Previous entries in the series can be found here.

I am superstitious, so that “last” scares me. My last DUI, please Jesus, knock on wood, was in the late summer of 1998. I was driving a white 1968 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, Randy’s “project car” at the time, home from the Dead Mule Social Club of downtown Chapel Hill, where we’d been putting back the Maker’s. Randy himself was sunk in a wordless bubble of booze in the tiger-print covered passenger seat next to me. Or really, “passenger side” – we could have fit another two or three people up there with us, easy.

It had been a lean summer. We lived on eggs, cheese, tortillas, vegetables from other people’s gardens, and a salsa Randy made with a mortar and pestle from dried arbol chilies, newly available in places like Pittsboro and Snow Camp. I love salsa de arbol to this day, and Tacombi’s is not as good as Randy’s was. We couldn’t spend much on food, because the two of us were living on what I earned as a gardener at a picturesque local “retirement village” that featured mascot cows, plus the income from whatever mechanic or handyman jobs Randy could scrape up. And although we weren’t paying rent, spending most of our time house- or dog- or garden-sitting or just plain couch-surfing, our liquor bills were high. Randy had been a local musician of regional fame, so people did still buy him drinks, which helped. Or not, taking the longer view, I guess.

This night, as sometimes happened, I was playing the role of the responsible one, tough for me to pull off next to anyone but a knee-walking drunk, which Randy was at the time. Part of the evening’s intended mission had been to retrieve my car, which we had left in town the night before for some reason, probably having to do with its mysterious headlight flicker. But here we were at closing time, and only one of us could drive. Not legally: physically walk to the car, open the (massive) door and fit the key into the ignition.

Here is probably where I should mention my sobriety date, which is January 11, 1999. Which does not excuse any of the events of the previous fifteen years, including those of this evening. I mention it to reassure those who might be terrified reading this. Now I don’t drink and I also don’t drive, because I live in New York City. I did some wretched things when I was drinking, and I do not look back on them fondly. Some of it is funny, but funny in the way it was when Chris sat on Adriana’s dog and killed it.*

That kind of funny.

So Randy, our hero, is slumped against his door, about five feet from my perch behind the big white wheel. That summer he wore white off-brand t-shirts we bought at Rose’s (ten shirts for three dollars), and threw them away as they grew filthy while he labored under various ne’er-do-well vehicles. Sometimes they’d be worth washing once, but not often. They were covered in black used motor oil, fresh golden motor oil, candy-colored antifreeze and transmission fluid. He usually had a pack of Luckies rolled up in the sleeve, and Red Hat brand navy work pants riding low, inevitably, on his skinny frame. Belts were hard to come by, for some reason, and that was fine by me, strangely, because they gave me the creeps.

Belts left in a loop on a chair or the floor, or a spoon resting in an odd place, still made me shudder. Randy hadn’t used since we’d moved in together, and drugs were only ever a chaser for me, a sidebar to the deep, full-throttle romance I had with alcohol, but heroin was Randy’s first love, so I was watchful.

That summer we sometimes swapped one house-sitting gig for another, our favorite being a white and blue concrete villa belonging to artist friends, a place that looked as if a chunk of Greek fishing town had been airlifted to a few hilltop acres of Bear Creek, NC. One night Randy added a habañero pepper from their garden to the evening’s entree, Kraft Deluxe Shells with Velveeta, and it was much too hot to eat. He meticulously removed every shred, but the pasta itself had soaked up the pepper and remained wickedly hot. And orange. That summer was green and gorgeous; the hummingbirds fought over the trumpet vine on the arbor in front of the house, and I admired the lush hardwood forest edging the meadows of Chatham County from the open windows of an old car as we circled from one borrowed dream of domesticity to another. Randy was on hiatus from music as well as dope, and I hardly picked up a camera anymore, having left most of my artistic aspirations behind when I left New York. We were almost thirty, and the extent of our collective ambition was to pay rent.

