...the perils of drinking and driving

Hell found me. I wasn't looking for it, that black night, but Hell with bat wings scanned the universe, the earth, the state, the city, the street and finally honed in on me. Heaven must have blinked away a tear and, in that miniscule fragment that hovered in time, Hell found me and changed my life.

I am an honorable man. I am a loyal friend, a loving son and a protective brother. I am my sister's knight, my mother's blessing and my father's hope. I am the life of the party and the antidote to anyone's depression. I am a drunk-in-training.

That night in December, the gears of fate cranked into position. All the possible, unsuccessful combinations locked in and paved the path when I left the party. Someone should have stopped me. Well, they did try to stop me but of course, liquor, like delirious happiness, is unstoppable.

I drove slowly with the windows open to release the loaded fumes of my breath. The scent of mints played with Jack Daniels and Coke on the inside of my mouth. Focus on the road. Only two more miles to go. I'm in the neighborhood. No other cars on the road. Piece of cake.

The muscles in my face twitched with the intensity of my focus. False bravado made me look normal. Yeah. I'm cool.

I was two blocks away from my apartment when I felt the bump in the road. Nothing dramatic, just a bit of a thump, and then a subdued dragging sound that I still hear in the silence before I fall asleep.

Someone must have thrown a garbage bag out in the street. On a pristine avenue in an upper-scale neighborhood, people were dumping garbage out on New Year's Eve. Right. Alcohol reigns as the monarch of a ridiculous kingdom, but it was enough to keep me going.  I didn't stop. Somewhere between Jack and a plea to God, I muttered a few prayers under my booze-laden breath and snuck home. In my heart, which was still somewhat intact, I instinctively knew the lump was trouble.

My choice was simple at the time: a driving-while-intoxicated charge, complete with jail, numerous fines and a loss of face...or a dead bag of garbage buried in the anonymous graveyard of my own memory. The choice was easy.

I felt blessed when I hit my warm bed, thinking God the Merciful had recognized the goodness in my heart and spared me. My life would continue as it was, after all. Just a bump in the road.

Somewhere between six and seven the next morning, the pounding assaulted my head, causing it to splinter in a few different directions. There's nothing worse than waking up to a normal day, taking that first breath of consciousness and then remembering a reality with dread, hoping beyond all hope that what you are about to remember is, in fact, nothing more than a dream. Unfortunately, the pounding on my front door was beyond a dream.

Still groggy from all of the booze even hours later, I got out of bed and staggered to open the door. Two policemen greeted me and threw questions at me before I could get my bearings. To this day I don't remember their exact words but I do remember recoiling in horror inwardly at the thrust of their interrogation. Every single, solitary hair from my scalp to my groin and down the front of my legs strained in an effort to fly off my body and disintegrate somewhere in the morning air.

It wasn't a bag of garbage after all. And even worse, it wasn't a neighborhood dog. The police were looking for the person who hit and killed someone's seventeen-year-old son on the road on New Year's Eve.

The mind is a silly thing at times, and at that moment I remembered an old friend of mine who used to cheat on his wife on a regular basis. His words of advice, or a cheater's hymn, were to deny, deny and deny some more. I followed suit that morning and denied all of the allegations the police suggested.

They politely asked me to step outside to take a look at the front of my car. I agreed hesitantly, knowing I had no other choice if I were truly innocent. My t-shirt was billowing in and out with the pumping of my heart and I knew the guilt I was wearing was apparent in the motion.

What are the odds of finding the car that killed the boy who walked the streets on the New Year's Eve when the Devil was waiting? As in a game of spades, Satan pulled the trump card.

There on my license plate, eye-level with a human being on his knees, was the splatter of dried blood and brain matter, smeared in a macabre landscape of a young man's life.

It didn't matter much to me, months later at my trial, when the autopsy revealed drugs in the boy's system. As they restructured the scene, authorities surmised the young victim, on foot, apparently lost consciousness on the road and only woke up for the second or two that it took for me to smash right into his upturned face.

It didn't matter to me that the lawyers jawed on and on about the fact that the young man would have died from an overdose in any case. I had to face the twin set of parents doubled over in grief at my trial...my parents and his parents, each caught up in the loss of a son.

Just a bump in the road and Hell found me.