Opinion

Wasting the night away – in jail

Drunk driving ruins one man's night, damages his future

By John Evans

Posted on Feb. 21, 2005, at 12:00 a.m.

Jail blows. What started as a good Thursday night with beer and a few inventive drinking games took a hard turn south when I decided I was fine to drive. “All right guys, I’m outta here,” were my famous last words. With assurances that I was good to go, I stood up, wobbled and left the room beginning the night of hell.

The windshield of my car was completely iced over, and being ready to pass out like the drunk that I was, I scraped only the smallest of holes. It was like driving staring through one of those cardboard cylinders in the middle of a toilet paper roll.

I knew my driving wasn’t great, and when I saw the cruiser swing behind me, I began to realize that I might be in a spot. I kept trucking though, picking my speed up to about 31 mph attempting a bluff, trying to drive like a normal person.

I reached the stop sign in front of Public Safety – the sign no one ever really stops at and very slightly rolled through, still keeping my “I’m just a regular guy driving in the wee hours of the morning with a perfectly good and legal reason” motif up.

Well, it didn’t fly, and once the blues lit up the night behind me, I knew I was screwed.

They call me a one-star general now. It sounds almost like a decoration, a badge of glory maybe. It’s not. Not only was that probably the second-worst night of my life, second only to the time I woke up shackled to an empty bedspring with naked midgets sleeping around me, but I now have to go through quite a shitstorm before I can be seen as a good, normal productive American citizen.

No, you say? I’ve been informed that UPS or any of the other major delivery companies won’t even look at me, let alone consider giving me a job. I’ll come out of this with almost a grand in fines and charges, I’ll lose my license for at least a year, and my insurance exploding like the number of downloads after Paris Hilton’s sex tape was discovered – that’s just the aftershock. Thursday night and early Friday morning sucked beyond belief.

Public Safety was strict, but at least civil and good-hearted. Once I got to the Penobscot County Jail in Bangor, I realized that I was just another drunk guy being processed. Those Penobscot County guys do not treat you well at all – don’t go there.

What was probably about 15 minutes of actual paperwork and pictures took about five hours. The other four hours and 45 minutes I spent staring at very incompetent looking guys reading the paper and joking around.

If you do ever go, don’t ask for anything. Half the time those guys pretend not to hear you, the other half they shrug you off and tell you to sit down. There was another guy there hammered off his ass telling me how he wrecked his car drinking a 40, and if I was a geek he wasn’t afraid to fight. So, between trying to get one of the Super Trooper-style cops to tell me how much longer I’d need to chill and giving the nut beside me just enough attention to keep him happy, I had plenty of time to ponder my situation and life in general.

Driving under the influence really isn’t worth it. Thank God I’ve never hurt anyone and my car is still in once piece. I won’t do it again, if only because being seen as “just another drunk bastard” really isn’t my style.

John Evans is sophomore English major.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 21st, 2005, 12:00 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.