For a year after we got sober, I would lie curled on Randy’s chest as he slept, our obese cat snuggled between us, and feel that we were floating on some becalmed sea, that the three of us were safely on a raft at last after a lifetime of dog-paddling. But on this drive home in Randy’s monstrous white whale of a car, the sea is dark, broken only by little shards of refracted light that signify nothing, no stars to steer by, no pier lights. I will not pump up the brakes headed downhill in this beast, I say, there’s no one out here anyway — headed downhill out of town on the back roads, one light turns and I run it and the two that follow and I see the cruiser pull up behind me as I start to climb the hill on Jones Ferry Road. In that moment I hold my breath, and the lights come on behind the two of us in the huge white car, which is uninsured and still registered to its deceased previous owner.

Randy shakes his head as I start to pull over, saying “Nahhh, it’s not you” and I paused long enough to look at him scornfully before rolling down the window for my arresting officer, who seems to be 19. Of course I don’t remember what ridiculous thing I said. I handed over my license and whatever spurious paperwork was in the glove box — maybe the title? — and indicated the car’s owner, who had settled into a posture of relatively upright silence.

Getting out of the car, I took care to mention that I’d been taking antibiotics for a UTI, as I’d heard a story at a bar once about maybe getting out of a DUI because…the details were fuzzy, but it was the kind of information I tried to hold on to, just in case. At that moment his supervisor pulled up in back of him, so I now stood in a carnival of lights under the soft, dark late-summer sky. This second cop was older than the first, and had some commanding-officer flair, including an impressive hat, and directed that I be blood-tested rather than Breathalyzed. I remember doing an abbreviated, perfunctory version of the field sobriety test, and that the 19-year-old cop started to cuff me in back but thought better of it and cuffed me in front, and that I looked up from my wrists to see Randy watching the proceedings, leaning against the back of the Caddy, arms folded, and squinting into the headlights of the cruiser. He walked about five miles into town that night, to the friend’s house he guessed I’d wind up at, only to get turned away at the door as the no-good junkie he’d so recently been.

At that moment I was still waiting to have my blood drawn, peaceably watching the clock above the TV in the emergency room and hoping my BAC might drop below .08 by the time they were ready for me. As he drove me to my friend’s, after a last stop for fingerprinting and turning in my license, the cop was moved to apologize to me for the evening’s adventure. Such were my good-girl skills, I guess, which were certainly all I had.

“I just, I thought you were going to hit me!” he said, his voice briefly relapsing into adolescence. The Caddy, about a lane and a quarter wide, had nearly grazed his cruiser on my weaving way out of town. I was driving a vehicle that couldn’t pass any kind of inspection, with a blood-alcohol level of .12 two hours after being arrested, and the cop apologized to me for pulling me over. Four months later, I would be sitting in Randy’s lap in the front seat of another old car, a Valiant this time, wearing my dead grandmother’s mink coat for warmth, and crying. I had gone with him to an AA meeting; I hated it; I was terrified. Lucky for me it was Randy I was sobbing on, who sat quietly with his long Popeye arms around me, eight days sober himself, and asked: “Haven’t you suffered enough, sweetie? Don’t you think it’s enough?”

The fallout lingered vaguely, anticlimactically. I lost my license that night, for 30 days, and my case was postponed until after I had quit drinking. This was lucky, because the District Attorney who agreed to let me off on a charge of Careless and Reckless Driving asked to see my one-year chip as proof that I was sober. It is a thing remarked on to great and often irritating effect in AA meetings, the idea of “chickens coming home to roost,” but it’s true that I was mysteriously protected from the consequences of my stupidity for more than a year, while I patched some kind of life together.

And that my first DUI, from sophomore year, which had slipped through the cracks of a state-to-state license change and never been seen or heard from since, just popped up in a background check for a job in New York. It’s okay, though.

*A Sopranos reference. Somewhere, sometime, some junkie has definitely done this, but I have no firsthand knowledge of it ever happening. Thankfully.

This post is a part of Step Out Of The Car, Please, a recurring and unglamorous series about DUIs and drinking problems that runs every Thursday. If you are interested in submitting a story either anonymously or under your own name for consideration, contact [email protected]. 

 [Image via Flickr]