Someone Could Get Hurt: A Memoir of Twenty-First-Century Parenthood (8 page)

I stared out the window and thought about the impending fallout of my arrest. My wife would be angry, to be certain. I might go to jail. I was gonna have to cough up a lot of money that I would rather not cough up. I dreaded the idea of not being able to drink for a while. I remember feeling like the party was over, that life was going to stop being fun now. Somehow I had become so fucked in the head that driving a car after a few beers was now an important facet of my existence, something I didn’t want to end. I was a suburban dad with two kids.
Lemme have my one last piece of rebellion. Pathetic, meaningless rebellion.

Once Officer Burgess took me into the station, he cuffed me to a table that had a special steel bar running underneath that served as a prisoner hitching post. Then he had me fill out reams of paperwork and snapped a Polaroid of me.

“Is that my mug shot?” I asked. I kinda wanted one. You know, for posterity.

“No,” he said. “I just take this so I can remember your face when I see you in court.”

He morphed into my DUI field guide, telling me everything that was going to happen to me and explaining that I needed a ride home since my license was now temporarily suspended. He also recommended a handful of state-approved alcohol education classes, which you must take prior to showing up in court.

“You think I’ll be able to manage this without a lawyer?” I asked. I already knew the answer.

He shook his head with genuine regret. “It’s unlikely, Mr. Magary. You can try, but I wouldn’t advise it. I’m sorry.” I visualized pretty whirlwinds of cash streaming out of my shorts pocket.

After hours of being processed, Officer Burgess handed me my paperwork, which included my official BAC of .10, and I was formally released. My friend picked me up at the station and drove me to my house. Just as we were turning the corner onto my street, my phone rang and I saw the word “HOME” flashing on the screen. And now the shame and regret and sadness arrived in a rising tide.
Why? Why, why, why?
I took my wife’s call and told her as fast as I could, like ripping off a Band-Aid to get the pain over with.

I walked through the door and she greeted me at the top of the stairs, exhausted. It was now 3:00
A.M.

“I thought you might be dead,” she said.

“I’m so sorry.”

“We can talk about it later. I just want sleep.”

The next day, she barely spoke to me. I wasn’t her husband that day. I was just this
thing
that she had to deal with. For a single twenty-four-hour stretch, I felt convinced that my wife didn’t love me anymore. Whatever life force is created when two people love each other had vaporized, and I could feel it. You could have strapped me to a table and sawed through my bones and it wouldn’t have been as painful. Being unloved is like being homeless. Destitute.

My daughter was playing outside on the swing when my wife finally pulled me aside to unload. She didn’t raise her voice.

“I’m hurt, and I’m angry.”

I broke down in front of her. “Please forgive me. Please. It’ll never happen again. Please believe me.” I kept saying that line over and over again.
Please believe me.
I thought if I said it enough, maybe it would stick. It began to grate on her.

“Stop saying that. I’m not gonna believe you right now. You have to actually not do it again.”

Wives aren’t dumb. They aren’t just going to absolve you on the spot. You’d never learn your lesson that way. If forgiveness were that swift, it wouldn’t be worth anything. That’s the hardest part of being married—when you’ve fucked up and want desperately to mend everything quickly, only your partner won’t give you the satisfaction.

The drunk driving wasn’t even the worst part of it. As a result of my arrest, I had my license suspended, making her the sole family driver for two months. She was far more pissed about that than the actual drunken driving, and I couldn’t blame her. In a family of four or more, it’s crucial to have at least two functioning drivers. A parent that can’t drive isn’t a parent at all. It’s an old dog that should be dragged out and shot.

My daughter continued playing as I cried to my wife for absolution. Later on, I told the girl that I was going to have to go to class for a few nights.

“What kind of class?” she asked.

“Uh . . . a learning class,” I said. “Here, have a pretzel.”

•   •   •

I
walked into alcohol education class and was greeted by the sight of twenty other drunk drivers sitting in a loose circle: rich, poor, black, white, Hispanic. It was a Rainbow Coalition of fuckups, almost heartwarming in a way.

