• 'I don't have a problem, and if I do, so what?'
• Maine kids and alcohol
• The parent's role
• Schools arm children with arsenal of 'life skills'
• Wounded adolescents find Focus
• Program extends hand to hardened youth
• Alcohol-related deaths in 1995

Aimee Howard, who grew up in Bucksport, drank for years until she ''couldn't go on any longer.'' She entered a treatment program, where, she says, ''I took an honest look at my life. I thought, 'Geez, this is how I lived?' I was brought up with booze. It was like food.'' Now, at 18, she is starting again. Staff photo by David A. Rodgers

Aimee Howard drank ''obsessively'' by the age of 10, she says, but she began drinking much earlier.

When she was a toddler, her parents gave her alcohol to make her sleep. By elementary school, she was stealing it from them: vodka, rum, beer.

In the fifth grade, she was caught drinking in school - Kahlua in a Scope mouthwash bottle. ''Like that's not obvious,'' she laughs.

By the time she was 13, she drank before, during and after school, and at night. She regularly blacked out and, paranoid, slept with a loaded rifle.

Suspended from high school one too many times, she was sent to a boarding school, where she drank vodka in the shower from shampoo bottles. Kicked out of that school, she wandered the state, drinking and drugging.

She slept in fields, stole from friends, broke into houses. In one, drunk, she was confronted by an old woman, trembling with fear; when Howard demanded money of her, she dug in her purse for her last $3.

"I felt wicked, wicked bad," says Howard. "But I was desperate."

She drove drunk, blacked out repeatedly, had accidents ''all the time,'' and almost ran over a friend. She lost track of the days. She grew sickly thin and ''nasty looking.''

And, finally, desperate.

When she ''couldn't go on any longer,'' she entered a yearlong treatment program. There, she says, ''I took an honest look at my life. I thought, 'Jeez, this is how I lived?' I was brought up with booze. It was like food.''

Now, at 18, she is starting again. She is learning to wash clothes, pay bills, talk, feel. She is hopeful about the future. But with decades before her, she remains fragile and wary, intent on surviving the only way she can - one vigilant day at a time.

Kids, like adults, drink to escape. Experts say today's teen-agers often seek to escape a deluge of pressures and fears - sexual, emotional, economic.

They are, in many ways, easy prey. They face boundless uncertainty, but have only elemental coping skills. Peer pressure makes them reason like lemmings: She does it, they do it, I do it. And they are teen-agers. Never mind drugs or alcohol, counselors say; adolescence is rough on a good day.

While they live in a culture permeated by sundry drugs, alcohol - the most acceptable, accessible and affordable - remains the drug of choice for kids, as it does for adults.

Substance abuse experts say kids today drink earlier than ever before. They say Maine teen-agers binge-drink more than teens in the rest of New England. Most Maine teen-agers have used alcohol, they say, and one out of four graduating seniors has a serious alcohol problem.

Once they do, treating them is uncommonly tough. To many, helping young people with alcohol problems is what David Dyer, a psychiatric clinician in Bangor, calls ''the Zen of substance abuse treatment,'' elusive and multi-layered.

Confronted with a disease of denial, kids offer up the blithe denial of adolescence. They are invincible. They know everything. And they know they're not sick.

Wending their way through those intricacies is a growing cadre of teachers and counselors working at both prevention and treatment. Savvy but sanguine, laboring toward a goal they can barely see, they recite the same steadfast mantra: You measure success one child at a time.

Above all, they insist, alcohol is a community problem, and the community must solve it.

Michael Clifford, director of Safe and Drug Free Schools for Portland, says adults must help children ''have a sense of power and purpose in their lives - we must find ways to allow a kid to turn to the light.''

A lofty goal. Asked how to achieve it, Clifford smiles, almost beatific.

''How do you eat an elephant?'' he replies. ''One bite at a time.''

Today's teen-agers, says Margaret Jones, often feel beleaguered.

Jones is director of prevention services for Day One, the state's largest substance abuse agency. It offers a broad array of drug and alcohol services, in both schools and communities, for adolescents and their families.

She describes a generation beset by sexual uncertainty, environmental concerns, the emotional baggage of divorce, the inflated expectations of a culture that demands they be better, smarter, sooner than any before them.

