An Easter miracle

Sometimes it all just comes around again. Call it karma, call it divine equity or just call it dumb fucking luck. Whatever it is, I’ll take it. Funny this happened on Easter, too, as I’m not exactly what you would call religious. I stopped believing in a just God – or any god, really – the day in 1992 when that no-name Francisco Cabrera singled home a gimp Sid Bream when my beloved Pirates were but one out away from going to the World Series. But no use delving into that heartache. This is a happy story, and those goddamned Atlanta Braves will never belong in one of my happy stories.

It was Easter evening, and since Mrs. Bitters and I were not with our families, it was just another Sunday night, albeit one with a Monday off, which means I wanted to take full advantage of not having to get up early to start another long week of coasting to the end of the school year. Plus, with summer vacation coming in just eight short weeks, I needed to start getting in summer shape, which means drinking more, smoking more and staying up too late.

Mrs. Bitters was not feeling all that great, so I decided to go out alone. I had been dying to see the movie Syriana, and it was playing at my favorite theater, a place with a full menu, alcohol and waitress service during the movie. It makes for such a great experience that we’ll go see almost any movie there, even some predictably awful Tom Hanks dreck or the latest wacky romance movie starring whomever is today’s Meg Ryan. (However, even waitress service and alcohol can’t lure me to a painfully unfunny Adam Sandler flick.) Syriana, by the way, is incredible, but only if you can handle a purposefully convoluted plotline that doesn’t follow the cookie-cutter Hollywood format in which all loose ends are tied up in a neat little bow by movie’s end. If that’s what you need in a movie, stay away ... and go the nearest Blockbuster and rent the 100 minutes of pain that is an Adam Sandler movie.

Anyway, the theater is about 25 miles away, which is no big deal, as that kind of trek is nothing in this area. To make my solo drive a little more entertaining, I took along a couple of Miller Lites for the ride. I finished the second one just as I parked, and I deposited both empty cans under my seat. Since I was a bit early, I went into the Thai joint next door to the theater and had a delicous Sapporro beer, served by a shy little Thai chick who played the coy role so well I thought I was a ‘Nam soldier on leave in Bangkok. After that, I went to watch the movie, and I had three beers while being mesmerized by this powerful film.

After the movie, I drove to our favorite pizza place for a take-out pie. While waiting for the pizza, I had two Jack and Cokes. For those of you reading without a calculator, that’s a grand total of six beers and two whiskeys, and if you do the math (remember to carry the two), that brings the total number of drinks sloshing around in Ned Bitters to a whopping eight. Now, eight drinks in a younger Ned Bitters would mean it was time to go out and start drinking. However, for the early-40s Ned Bitters, this means Mr. Bitters should probably not be anywhere near a steering wheel of a car. However, many years of alcohol abuse has given me a pretty good idea about when I shouldn’t drive, and I knew I could drive okay, so I headed home.

I was driving just fine and not feeling drunk at all, blasting some Foo Fighters and realizing again why I’m a teacher. I had just had nine days off for Spring Break and I had one more day off ahead of me. Life was grand, and nothing was going to take away that high-on-life (and booze) feeling as I headed home to attack that pizza. Nothing, of course, except being pulled over by one of this county’s finest. (And I don’t mean a Hooters waitress.)

Just as I drove into our county, I saw the trooper’s flashing party lights in my rearview mirror. After a lifetime of pushing that drunk driving envelope, I figured that this was the night I finally got busted. I pulled over and noticed that the two beer cans were now on the floor of my back seat, in plain view of any officer, even if that officer were Sgt. Stevie Wonder.

It wasn’t Stevie Wonder, but instead a polite young officer who told me I was doing 70 in a 50 mile per hour zone. He didn’t ask me any questions to get me talking, which was a huge relief. I was not to the point where I would have been slurring my words, but those guys are trained to notice the signs, and I have a feeling he would have detected something in my voice that gave me away. Luckily, my registration was handy, as I had just gotten a ticket in another state about a week earlier. (Hey, I’m a glass is half full guy sometimes, so that first ticket might have helped me out in that I didn’t have to do a drunken search for my card.) He took my cards and went back to his car, leaving me to sit and wait for his inevitable return, in which he would ask me to step out of my car and begin the whole gamut of activities that would confirm my much-too–high blood alcohol level.

After 10 interminable minutes, he came back. I reached for my door handle and wondered if my impending arrest would make the local newspaper. I was already tallying the amount of money this would cost me in fines, raised insurance rates and lawyers’ fees, not to mention the embarrassment that would come with getting a D.U.I. However, his first words to me were not, “Please step out of the vehicle.” (Remember, he’s a cop, and they do not use pedestrian words like “car” or “truck.” It is always “vehicle.”) Instead, he smiled and said, “Well, which do you want first, the good news or the bad news?” By this point, I was so sure I was busted, that I figured the bad news would be that I was going to be arrested for having open containers, but the good news was that it was going to be a pleasant, sunny 75 degrees the next day!

I asked for the bad news first. He told me I was getting a $40 ticket for failure to change my address on my license when I moved this winter. Now, at this point I almost ruined the entire episode by jumping out of my car – or vehicle – and giving him a big sloppy kiss right on his doughnut-enlarged ass. I’m driving 20 miles over the speed limit with eight drinks in me and two beer cans on the floor, and a $40 fine is the bad news?

He proceeded to tell me the good news, although as far as I was concerned, I had just heard the good news. While he was in his squad vehicle – I mean squad car, as I’m not a cop - running my name and information, another cop had seen the name Ned Bitters pop up, and he recognized the name from his high school days. I had had this other cop in a ninth grade English class, and he graduated in 1999. He called my cop on his cell phone and told him to give me a break, because I was a good guy and I wasn’t an asshole to the kids. And that was that. I was free to head home with no more than a $40 fine. Life was still grand, and it WAS going to be a pleasant, sunny 75 degress the next day.

I’d like to say how this Easter moment helped me see the light and brought me back to God, but that’s not what I learned from this. I learned that it really does pay to treat the kids like human beings, to cut them a break and let them turn in that homework assignment a day late, to give them a pen or pencil when they forget one, to pretend you didn’t hear that f-word that slipped out, to bump that 68 percent up to a 70 percent because the kid never caused me one iota of trouble, to listen to their problems about girlfriends or parents or that asshole teacher who makes his life miserable for 48 minutes every single day.

I also learned a very valuable lesson about drinking and driving. Next time, I gotta make sure I throw out those empty beer cans as soon as I see a trash can.

Ned Bitters teaches high school and dreams of one day seeing one of his former students on stage at a strip club. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.