My first night there was in August. There was no air-conditioning and the opening speaker was an elderly man who wore open-toed shoes despite having hideous, gnarled old-man feet. I tried desperately to avoid staring at them, but they reached into my line of vision, following me everywhere I went. For reasons I didn’t understand, he spent half an hour talking about his wife nearly getting hit by a bus. And while I sympathized with him for having a wife who nearly got hit by a bus, I really wanted him to get to the fucking point. I began to worry that AA was less a refuge for alcoholics than for lonely people. Is this all people do here? They come here to bore other people with tedious bullshit?
But then he began to talk about his addiction. His intervention was on a beach. His wife and daughter were the only attendees. Whenever he traveled, he had to look up the nearest meeting because he didn’t want to fall back into the hole, to ruin the effort his family had put into saving him by the ocean. Other people soon chimed in, and everything about AA began to make sense. Many of the alcohol education students despised the AA requirement because it further inconvenienced them, and I saw more than a few of them sign the attendance sheet passed around in every AA meeting and then get up to leave halfway through. But I didn’t because it seemed like a huge insult to the people who CHOSE to be there, the people who went to AA because they knew they would die if they didn’t.
One night, after a woman in the meeting asked me who I was and why I was there, I told everyone about my arrest. I told them about the nights when I would get loaded and happily drive home.
“I don’t know why I liked doing that,” I told them.
There was another old man in our meetings, a man who came to each meeting wearing a finely tailored business suit. He turned to me and spoke slowly, in small sips.
“I’m glad you’re here tonight, Drew,” he said. “Because you’re not alone. I’ve been an alcoholic for forty years. My parents were alcoholics. My grandparents were alcoholics. My four brothers are alcoholics. I have a disease. And I know that, one day, this disease will kill me.” The way he said that last sentence, I didn’t doubt him in the slightest. “And I loved drinking and driving. Adored it. Lived for it. I can’t drive by a liquor store on the way home now because if I do, I’ll pull over and drink and drive on the way home. I know I will. I want to do it as much as I ever have. This meeting . . . this is what’s keeping me alive, keeping me breathing. So I’m glad you’re here.”
“I’m not gonna lie to you,” I told him. “When I’ve done the required amount of AA meetings, I don’t know that I’ll be back here. I’m not ready to brand myself an alcoholic, even if I know that’s a typical sign of denial. I made a terrible mistake and I want to learn from it. And I promise you, if it happens again, I will be here, and it won’t be because the court ordered me here. It’ll be because I know. I’ll be ready to say to you that I’m definitely an alcoholic, and that I don’t have the power to stop it.”
“Well, good luck to you, Drew,” he said. “I hope you never have to come back. I hope you don’t have what I have.”
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 coul
dn’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.
“How much does it cost?” I asked.
We hopped online and the admission fee was $28 per person. Kids were NOT free, which was bullshit. I immediately pictured plunking down $112 and watching my kids demand to leave after five minutes of staring at clown fish.
“That can’t be right,” I said. “Twenty-eight bucks? That’s insane. Who can pay that?”
“Jenny down the street got a family membership. They go all the time.”
“What does that cost?”
“A hundred fifty, I think.”
“JEEEEEESUS. Is that per person?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Why does everything have to cost something? This is crap.”
I always had a hard time coming up with an excursion that was new and interesting and didn’t cost irritating amounts of money. In the end, we usually succumbed to wandering aimlessly around a mall, or going to a movie, or attempting (and failing) to eat lunch at a modestly priced restaurant. I looked up movie listings and there was nothing bland and shitty enough to be appropriate for little children.
“You could just stay here and do a craft project,” my wife said.
“No way.” I wasn’t the kind of parent who could come up with brilliant craft projects for my children to do for five hours straight. Family magazines are littered with these ideas. MAKE A PIRATE BOAT OUT OF OLD MILK CARTONS! No fucking way. I wasn’t gonna sit at the dining room table for that long cutting out pictures of parrots and getting dabs of Elmer’s glue on my elbows.
“Oh, let’s just take them to the playground,” my mom suggested. So we did.
I have a vision in my head of what the perfect playground is like. It rests on a twelve-inch-thick cushion of mulch—that soft, recycled tire mulch that would be fun to jump on while stoned. And the dream playground equipment is never wet from rain or morning dew, because dew ruins everything. There are swings—many of them, including big kid swings, baby swings with nice wide foot holes that never trap baby shoes, and none of those evil plastic yellow swings that are meant for handicapped kids but are often occupied by fat, tired parents looking for a place to sit. The swings at my dream playground swing themselves so that I don’t tire out after five seconds of pushing my kid high enough to kick the clouds. And there are enough swings to go around so that I don’t have to worry about other shithead parents being oblivious and letting their kid hog the swing for eight hours straight. You can try to stand with your kid near these parents and get them to overhear you saying, “Now, Johnny, as soon as this nice young lad is off the swing, you’ll get your turn,” and it won’t matter. Those people never seem to take your subtle cue. They’re off in Shitheadland, never to return.
Our playground for the day was not my dream playground. Much more of a Shitheadland playground. It had four swings, which wasn’t much but at least gave it Real Playground status. But it had many other unwelcome hazards. There was a merry-go-round, which was not a carousel but rather a giant metal plate with handles that kids used to subject each other to gravitational forces of up to 5 Gs. There was a play structure that rose up ten feet in the air, with wide openings along the barriers that allowed for toddlers to fall to their death at any moment. The structure was labeled for kids five to twelve. Well, what am I supposed to do with a two-year-old, Mr. Playground Designer? Have him build mud huts over to the side?
