MY YOUTH ENDED UNDER THE fluorescent lights of a jail cell as my body quivered with dry sobs of shame.
I suppose people mark the end of youth in different ways, if at all: the first day of basic training, college commencement, the birth of your first child, the first day of your first “real job.” For me, it was DUI arrest number two: the end of Getting Away With It. It was then that I began to try to be a good person and make up for all the bad stuff I had done but hadn’t been caught for—things my parents had raised me to know were wrong but I did anyway. I knew full well how I’d gotten to this spot but I lay there on the bunk trying to find some better explanation.
The cops busted me before our night even got started. One minute I was peeing my name in the snow, and the next I was in the back of a squad car, staring out the windshield, knowing I’d fucked up bad. Again.
Bode and I had finished a few pitchers after our shift at the bar, then stopped to see my pal Jayson, another bartender. He served me the last beer I’d ever drink.
Two twenty-three-ounce Budweisers, one for me, one for Bode. We made half-formed evening plans across the bar, Jayson half-listening to us, half-concentrating on the drink orders piling up from customers, every few minutes mouthing off to us when he stepped across the bar to hand drinks to a waiting server. Cozy golden bar lights, bubbly pilsner getting warm in the tall glass but not faster than I can drink it, big gulps, stubbing cigarettes out in the ashtray, put some bills down on the bar even though the check never comes when your friend is bartending, okay, see you later.
Back in the car, Bode fishtailed around corners through six inches of fast-falling snow, back to his house for a sweater. I waited in the car, parked on the street, engine on.
“Let’s go, Bode,” I said. Honk, honk. “Come on, man.” I put the gearshift in drive, let the car roll forward a few feet, whoa, better jump over to the driver’s seat and hit the brake, and put it back in park. Red and blue flashers lit up the street, bouncing off the snow. My heart jumped into my throat, then dropped into my stomach.
“Do you have a license?” a cop yelled through the open window.
“I don’t, sir,” I said. I was fucked. By then, I already knew how handcuffs fit. Real tight.
The cops had followed Bode’s swerving tracks all the way to the house and found me moving the car a couple of feet down the curb as he stood on the porch. Bode ran through the snowy yard and tried to explain the situation to the unsympathetic officers as I stared out the windshield and decided that if I believed in God, he hated me.
They took me to the police station so we could all have a good time watching me fail at walking heel-to-toe in a straight line. I blew a .12 into the Breathalyzer and immediately demanded they give me a blood test. We drove to the hospital, and three of them watched a nurse suck a fat finger of blood out of the crook of my elbow while I tried to look tough. I wished they would just shoot me so I wouldn’t have to face my mom and dad.
I was almost a year out of college. I was supposed to be an accountant or an advertising salesman or something, not a screwup, a two-time loser. They pushed me back into the puke-, piss-, and blood-proof plastic seat in the back of the squad car, wrists cuffed tight like a real live violent criminal. I had all night in jail to think about what to say to my parents the next day.
I shivered on a concrete bed in a holding cell, looking at a diamond-wire-glass window with my name and birthdate scrawled on it in dryerase marker—Brendan Patrick Leonard, 01/16/79—just above $3,000, the amount of my bond. I got a lump in my throat thinking about my dad looking at a seven-pound, six-ounce Brendan Patrick Leonard through a similar window in a hospital in Le Mars, Iowa, wondering if I’d become a doctor or a lawyer or a professional baseball player when I grew up. I wanted to dig a hole in the earth and hide in it until nobody remembered me anymore.
The next day, after a series of phone calls, I sat watching an indestructible TV with a couple of guys who had robbed someone the night before. My friend Dave was able to bail me out at noon with $300 that he knew I couldn’t pay him back. I spent the rest of the day and night in my bedroom, smoking cigarettes and sitting out a blizzard. I mustered the courage to call my mom in the afternoon, and she wailed with disappointment. My heart broke when I told her, just like I knew it would.
She said, “You’ve got to get some help,” and she was right. If I got arrested for drunk driving one more time, I was headed to prison, not jail.
Later that weekend, after a depressing lunch, Dad and I stood outside my apartment, the snow from the blizzard still blanketing our world.
“Well,” he said. “We better get you to Montana.”
I’d been accepted to the University of Montana’s graduate journalism program the year before, but had deferred my enrollment. Dad loved the West and probably thought it would be a good idea to get me away from all my drinking buddies in Iowa.
