"Have you had anything to drink tonight?" the officer asked. About thirty feet behind me, sitting on the curb, was a pretty, young girl who had just slammed her bicycle into the side of my rental car on the intersection of Congress and Cesar Chavez.
"Yes, sir. One beer," I replied. I have gotten into the habit of using "sir" and "ma'am" ever since I moved to Texas. Always count on an Asian to assimilate quickly.
What's odd is that I'm not a talkative drunk. I am very much the classically reserved drunk. My thoughts slow as if the electrical currents in my head are struggling to jump from one conductive idea to another. I am conscious of this so my defense is to shut the hell up. Far from lowering my inhibitions, I batten the hatches, determined as ever not to reveal my undeniable, underlying stupidity.
My first taste of this, my first taste of alcohol was in college. I was twenty-one. It was a Bud Light. It was terrible. I am a late bloomer in almost every regard, and all the touchstones, the universal milestones that we measure our lives by - first drink, first kiss, first funeral - have arrived later for me than for nearly everyone else.
Don't think, either, that because I waited until after I was twenty-one that I am some stringent adherent to the law. It just happened to work out that way. (In fact, I will admit that I felt a thrilling chill in my spine when a friend of mine told me she regularly steals expensive cheeses from the grocery store.)
"How long ago was that?" the officer continued.
"Let's see, the first movie started at seven, so about four hours ago." This was true. I was driving home from the theater. I had just watched The 400 Blows and Yojimbo back-to-back. I idly wondered how long it takes the average man to - what's the word? - dedrunkify. Was four hours enough time?
I could pretend that I don't know why I refused to drink in my youth but I know precisely why. It's because being a Non-Drinker was a foothold for my sense of superiority. "They are all drinkers," I would think. "I am not. I am different. Better."
Alone. When I went to a party in my freshman year at college, my best friend handed me a cup of beer. She wanted me to fit in, enjoy myself, see that there was joy to be had in the company of other people - drunk or not. She cared about me. I failed to understand this at the time.
I didn't know what to do with the beer. I only knew that I wasn't going to drink it. She and I were standing in a circle with a few of her friends. I carefully placed the nearly overflowing cup on the ground, in the middle of the circle, and that was that. Her friends all stared at me.
She smiled and let it go but the night still ended in a fight. Or rather with me yelling at her as we walked back towards the dorms, as if I had a genuine grievance, as if she had somehow done me irreparable harm. I can still see her stunned reaction. I can still feel that strong need for her to put up a fight, to not take my bullshit. And I can still feel that sudden weight of guilt when I realized she wasn't going to fight back, that she was just going to be hurt and then forgive me. This is the lot of the young, insecure Asian man. Everything is an insult. Everyone is an enemy. There is no sense in being a gentleman when the world is going to reject you, anyway.
The next year I transferred to a different university.
That was where, two years later, I drank for the first time only to discover that I couldn't drink worth a damn. Half a beer made my face beet red. One beer gave me a pounding headache. For a short period in college, I built my tolerance up to the point where I could have nearly two beers without passing out. I am drinking a screwdriver as I write this. If you check my notebook, you will see that I have crossed out many lines, added in entire paragraphs in the margins, and sometimes ended sentences with nothing but the abbreviation "ex." As in, "Come back and add some examples of this idea later because right now you can literally feel the vein in your forehead pounding blood to your booze-soaked brain."
"Have you had anything to eat tonight?" the officer asked.
"Yes, sir."
"When?"
"About four hours ago."
"What did you eat?"
This marks the first time I've ever been glad to respond to the question, "What did you eat?" with the answer, "Half a pepperoni pizza." I think I was smiling as he said it. He smiled, too.
"Feet together," the officer said. "I want you to follow this light with only your eyes. Make sure it's only your eyes. Keep your head still."
I followed the light with just my eyes. He started slow. Left to right. Up and down. Then he suddenly sped up, then ramped back down. Faster, slower. Over and over. He was conducting an orchestra, and the symphony had some damn wild tempo changes. I could hear that vein again - the one pumping blood to my brain. I was as nervous as I had ever been in my life. I wasn't drunk, though. This I knew. Or thought I knew. Hoped I knew.
"All right, you're good," he said indifferently. He walked over to the girl. Another officer approached and it all came spilling out of me. I described to him how fast my heart was beating, how I could feel the adrenaline coursing through my body, how scary and surprisingly loud the collision was, how I felt the car actually rock, how time seemed to freeze as one minute I was driving and the next there was a girl sprawled across my windshield. I looked at her face through the glass, and I imagine the expression on her face - complete confusion - was a mirror image of my own.
He listened politely then went back to his squad car to fill out a report.
Momentarily alone, I shifted back and forth, feeling restless. I looked at the girl who was now alone, too, and decided to walk over.
"I'm so sorry," she said as I approached. "That was totally my fault."
She had told the police that it wasn't her fault - that her light was yellow, and that mine must've been, too. I let it go.
"It's okay. I'm just glad that it wasn't worse. I mean, a collision between a bike and a car should've been way worse."
"Oh, I know! I've actually seen friends of mine get hit by cars, and the cars would just drive off."
"That's... I don't even understand how you could live with yourself."
After she slammed into the side of my car, and after we shared a momentary pause in time, I remember hitting the brakes and seeing her fall forward off of my hood. I immediately checked the stop light. Green. And then I sat there. It must have been about two seconds but it felt infinitely longer. It felt like my life had just ended.
I put the car into park. The thought crossed my mind that I was still in the middle of the intersection but before I could even begin to give a shit, another thought came storming in. This girl could be seriously hurt. It wasn't my fault, as she would later admit, but there is no stopping guilt in a Korean.
I went to open the door. I stopped. My radio was on. Loudly. I'm the kind of guy who turns the volume down if I'm stopped next to a car at an intersection. Some deep well of modesty or shame prevents me from willingly intruding on someone else's aural territory. I shut the radio off before I got out.
By the time I exited the car, she was rolling her bike towards the curb. The front tire of her bike was wobbly.
"Okay, yeah!" I shouted towards her. "Go right there! Uh... just stay there. I'm going to drive into that lot, okay?"
This was as elegant as I could be at this point.
She didn't respond or turn around. She just kept rolling her busted bike towards the curb.
I hopped back in the car, checked the stop light again. Still green somehow. It felt like I was in the middle of that intersection for an hour but it must've been less than thirty seconds. When I got the car into the lot, I raced over to the girl.
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah, I'm fine." She still wasn't looking at me.
"Are you sure?"
"It's just some bruising. Really." She stood up to demonstrate. She squeezed her leg gently and took a few tentative but solid steps.
I fought away my feelings of helplessness. The police arrived. They got our statements. I had my field sobriety test. And then later we found ourselves alone again.
"I don't know how you'd live with yourself either," the girl said. "You were great, though. Thank you for handling it the way you did."
"Oh...uh...yeah. I don't really know how else I would've gone about it," I muttered.
"Anyway, I have your info so we'll get in touch about insurance stuff, okay?" She looked at me and smiled.
"Yeah, sounds good."
She hugged me then. She said into my ear, "Thank you so much for being a gentleman."
"Sure," I said in what could only have been a surprised tone. "Not a problem."
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