A FRIEND BACK HOME, let’s call him Steve , recently had a close encounter of the homoerotic kind, and it got me thinking—especially about social ills and the means by which we place blame.

Steve, a computer consultant who lives a solitary existence in one of the small hill towns southeast of Buffalo, was at a dive bar in the city with some friends trying to unwind after a long week of work. Not wanting to make the difficult drive back to the sticks in his inebriated state, he did the semi-responsible thing at the end of the night: attempting to go home with a girl who lived nearby. She consented to offering him a glass of water to sober up, on the condition that he drive some of her friends home first.

Because they lived in a nearby section of the city, Steve thought nothing of climbing into his Chevy S-10 to drive the kids home. 49mph in a 35mph zone later, he was pulled over by the Buffalo P.D., questioned, cuffed, and hauled in on DUI charges. The next three hours were a long, terrifying stretch of interrogations, blood tests (administered by one very cute blonde he was tempted to ask out for a drink later), and bad TV, culminating with a large gay gentleman in a sweaty T-shirt and jeans rubbing Steve’s shoulders and telling him that "everything will be ok," much to the delight of the guards ("Knock it off, this isn’t a pick-up bar!").

While amusing—if traumatic—the close-encounter isn’t the point: the DUI is. Who is to blame when some dickhead gets behind the wheel of a one-ton blunt object after six hours of licking whiskey off foosball tables and giving dull girls fake phone numbers? The dickhead, or the society the dickhead lives in?

A conservative might blame the dickhead, because, to paraphrase paraplegic bad guy Jeffrey Lebowski: every bum’s lot in life is his own fault. The gushy liberal, on the other hand, might point the finger at a society far too fond of beer, basketball, and BMWs. Strong arguments can be made for each, which is exactly the point: both sides are partially right. And both sides should be called into play when we ask the two questions fundamental to the whole dickhead-pounds-eight-beers-drives-in-the-wrong-lane-kills-an-optometrist issue: Why do people drink? Why do people drive?



THE THING ABOUT BEER

While we as a civilized society are right to mistrust (and incarcerate) repeat drinking-and-driving offenders, we should mistrust people who don’t drink even more. Yes, every person on the planet should have the right to choose what types of manufactured liquids go in his/her body (no one is calling for frat boy funnel attacks down at Wal-Mart after all), but there is something fundamentally suspicious, alien even, about someone who has never gotten drunk.

"Alien" is actually the best term: the willful avoidance of a common behavior and state of consciousness partook in by, I would guess, the majority of human beings throughout time bespeaks a fundamental disconnection with History. While there is a certain monastic beauty to an abstinent lifestyle, such a choice should come about after a range of options have been tried and the self has been experienced in as many facets as possible. To deny drinking is to not only deny that part of your self that might actually—gasp! —enjoy a whiskey and coke to go with your Galaga, but to deny that same thing in other people, resulting in violent acts against that which you don’t understand, both inside and out. After all, the greatest dickheads in the world don’t think they are even capable of dickheaded-ness—just look at John Ashcroft.

But there is something even more interesting going on with drinking than just self-exploration, and it has to do with chicks… or rather, the unique stance the feminine takes towards the world. Whereas it is a very masculine approach to the world (and by masculine I don’t mean biological male-ness per say) that privileges directedness, agency, and solitary achievement, the feminine approach (again, not biological female-ness) is one of giving, communion, and spontaneity.

Steve, being a computer man, was prone to long, solitary bouts of the masculine: making tough decisions, maintaining discipline, and pursuing goals. In turning to booze with his buddies he was NOT indulging in some personal weakness, but seeking a way of compensating energetically for a week’s worth of masculinity, which is why the night up until the DUI was a free-flowing, spontaneous, almost ecstatic affair, and damn society for denying anyone that.

But of course, with rights come responsibilities, and Steve dropped the ball on that one. Could he have found a less lethal means of contacting his girl-ness? Of course: dancing, coffee, improvisational Parcheesi—nothing says you have to soak your liver in fermented grains to unwind. The willful loss of consciousness, though it makes for some funny stories and a false sense of virility, cheats a whimpering universe of the awareness we all need to save our asses. We don’t need more idiots.

