I’m not an ugly person.
Many people think of the problem gambler or anyone with an addiction as being shifty, dirty and generally unattractive. Probably it has a lot to do with the way anyone with these issues is portrayed in popular media. The Disney world, as I call it, has little to do with actual life, girls are weaned on romantic comedies and boys on our science fiction and war movies. When the little girls grow up they find out that everyone isn’t like Hugh Grant (not even Hugh Grant), and the boys just get pissed off and take it out on everyone, including themselves, before going off to mediocrity in some nine to five or getting half their face blown off in some arbitrary war.
Anyway the point I’m making, and it’s a little laboured tonight as I’ve had a few drinks- is that I am not all that ugly.
So it is inevitable that over the past ten odd years I’ve been in a few relationships and on a few dates, it was one of the latter that begun the precipitous shit storm that saw me leaving Sydney and my job of 7 years.
The date was with a girl whose name I don’t recall, it was setup online through one of those websites that must make ungodly amounts of cash from desperate, sad lonely people- which probably summed me up nicely.
Now I say I’m not that unattractive but as soon as the girl I was meeting for the date walked into the cinema lobby I knew I was woefully outclassed. Fortunately it was one of those fancy expensive cinemas where they serve booze so I set about getting sloshed while we made small talk- I don’t remember much about her other than that she was stunning, had close cropped hair and owned over 60 pairs of shoes.
Also I have a bad habit of brutally frank honesty on first dates, I always confess and methodically list each and every one of my faults, including gambling, drinking, drug use, depression and not calling my mother as much as I should.
Anyhow the date was an unmitigated disaster. I don’t care what everyone thinks- I hated The Dark Knight, the whole Heath Ledger thing struck me sourly; I don’t know if it’s because I was jealous of someone achieving such fame simply for being a drug addict who pushed it just a little too far or if I was simply bummed about the date which although she hadn’t said as much, was no surprise when she said she’d just like to be friends at the end of the night.
Either way it didn’t matter- now I had my excuse to hit the pubs.
The problem turned out to be that the date had occurred in Chatswood, which was over the opposite side of the harbour from my house. Now since I’d had a couple of bottles of wine with the movie I didn’t particularly give a fuck about this but when I was taking an off-ramp onto the freeway at 140km/h at four in the morning after half a dozen beers and a good portion of a bottle of vodka I began to start giving more of a fuck.
Particularly when the car started slaloming into the concrete dividing wall of a near-90 degree turn the amount of a fuck I was giving peaked. I spun to a stop and immediately restarted the car, it wasn’t the first time I’d pranged a car drunk and I knew I’d be in shit if I were caught and I had to be at work tomorrow.
I made it perhaps 2 kilometres before I noticed a lot of steam and smoke coming from somewhere nearby, it seemed likely that it was emanating from my car as the temperature gauge was redlining and I also couldn’t see much else past the bonnet of my car. I pulled over halfway across the harbour bridge even though there’s actually nowhere to pull over, so I suppose I just stopped and stumbled out of the car.
What it reminded me of was the last time I’d done this to my car, I was a fair bit younger but it was the same mistake; I’d tried to make a turn onto the highway from the pub at over 100km/h, this was a dead 90 degree turn and I had no chance, I ended up going across the highway, backwards, at 100km/h and into a tree. I’d immediately restarted the car and tried to drive but it hadn’t moved. I glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw what I thought was a branch on the back window so had given it more gas, thinking I was tangled up in a shrub or something, the car had started to swerve side to side, but still not forward and smoke was coming from the back but then eventually it edged forward and I was on my merry way home. I parked the car in the garage and fell into bed. I almost forgot about it until the next morning when I opened the garage and realized that it wasn’t a branch I’d seen in the rear-view mirror but the spiderweb of shattered glass on account of my entire back end being wrapped around a tree. The car was a write-off. I was lucky I’d hit the tree as it was standing on an embankment which descended into a dam.
So I wasn’t entirely surprised when I saw that the extent of the damage to my vehicle this time was more than anticipated, the front end was smashed in, one tyre was shredded on account of the wheel arch gouging it and the radiator was somewhere back in Chatswood.
This was a problem, there are signs all over the harbour bridge telling you to stay put in case of breakdown as the bridge is constantly monitored with cameras and to top it all off I was absolutely blind rotten drunk.
I threw the empty cans out of my car and poured the remains of the open beer I had onto the engine (I wasn’t ready to part with the remains of the vodka yet), it evaporated almost instantly in a hiss. For some reason I snapped a photo on my phone, I have it to this day, it’s almost unrecognizable as to what you are looking at unless you know, I suppose it has served as a reminder as I haven’t ever driven drunk since.
I was able to restart the car and drive very slowly, having to stop every 500 meters or so to let the car cool down, in addition to the smoke and steam there were now sparks coming from the front right wheel and it was getting almost impossible to steer with any degree of accuracy.
It was around then that I had the bright idea (along the same vein as wearing pants on your head I imagine) of driving to work instead of home- they were both about the same distance and I knew that I would never get to work tomorrow if I went home, with what would undoubtedly prove to be a record-breaking hangover and no vehicle to speak of it seemed logical that I camp out in the work parking lot for the night and finish the rest of the vodka while I weighed up my options.
My options turned out to be almost freezing to death in the car and calling my mother, hysterically, I don’t recall anything I said and she didn’t understand any of it either, but it was the final nail in a coffin which was now so brimming with nails it looked like a porcupine. Once you’ve called your mother in that state it’s all over.
I don’t recall anything else about that night and I’m glad of that at least, one of the worst nights of my life so far and I hadn’t even gambled.
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