by Richard Carriero

Created on: April 27, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

My Uncle Kenny was the baby of the family and the only son. He was a good-looking and confident kid that, according my mother, the neighborhood girls used to follow around. Drinking was a way of life in my mother's family. My grandfather was a New York City cop known for his sense of humor and the raucous parties that he liked to throw. My grandmother was a housewife. Both drank profusely and after a while it affected their parenting. My mother, the oldest, got married and left at 21. My aunt, the middle child, got pregnant at 16 because no one was supervising her and her boyfriend. Soon she was out of the house too, living with her teenage husband. My uncle Kenny was left alone in the house at 11 years of age, just as his parents were starting to really deteriorate from the effects of alcohol. They alternated between partying with friends, fighting with one another and drinking alone in the furnished basement.

My uncle became a wild teenager. He liked to drive fast. He once got a speeding ticket for driving 80 mph in a New York state park. My grandfather, being a cop, was able to make the charge disappear. Uncle Kenny learned about drinking and drugs from his friends-not his parents. He and his friends liked to get high and drunk while driving around town. On February 2nd, 1980, my uncle Kenny jumped into a station wagon full of teenagers for a night on the town. They passed around beers and joints. At about 10 O'Clock that night they pulled off of the main road because some of the boys had to got to the bathroom. They got back in the car and drove down the hill at top speed. They tried to make a left turn going over 60 mph and the driver lost control of the car, broadsiding a telephone pole. Everyone else was OK aside from some cuts and one broken wrist. Uncle Kenny, however, wasn't wearing a seat belt. He died of head trauma four hours later at the hospital, 15 days shy of his 17th birthday.

Alcohol killed my uncle. What happened in that car-a bunch of stupid teenagers being stupid teenagers-was, while inexcusable, at least understandable. Drinking and driving fatalities were all too common back when the legal age was still 18. The real culprit, however, was my grandparent's drinking. They hid from their problems in a bottle when they should have been watching their son. They should have gotten to know his friends. They should have smelled his breath when he came home late. Instead they did nothing.

I grew up in the shadow of my uncle's passing. I was sternly warned not to drink and drive before I even knew what alcohol was. As a teenager I chafed under the stricter rules of these times but now when I think back about Uncle Kenny's life, snuffed out at 16, I begin to understand.

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