This Haley Joel Osment DUI /pot-possession rap is so far below the Mel Gibson shockometer it’s not funny. My first thought when I read it was, “Tough darts, kid…deal with it.” My second thought was that this might be some kind of left-field karma payback for A.I. and especially that awful Pay It Forward. That sounds unfair and silly but I always partly blamed Osment for those films.
On top of this, who cares? Former child stars always get into trouble in their teens and 20s and beyond, right? Either they get what’s happening at some point and they turn away from a wild drug-booze lifestyle, or they don’t and they end up fried or dead or whatever. Life is hard and you make your choices.
There’s nothing more venal than drunk driving, and yet it was almost routine and a subject of regular amusement among my teenage friends in Wilton, Connecticut, back in the old days. I remember them piling up their cars due to drinking and drugs all the time, and some of them turned out okay. (And some didn’t.) I knew a guy who ran his father’s XKE into a two-foot-deep swamp covered with lily pads. (This was years before Risky Business.) I knew another guy who was so shit-faced that he slammed his car into someone else’s just as he was pulling out of parking space — he didn’t get more than 10 or 15 feet. I remember joking with this same guy one night as I was about to drive home plastered, both of us saying “God is my co-pilot” and that my journey should be titled “a wing and prayer.”