Barker Ajax spent fourteen hours Saturday and Sunday – nicest two days of weekend weather in too many months – in treatment. Inside a hospital. Psychiatry department.
With eight other drunken drivers, who turned out not to be such bad people. One woman who looks positively pickled has had two DUI’s, blames everybody else for her problems and claims not to drink. Another guy has had three DUI convictions and downs a six-pack nightly on average, including last night. Some people haven’t had a drink since the incident. Most, Barker himself even, haven’t been drunk since arrested. Hey, that’s something, that’s a start.
The instructor is a pleasant attractive young woman who tries not to make the entire experience a total bummer. But all day they watch videos about rotten livers and waitresses who have to pay eight million dollars to their victims’ parents, and the guy doing forty-five years in prison without the possibility of parole for running down seven people at a bus stop. And on and on. Over and over. Makes you think.
He thought, stare at one of those livers too long, well, let’s just say, you’re not likely to forget it.
And this stuff goes on every day for what must be weeks and those same people are still there, except the lady who went to jail. And the young woman up front seems not as pleasant or much less attractive. And all Barker wanted to do is jump out of his hardass dark wooden chair and scream, “Enough! You had me at JAIL!”
Previous night, Barker dreamt he’d gotten more than a little drunk, killed an old friend, nobody you know, had sex with his wife, also nobody you know and, to escape the police, stole a passenger jet, later forgetting where he’d parked it. Stereotypical alcoholic behavior.
The rest of the dream involved ducking through a Portland Oregon night in the pouring rain attempting to evade the authorities while trying to locate the damn airplane. On his search Barker bumped into his predecessor as PR director of a giNormous athletIc Kompany locatEd in the suburbs. He’d gotten fat and bald and was measuring a running course with a metric wheel. Claimed he had no idea where the jet might be. He was no help at all.
And that’s all Barker remembered. Enough to drive a man to drink.