To get to the playground, we had to walk along a busy street and cross under a filthy highway overpass. My daughter, now five, took her bike and blasted ahead of us, with me shouting at her to stay on the innermost portion of the sidewalk so that a bus driver wouldn’t run her down. She didn’t listen to me, but I kept shouting at her anyway because my parents were there and I wanted them to feel like I had control of the situation. My son, now two, trailed behind her on a tricycle. I occasionally used my foot to guide him away from the road, like a shopping cart with a bad wheel.
The entrance to the playground was blocked by a series of bikes and scooters lying on the ground. I cleared them out of the way so that my kids could run through. Then I looked around for the children who’d left their bikes lying around so that I could murder them with my icy stare. No such luck. My parents and I took to a nearby bench that was already capable of causing third-degree burns because the entire playground was exposed to the sun. My daughter went running onto a rope bridge. My son followed her and immediately got his feet tangled in the ropes and was stuck on the bridge, crying. I assume the rope bridge was added to the playground at the last moment by some kind of giant spider goddess who needed a surefire trap for luring human children.
I untangled my son and returned to my spot on the bench next to my folks, who offered a running analysis of the children as they watched them in action.
“She plays so well by herself,” my mom said of the girl.
“Thanks, Mom.”
“She’s very tactile, you know? She’s very interested in the texture of things. Maybe she’ll be a designer. And I love how her hair bounces.”
“That is a great head of hair,” my dad agreed.
Ten minutes after we arrived, a middle-aged mother showed up at the playground dressed like a Turkish hooker. She had long black hair and was wearing a tight blue tank with painted-on skinny capris and platform shoes that sank down three inches into the mulch. I’m certain that she had a speed dating session set up at the local Romano’s Macaroni Grill at happy hour.
This woman was clearly violating protocol by not wearing yoga pants and a hoodie to the playground. But I didn’t say anything because that wasn’t my business. She kept chasing her kid around in her giant platform shoes in front of us, and I tried not to stare at her even though her outfit was basically a giant sandwich board that said “STARE AT ME” in block letters. I kept it to myself, which would have worked out splendidly if my parents hadn’t been sitting next to me.
My parents live in a very quiet part of northwest Connecticut, the kind of place where you can go weeks on end without seeing another live body. Spotting a provocatively dressed human being counts as a real event for them, and so they began a running commentary on Turkish Hooker while I was trying to ignore her and make sure my son didn’t get tangled up in the rope bridge for the ninth time.
“Look at that woman, Drew,” my mom said.
“What? What woman?”
“That woman right there. Boy, she’s heading out tonight.”
“Oh Christ. She can hear you, Mom.”
“Nonsense. Look at those pants. How do you get pants like that on?”
Meanwhile, the surface temperature of the playground was rising to roughly a million degrees, and I had lost track of my son. I scanned for him, but Turkish Hooker kept flouncing around in front of us, running her fingers through her hair like she was on the set of a goddamn L’Oréal ad. I stood up in a panic because any time I lose sight of my children at a playground I assume some deranged pederast has grabbed them and thrown them into a windowless van.
Then I realized my son was sitting in the tunnel slide, only he couldn’t exit the tunnel slide because a ten-year-old was hanging out at the bottom of it, like a complete dick. Downward sliders should always have the right-of-way, but there are any number of older kids who have no respect for matters of slide etiquette. I spotted my son’s shadowy lump through the opaque plastic and reassured him.
“Don’t worry, son. You’ll be able to get out once this nice boy moves out of the way.” I said the last sentence extra loud so that the ten-year-old would take the hint. I fully expected
him to tell me to go fuck myself because ten-year-olds do that sort of thing. Instead, he got up immediately.
“Sorry about that.”
“Oh, no problem,” I said. “Thank you for moving.”
And I was heartened for a moment. A playground, when you think about it, is something of a miracle. There are any number of opportunities for children to inflict fatal harm upon other children they don’t know. They can push each other off structures. They can punch each other. They can strangle each other with swing chains. But that rarely happens, and when the ten-year-old made way for my son, I found myself marveling at how all these tiny, immature people were able to coexist in this spot in relative peace.
Then I noticed my daughter had made a new friend and that the new friend’s dad was actively playing with both of them, which made me look terrible because I wasn’t interacting with my daughter at all. This happens at playgrounds. If one parent does something, you follow his cue like a sheep. If she checks her phone, you check your phone. If he starts clapping and saying “YAY” while swinging his kid, you do the same. I wanted to have an equal presence in this impromptu playdate, only I had to keep an eye on my son and another eye on Turkish Hooker because my parents were demanding that I stare at her. Then I spotted a rumpled man walking around the playground with no child and I quietly feared that he was a serial killer hunting for victims. I needed six eyes in my head to keep tabs on everything.
My daughter ended up on the dreaded merry-go-round, which was now loaded with older kids. One twelve-year-old was spinning it using every last ounce of strength, like he was spinning the showcase wheel on The Price Is Right. There was another shithead kid wearing a tie-dyed shirt leaning off the side of the merry-go-round and deliberately allowing his own head to drag around on the mulch. There was no parent for this child anywhere in sight. The kid was clearly an orphan who had been left there to sleep under the climbing wall and forage for wild berries. His empty head doubled as a spinning weapon for any small child trying to approach the ride. I saw one kid try to grab the spinning wheel of death and she nearly had her arm torn out of the socket thanks to the centrifugal forces at work. Suddenly, my warm and fuzzy feelings about the playground being a utopia of cooperation faded away. I had to save my daughter from the merry-go-round before it came off its moorings and went flying off to the goddamn moon. I tried to address all the kids on the merry-go-round en masse.