I tried to say, “Yeah,” but it came out as a sob. I gave him a hug, fighting back tears. I stared at a spot on the ground, trying to swallow a giant knot. There wasn’t anything he could do to make it better.
More than a decade later, my uncle Danny told me that he and Dad had been talking about parenting, in regards to one of my cousins and some trouble he’d been having in school, or maybe his marriage. Danny said that Dad, mostly quiet for the whole conversation, had suddenly interjected, “Well, sometimes you gotta let ’em make their own mistakes.”
My dad never hovered over my brother and me, never overreached or made decisions for us, never pushed us too hard in any direction. He was next to me when I landed on my head in my first big bicycle crash, and he took me to the emergency room. He was there when I launched off too-big ski jumps too fast, scattering gear everywhere as I slammed into the snow. He was at every basketball game, watching me turn the ball over too many times, and at every baseball game when a grounder went between my legs. And he listened to all my stories when I was a young, dumb teenager who thought I knew everything.
As a kid, all I ever wanted was some good stories to tell people, some adventures. As an adult, my first real adventures were in bars: How many could we go to in one night, or one day? How many hours could we drink before we passed out? How many shots could we buy the new guy before he fell out of his chair? What about that nightclub across town, or the VFW fifteen miles down the road, or both? When we were done drinking, how fast could we make our car go, and how much stuff could we hit with it? And how many girls could we talk to, and how dumb could we act, and how close could we get to real trouble before we went home for the night? I did all those things and told the stories over and over at the next party the next weekend or on the next barstool.
For a while, it went okay, and I imagine my dad didn’t worry too much. I was out there making my own mistakes. But this last one, which made Mom cry, making me cry, I think that might have stung Dad a little more than all the rest of them.
Besides taking it a little too far in high school and spending more time in detention than kids on the honor roll usually did, I was a solid student—3.89 GPA, 31 ACT score—could run a pretty quick hundredmeter dash, had good friends, and got along with most people pretty well. But even if you’re fine with letting your kids make their own mistakes, I’d guess you still want to do anything to keep them from turning their whole life into one giant sad mistake.
I wrote the professors at the University of Montana, and Dad put some plane tickets to Missoula for the two of us on his credit card. Our campus visit would be our first big adventure to the mountains since a decade earlier, for a ski trip in Colorado. It was the nuclear option, sending his youngest son thirteen hundred miles away in the hopes it would fix him. With that trip, though neither of us knew it at the time, he opened the door for real adventures, for far bigger dreams than I could cook up over pitchers of beer in Iowa. But before I left, I had to go to court-ordered rehab.
In the office at the Horizons Family-Centered Recovery Program, I told Mark, the counselor, that I’d already gone three months without a drink. Since my arrest, I’d waited for an open slot in the program. Mark looked a bit like those old portraits of Jesus, but with a trimmed beard and clean hair. He was a patient listener, always making sure I’d finished before he responded.
I figured as long as I always had a pack of cigarettes and a pot of coffee nearby and never had to leave the house except to go to work, I’d be just fine. I was still bartending, albeit mostly during the lunch shift, when only one or two people per day actually ordered a drink. Plus, I could go without the hassle of hitching a twenty-minute ride to the medical center four nights a week and having to restructure my work schedule around it. Hey, boss, I have to get someone to take over my regular Thursday night shift because I have to go to rehab.
“You won’t make it long white-knuckling it,” Mark said. “Not on your own. A person who gets two drunk-driving arrests in one year—blowing more than twice the legal limit at one—is not the type of person the state lets off without sending them to treatment. You need to work the program. The twelve steps have been proven to be successful. You can go ahead and keep your job at the bar, though.”
“The program,” I said, “is three hours a night, four nights a week, for five weeks?”
“Five weeks is the minimum,” Mark said. “You can’t white-knuckle it.”
Had I been smarter and trying to talk Mark into please, please, please letting me into the treatment center instead of trying to convince him I didn’t need any help at all, I would have shared as many of the following items as he had time to listen to:
•I got drunk for the first time when I was fifteen years old.
•My mother’s father was an alcoholic. My father’s father may have been, but I don’t know because he died of tuberculosis when my father was eight.
•When I went out, as many nights as I could, I’d have between twelve and twenty-five drinks. I rarely left bars until closing time, except when thrown out for falling off my stool.
