Metro Pulse/Secret History/Being There

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A place for the nearly legal: one more New Year's wish

by Jack Neely

A certain 18-year-old of my acquaintance tells me he doesn't like Knoxville very much. He's attending college in New Orleans, and came home for a month-long break. Knoxville's his home town, and he knows his way around. He has his favorite restaurants and some friends here and there. He likes movies, and says our movie theaters are OK. He has access to a car, and he knows the malls and the skating rinks and the bowling alleys.

In spite of the distance, he invested his Christmas money in gasoline to drive back to New Orleans for New Year's.

New Orleans may be the last major city in America that allows 18-year-olds to drink beer unmolested, and he admits that's part of the appeal. It's not just that Knoxville doesn't allow 18-year-olds to drink beer. Knoxville doesn't allow 18-year-olds to do much of anything. They're not allowed into most Knoxville music clubs. An 18-year-old can legally be drafted and carry a high-powered rifle in Baghdad. But the same 18-year-old can't legally shoot a game of pool at a large downtown pizza restaurant. The city's baroque River City codes have made certain of that, and the rule is sternly posted on the wall. If you're 18 or 20, you're not allowed to shoot pool in a room where alcohol is served—even if what you're drinking is Pepsi-Cola.

Now, that's ironic. I loved to shoot pool when I was a teenager. I played more pool before I turned 21 than I have in the quarter century since.

However, part of the reason he was willing to travel 3,000 miles to avoid Knoxville on two round trips to New Orleans, this teenager says, is the fact that in New Orleans you can just "go downtown" without specific plans, and find something interesting going on without spending much money.

Say you're 18, 19, or 20; you're in Knoxville; and it's 9 at night. For most collegiates of my acquaintence, 9 is the rough equivalent of noon. It's time to get out of the house, go out and see what's going on. Being there is the main thing: some place that has a choice of several different things to do. Where, if something happens, you won't miss it. For them, is there a there here?

Everybody says the malls are made for teenagers, but at 9, the malls are shutting down. When I was 18, it was the Strip. But raising the drinking age took its toll. There are some nice places on West Cumberland, and I don't doubt you can get a pretty good meal at O'Charley's, but the old Strip seems a shadow of its former self. I mentioned that option to this particular 18-year-old, and he said, "That's just a string of filling stations." To a kid who's not old enough to drink a beer, that's what it is. There are a few nightclubs here and there that accommodate underage kids, but there doesn't seem to be enough of them in one place to form the sort of gravity that draws the almost-legal.

Some think of it as a dangerous group, but it's also a dangerous age group to ignore. This non-drinking three-year age demographic would seem to be a gold mine for retailers: mobile kids with cars and jobs and few responsibilities, no definite curfew. They spend more freely than most of us do.

But even more importantly to the city, it's the age at which many people, especially those who are upwardly mobile, start to decide where they're going to live. The 18-to-21-year-old demographic may be more critical to the city's long-term vigor than any comparable three-year segment of us middleaged taxpayers.

At every high-school reunion, I'm struck by how many of the people I knew as a teenager no longer live here. My class was loaded with goal-driven achievers: engineers, lawyers, a nationally successful author, enough surgeons to staff St. Mary's. Most of them are pursuing these vocations in cities other than their hometown. They're in Atlanta, or Memphis, or New York. At our reunions, those who live outside the Knoxville metro area always outnumber us homeboys.

Some of my old pals retain the prejudices against their hometown that they developed when they last lived here, at 18 or 19 or 20, when they were deciding not to live here. At 45, these former Knoxvillians describe Knoxville to Atlantans as a place where there's nothing much going on. If I left at that age, I'd be saying the same thing.

The contrast between Knoxville and New Orleans is rarely greater than on New Year's Eve, the holiday our unhypothetical 18-year-old didn't want to spend in Knoxville. On that night, you can go to downtown New Orleans and find yourself in the thick of a party, and have as good a time as anybody who's a member of a country club or paying to go to a swank hotel soiree.

That's the Big Easy. We can't match it. But the fact is that scores of other American cities host big public outdoor New Years' Eve celebrations. It doesn't have to be extravagant. I read in the New York Times about Brasstown, N.C., which sponsors an event which draws a crowd bigger than the town's population of 250: the annual Possum Drop. At midnight a possum is lowered from the top of a filling station, and then ceremoniously freed. I bet they allow 18-year-olds to watch.