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On the way home from a meeting recently, I stopped at a gas station near my house. I immediately flashed back to 2013, when I had five years sober, and I stopped at the same gas station with my two oldest kids in the car… and I almost punched a guy.
It was an eye-opening moment for me because it was the first time I really felt pure rage since I had stopped drinking and drugging. And even though I had a pretty strong program at the time, I still got sucked into it. Bear with me, let me cook a little bit here. This story gets me pretty riled up.
Okay, here goes.
I took my kids to the beach for the day by myself. They were 3 and 5 years old at the time, so it was a hectic six hours or so. With kids that little, with open water involved, there is a lot of chasing. By the time the sun started to set and it was time to head home, I was out of gas, figuratively, and my feet were really bothering me. I think I was hungry, too, so that is pretty much all of the H.A.L.T. (Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired) acronym that we so frequently cite in recovery.
About a mile from my house, I decided to fill up my gas tank. The girls whined they wanted a drink from inside, so I eventually pulled my car away from the pump and into a regular parking spot. That’s when the trouble began.
My 5-year-old threw open her car door, and it dinged the Nissan Sentra beside us. I looked and saw that the door had left a mark, and I quickly began to try to figure out how to scoot inside before anybody noticed. Not cool, in retrospect—that was the old addict part of my brain going right to how to take care of the coverup.
I didn’t see that the driver was actually in the car, and he hopped out and got right in my face. He was a smallish guy, maybe 50 years old, and at first, I felt no physical intimidation. But he was PISSED.
“Look what your kid did to my car!” he said. He wasn’t yelling but he wasn’t quite talking in a regular voice, either.
The serene part of me made an appearance, at least briefly. “I’m so sorry, it was an accident,” I said. I meant it, too.
“She put a huge dent in my car! I love this car!”
He pointed at the car and then the dent. This is when things started to go a little sideways for me, because I looked at him and then the car and thought, “Uh, it’s a Nissan Sentra, not a 1967 Corvette. Gimme a break, bro.”
But I apologized again. “I’m so sorry, she really didn’t mean to hit your car. She just got a little too excited getting out of the car.”
The guy was shaking his head, livid, and he moved closer to my daughter’s window. I’ll never forget her head sticking up, halfway hiding, halfway curious about the dispute unfolding in the parking lot.
“She needs to learn to not be so reckless. She could really cause problems with that sort of behavior.”
Okay, now I felt my back going up. I grew up choosing to fight way more than I should have, so my fists started to ball up.
“Listen, man, I’m not sure what to tell you other than we’re really sorry. I’ll take your information and I can pay for the damage…”
“You absolutely will pay for destroying my car door…” he fired back, waving his hands right near my daughter’s face.
My serenity was gone. Destroying his car door? That’s when I dusted off some lyrics from “Mother,” the classic Danzig song from 1988.
“If you yell at me or my daughter one more time, you’re gonna find hell with me!” I barked at him.
I started moving toward him at the same time, causing him to back up. I must have looked like I was going to throttle him because he dialed it down and moved a few steps away. But I kept moving toward him and he put his hands up to indicate he didn’t want this to escalate.
I really was out of line. Yes, not cool to try to intimidate me or my kids. But I should have just let the guy blow off steam.
Good news about sobriety: I have a much better radar for my own behaviors now, so I caught myself at that moment and was able to quickly course correct. Guess what? I need to not be getting in fistfights, especially when my kids are sitting there watching! Not great that I came close that day. But I am proud that my temperature dropped a few degrees in a hurry.
We exchanged information, and he eventually drove off. I still thought he’d made too much of it, and I didn’t love how shaken up my daughter was. But I was able to talk her through it, that we gotta be careful opening up car doors but that it wasn’t a big deal, that I was going to take care of it, that that guy was being a little bit of a jerk. And we moved on.
Well… the kids moved on. The next week, I connected with the guy and he had gotten three estimates for the ding in his car door. One was for $600, one was for $1000 and one was for $1100. I said, “Great, I will mail you a check for $600 right now.”
He quickly said that was not acceptable. “I believe you owe me the average of those three estimates.”
My teeth were grit so hard I thought I’d chip them. I haggled with him for a bit but then something came over me where I remembered that part of A Bronx Tale where the wannabe gangster kid starts chasing another kid who owed him money. Chazz Palminteri pulls him aside and asks him if he likes the teenager who was running from him. The kid says no… “But he owes me money!”
Palminteri says to him, “Look at it this way. You got a kid you don’t really like out of your life for $20.” I always think about that sometimes when my pride is getting all wrapped up in something I could just take a loss on and move forward in life.
So I sent the guy $900 and sure enough, I never heard from him again. It was over. That guy takes up no space in my head at all.
All right, I’m full of s**t. I still think that guy has an extremely punchable face, wonder what kind of dolt gets three estimates on a car dent on a freaking Nissan Sentra, and then how does the concept of averaging three estimates to get a dollar total even make sense as a compromise? You’re not going to pick the $600 place and give them $900. You probably can’t go to the $1000 or $1100 place and tell them you averaged the estimates and, “Here is $900.”
Okay, deep breaths. I may need to think about doing some resentment work on this, huh?
ALCOHOLIC/ADDICT JOKE OF THE DAY
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke. In this case, it’s three dispatches from The Grapevine’s “Heard at meetings” feature.
HEARD AT MEETINGS
“I’ve spent my share of nights in jail. Thank God, nowadays, the only thing being arrested is my physical, mental and moral decline.”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, March 2001, Kevin J. from Evanston, Illinois)
“An alcoholic is someone who wants to be held while isolating.”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, April 2001, Dave S. from Ithaca, New York)
“Drinking didn’t drown my problems, it irrigated them.”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, April 2001, Dick L. from New Westminster, British Columbia)
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