In a world of $170 skateboards and $150 sneakers, she says, kids face economic worries: soaring college costs, fewer jobs, the demands of an electronic revolution. They are barraged by images, from the instant violence of CNN to the dreamy allure of music videos promising sex and romance, here and now.

Bound by a meager language of ''like''s and ''you know''s, they shape rebellious images of their own - from pierced tongues to purple hair - to speak for them.

''They'll say, 'I dunno who I am, but I'm not Mom or Dad,' '' says Jones. ''They will say it with tattoos, nose rings, dreadlocks, sex, pot - and drinking.''

Most kids, it is universally agreed, drink.

They drink beer, wine coolers or mixed drinks that mask the taste of the alcohol. They drink in each others' houses or outside, often in longtime favorite gathering spots - a beach, a gravel pit, a stretch of woods.

Experts say the vast majority of Maine teen-agers drink at least socially. A sizable minority drink to excess. Of those, most are left to their excesses. In Cumberland County, school officials estimate only one in 10 students gets the alcohol treatment he or she needs.

Kids today start drinking earlier than ever before. Twenty years ago, they started at 15 or 16 years old. Today, the average age is 12, or around the transition from eighth grade to high school. Some start as early as 9 or 10.

Aimee Howard has been drinking, she says, ''as long as I can remember.''

She grew up in Bucksport, in what she says was a dysfunctional household filled with guns. She never felt she had to hide her drinking from her parents.

By the time she was 10, alcohol was crucial to her: ''I drank a lot, thought about it a lot, and stole it from my parents and my grandmother, who ran a bar.'' By the eighth grade, she drank and smoked pot throughout the day, and often blacked out.

''Friends would tell me stuff I'd done, and I'd say, 'What the hell . . . ? Or I would wake up and be doing stuff. It was whenever. Whenever I was drinking.''

Over time, she did ''every drug you could think of except heroin and crack,'' including a period when she took acid every day for months. She ''had a little pattern,'' from speed in the morning to codeine and alcohol at night.

But alcohol remained her drug of choice, in large part because it was so accessible. She got it from home, and from ''buyers,'' older friends with IDs.

''Adults didn't get it,'' she says. ''It wasn't a problem - I could always go and find it, and I could now . . . If you're a drunk, it's not hard. It's sort of an instinct.''

Staff art. Source: Maine Office of Substance Abuse.

Despite Maine's legal drinking age of 21, alcohol remains the most accessible drug for young people. They borrow an ID, have an older friend buy for them, take beer from their parents' refrigerators. Alcohol is everywhere, in grocery stores and TV ads and bars on every corner. Today, it is more fashionable than ever in its newest incarnations - wine-tasting and microbreweries.

Combating that easy access, Maine schools have established a vast array of prevention programs. Schools have in-house substance abuse counselors, alcohol awareness days, early intervention teams. There are peer support programs and ''life skills'' classes to teach kids decision-making and refusal techniques.

Still, attitudes change hard. Living in a beer-downing, Prozac-popping culture as they do, many young people follow the lead of their elders - and the tradition of drinking as a time-honored rite of passage.

For most young people today, driving drunk is no longer acceptable. But drinking often remains what Brian Dostie, a Portland High School senior, calls ''the hip-happening thing to do.''

Today's schools work to find kids alternatives. One of the most effective is sports, and what they demand of students: time, energy and, increasingly, a written promise to avoid drugs and alcohol.

Another alternative is peer support to combat the sense of isolation many kids feel. Day One's Natural Helpers program - with 300 kids in 16 schools - encourages young people to turn to each other before they turn to alcohol.

Naomi Googins, a Scarborough High School senior, says she and other Natural Helpers serve as ad hoc mentors for students who may need help. ''We watch out for each other like you wouldn't believe,'' she says with fervor.

Still, young people confronted about a problem with alcohol often respond the same way as adults - with denial. Googins cites the bottom-line reality of all substance abuse work: ''You can't help someone who doesn't want help.''

Through high school, Aimee Howard drank and did drugs more and more. Rum, pills, vodka, LSD. Over time, she invented ways to rationalize. Drinking beer ''wasn't really drinking,'' she decided, and marijuana wasn't really drugs.

