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.
? ? ?
My lawyer was a short man with a gimpy leg who resided in a suburban office that looked like a hoarder’s fruit cellar. There was paper everywhere, stacked to the ceiling: briefs, depositions, sworn affidavits, notes scrawled in longhand on garish yellow legal pads. Only he knew where everything was and why it was there. He gave me a “discount” on my defense, a bargain basement price of $1,800. (I was charged another $2,200 in fines and alcohol ed tuition.)
He brought me in front of the judge and I quickly realized that the only reason people hire lawyers is so that their case isn’t called last on the docket. One of the guys in my alcohol education class navigated the system without a lawyer and ended up paying a smaller fine than I did, which I thought was bullshit. The judge called on me to stand up and enter my plea to a reduced charge, and then asked if I had anything to say to the court. I had to strangle myself from being Mr. Dramatic and subjecting the court to a very long speech that would no doubt win me an Academy Award. The judge looked like a man who heard those speeches once every forty minutes and hated them with every cell of his beating heart. Before my turn, I had seen a wealthy suburban dad break down and apologize profusely before the court and the judge looked as if he were being handed a soiled diaper.
“Do you have anything you’d like to say to the court, Mr. Magary?” the judge asked.
“No, sir. No.”
He banged his gavel and I went downstairs to get my paperwork processed. All the fines had to be paid by money order. The court system, shockingly, does not trust checks that come from convicted criminals.
For the final portion of my DUI penance, they sent me to a lecture for all DUI offenders at a local vocational school. The auditorium had two thousand seats, and for this lecture, every seat was taken. I was forced to stand with dozens of others in the back. They arrested three people for showing up drunk to the lecture and violating the terms of their probation. Policemen walked right up to them during the talk and escorted them out. The man next to me thought the drunks were planted as a scare tactic. In my case, the tactic succeeded. I was terrified.
Our lecturer was a local man who had lost his daughter in an accident when she took a ride with a drunk driver—the same kind of pointless, late-night ride I took back in Connecticut fifteen years earlier. One year later, her best friend was also killed by a drunk driver in the exact same spot where she had been killed.
“I don’t really care about what happens to you people,” he told us. “I’m just here so I can talk about my daughter. This is how I keep her alive.”
He passed around her picture and made us say her name out loud. The picture came to me and I stared it. I thought about every picture ever taken of my daughter, and how it could be me passing her image around to a bunch of fucking lowlifes who would probably never get the hint. Then I thought about that Polaroid that Officer Burgess took of me when I was first caught. He never did show me that picture. I wonder what I look like. I wonder if I look dumb. I bet I do. I bet I look dazed. I bet I look almost offensively casual about the proceedings, someone so out-of-touch with what’s right and what’s wrong that he can’t see the damage he’s doing. I wonder if I look any different today. I pray to Christ that I do.
SPINNING WHEEL OF DEATH
It was Saturday and my parents were in town and we needed something to do. This happened every weekend, with my wife and me feverishly racking our brains to figure out a decent place to take the children. We couldn’t just keep them in the house all day. If we did that, everyone would kill each other by 3:00 P.M. We had to find some new and dazzling adventure to take them on. This is why apple orchards make zillions of dollars. My wife was going out with friends that afternoon. It was up to me and my folks to divert the little ones.
“You guys could take the kids to the Baltimore aquarium,” my wife suggested.