DUI

                                DUI





                Why he wasn’t dead yet he didn’t know. He’d tried hard enough.

         He couldn’t pick the closest call. Was it waking up in the Ford Granada on the shoulder of the Indiana Toll Road with no idea how he got there? Or flipping the Karman Ghia on a winding lane in Baltimore, hanging upside down by a seatbelt and crawling out next to a muddy creek. What didn’t happen except death in 30 years of drunk driving?

         They would have said he was suicidal, the trailing loved ones. He would have been denied any restful berth in memory.

         But once the hangover passed he was quite glad to have survived. He shuddered at how close he came. His own survival was his favorite mystery.

                On the other hand the thought of death in general was nearly guaranteed to put him to sleep.

                The actual death of loved ones seemed a peaceful resolution of often squalid struggles. This was not because he believed in the conventional religious consolations: God was for the weak-minded.

                He liked funerals, however, though not yet an addict. The dark garb, the muted voices, the sense of finality, the feeling that nothing more was expected not only of the deceased but for that moment of anyone, and above all the empty space.

                Someone had left and that place had not yet been taken, offering an amplitude to be filled for an hour with kind words and music.

                When could music be appreciated more than at a funeral? When else did it sink so deep, unfold so expansively, so that notes not apparent in other settings sounded clearly? The kind of music didn’t matter. He had once heard a gospel group sing “Ooh Wah Ooh Wah (The Boy from New York City)” at a memorial service for a real estate developer and it became a prayer of praise, an anthem as suffused with spirit as Bach or Brahms.

                  He had in his laptop a eulogy he wrote for himself, not to be read at his funeral but as an exercise in self-realization, an enumeration at the last of what he might have been or done to feel good about.

                  As for its accuracy, others could judge – or not, since they would never see it. But for him the words had the shadowed quality of deathbed utterances, each one surrounded by the same stillness that set off each note of a threnody, a vast space opening up, the same space in which he was nightly submerged in sleep.

                  The years of unapprehended DUIs seemed in retrospect an effort not to die but to reconnect with life, a leap of faith into a blinding light in the dark. Or sometimes simply a way home. More complicated, confined and unrestful than death.

                  The original disconnect is irreversible. Unless the reset is instant the break becomes part of the system, like an indiscreet Internet post that can’t be annihilated and always accompanies your name on Google. The disconnect itself comes finally to seem the earliest and only recorded event.

                    In the succeeding disintegration you don’t hit bottom just once. Revelation, if it comes, seeps in like a song you hear over and over on the car radio until it’s embedded without your noticing. Recurrent floods of self-loathing must refresh the barren fields under the wan hopeful sun. 

                    The avid devouring of pain, the ritual chanting of  swooning lamentations of life are culturally acceptable. Grace is suspect. Does grace precede redemption or are they simultaneous? Does the intensifying glimmer of grace’s imminence gradually awaken readiness? 

                    Or did he die at the wheel?