She was caught drinking in school and was suspended. She was caught smoking pot in school and was arrested. She was frequently sent home drunk by teachers fed up with her. She was suspended several more times.

In her junior year, she was sent to a boarding school. Her reputation preceded her: She was required to see a drug counselor and undergo random drug testing.

She stayed clean about a month. Then she started drinking and using drugs.

She would fill a shampoo bottle with vodka, and retreat to the shower. Soon, she was heading for each shower armed with an entire trayful - the kind meant to hold bath oils and lotions - of vodka-filled shampoo bottles. She began taking more and more showers. In the morning, after soccer, at night.

Boarding school didn't change much for her. Because the school was residential, she had to alter her buying habits a bit, stockpiling drugs and alcohol. ''I bought large quantities,'' she says. ''But I already bought large quantities.''

She was, she says, ''a rowdy drunk.'' She would start off happy, but then get ''nasty - I'd get into fights.''

Drunk, she often got into trouble. She would find herself in the boys' dorm, or teachers' apartments. Sober, she says, ''I was a nice person - the teachers really liked me.'' She managed to do all right in most classes, though she never passed a math class until she was in school in the treatment program.

In her one year at boarding school, she earned more dorm demerits than anyone ever had. The day after school ended for the summer, she got a letter saying she would not be allowed to return in the fall.

She told herself she didn't care, and took off for the summer to drink and drug. Set loose, she spiraled down, fast and hard.

As director of residential treatment services, Gene Vahey runs Day One's house in Hollis, the state's only long-term, residential program for young people with substance abuse problems. ''We invite them into the process of figuring things out for themselves,'' Vahey says. Staff photo by David A. Rodgers

No child can be saved, it is widely agreed, until he or she feels the need to be. It takes most kids years of abuse before they feel that need.

Once they do, they must embark on a long, harrowing journey back to sobriety. Of recovery, Gene Vahey says, ''There is no magic cure.''

As director of residential treatment services, Vahey runs Day One's house in Hollis, the state's only long-term, residential program for young people with substance abuse problems. He has spent 25 years in the field.

When he began working in the 1970s, Vahey says, kids were perceived to have drug, not alcohol problems, and alcoholics were ''old men in trenchcoats.'' Since then, the alcoholics became kids, and the kids became younger, sicker and more violent. Today, more than half have problems with both drugs and alcohol.

The Hollis program represents a bottoming out for been-there-done-that kids who have spiraled inexorably downward. Most have spent years in and out of jails and hospitals, on and off the gritty streets.

Often, they have a common profile. They are risk-takers who have long been drawn to older kids with bad habits. Many come from dysfunctional, abusive or alcoholic families. For years their lives have focused on getting ''plastered,'' ''hammered,'' ''baked'' and ''wasted.'' They have passed from probation officers to mental health workers to shelters, and now they have no place else to go.

They arrive in Hollis, Vahey says, angry and mistrustful: ''We're just one more stop on the road, something else somebody's making them do.''

They have minimal expectations - ''They're so used to being in trouble, to everything going bad''- and bags of old tricks. They are used to shutting down, getting by, telling adults what they want to hear.

Says Vahey, ''They've protected themselves from whatever. They've created their version of safety, which is often, 'I'm not dead today.' ''

Aimee Howard spent the summer after she was thrown out of boarding school wandering the state, a loaded pistol in her car. Increasingly, she ''just didn't have any connection with what was real.''

She spent days high, roaming dreamily through apple orchards. She experimented with more and more drugs, seeing herself as ''the guinea pig. Sometimes I wouldn't even ask what it was. I'd just take it. I didn't care.''

She slept anywhere, stole money from friends, stole booze from stores, and broke into houses. In one, drunk, she was confronted by an old woman, shaking with fear. Howard demanded money of her. The woman gave her $3, all she had.

''I felt wicked, wicked bad,'' says Howard. ''But I was desperate.''

She stole chain saws from hardware superstores, wheeling them out in carts, to sell. One night, she stole a door off a house because a friend needed one.

Drunk, she jumped from the top of a gravel pit, landing on a friend. She jumped fully dressed from a deck into a lake, blacked out or hit her head, and floated face-down until her boyfriend, screaming, pulled her out.

She blacked out more often, more easily, more unpredictably. Sometimes, it happened when she ''drank hardly anything, maybe four shots of vodka and two beers.'' It was hard to measure: She usually drank straight from the bottle.

