Someone Could Get Hurt: A Memoir of Twenty-First-Century Parenthood (7 page)

A
n old friend was in town and wanted to go to a baseball game, which presented me with a rare chance to get away from the wife and kids for an evening. Any time I’m away from my family for an extended period of time, I lose any sense of common decency and become a vile repository for booze and meat. It’s just ZOMG NO ONE WILL NOTICE ME EATING THIS FISTFUL OF BUTTERSCOTCH CHIPS. It’s a grotesque transformation. One time, I was away on business and I ate three dinners in one night, just because I could. I didn’t even enjoy the third dinner all that much. It was just piling on because I rarely had the chance to pile on, and piling on is fun, like when you empty the entire bottle of hotel shampoo onto your head.

I told my wife I was going out. Asked her, really.

“He’s only gonna be here one night,” I said. “It’s a special occasion.”

“That’s fine,” she said. “Just don’t get too drunk.”

“I won’t.”

“Seriously, don’t get too drunk. Because then you wake up at three
A.M.
to barf in the toilet and that makes me wake up.” My wife did not like having her sleep disrupted.

“Will you leave me alone? You can’t get on my case for drinking too much before I’ve even had a chance to drink too much. Stop ruining my one night out, lady.”

“Just keep it reasonable. Two, three drinks.”

Now two or three drinks is a ridiculously low maximum, one I would surely surpass before the first inning. But I agreed to the limit anyway, even though I had no intention of holding myself to it. I figured that was one of those lies that came standard with a marriage. The wife tells the husband not to drink too much even though she knows he will, and the husband agrees even though he knows that she knows that he’s gonna do fifty shots of Jameson the second he’s out the door. It’s like a running joke.
Good one, honey!

“And try to come home at a reasonable hour,” she said.

“I will.”

I had a habit of pushing curfews. If I said I was gonna be home at ten, that usually meant I came home at eleven. A lot of times, I would call from the bar at ten to say I was “gonna be home soon” while trying to squeeze in one more drink. It wasn’t because I wanted to stay away from home. I loved home. It was because I was out, and sometimes dads feel the urge to maximize the “freedom” because who the hell knows when you’re gonna get another night out. Could be next week. Could be 2035. One time, I got home at 11:00
P.M.
and my wife was dead asleep and I cursed myself for not staying out later since she wouldn’t have noticed.
I could have spent another twenty minutes at the bar, staring at the TV! Dammit!

So I went to the game to meet my old friend—along with a handful of others—and I drank. There was a rain delay, so we went to one of the stadium bars and I drank even more, staring out the windows and watching the entire span of the Anacostia River outside get pounded with fat raindrops. Each beer tasted better than the last. I had so much fun drinking during the rain delay that I was legitimately disappointed when play resumed and I had to take my seat again.
Why are we ruining this fun conversation by watching a baseball game?

The game ended and we went to another bar and I drank more beer because the beer was still making me happy. Then I put in the obligatory phone call home.

“Where are you?” my wife asked.

“I’m coming home soon! Love you! Super love you!”

“Are you drunk? You’re drunk.”

“Drunk with LOVE.”

“Just come home soon.”

“I’ll be right there. Honest.”

I drank one more round before deciding that I had pushed the limits far enough. Fathers are like children in that they’re always scheming to see exactly what they can get away with. I think a lot of men get married so that they’ll have someone around to rebel against. Once you get out of school, there are no more parents or teachers to defy. Who’s left? The old ball and chain.

Prior to the game, I had parked my car at the Metro station and taken the train into town. My reasoning was that this allowed me to drink all I pleased since I had such a short drive home. A mile, perhaps less. I was taking public transit 80 percent of the way to the stadium. Who gave a shit about the other 20 percent? It wasn’t drinking and driving. It was drinking and
parking
. That’s the kind of mentality you develop when you start habitually drinking and driving. You excuse your behavior at every possible turn because it
seems
so reasonable. You get comfortable with bullshitting yourself.

One of my friends offered to give me a ride from the bar downtown and I took her up on it. I told her to drop me at the Metro station and I’d take my car back home.

“I can just take you all the way home and you can get your car later,” she said.

“Nah, nah,” I said. “I want my car.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I want my car.” I didn’t want to get up in the morning and explain to my wife that we had to drive back into town to fetch my car because I was too shitfaced to drive it home that night. Driving it home drunk was easier. Better.

Reluctantly, she took me back to my car and I hopped in, driving away drunk from the Metro garage like I’d done before. A few minutes later, the sirens flashed in my rearview.