The multitude of DUI arrests in this country has created a microeconomy of lawyers, alcohol education facilities, and local government agencies. Your arrest helps keep the industry afloat, and nowhere is that more apparent than in alcohol education. No one in my class seemed at all remorseful about getting arrested. In fact, many of them felt dicked over by the system for having the gall to catch them drinking and driving when everyone else did it anyway. The class was just like detention, only sadder.

Class started at 7:00
P.M.
every night, which further infuriated my wife because 7:00
P.M.
was right around kiddie put-down time, when it’s crucial for all hands to be on deck to deal with bathing, brushing teeth, and threatening the kids with prison for coming downstairs more than six times after being tucked in. Before the teacher arrived, we would sit in a circle and make small talk, which always revolved around three questions:

1. How did you get arrested?

2. What was your BAC?

3. How many classes you got left?

Everyone sympathized with everyone else, and everyone thought everyone else’s arrest was some serious bullshit. There was an immigrant who got arrested for being drunk in a parked car. There was a twitchy, dark-haired man who was bitter because he had to travel all the way from Virginia each week for class. There was a seventeen-year-old high school student who was now grounded until 2027. Everyone complained about lawyer fees, about the cops, and about the obligations of the class. My first night in class, a girl asked me where I got pulled over.

“On Rockville Pike,” I said.

“Oh my God, was Officer Burgess the one who got you?”

“Yeah, that was his name.”

“He got me too!”

Suddenly, we had so much in common. It was like we were siblings. Officer Burgess was the Scourge of Rockville Pike.

“What was your BAC?” she asked me.

“Point one-oh,” I said.

A handful of other students let out winces because the legal limit is Maryland is .08. I was THIS close to not being too drunk, even though that doesn’t really mean anything. I was plenty drunk. We all revealed our BACs to each other: .09, .16, .18, .25. I tried to form a mental picture of what each level of drunkenness looked like. I was delighted at how many students had higher BACs than me. It made me feel like less of a criminal.

Every week, a handful of students would announce that they had just one or two classes left to go before being freed, and the rest of the class would congratulate them despite also being deeply jealous of them. New arrestees would come in to take the veterans’ place in class. They are never short on students in alcohol education.

Once the teacher arrived and we had all settled in, she would have us say our names and then ask us if we had “used” in the past week. The correct answer to this was obviously NO, even if you had drunk alcohol in the past week (I abstained for eight months after I got arrested). But more than a handful of students would happily confess and then watch the teacher scribble down the answer without realizing that she was there to report such things to the courts.

One lady even showed up to class drunk, as if she had been shotgunning beers on the Metrobus ride over. The teacher asked her if she had used the past week and she was like, “Of course! But what’s the big fucking deal? AM I RIGHT, GUYS?!” A lot of scribbling after that. I was so embarrassed for her, I wanted to gag her and hide her in the closet so she wouldn’t dig a deeper hole for herself.
You fool! Don’t you understand that the teacher is a government mole?!

The teacher’s only job was to press play on a DVD player so that we could watch the educational video for the night. Most of the time, this consisted of an episode of A&E’s
Intervention
, which was a fantastic show, and part of me was happy to be arrested just so I could discover it. We also watched
Leaving Las Vegas
over the course of three classes, because there’s no better lesson for alcoholics than to watch a dying, insufferable drunk manage to score with a smoking-hot prostitute.

Despite its flaws, alcohol education was uniquely successful at shaming me, at making me feel like a total fucking loser. Everyone who shows up to a DUI class thinks that they don’t belong there and that they’re better than everyone else in the room. It’s like walking into an OTB parlor by accident.
These people are degenerates. I’m the anomaly.
That’s the standard alkie train of thought. But down in my guts, I knew that I belonged in that class. I wasn’t there by accident. I was just as stupid and irresponsible as the rest of them. And it’s never comforting to feel like a stupid person. You wanna die from embarrassment. That’s the real deterrent to a second DUI arrest. Not the money. Not the inconvenience. It’s the self-ridicule.