She often drove drunk. She ''hit trees and rocks and both my mother's and brother's cars in the driveway one night in a blackout.'' She almost ran over a friend with a truck. She veered off a road, just missed a house, and landed on a pile of lobster traps; she drove home with flat tires and gas pouring out of the ripped-open tank.

She drove from Bucksport to Orono, with no memory of the trip. After each blackout she would climb, fearful, out of her car to look for telltale dents.

''I'd wake up in the car in the morning, and not remember how I got there,'' she says. ''I could have killed someone, and wouldn't know it.''

She would go nights in a row without sleeping, take downers, drink, and crash. She rarely knew what day it was. She grew thin, pale, with sunken eyes. She overdosed on pills, got deathly cold, and couldn't talk; she waited it out.

She questioned what she was doing to herself ''all the time, all the time.'' When friends urged her to stop or get help, she'd agree.

''I'd say, 'You're right, I'll stop tonight, I'm done.' But it never happened. I'd stop the rest of that night, but by 10 the next morning I'd slip again.''

Like most people in recovery, she knows when she did stop. On Aug. 26, 1996, she contacted a counselor from an earlier rehab whom she trusted. He in turn led her to Hollis. No external event, she says, triggered the end.

''It was just me,'' she says. ''I couldn't go on any longer.''

In Hollis, what was the first thing she had to do?

''Give up,'' she says.

The Hollis program is run out of a former farmhouse and community hospital. The house is licensed for 12, but often has a waiting list. The staff includes two teachers, four counselors, a nurse. The kids go to school, group and individual therapy, AA meetings, recreational activities.

Years ago, Vahey says, treatment was relatively simple. Kids would be sent to a 28-day detox program: ''Parents would ship their kids out and say, 'Fix them.' The first 25 days, they didn't know where they were. There was the sense that if they just did their time, they'd be OK. But when they were done, they didn't look much different to me.''

Today, the view of treatment is far more complex: ''It's not as simple as saying, 'Stop drinking, and you'll be OK.' It's not just saying, 'Don't be angry,' but 'Why are you angry?' ''

Because ''you can't sentence somebody to sobriety,'' says Vahey, the kids in Hollis must above all take part in their own recovery.

''Everyone has told these kids what's wrong with them,'' he notes. ''We invite them into the process of figuring things out for themselves. They do the work.''

The Hollis program is rooted in the belief that once users get addicted, they come to rely on alcohol to cope with life. They stop feeling, or trusting, or growing emotionally. They shut down. Over time, they grow numb.

The longer they've been addicted, the less they are left with when they stop.

''If they started using drugs at 12, they're still back there, even if they're 18,'' says Vahey. ''We're not rehabilitating - we're habilitating.''

Jason Tuthill, 23, grew up in Parsonsfield, with a classic alcoholic history. He landed at Day One in Hollis in the spring of 1995 after standing one day on a bridge and finding ''it was soothing to think about suicide.'' He graduated last spring. Now he has a job as a chef, a bike, a life. But none of it is easy. He has lost one job, and almost lost his brother in an alcohol-related accident. He is still on probation, still paying off fines, and still scared. ''Every day,'' he says, ''is not a rose.'' Staff photo by David A. Rodgers

The kids must learn virtually everything, from cooking to interacting to dealing with daily responsibilities. They must also confront issues they have long buried, from sexual abuse to broken families to their own fear or anger.

''It's really about who they are and what they want,'' says Vahey. ''We say to these kids, 'You're still gonna have the ability to make the same bad choices. But you can also choose another way.' ''

Having lived without limits they urgently needed, the kids must now learn to make choices, and obey rules. They have strict bedtimes. They must do chores, go to school, be at group, be at meals, and, in rotation, make them. No radios, sex or violence are allowed. They must ask permission to take a walk, use a phone, or get an aspirin.

Infractions bring a loss of privileges: no TV, no walk, no retreat to a room.

At first, many rebel. They act out, mouth off, leave. If they stay, they often spend the first months playing street games, not truly listening.

When they arrive, most see their stay in oversimplified terms. Vahey says the most common thing he hears is, ''I've just gotta straighten out my life a bit.''