•Lately, I had taken to leaving the bar about a half hour before it closed to buy a bottle of red wine, which I would drink at my kitchen table, while listening to Irish drinking songs and smoking cigarettes. Sometimes I’d start crying and end up sleeping on the kitchen floor until my roommate woke me up so he could make breakfast in the morning.
•I had been in four one-car accidents in the past two years while driving drunk, not counting all the shit I had driven my car into on purpose.
•I drove drunk all the time, and usually kept drinking while I drove.
•I had blacked out dozens of times.
•I had woken up in the morning with women who were not my girlfriend, Amy, women I didn’t recognize. Amy and I were often on the rocks, so I didn’t beat myself up.
•I was uncomfortable in most social situations, unless it was acceptable for me to be drinking.
•If Mark had asked me about the last time I felt happy, I would have told him about the last time I went drinking with my good friends.
But I was not smarter, and I did not feel grateful to the state of Iowa for opening my eyes to the possibilities of substance abuse treatment. In fact, I felt quite cheated. I was twenty-three years old, and I had to give up drinking for a year. If I violated my probation, I would get six months in jail. Granted, I would find it a lot easier to not give in to the temptation of booze there.
Some of my friends were growing up and not drinking on weeknights, but they still had more than a few beers after work on Friday. The state had told me that I had to quit, that I couldn’t legally go on doing my favorite thing in the world. That didn’t seem fair. I had been legally drinking for only twenty-five months. What did they expect me to do with my time? Needlepoint? Golf? Go to church?
Still, I didn’t have any other options, so I decided I’d quit for one year. It wasn’t worth the risk. After a year, I could do whatever I wanted. Maybe I’d even have a new outlook on drinking and I’d be able to keep it under control a little bit more—maybe go out and have three or four beers instead of fifteen. If not, who cares? All I had to do then was stay out of the driver’s seat and I wouldn’t be in any trouble. I didn’t tell anyone else that my no-drinking plan was temporary, but I was already looking forward to being welcomed back to my favorite bars in one year.
Amy and I were in another hazily defined stage of our on-again, offagain relationship. I’d first noticed her in my information systems class my junior year at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. She was pretty, with short blonde hair, and she always wore black or gray. A few weeks later, I offered to buy her a drink in a bar, the first time I’d done that for a girl, hoping to go on a date or two. We became a couple a few weeks before I turned twenty-one, when my drinking turned the corner from fun to disastrous. We drank together, sometimes just the two of us, sometimes with my friends. Some nights she babysat us after we’d already had enough to drink to handicap ourselves—the kind of thing you do when you think you’re invincible.
She moved to Omaha just before my senior year, and we took turns driving the four hours to see each other on weekends. If it was my turn, I usually picked up a twelve-pack of some Budweiser at the QuikTrip off the Merle Hay exit on I-80 to get me through the last two hours of the trip, arriving at her apartment with six empty cans in the backseat and hoping she’d drive us to the bar.
In the early years of our relationship, I wasn’t good to her. Sober, I opened doors, listened, and tried to be the kind of guy a girl would want to be with. But drunk and a couple hundred miles away, I didn’t often act like a guy with a girlfriend.
The day after my first DUI arrest, I showed up in Omaha feeling terrible. I didn’t know how I’d ever have enough money to pay for a lawyer, much less the fines. But Amy and I went out drinking. She told me she’d pay for our bar tab, and I drank eleven White Russians, spending money I knew she didn’t have. Another time, I called her from a bar back in Cedar Falls and told her I thought I would drive to see her that night even though I’d already had eight or so drinks. When I arrived, she had a deep cough and was having difficulty breathing, but she insisted she was fine, and we went to sleep. A few days later, she went to the hospital and found out she had aspiration pneumonia from making herself vomit up food. Sometimes I think we were just a couple of fucked-up kids.
For a lot of people, college can seem like a time where everyone’s partying and making their own bad decisions. I saw plenty of things that helped me rationalize my behavior. I wasn’t that different from the guys who were my neighbors and friends, I thought, and my stories from nights out seemed pretty similar to other people’s. Eventually, though, when my problems with drinking started to outpace everyone else’s, I had to be honest with myself: when I was drinking, I was self-centered, arrogant, and out-of-control.
Now I have the rest of my life to make up for it. I guess you could call it penance.