The alcohol education course also required students to attend AA once a week for eight weeks. The teacher handed me a green booklet of meetings that took place around the area, and I perused it like a college student going over a course catalog. There were AA classes for people of all stripes: vegans, dog owners, evangelicals, pastry chefs, you name it. I chose one called “We Agnostics” because it promised a secular approach to sobriety, and I wanted to avoid prayer circles if I could. The meetings were held in a church, which kinda defeated the purpose of the enterprise, but I went anyway.

My first night there was in August. There was no air-conditioning and the opening speaker was an elderly man who wore open-toed shoes despite having hideous, gnarled old-man feet. I tried desperately to avoid staring at them, but they reached into my line of vision, following me everywhere I went. For reasons I didn’t understand, he spent half an hour talking about his wife nearly getting hit by a bus. And while I sympathized with him for having a wife who nearly got hit by a bus, I really wanted him to get to the fucking point. I began to worry that AA was less a refuge for alcoholics than for lonely people.
Is this all people do here? They come here to bore other people with tedious bullshit?

But then he began to talk about his addiction. His intervention was on a beach. His wife and daughter were the only attendees. Whenever he traveled, he had to look up the nearest meeting because he didn’t want to fall back into the hole, to ruin the effort his family had put into saving him by the ocean. Other people soon chimed in, and everything about AA began to make sense. Many of the alcohol education students despised the AA requirement because it further inconvenienced them, and I saw more than a few of them sign the attendance sheet passed around in every AA meeting and then get up to leave halfway through. But I didn’t because it seemed like a huge insult to the people who CHOSE to be there, the people who went to AA because they knew they would die if they didn’t.

One night, after a woman in the meeting asked me who I was and why I was there, I told everyone about my arrest. I told them about the nights when I would get loaded and happily drive home.

“I don’t know why I liked doing that,” I told them.

There was another old man in our meetings, a man who came to each meeting wearing a finely tailored business suit. He turned to me and spoke slowly, in small sips.

“I’m glad you’re here tonight, Drew,” he said. “Because you’re not alone. I’ve been an alcoholic for forty years. My parents were alcoholics. My grandparents were alcoholics. My four brothers are alcoholics. I have a disease. And I know that, one day, this disease will kill me.” The way he said that last sentence, I didn’t doubt him in the slightest. “And I
loved
drinking and driving. Adored it. Lived for it. I can’t drive by a liquor store on the way home now because if I do, I’ll pull over and drink and drive on the way home. I know I will. I want to do it as much as I ever have. This meeting . . . this is what’s keeping me alive, keeping me breathing. So I’m glad you’re here.”

“I’m not gonna lie to you,” I told him. “When I’ve done the required amount of AA meetings, I don’t know that I’ll be back here. I’m not ready to brand myself an alcoholic, even if I know that’s a typical sign of denial. I made a terrible mistake and I want to learn from it. And I promise you, if it happens again, I will be here, and it won’t be because the court ordered me here. It’ll be because I
know
. I’ll be ready to say to you that I’m definitely an alcoholic, and that I don’t have the power to stop it.”

“Well, good luck to you, Drew,” he said. “I hope you never have to come back. I hope you don’t have what I have.”

The difference in attitudes between the people at the AA meeting and the malcontents in the alcohol education class epitomized the struggle that went on inside my own head. You have to fight your own cynicism. You have to shut up that little voice in your head that tells you,
This is not a big deal
. It’s easy to listen to that voice because so many people drink and drive and so many people get away with it. It’s easier to tell the problem to fuck off than it is to try to fix it. But you have to acknowledge your massive failure as a human being and work to correct it because otherwise—what was the fucking point? What was the point of spending thousands on lawyer fees and being cuffed and hauled into a police cruiser if you’re not gonna learn anything from it?

Whenever something lousy happens, my wife likes to say that it happens for a reason, but that’s only true if you
give
the event meaning. It’s up to you to make it the catalyst for something good, something better. I came to view my DUI arrest as a purchase. I was buying the sordid thrill of being arrested, the joy of discovering a very good reality show, the experience of standing before a judge in pants-shitting fear, and the wisdom of listening to real people struggling with an addiction that many of them knew, deep down, would eventually defeat them. That had to be worth my four thousand dollars. I wasn’t going to just piss my money away and not get anything out of it. Oh, and I wasn’t gonna drink and drive ever again. And I haven’t.