Though the program is designed for a year, he usually doesn't say so. Because so many have come from jails, he says, ''We don't want them to see it in terms of doing time. We just ask them to commit to doing something different.''

Aimee Howard arrived in Hollis ''on my own timetable - I wanted to set a record and get out in six months. I had the world together.''

Following a common pattern, she says she spent her first four months ''telling (the counselors) what they wanted to hear.'' Then she got serious.

The easiest part, she says, was admitting she was powerless over alcohol, a basic first step: ''I knew I was powerless. I was drunk for three years. I'd say I was done, and then get so sick. Nobody in their right mind would do that.''

Other things were harder. She started thinking and talking about her family life, and feeling the pain and anger she had buried for years.

''I slowly realized that people live different from that,'' she says. ''People don't live on a day-to-day basis worrying about jail, having guns around all the time, living in craziness.''

Still, the reality of having to separate from her family - to ''get out of the sickness'' - was one of the hardest tasks she faced. She almost left Hollis ''all the time,'' she says, but came closest at Christmas.

The kids were taught to devise plans, ways to stay safe in any situation. It was Christmas. She wanted to go home. Vahey ''wasn't real fond of the plan.''

Howard says at that point she ''had to decide if my sobriety was more important than my family.'' In the end, she devised a compromise plan: She stayed with a sober friend, and visited her family on Christmas morning.

Trenchant, wary and wry, part father figure and part therapist, Vahey steers the kids through their tricks and hard times with a fierce attentiveness.

Knowing they do things for show, he reminds them they attend AA meetings to work, not to be seen. Knowing they use tough images as shields, he says they can wear nose rings and black lipstick, but only if that's who they are.

And knowing they have come from a watch-your-back street scene, he tells them they must now learn to trust, and help each other through.

Some listen, some don't. Of those who came in from July 1996 to June 1997, he says, only 28 percent graduated. Their average stay was 5.8 months.

Faced with such numbers, those who work with kids grow philosophical. Redemption is always possible. Some kids may party heavily when young, but grow into adults who barely drink. Others will fall deeper and deeper.

Their counselors grasp hope like a talisman, always citing the one child saved. Notes Gino Ring, substance abuse counselor for Bath's middle and high school, and the father of a young child, ''One is a huge number if it's my kid.''

A few months before graduating from Hollis, the kids undergo counseling to prepare them for the unsafe realities of being ''out there'' - where friends will drink, and pot smoke will drift past, and things will go wrong.

''We tell them, don't expect the world to be different,'' says Vahey. ''The world didn't change while you were gone, but you can change how you react.''

When they graduate, many head for the Portland area. It has more jobs and the largest recovery community, with up to 200 AA meetings a week.

Vahey meets his kids regularly, usually over breakfast or coffee - the addict's last addiction, along with soda and gum. He quizzes them. Are they getting to meetings? Seeing their sponsor? Weathering the inevitable storms?

Usually, they are. They have the resilience of youth and, from their tough times, finely honed survival skills.

Jason Tuthill, 23,grew up in Parsonsfield, with a classic alcoholic history.

At 5, his father gave him sips of whiskey to make him sleep. By high school, he drank, drugged and stole. By 20, he drank nightly, blacked out, punched things, mutilated himself. He fell through a series of jobs, felonies, OUI arrests. He lost friends, family, almost his life getting beat up drunk.

''I was one sick individual, a person I never wanted to be,'' he says. ''My favorite saying was, 'That's all right, I'll be dead in the morning.' ''

He landed in Hollis in the spring of 1995 after standing one day on a bridge and finding ''it was soothing to think about suicide.'' He graduated last spring.

Now he has a job as a chef, a bike, a life. But none of it is easy. He has lost one job, and almost lost his brother in an alcohol-related accident.He is still on probation, still paying off fines, and still scared.

In his job - at an Italian restaurant - he cooks almost everything in wine. One day, he found a joint on the floor: ''It was some kind of sign - either somebody was trying to torture me, or it was a learning experience.''

Out here, it is all a battle for him.

''Every day,'' he says, ''is not a rose.''

Aimee Howard left Hollis on Aug. 21. She is doing well. She has an apartment, a job in a restaurant, a circle of sober friends. Still, there has been ''bumpiness.''

What has she found hard? ''Everything,'' she says.

