Come on, tell the truth…did you ever have a fake ID?
For those not in the know, the legal drinking age in The United States was 18 for a long time and then all of a sudden…poof…back up to 21. I mean, you could still join the military at 18 and still buy cigarettes, but no more booze for the college students.
Unless you hung around outside a liquor store and paid a sketchy guy to go buy you your nightly haul…but I digress…
The suck part was when the law went into effect, it started mid-year. So, anybody that was already 18 was grandfathered in and able to drink and those poor unfortunate souls born after that date were out of luck. My brother fell into the latter category, and he was pissed. I remember him ranting about it and thinking to myself (at the age of 12), why doesn’t he just go get a fake ID?
This all came back into my memory last night when I started reading a new book, well new to me. It’s called “Deep Fried and Pickled”. So far it is a girl gone off to college in 1986 and after a couple of weeks this girl and her new dorm mates decide to get fake IDs so they can hit the local hotel bar. (I am hoping this is just a small town without a big bar scene…I mean come on, really? The local hotel, LOL)
It got me thinking. I was 16 in 1986 and while I was not a big party girl, I did from time to time have a beer or a wine cooler. (Don’t mock, Bartles and Jaymes was extremely popular in the 80s) I left it at a couple here or there until I graduated high school and then spent a week in Ocean City, Maryland. In the month of June almost every high school senior converges on Ocean City for a week of debauchery. Cars are packed with booze purchased by older siblings or said guy in the front of the liquor store, and it is a week of getting drunk and sunburned and eating nothing that can remotely be classified as healthy. I was hungover and red as a tomato and loving it.
Off I went to the local community college and did not drink at all. Most of my friends weren’t drinkers, so no problem. Then we wanted to start going to see some bands play. Well as is always the case someone knew a guy and for the price of 20 bucks in 1989 you could get a fake college ID. Yes, bars still took them for identification back then…fools.
So, there we were thinking we were all that hitting the bars and listening to the local bands with a cocktail in hand. Looking back, I have to say that we were morons. Not because of the ID or the drinking, it was because we acted like idiots. Think of any pack of stupid girls in a movie being annoying and that was us. 19 in the 80s is different than 19 now.
We started going to one particular bar with a surf theme until the night it got raided for underage drinking. Well….we were there that night, and I dragged my two friends through the kitchen and made it out the back door without getting busted. I got rid of my fake ID the next day. I waited until I was legal the next year before I went to another bar. We stuck to house parties after that…but that is a whole different blog post waiting to happen.
***Question for the comments: Did you drink underage? Did you have a fake ID? Let me know the details.
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