•   •   •

T
he 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.

I began drinking and driving regularly after moving from New York to DC when I was twenty-seven. When you live in New York, you never drive, so going out and drinking is never a problem because there’s always a cab or a subway or a bus or your own two feet to get you home. Anyone leaving New York for another American city has to find a way of adjusting to that new city’s driving culture, taking your car with you virtually everywhere you go. I adjusted poorly.

One night in my new hometown, I was out with a friend, with no way home except for my car. I figured that one beer wouldn’t impair me all THAT much, so I had a beer and drove home and everything was hunky-dory. So the next time I went out, I figured that perhaps TWO beers would be just fine. After all, one was no problem. Why not one more? In no time, I was merrily drinking and driving every weekend. I stopped counting drinks. I became convinced that I was good to drive no matter how much I drank. I drank and drove with my wife in the car. A handful of times, I had a couple of drinks and drove with my kids in the car, which was irresponsible but softened my temper when they were kicking my seat. At any kid function like a birthday party or a playdate where booze was served, I drank. Adults need alcohol in that situation. You stop hovering over your kid and have an easier time talking to other parents.
Oh, you’re building a new basement? FASCINATING. Do you have any more of this Cabernet? It’s awesome. GLUG GLUG GLUG.

The longer you go drinking and driving without getting caught, the more you become convinced that you’ll NEVER be caught. Getting caught becomes the domain of other, less professional drunk drivers: teenagers getting loaded on peach schnapps, hobos, athletes who drive too fast, etc. Not you. You wildly underestimate how much the alcohol impairs your abilities behind the wheel.
I’m okay to drive.
I said that a lot, as if my own bullshit assessment mattered.

In the back of my head, I knew it was wrong. There were nights when I would wake up at 3:00
A.M.
to go piss and to down a glass of water and two Advil to prevent a hangover the next morning. And while standing in my bathroom, with nothing but the moonlight illuminating my bloated body, I would think to myself,
Why did I drink and drive like that? What am I, stupid?
In that moment, I would feel a tremendous surge of dark guilt and shame, a sense that I had endangered the welfare of my wife and children for no good reason. It was that sickening feeling you get when you know you’ve done the indefensible.

Then the morning would come and I would forget all about it. Despite the occasional self-induced guilt trip, I came to
enjoy
drinking and driving. Sometimes I would go out and look forward to the drive home more than the actual time spent at the bar. I loved the feeling of the car zooming along when I was buzzed. Sometimes I would blast the music and take curves at a decent speed, pretending I was driving an Alfa Romeo with a cadre of Russian spies hot on my ass.

One spring day, I met some friends after work at a bar to watch basketball and I drank five or six beers. Then I drove home on the Beltway—one of the worst roads in America—and got stuck in traffic. But I couldn’t have cared less about sitting there in that jam. I reveled in being the only person stuck on the road that had no problem with it. I rolled down the window, took in some fresh exhaust, and sang along to the radio without a care in the world. I was having a blast, alone, drunk in my car.

•   •   •

T
he second I knew I was gonna be arrested, I accepted it. There was no frantic search for a penny to suck on or some wild deliberation in my own mind about taking a Breathalyzer. I sat there calmly and waited for my fate to be sealed. Officer Burgess had me step out of the car, walk the line, say the alphabet backward, run an obstacle course, do burpees, and all that other fun stuff. Cops don’t do this to figure out if you’re drunk. They know that the second you roll your window down. I think they do this just for fun, and I can’t blame them. It really builds up the anticipation for administering the Breathalyzer and putting on the cuffs.

“Close your eyes,” he ordered.

“Okay.”

“Now touch your nose.”

I felt my finger touch the point of my nose and I had to suppress my glee. Maybe I was getting away with it.

“Okay, Mr. Magary, I’m gonna have you take a Breathalyzer test.”

Shit.

He led me over to the Breathalyzer and had me blow. Seconds later, he took my hands behind my back and I felt the cuffs go on. They were cool to the touch.

“I’m going to book you for DUI, Mr. Magary.”

“What did the Breathalyzer say?”

“I can’t tell you that right now.”

“Really?” It seemed like such a tease.

“Sorry.”

He helped me into the front seat of his car. I wondered why I didn’t get the backseat treatment.
What if I try to bite his penis off while he’s driving me to the station? There’s nothing stopping me, except for common sense and basic human decency.
I made small talk with the officer, as if we were on a business trip together. “Busy night?” I asked. What a fucking stupid question.