''Working 40 hours a week. Getting up early. Getting parking tickets. Figuring out where I can and can't park. I used to go to Goodwill every week and buy new clothes when mine got dirty - now I wash them. Just being accountable. Doing what I say I'm gonna do, when all my life I wasn't responsible.''

It is hard being at her family's house in Bucksport, though her mother tries to help. The last time she visited, she went into the pantry and found the floor covered with liquor bottles, her mother's way of trying to protect her.

She knows she is still angry at her parents. She deals with it: ''I talk about it. I beat trees. I let go. I turn it over to my higher power.''

At work, she too works with alcohol ''all the time.'' Once, she inadvertently got locked into a walk-in fridge full of fish and alcohol; she worried, she laughs, far more about freezing to death than drinking.

Still, she tries to stay away from people drinking: ''If you really like chocolate, and you're around chocolate all the time, you'll eat.''

For these kids, the world is full of dangers, and recovery is never done.

Carie Woodrow, 19, has had her share of missteps since leaving Hollis last summer. With her wide eyes and short swirly skirt, she looks like a schoolgirl, untested and fresh; but she has stolen, been in jail, lived at a crackhouse, bottomed out.

When she first came to Portland, she moved into an apartment with a woman who drank. There was a bottle of wine in the refrigerator. Woodrow asked the woman to remove it. But it remained, testament to the difficulty of a life lived not just one day at a time, but one opening of the fridge door at a time.

Woodrow changed apartments. She also changed jobs; her first job was at a convenience store where she constantly handled six-packs of beer.

Not smart, Vahey persuaded her. After she quit, he pestered her all summer to find another job. He knew she was Rollerblading, ''socializing,'' going to the beach. He stayed on her case about her ''take-me-to-the-moon stuff.''

''I'm asking her, 'Do you have a job?' And she's saying, 'I'm trying to find a job.' And I'm saying, 'Yeah, but do you have a job?' The point is, there's a million reasons not to do something.''

A favorite reason alcoholics use is expecting the world to be perfect, and taking to drink when it isn't. Meeting with Woodrow - more coffee - Vahey listens, a slight smile creasing his face, as she lays out her fears about the job she did finally find. What should she wear? How should she do her hair?

''I want to do 100 percent,'' she exclaims. ''I'm wicked excited about it, but what if I mess up?''

Vahey squints at her, matter-of-fact. ''What if you mess up?''

Woodrow gulps, looks cautiously back at him, says, ''I mess up.''

It is in the nature of his job to be exacting. Vahey keeps at her.

''And what do you do about it?'' he asks pointedly.

''Work it,'' says Woodrow firmly. ''Work through it. Accept it. Ask for help.''

Every year, Vahey says, he worries the kids will return to a world where there are no jobs, no apartments, no shining possibilities before them. But every year, they somehow find jobs and homes and lives to make their own.

''We've supplied the basic tools,'' he says. ''Hopefully, they'll use them to do what they need to do.''

'Just lookit this dog,'' Aimee Howard says of Boddhi, a friend's dog. ''Someone likes me and trusts me enough to take care of this dog. Before, they wouldn't even give me something they didn't want. It's pretty cool.'' Aimee, who is doing well after leaving Day One, says she is ''happier than I ever was.'' Staff photo by David A. Rodgers

Aimee Howard is now, she says, ''happier than I ever was.'' She looks it.

On a wind-swept, blue-sky October afternoon, she wears torn jeans, several necklaces, a broad and clearly heartfelt smile that somehow lifts her, makes her seem buoyant. She holds a quart of bottled water in one hand, and the leash of a friend's rowdy dog, named Boddhi, in the other.

''I don't obsess about alcohol, I don't wake up in the morning and wonder where I'm gonna get my booze,'' she says. Then, grinning, she gestures toward Boddhi.

''Just lookit this dog,'' she says, as Boddhi, oblivious, dances and leaps. ''Someone likes me and trusts me enough to take care of this dog. Before, they wouldn't even give me something they didn't want. It's pretty cool.''

Day One and recovery, she says, have taught her so much.

''They taught me to iron clothes. To feed myself. To be honest. To trust other people. To talk to people.''

She pauses, admiring the perfect sky.

''They taught me to live,'' she says.