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.