Dad I Got a Dui

Dad I….. “Dad I got a DUI. ” When those words finally came out of my mouth I felt like a huge weight was lifted off of my shoulders but at the same time I felt ashamed and like a giant failure. It was finally Friday and it had been a long week. I was ready to get home and start priming for the night. I bought an eighteen on the way home from sunmart, the local grocery store. Once I stepped in the door to my apartment I ripped open the case and quickly guzzled that first beer. I kicked off my heavy steel toed boots and rested my feet on the coffee table. By this time I was almost halfway through my second beer.

I had a good feeling about the night and I was ready to party. I looked at my cell phone and it was about five o’clock. I figured that I could use some company so I started dialing. After a few short calls I convinced a couple of friends to come over and relax with me. They loved the fact that I had a fake ID because I could buy them alcohol so they wouldn’t have to spend half of the night wondering how they were going to get something to drink like we used to do in high school all the time. It felt so good to be off of my feet after standing all day at school.

It also felt good to have a cold beer in my hand even though I wasn’t old enough to be in possession of alcohol. My first drink was at the age of 16 but I didn’t become a weekend drinker until I was about seventeen and a half years old. I wasn’t a wild or bad kid by any means, drinking was just something that we as friends did when we hung out. I had been caught drinking one time before by the cops and I ended up getting an MIP out of the deal. I guess an MIP wasn’t enough to get me to stop drinking at that time. I figured that a lot of my friends had them so what the heck, I paid the fine and never told Mom or Dad.

After channel surfing for a while I decided that I better shower before my friends got over, plus I was counting on meeting a girl later in the night that I had been talking to for a while. I reeked of diesel fuel from working around tractors all day at school. It was good to get that smell off of me. The place needed to be picked up so when I got dressed I cleaned up some stuff that was left over from the last party that we had. Lucky me, my roommate never seemed to help out with the cleaning duties. I often thought about the consequences of underage drinking.

I think I thought I was invincible even though I already had one MIP. There where lots of times where I had been drinking and then decided to drive home or to go meet a girl somewhere. I had been very lucky so far with not getting pulled over by the cops. After all the lectures and lessons that my parents had given me you would have thought that I would know better than to drink and drive by this time. My friends showed up and the drinking games began. I had gone to Home Depot the week before and gotten all the necessary items to make a beer bong so that’s how the beers were getting down tonight.

Everyone was having a fun time and I had gone through about 14 beers by the time ten o’clock rolled around. Someone had heard about a big party on the other side of town and everyone wanted to leave and go there. I wasn’t interested, I had other things on my mind. She was 5’1”, dark hair, had an olive tint to her skin, and was smoking hot! I met her at a house party a couple weekends past. Her skin shined in the light like a car that just got a wax job. We started talking and just happened to hit it off. All of my friends took off for the party and I left to see my new friend at her place.

Little did I know I wouldn’t get to see her that night. On the way to her house I took a wrong turn down a one way street and there was a police officer headed right at me, easy catch for them. I remember trying to drink the rest of my beer before the officer took it from me. I went through a series of sobriety tests that I don’t remember doing, and then it was off to detox in the back of the cop car. My room at detox had a rubber floor like a playground does so kids don’t hurt as much when they fall. The only things in the room were a cold stainless steel toilet and a padded matt for me to lie on.

I can’t recall much of the rest of the night except for the one friend that I had the cops call couldn’t pick me up because he was drunk too. I was too scared to call my parents, I figured I would wait to tell them the bad news. Eventually a friend of a friend came and took me to my Apartment. $2700 later, a good ass chewing from my parents, the loss of a scholarship and a job, I learned my lesson about drinking and driving. Dad didn’t yell at me that night, he talked to me in a calm but disappointed manner. I have never been so scared and relieved at the same time in my life than I was that night. And for the girl, well it didn’t work out.