#68 THAT TIME I GOT IN A DRUNK STRANGER’S CAR

Is driving under the influence still a prevalent problem in rural America?

For all of those who make it through my usual super-long posts, today is going to be a (perhaps) mercifully short(er) post. 

I have lots of things going on right now, writing and editing-wise (Yay).

Today, I have finished the last twenty pages of the final (fifth) round of edits of my Grandad’s memoir. 

Amy Lord, a wonderful and inspiring young woman I met on the Arvon Writing course (along with all the other gems of humans/amazingly talented writers – can you believe that was a week ago already?) recommended I enter a snippet of Grandad’s book into a memoir competition so I’m preparing an entry for that (8k words) and one of my own, adapted from my Substack. 

Then, this week she told me about a romance novel writing competition, so I’m in the process of writing an entry for that too (5k words). I didn’t feel that the 50k-word romance novel I wrote this year was a good fit for this particular competition (because I wrote it to Mills and Boon specifications) so I’m developing another idea I had and planned to write next anyway (already had the outline and the characters plotted).

DM me if you want the details of these competitions to submit your own things.

It’s all very exciting! Even if nothing comes of any of these submissions, I always find it motivating to have deadlines and to keep going. I’m still waiting to hear back about my TV pilot (submitted to two competitions) and the Modern Love column I submitted to the New York Times, so things may or may not be happening for me this year (fingers crossed). I won’t hear back from those until the end of August/early September.

I asked Amy to send me a signed copy of her book (which I bought, obviously) and I can’t wait to read it. The opening line is brilliant and sucks you right in. You can buy a copy here called, The Disappeared, which is a dystopian novel where reading the wrong things can get you arrested (scary!). 

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I was talking to my therapist last week about how proud I was of my baby sister, Hannah, and even my sister, Jae. They have always valued kindness in partners over simply physical appearance. That’s not to say they aren’t with handsome partners but physical human beauty was not their yardstick to measure by. I lamented how I always chased the men I thought were good-looking and was often left with a broken heart and worse self-esteem.

My therapist, Lorraine, said that some women view being with someone handsome as a status thing. If this really handsome person chose me, I have value too. Of course, I have much work to do on my self-esteem, but as many of my stories go, I chased after someone because they were hot! Except this one was so short-lived it did no damage either way (thankfully).

I was out one night with Rick and Darcy at this club in downtown Valdosta, Georgia, when I was a graduate student. Rick was one of my professors (no, not this one) and I’ve spoken about Darcy before. Darcy was a fellow grad student and my party wingwoman. Brittany, my grad school housemate and best friend, was more on the introverted quiet side and she preferred more subdued plans than getting blackout drunk and making out with (or hooking up with) strangers.

It’s a miracle I never had anything terrible happen to me because of the poor choices I sometimes made and none more terrible than getting into a car with a guy who had also been drinking. I guess none more terrible than some of the men I chose to date, that is.

In Valdosta, there were two areas that contained bars, AKA drinking establishments (that are not like pubs in the UK). 1) The college bars in Remerton, complete with sticky floors, bar bands, hand stamps, and watered-down inexpensive drinks and 2) the more sophisticated downtown bars where Valdosta’s white-collared, more affluent population preferred to drink for a more civilised experience and real cocktails, none of which in my early twenties I was bothered about. Give me lighter-fluid liquor and a sugary mixer and I was sorted. Sometimes liquor was even shot out of water guns and you had to blow someone’s ear drums out to have a conversation. Great times!

I had seen this guy, we’ll call him Parker, around campus or maybe like the ATC situation, I was stalking his photos of friends of friends. He was tall with striking dark green-blue eyes and dark hair. We chatted at this downtown bar above this nightclub called Glo that I think I only went to once because the cover charge was overpriced and he said he was going to go to the Remerton bars next. I asked if I could go with him. Bar hopping was always a thing!

He must have said yes and I got in his SUV. The drive was about two miles away, maybe ten minutes at most, but we had both been drinking. Darcy and Rick told me it was not a good idea to go with him; they were worried for my safety, but I was determined. It would all be fine. Fine!

Thankfully not what happened…

I do remember having a fleeting thought on the way to the bars that I didn’t know this man, he was bigger than me (even though I’ve never been slight), and he didn’t have to take me to where he said he was going. 

Turns out, though, I got lucky. He parked up near the strip of bars, we kissed, and then proceeded to hang out with other people all night. I’d see him around campus again but that was that.

I think he joined the military and was stationed in El Paso, but he’s now a Facebook ghost and our correspondence – if it had ever been substantial – is long gone and there are no signs of him on any social media platforms except LinkedIn, where I learned he enjoyed a six-year Army career, graduated from my uni with a degree in criminal justice, was in the Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia fraternity (apparently for a special interest in music – I wonder what instruments he played), and he’s now an Assistant Director at the Kentucky Department of Corrections.

Darcy messaged me a couple of years after I’d let him drive me that night and said she’d been FB stalking my ‘super hot friend’ and I said, “Yeah, he's hot. He used to live in Valdosta. I went on a couple of dates with him. Actually, you met him the same night I did. We went to that club thing above Glo with Rick and I met him there and I was drunk and he drove me to the bars, but we'd just met so I thought, ‘Maybe this isn't such a smart idea.’ We got to the bars and I ditched him. But he's a nice guy.”

I don’t remember the dates but obviously no sparks flew or he’d have been more significant. I think he got a girlfriend not long after and unfriended me (kind of like the whole Mr Target incident except without a hookup first), but I did remember meeting him because drink-driving can be a real problem in the States. 

Distances between places in more rural areas are often vast and until companies like the Tipsy Transit came along (Valdosta’s answer to the Knight Bus but for drunk people), then there weren’t many affordable options to get home for drunk university students. And sometimes walking three miles in the heat in heels is also not a safe or viable option. We often had to have people on hand to be DD (designated driver) and I can’t tell you the number of times my long-suffering gorgeous guy best friend, Chester, picked me up from wherever to get me safely home (thanks).

In England at least, and in larger cities in the US, public transit provides safe and fairly inexpensive transport home, but rural America often suffers from this issue – not to be a PSA about it all or anything. 

I wrote here about the time I almost got a DUI when my terrible boyfriend (at the time, nicknamed ‘hot but dumb as rocks’) was meant to be DD but got trashed on a night out. I blew below the legal limit but after that point, I never got behind the wheel of a car when I’d been drinking anything alcoholic again (the worst sort of alliteration).

In Georgia that year I met Parker, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there were over 1,200 traffic fatalities, 277 of which were caused by alcohol-impaired drivers – and that just counts fatalities not incidents of drunk driving that resulted in accidents. 

My God this GIF works on too many funny levels. Is Armie crawling back from cancelled status? Is it bad I thought he was hot. Damn! Just shows my terrible choices (except my hot husband, of course).

I think the younger generations – I’ve been told – are more sensible than the elder millennial lot so I’m happy to hear about that. I hope my baby sister, Hannah, never repeats my mistakes and so far, it seems she’s on solid footing.

Coming up next, this one rare time I was attracted to a hot-tattooed Hispanic DILF (the parenting thing and the tattoo thing being rare attractions), AKA the third guy I met at Starbucks. (Starbucks should sponsored me but that wasn’t a thing back then.)

Don’t forget to check out the other sixty-seven posts I’ve written, including the one on why I’m writing this newsletter/blog in the first place – and the odd “present day snippet” of what I’m up to lately.

Have you ever gotten into a car with someone who has been drinking? What’s the public transport like after a night out where you live or back when you were young, drinking, and making reckless decisions? Let me know in the comments.