the destroyer > the vent > Jemma G. Hovel

THE OTHER DRINKING PROBLEM

Two months ago, I paid $40 for the privilege of two and a half hours of semi-public scolding in a stuffy courtroom. I definitely deserve some version of reprimand—I don’t think anyone would argue that drinking and driving should go unpunished—but I spent the whole evening seething, thanks to an opening comment from the judge who presided over all of this: “Every month I keep hoping that something will have changed, but every month this courtroom is packed.”

He hoped? He HOPED? What the fucking fuck. I’ve been hoping for years, and if I’ve learned anything, it’s that hope is pretty fucking ineffectual.

Hope doesn’t change anything. It’s action that changes things.

What followed was a barrage of statistics that I suppose were meant to shame me. I don’t remember a single one of them. All I could think was, Yeah, I fucked up, but the blame isn’t mine alone—you powerful hopers better shoulder some of this blame yourselves. Some judge and some concerned mothers want to stop drunk driving? Well here are a few thoughts that might help them out:

Give drinkers some attractive options. And god damn it, advertise them. Did I know that this town offered free bus service at bar time? No. I’ve lived here for a year, and it took some hunting on my part to find that one out. Is it convenient? Not really, but I bet if the city took the ungodly amount of money they claim to spend on drunk drivers every year and funneled a fair amount of that into a public information campaign and more than an hourly run up until bar time each weekend night, then I bet that courtroom would empty out a bit.

Let me throw out a few other of ideas for city planners everywhere: a government-subsidized, late night cab service. A subsidized organization that employs people to drive you and your car home. (The last time I took a cab home, I returned the next morning to find a farmers’ market sprung up around my car, and had to wait five hours move it.) Hell, we’re in a “green” city—pay some chump on a trike to cart the puking sorority girls and thick-necked frat boys home. Seriously, this is not my job—maybe somebody with an understanding of the resources at hand could throw together a really comprehensive list. And for god’s sake, advertise how expensive a DUI actually is—I’ve spent upwards of $2,500, and that’s with the low-income adjustments. Better yet, advertise the minimum 12-weeks of weekly group rehab, complete with random urinalyses.

In fact, the group therapy is probably the most demeaning part of the whole process, because it’s so insulting. I’m greeted each time I walk into the dingy basement room where our therapy is held with a poster that reads, “Call Me Crash: Once a model, Denise Wagoner is now blind, disfigured, and brain damaged, the result of a drunk driving crash. The driver was not sentenced to jail and did not receive a fine: her punishment was to live in a world of darkness. Denise was the drunk driver.” No detail has been spared on the photos, either—a swollen bloody face features prominently. (Actual poster can be purchased here!: http://www.drunkbusters.com/product-info.php?crash-poster-pid65.html)

I doubt my counselors have anything approaching formal training, and as a Future Scientist of America, I cringe when they attempt to describe the mechanisms by which the body processes alcohol, or any drug for that matter. How many times have I awkwardly sat in the gray vinyl chairs watching as the chunky lady asks a college pot-head, “Do you want mutant sperm? Deformed sperm that can’t swim because their tails are all effed up?” and contorts her hands to demonstrate… what? The sperm itself? How a child born of a mutant sperm will appear in her middle-age?

They’re just spraying it everywhere— somewhere along the line they read something about the negative consequences of alcohol, but it’s clear that they don’t grasp how any of it fits together. We’re told that “alcohol consumption leads to fatty liver which leads to cirrhosis, and then if you have even one drink you can die.” Ok, but why? And what is fatty liver anyway? I guess explaining that alcohol is preferentially metabolized by the liver over the fatty acids it normally runs on, which can lead to a build-up of said fatty acids is just too far beyond comprehension.

My fellow ne’er-do-wells run the gamut. Most are dumb college kids who had the misfortune to be caught smoking pot outside, or who walked down the street swigging from an open container. However we’ve got our very own nurse who’s addicted to narcotics, an elderly cirrhotic, and a meth addict who went to the Scientologists for his initial detox. It would be easy to judge these people, but I actually like them the best. It’s the college kids that I hate. I hate the sorority girl who says that now that she can’t drink, all she does is shop all the time. And her friend who responded to a critique of “The Little Mermaid,” by screaming, “You’re ruining my childhood!!!!” I hate the clearly gay, doughboy-esque, ex-Naval cadet who likes to talk about how many times he’s been to Disneyland. I hate the Australian kid who passed around a shitty poem he wrote with accompanying shitty pencil drawing of a boy and girl embracing each other on Valentine’s Day. If I have to be here, I want to be with some honest people who understand that they are fucked up and want to learn how to live around that. I’m fucked up, too. I want to learn how to live with my fucked-up-ed-ness, too. I don’t want to listen to pissy, entitled little children whine about how they don’t belong here, and how much they hate every minute. Whenever they open their Starbucks-holes, I imagine how they’ll look once the sheen of youth wears off, because I know they would hate it—me thinking of them ugly.

Rather than have a structure, each week’s meeting resembles an information session that rapidly devolves into reiterations of the question, “What is it going to take to get through to you?” My answer is: it’s going to take you doing your job in a less haphazard manner.

Which turns out to be my complaint with this whole process—everyone, at every step of the way, needs to do their job better. Because right now, the myth that getting caught in a drinking-related crime represents a vast personal failure is wearing thin, and those in power are resting idly on it to absolve themselves of having come up with scant solutions to this societal woe. Some people with the means to effect change better start using their brains to stop the problem before it starts, rather than daydreaming about a mythical alcohol and car-free nirvana and breaking out the beating sticks when reality refuses to measure up.