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The first time I ever got into a car with a drunk driver was when I was seventeen. I was working as a table runner at this Austrian restaurant up in northwest Connecticut. The head chef was a dictatorial bastard with a comical Teutonic accent. All the girl waiters had to wear tight dirndls, which was both demeaning and kind of hot. All the guy waiters had to wear black bow ties (clip-on) with white dress shirts and cheap black sneakers that became filthy by the end of every shift, with potatoes and other food scraps mashed into the treads. After the shift ended, the waiters and waitresses would pool their tip money together and go get shitfaced at one waiter’s house. After working there a few weeks, I finally got invited to one of these after-parties. Once there, I drank so much that I threw up in my lap. I wiped myself off, returned to the party, and ended up in a car with four other people and a guy named Scott who was driving drunk back to his house. This was late at night, deep in the rural Connecticut woods, where the roads twist and turn and there are no streetlights or house lights anywhere and you feel like you’re driving through some kind of endless black cloud.
I remember sitting in that car, asking myself why I was there, why I was bothering to endanger my life to sit in a car going nowhere I wanted to go. I’m sure any number of teenagers have died asking themselves the same question. It’s such a stupid thing to do, to get into a car being driven by a blind-drunk person. And yet, when you’re that age, you feel as if that’s clearly the best option. You feel as if turning down the ride would be embarrassing, which is insane because the real shame is in being stupid enough to accept it. I easily could have died that night. We could have gone skidding off the road and that would have been that. Instead, we made it back to his house and I slept myself sober.
I’m sure there will be a moment in my children’s future when they will be shitfaced at a party and someone who is equally shitfaced will entice them to take a ride in a car. And they’ll have to decide, on a whim, whether that’s a good idea. One stupid tiny moment in an ocean of hours and days and weeks and years, and maybe that’s the moment when they’ll randomly choose their own demise. You can do everything possible as a parent to prevent it, but ultimately, there are no guarantees. There never are.
The first time I ever got drunk and drove on my own was at another after-party for some other table-running job I had (the Austrian guy declined to bring me back the next summer, probably because I used to sing out loud while washing dishes). The head chef brought everyone to his house and cooked up food for us on three different grills, with buckets of One-Eyed Jack—a precursor to Mike’s Hard Lemonade—dotted all over his lawn. I was eighteen, so I was at the proper age for consuming malt lemonade and thinking, This tastes like candy!
I drank one after another and quickly realized that I was shitfaced with no way home except my car. I could have called a cab. I could have gone with my tail between my legs to someone at the party, asking them for a ride home. I could have called my parents to pick me up. But there was a combination of laziness and that ever-present fear of embarrassment that prevented me from doing the right thing. Instead, I got into my car, drove back home, and blew a stop sign along the way. I was NOT driving the speed limit. I was halfway through the stop sign when I realized what I had done. I slammed on the brakes and skidded into the center of the intersection. No one was there. No one saw me do it. If another car had been around, I probably would have hit it. Maybe killed someone. Maybe died myself. After that, I promised myself I would never drink and drive again, but time has a way of loosening you up, of getting you to give bad ideas a second chance.