a dry campus. They also drink more dangerously. I’ve seen friends down eight or nine shots in succession before heading out onto campus for a dance or a concert. What could be an evening of slow, more relaxed drinking turns into a rush to get as drunk as possible before leaving the safety of your dorm room, even for students who are twenty-one.

The college used to provide a shuttle (known by students as the drunk bus) between the campus and downtown on Friday and Saturday nights, but it discontinued this service, forcing drunk students to drive or walk the mile back to campus. A few times a year, the entire student body received an email informing us of a reported assault late at night. Many of the attacks involved alcohol in some way.

While I had mixed feelings about the relationship many of my peers had with alcohol, the most difficult thing for me was to enforce a drinking policy that I adamantly disagreed with. Unfortunately, it was an unavoidable and complicated part of my job. I know there were plenty of parties I wasn’t invited to because of my RA position, and I know that many residents viewed our entire staff with suspicion, thinking we were all out to get them. At staff meetings we joked about buying a Voldemort mask to wear around the dorm, just to drive the point home.

Because of my occasional policy violations, I worried constantly about getting busted and being exposed as the Worst RA Ever. I went to great lengths to hide my lone bottle of vodka at the bottom of my smelly laundry basket, despite the fact that I lived in a single room and locked it religiously. Once, I ran into a resident while I was drinking on campus and spent the next week terrified that he would rat me out. I even had to untag pictures of myself on Facebook in case someone from residence life saw them and figured out that I had been at an on-campus party. I regret the amount of time I wasted worrying about drinking and obsessing over the alcohol policy, and it makes me sad that the dry-campus policy stigmatizes drinking, even for those who are of age. The zero-tolerance attitude adopted by some schools functions only to make the drinking culture a secret—and consequently makes it more difficult for students to get help with alcohol problems if they need it.

During my last week as a residence life staff member, I got called on an alcohol “medical,” which is RA-speak for when someone goes on a bender and needs an ambulance. The guy wasn’t a student at St. Olaf but was visiting his girlfriend, who lived down the hall from me. She called the paramedics when he passed out and took care of him until they arrived, holding herself together. When they carried her boyfriend away on a stretcher, however, she lost control and started sobbing. I can’t imagine having to watch someone I loved in that condition: vomiting, eyes rolling back, incoherent. It was traumatizing for me, and I had never seen the guy before in my life.

I wish there was a six-week course or an informational video that could illustrate the not-so-glamorous side of college drinking that I got up close and personal with during my two years as an RA, but nothing can simulate the “Oh my god, really?” feeling that comes with discovering surprise vomit in your bathroom when you are stone sober. That’s just something that everyone needs to experience for themselves.

I’m sure the prospective students touring St. Olaf’s beautiful campus right now are having their college party fantasies ruined by some smiley tour guide proclaiming the wonders of the dry campus. They shouldn’t worry too much. The liquor store is only a mile away, and there are plenty of upperclassmen willing to provide innocent freshmen with their first “real” college experience, hangovers and all. The newbies will find out soon enough that college isn’t just about drinking—there are, after all, concerts to attend, video game competitions to enter, sports to play, and possibly books to open. While some students choose alcohol as their number-one college activity, most people I knew had a lot more going on in their lives than the contents of their secret booze stashes. As an RA and professional party pooper, I may not have had the “typical” college experience, but I am happy with my choices. I had a lot of fun, watched my friend drink a juice box filled with rum, and stayed out of the hospital—all while living the (mostly) dry life.