CULT OF CARBURETOR

But the most infuriating part of the whole DUI issue is the carte blanche that Car Culture is given in the whole affair. One hundred years ago, there were actual trolleys which ran from Buffalo to within a few miles of Steve’s house: back then he could have had his buddies roll his semi-conscious body onboard to be whisked away worry-free. Not so today, as the majority of our post-World War II social infrastructure has been rearranged around automobiles and the roads they drive on, a dangerous vote in favor of individualism requiring the sacrifice of 10,000 souls per year. No one fines Ford Motors or the US Department of Transportation every time Don or Dolly Dickhead gets creamed on the interstate.

Yet to suggest an EU-esque move to increased reliance on public transit, mixed-use zoning, and New Urbanism offends our by-the-bootstraps American sensibilities. Beyond even the romance of the open road lies the very needed feeling of being in control of one’s own life, of facing death on a daily basis on the avenues and toll ways of your choice. Although it may be tempered, driving, like drinking, isn’t going away.



THE GAUNTLET

The day after his unfortunate trip to the drunk tank, Steve was flipping out, vacillating between swearing off drinking forever and seeking someone to blame. He has since calmed down. What two weeks ago seemed tragic and unfair (which it was), he now looks upon with some sense of equanimity, finding in it an almost ritualized source of pride, like the reception of a gang tattoo or the stigmata of Christ. While he acknowledges the risk he placed untold other individuals at during his 49mph chase through blurred city streets, he takes solace in the event as a wake-up call of sorts, a misdemeanor dissolving of his ego.

With that in mind, I have a proposal to the whole DUI mess, and it sounds nuts: we make drunk driving a coming-of-age ritual. Just as competitive sports are tamed versions of the tribal warfare we still feel rumbling through our genes, we can transcend the modern disaster of drunk driving with a little imagination, finding a place in our society for this scorned but all-too-common occurrence.

It goes something like this: young Don or Dolly Dickhead get to drink as young as they want. They get to experiment with all types of booze, experience the feeling of wiping puke off of toilet bowls and falling down dizzy in bowls of chips… but it all happens in the home. Mom and Dad Dickhead steel their children to face the rigors and responsibilities of adult inebriation, and when they turn seventeen it is time to run the Beer Gauntlet.

The Beer Gauntlet is an actual five-mile road existing on the outskirts of Dickheadville set up specifically to accommodate virgin drunk drivers. Don and Dolly are brought to the far end of the road in an open-air limousine, and the whole town turns out to wish them well. A bar constructed alongside the starting line sets Don and Dolly up with a round of drinks, and then another, and then another. Once their respective BACs have reached the Traditional Limit, they each do one more shot of tequila, and are herded into their specially-designed Drunk Cars.

With a mighty whoop by the mayor and the firing of the Drunk Gun, Don and Dolly speed off into the woozy darkness to face an unknown quantity of obstacles. Small, life-like mannequin children pop out of nowhere, vans swerve in and out, traffic cones spring from the shoulder, patches of ice and loose gravel test their tires, but Don and Dolly Dickhead soldier on. At the Great Intersection, a police cruiser appears and pursues the speeding youths.

Having been coached on the consequences of being caught (for Don, the loss of a testical… for Dolly: the public dismemberment of her favorite boy band), the young drunks jam the gas and ditch the cruiser, until they come to the Beer Gauntlet’s nasty secret: a ramp that sends the Drunk Cars soaring into the air, only to crash-land in a canyon some two hundred feet past the end of road.

Arms and legs akimbo, Don and Dolly get a life-changing jostle in their heavily-padded, roll bar-protected vehicles, and when they at last emerge, bruised and bleeding, the Dickheadville Drunk Tank Marching Band greets them with a full rendition of George Thorogood’s "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer" as they are escorted to the Divine Booze Pokey for processing.

Though an extreme solution, the intent is clear: to administer the eye-opening confrontation with life’s fragility and one’s own dickheaded-ness that a DUI provides within a controlled environment, away from the unforgiving streets of the public sphere.

And if we can get this one right, if we can make drunk driving both an individual AND a collective responsibility, perhaps the large gay gentleman in a sweaty T-shirt and jeans back at the drunk tank will mean it when he says "everything will be ok."